hannah wilke

“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”

It’s the seventies and you enter a gallery. A woman hands you some gum, which you place in your mouth and begin to chew. You admire this woman: she’s got long dark hair and a shirt is carelessly enveloping her slender frame. She’s beautiful. She proceeds by removing her shirt and your gaze wanders to her breasts as you chew. And then she approaches you and you are forced to look her in the eyes. She requests the gum back and you oblige, after all, it was a disposable gift. It’s lost its sweetness. You weren’t going to chew it forever. You watch her as she twists the gum, toying with it and transforming it, before she places it on her bare skin. Before long she has collected the gum from everyone around you and you are looking at her as you were before, but now you are distracted by her wounds. Your view is interrupted by imperfections, as she is spotted with scars. For her, she has starified herself.

Hannah Wilke performed such scenes for a series of photographs entitled S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-1982) in which she would appear topless, posing with sunglasses or cowboy hats or toy guns as she satirized the glamour models, adopting the exaggerated poses of celebrities as she assumed the role of a star. In every image she looked beautiful, but diseased. Her wounds had been regularly placed, purposefully, reminiscent of the tribal ritual of scarification, where you are marked with scars as marks of your rites of passage, providing status and labeling your sex. Wilke began her career as a sculptor, creating vulva terra-cotta sculptures in the sixties as some of the first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the women’s liberation movement. They appear to erupt before you and remind the viewer of both the warmth and fragility of a flower. They were a counter symbol to the phallus. She utilized not only conventional materials for such sculptures, but also Play-Doh, laundry lint, cookie dough, and chewing gum. Covered in cunts.

Often one can only understand their identity in relation to another, a comparison of the two. Men who fear castration enjoy the image of a woman and their lack of phallus. There lurks a sense of opposition, of the viewed and viewer, interpreted and interpreter, have and have not. Femininity often implies fragility. You are wounded, not as strong as a man. You should ‘grow some balls’. There is also a ritual scarring women often have to go through to become a female star. Not only through unattainable beauty standards but it is not uncommon that it is expected that your vagina is to be used, in this rite of passage, to achieve your goals. One of the biggest stars in the world became famous through a sex tape. It’s not Ray Jay’s sex tape, it’s Kim Kardashian’s. We are in a world where stories of sex being used as a tool are more common than those where it is a celebration. Where women are often expected to compensate a gesture with their cunt. Where when men look at women they are often automatically sexualizing them, projecting an often-unwanted sexual image. Distracted by the vagina, hiding underneath yet it is all they can see. It is her label. Especially if she is beautiful.

“Asking people to take pleasure in their own bodies puts them in fear more than anything else” 

The patriarchy has separated the mind from the body, the subject from the object. Can you retain authority whilst naked? When you pose, immobilized and confined, you are a body performing for someone. Wilke’s work around her portraits, such as her performances as films, display action and combine the subject contained with the body, which speaks for it. She forces the object to be viewed as a subject in her 1974 work Gestures, in which she manipulates her face into sexually suggestive orifices. She forces the audience to look at the entrance to her mind: the tools she has to vocalize herself as a person, and displaces their sexual desires onto it. 

Whilst men view themselves as transcendent, as surpassing others in complete comprehension and ability to control the situation, a woman has to first view herself through the eyes of a man before she can see herself as she is. She must conquer double the distance to achieve the same goal. Wilke performed her poses, exaggerating beyond their patriarchal function in a reiterative, narcissistic display. She was positioned as an object would be for male voyeuristic enjoyment, however she was in control of his gaze. She employed reiteration until how you view her becomes unignorable, as her deliberate poses direct your eyes, as she leads them across her body. This allows her to be a subject rather than an object and forces the viewer to face their projections on her. You are made to question why she would pose in such a way willingly, exposing the reality that when girls pose like this it is often for a man. Her work appears to be an oxymoron, as she is both the subject and the imitation of a woman as an object, and by doing so she depletes the incompatibility of the two. At first viewing, you succumb to your gaze and the enjoyment you achieve from poses prominent in western culture, before she employs a chiasmus as she so exaggerates it and consequently undermines it. You realize this was her purpose and through the rhetoric of her pose, she is in control. She simultaneously solicits and confronts the male gaze, dislocating its self-assured direction, negotiating with the other. She treats her body as though she does not own it, but questions the viewer why, evoking a sense of self-realisation.

“People give me this bullshit of, ‘What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make? ... Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.’ Everybody dies.”[1] 

Beauty is a curse. What a cliché, I suppose. It’s easy to say that when you’re beautiful, to not know what it’s like to be ugly. Yet does that make your personality invalid? Are your opinions no longer something to be taken seriously, instead constantly undermined? Just because certain things may be easier doesn’t mean they are any less credible. Why should beauty equate shallowness? Why should it remove power? Sometimes you have to remove these so-called blessings in order to no longer be disabled by them.  

When male artists used female nudes they were a body, not a face or a person, and they were always beautiful. That was expected, as is often the case in art today. For a man to use a beautiful form it is neutral, expected. Wilke was criticized when she did the same to her own body. Her art was conscious and deliberate: she knew how people would look at her but she was confronting it rather than running from it, in the same way that we shouldn’t have separate carriages for men and women on the tubes to prevent catcalling, as that segregation is running from the problem rather than dealing with it. Wilke reclaimed her body and commanded her image. Yet she was undermined, with prominent feminists of the age such as Lucy Lippard proclaiming there was “confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist.”[2]Wilke responded “Beware of Fascist Feminism”, for if feminism is to be a celebration of women, giving them back power over their own bodies, why should she merely migrate from a society where she was compelled to employ her body in one arena, to be forced to use it in a different way. Some feminists had the view that there was no possible way to see the female body other than in the patriarchal setting. Surely her body is her own and she should do what she wants with it. It is this intention that often gets misconstrued as people project their own perspective on ideas, unable to see the other view.

Wilke multiplies herself, she is a continuous form rather than a static being, as she adds layers with each pose. You can choose how to interpret this, either as a woman you will never fully know, or as a narcissistic, shallow girl. Whilst Narcissus fell in love with his reflection and his downfall came from his lack of ability to merge his image with himself, living in a constant state of flux between subject and object, Wilke managed to collapse the gap in her work. By performing, she removed the distance between the image and herself, removing any perspective and interrogating the audience. Indeed her chewing-gum cunts can be subject to different viewpoints, for when you get close enough her sculptures can look equally like the head of a cock. She emphasizes lack of differences between men and women, a lack that men fear.

Critics saw her as taking too much pleasure in her work, as if she were complying with men rather than exposing it, however she is fundamentally exposing it. Something that has been so ingrained in our culture she led her viewers to awareness on the matter rather than aggressively attacking it. Narcissism is culturally ascribed as female, as women are often out of necessity: men want beauty. She worked too comfortably within the code of an ‘ideal’ woman, for you must be beautiful to be labeled narcissistic. Yet she was merely the foundation that must be activated by a male gaze, imposing their own interpretation onto her, enacting a fundamental incoherence between interpreted and interpreter. But the true female narcissist is dangerous to men, for she needs no confirmation from them and instead her self-love is her driver. 

It is pitiful that it was only when Wilke got cancer that the beautiful filter was removed and critics could finally see her work for what it was. She needed cancer to be able to communicate effectively, for those not to misinterpret her intentions. She needed pity to be taken seriously. Her final project, Intra-Venus (1992-1993)mirrored her previous work. It included pieces she called “Brushings” which were made from her hair that had fallen out from her treatment and bloody bandages mounted on paper. They contained her DNA, just as those who chewed the gum laced a part of themselves on Hannah, she placed a part of herself that she had lost unwillingly in her art. She had lost control of her body, this time to disease not the patriarchy, and once again exposes it. There were once again performative self-portraits. She was once again missing clothes and remained eager to use her body as part of her sculpture, yet this time she was not what most would call beautiful. This time she was actually wounded. She was bloated, bloody and hairless, and now she forced the viewer to confront their expectations about the appearance of the female body. Her cunt was hairless, not through beautification but taken from her by the illness. By displaying her vagina she proves that even without beauty, sex survives and exposes the viewers striking depletion in sexual interest despite the function of desire remaining. She exposes the shallowness, the insufficiency of the male gaze. Her work is once again a negotiation between herself and the other, yet the cancer has taken on this role. She is now the same subject, but a different object. 

It’s the seventies and you enter a gallery. A man hands you some gum, which you place in your mouth and begin to chew. You admire this man: he’s got dark hair and a shirt is carelessly enveloping his toned frame. He’s beautiful. He proceeds by removing his clothes and you admire his confidence. He has ownership of his body. He is in control.

This piece originally appeared in SheZine

[1]Marvin Jones et. al. interview with Hannah Wilke, “Hannah Wilke's art, politics, religion, and feminism,” The New Common Good (May 1985), 11

[2]Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art,” Art in America 64, n. 3 (May- June 1976), reprinted in Lippard's From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976), 126.