Hannah Wilke’s ‘labial’ artwork challenged both the patriarchy and feminists
The ‘hot sexual side of the spectrum’ was her terrain
The many scalloped folds of pastel pink and peach latex in Hannah Wilke’s soft sculptures were affixed to the white gallery wall with metal snaps, but still they gave the appearance of fluttering open suggestively like so many paper-thin lips. The blooming bouquets of rubber hanging at the Ronald Feldman Fine Art gallery in New York’s SoHo in October 1975 were fleshly and tactile, moving in an organic way. Naturally, (re)viewers thought of only one thing. “All the sculpture is done in pointed allusion to the female genitalia,” wrote Michael Andre in ArtNews in 1975. The pieces “provoke an irrepressible desire to touch them,” wrote Douglas Crimp. “Touching them confirms their sensual appearance, achieved through luscious colors, all on the hot sexual side of the spectrum.”
The “hot sexual side of the spectrum” was unquestionably Hannah Wilke’s terrain, and the “labial” wall hangings on which she focused in the early 1970s were but one iteration of her longstanding interest in making art that evokes the body and, particularly, female sexuality. By the mid 70s, her career was well established, but her reputation was fraught: Wilke was both inside and outside of the crescendoing feminist art movement. Her sculptural work, which often eroticized industrial materials, recalled that of Eva Hesse, another post-Minimalist art world darling, and had attracted acclaim. Still, her beauty and perceived narcissism were irksome to some critics, and the wordplay in the titles of her pieces and shows signaled a winky exuberance some viewed as frivolous.
Born Arlene Hannah Butter to Hungarian Jewish parents in New York City in 1940, Wilke studied art at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and taught sculpture and ceramics at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She worked in a range of media, making drawings, photographs, sculptures, installations, video art, and performance art over the course of her career.
She was best known for her most suggestive work. “By now everyone is quite well aware that Hannah Wilke does cunts,” Mark Savitt’s 1975 profile in Arts Magazine provocatively began. It was both true and not true. In addition to latex pieces with names like “Pink Champagne” and “Ponder-r-osa” (a nod to both the cheesy steakhouse chain Ponderosa and Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), Wilke made herself the subject of numerous conceptual photography series. In many of those, she affixed small vaginal shapes — mostly crafted from materials that signaled both capitalist detritus and domestic labor, like laundry lint and bubble gum — to her naked body. The shapes Wilke referred to as “wounds” or sometimes even “cunts,” and commented, “I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman — chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.” Elsewhere, however, she said that the objects “can be seen as female and male…So they are really male-female gestural sculptures.”
They were actually the pieces that began her career and would largely define it. Wilke started making the “vulval” shapes, “one-fold gestural sculptures,” as she called them, in clay in the early 1960s. Though they were clearly erotically charged, she always intended for the shapes to conjure a host of other material associations. “My folded clay pieces are like little pieces of nature, a new species,” Wilke said. “They exist the way sea shells exist.” Savitt’s piece corroborates the possibility for manifold interpretations; he says the tiny sculptures suggest “a disembodied nipple, the head of an erect penis, a clitoris, or a collar….An evocative, composed form, is fashioned by the artist with a perfect economy of means.”
Though many women artists of the era dreamed of the day they might be seen as artists first (a day that has yet to arrive), a great deal of feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s foregrounded women’s experience. Along with artists like Lynda Benglis, Carolee Schneemann, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wilke used her own body in clever, startling, and titillating ways, to various ends. In some of her pieces, like “S.O.S. Starification Object Series,” Wilke, re-appropriating the male gaze, represents herself as a sex symbol and seems to be practicing a form of self-objectification as a way of forcing the viewer to explore his/her own complicity in female subjugation. Elsewhere, as in her 1976 poster “Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism,” she takes mainstream feminism itself to task for its double standards and judgments about how women use their bodies. Her work was always shot through with playfulness and humor, however. As soon as critics thought they had her pinned down, pieces like her 1978 “What Does This Represent…? What Do You Represent…?” in which Wilke sits naked surrounded by toy guns, would turn the questions of the critical reception of art back on the viewer.
Wilke was undoubtedly invested in creating an iconography of femininity. In an application for a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Wilke wrote that she had, since 1960, been “concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female, a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract.” But as a result of this interest, as with so many women making art during the height of the women’s movement, Wilke was frequently seen only as a “feminist artist” who made “cunt art,” as visual art depicting vaginal themes was sometimes being referred to at the time. It was an unfortunately reductive view of her ambitious and broad body of work, and one of the reasons she sought to distance herself somewhat from the “essentialist” work of feminist artists like Judy Chicago.
There was also the problem of Wilke’s looks. Lissome and gorgeous, she was often dismissed or criticized for making her own likeness central to her work — or just for being so pretty in the first place. Though many sophisticated critics took her work seriously, Wilke was sometimes seen as an “art star” as much as an artist, and she struggled to transcend narrow perceptions of her work and its impact. Some saw her images of her own naked body as simply reproducing, rather than critiquing, the sexist representational regimes so many feminists were fighting against. Even feminist critic Lucy Lippard uncharitably wrote that Wilke was a “glamour girl in her own right, who sees her work as ‘seduction’” and confuses “her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, [which] has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations.”
But Wilke was exceedingly comfortable with ambiguity. In her willingness to challenge cultural prescriptions and categories, Wilke was, in the words of art critic Amelia Jones, “flamboyantly courageous.” Her work took an even more personal turn in the late 1970s when she began chronicling her mother Selma’s battle with cancer. In “Portrait of the Artist With Her Mother Selma Butter,” Wilke juxtaposes a photograph of herself topless and made up with one of her rail-thin, dying mother, her mastectomy scar an angry red.
When Wilke herself was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987, she began, with the help of her husband, Donald Goddard, to document her own decline. The unsparing, often disturbing, sometimes grotesque photographs of her changing and ever more medicalized and desexualized body offer a stark counterpoint to her earlier work, and prompt viewers to contemplate both the grimness of mortality and the power of art. The images also serve as a reminder that there may be a greater cultural comfort with the naked body of a dying woman than that of one who is exercising her agency to live fully.
