by Chris Kraus
On April 9, 1995 I saw Dick alone in Los Angeles for the last time. We took a walk behind Lake Avenue. On April 20, I phoned him from upstate New York. I was upset and wanted resolution. The conversation was long and messy. He asked me why I made myself so vulnerable. Was I a masochist? I told him No. “’Cause don’t you see? Everything that’s happened here to me has happened only cause I’ve willed it.” On April 23, I met John Hanhardt, then curator of the Whitney Museum, to talk about my films. I was expecting John to offer me a show; instead, he wanted to engage me in a dialogue about the “failure” of my films.
On June 6, 1995 I moved permanently to Los Angeles.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “Understand or die.”
That summer I was hoping to understand the link between Dick’s misapprehension of me as a “masochist” and John Hanhardt’s judgement of my films. Both men admitted that though they found my work repugnant, it was “intelligent” and “courageous.” I believed that if I could understand this link I could extend it to the critical misreads of a certain kind of female art. “I have just realized that the stakes are myself,” Diane di Prima wrote in Revolutionary Letters in 1973. “Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the genius Alice Notley said when I visited her in Paris. Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?
Today at Barnes & Noble I bought a new book by Steve Erickson. The jacket blurbs, placing him within a new and all-male canon, offended me. “Erikson’s a major player,” the Washington Post crowed, shades of Norman Mailer in the ’50s, “up there with his contemporaries Richard Powers and William Vollman, the spokesmen of the chaos generation.”
“Dear Dick,” I wrote in one of many letters, “what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it’s least described.”
MONSTERS
El Paso Drive
June 21, 1995
DD,
This letter comes to you from Eagle Rock, Los Angeles—it’s 40 miles away from where you’re living but it feels very far away. I got to LA two weeks ago, seems like forever. Constant loops from one mood to another, loneliness and optimism, fear, ambition… Do you know the meaning of those roller coaster billboards that you see driving round the city? A black & white slightly blurred photo of some people on a roller coaster, a red circle slash for “No” printed at the center? Don’t know if it’s some kind of public art. It’s a poor attempt at menace if it is one. In New York on 7th Street between Avenues B and C there’s a plywood hoarding nailed like a canopy to some scaffolding above the entrance of a crackhouse. Someone’s wheat-pasted a poster of two men in loose black clothes leaning with their guns against a high-rise patio balustrade. It’s very scary: war-time reality slammed up against the image of a new-wave ’60s futuristic movie. This is no movie, the poster seems to say. It’s Beirut, these guys are serious, and so is thug business. Walking east towards it your eyes perform a double flip—the image of the patio seems to be protruding from the building, very trompe l’oeil, but by the time you’ve finally unravelled it you’re already walking past the armored door.
God what a hoot. I’m moved to talk to you about art because I think you’ll understand and I think I understand art more than you—
—Because I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, ’cause there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style.
But really Dick I’m moved to write you differently ’cause everything is different now. I think of you a lot now that crossing socially seems inevitable. Both of us are in the LA artworld and it’s small.
The image that I have of you is frozen in a single snapshot: April 19, the opening of the Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin/Charles Gaines show at the Santa Monica Museum. You’re standing in the largest Jeffrey Vallance room, talking, drink-in-hand, to a knot of younger people (students?). Tall, black shirt and Euro-cut black jacket, standard opening wear for artists. You’re standing very straight, your face smushed back in against itself; smiling-talking-moving yet imploding somehow backwards towards the immobility of the frame. You’re locked. You are a country. A separate state. Visible, unbridgeable. And I’m standing in a tiny cluster next to yours, a trio, Daniel Marlos and Mike Kelley and just like you I’m shaky—my body trembles slightly as it cuts through space. But also very present. The Conquering of Fear is like performance. You recognize your fear and then you move with it.
So far I’ve told “our” story twice, late at night, as fully as I could, to Fred Dewey and Sabina Ott. It’s the story of 250 letters, my “debasement,” jumping headlong off a cliff. Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it’s personal and private; my neurosis. “The greatest secret in the world is, THERE IS NO SECRET.” Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. I think our story is performative philosophy.
The artist Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Butter in 1940 and grew up in Manhattan and Long Island. She died of cancer at the age of 52. Wilke’s output was prolific and consistent. Through constant effort she maintained a visible career. At a certain point, perhaps the early ’70s, her work began addressing the following question:
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
To ask this question, to be willing to live it through, is still so bold.
In 1974, after producing drawings, ceramics and sculptural wall pieces—many of which involved a “tough, ambiguous depiction of traditionally female imagery” (Douglas Crimp, 1972) for 11 years, Hannah started to insert her own image into her art. I don’t know what experiences or conditions in her life precipitated this. Was she pushed towards it by critics such as Phyllis Derfner, who wrote responding to her show of cunts fashioned out of washing machine lint at Feldman in 1972:
“There is some wit in this but it is swamped by aggressive ideology… The ideology is that of women’s liberation. Female bodies have been shown, but only in an oppressive, ‘sexist’ manner. Wilke’s forthright repetitious presentation of the most intimate image of female sexuality is intended to be a cure for all this. I don’t see how it is supposed to work. It is boring and superficial.”
Unlike Judy Chicago and her bloated vaginal renditions of Great Cunts In History—a show that every mother in the world could take her daughters to—Hannah never was afraid to be undignified, to trash herself, to call a cunt a cunt. “I want to throw back to the audience everything the world throws at me” (Penny Arcade, 1982). Hannah later told the Soho Weekly News how she’d collected ‘material’ for this work over several years by doing laundry for Claes Oldenburg, her companion at that time. Even then Hannah was a neo-Dadaist. Claes Oldenburg, Great Male Universal Artist, shanghai’d.
In 1974 Wilke made her first videotape, Gestures. Created one day after the death of her sister’s husband, Gestures was, among other things, an expression of grief and dismay, a reaching for the body after death. The critic James Collins gave it two thumbs up in Artforum. “Every time I see her work I think of pussy,” he decl
ared. An early champion of Wilke’s work, Collins described Gestures thusly:
“Erotically Wilke’s video was more successful—‘hornier’—than the sculpture. Why? Well she’s actually in it for a start. The video is probably the best thing in the show because by being in the pieces, using just her head and hands, she gives the folding gestures, particularly, more meaning. Stroking, kneading, preening and slapping her face were interesting but the folding mouth gestures were the naughtiest. Because she’s sensuously breaking a cultural rule and that’s one definition of erotic. Pushing at her lips and then folding them back… Using her mouth as a surrogate vagina and her tongue as a surrogate clitoris, in the context of her face, with its whole psychological history, was strong stuff !…
“Wilke’s position in the art world is a strange paradox between her own physical beauty and her very serious art. She longs to fulfill her sexuality; but her attempt to deal with this dilemma within the women’s movement has a touching air of pathos about it.”
But don’t you see, the paradoxes in Hannah Wilke’s work are not pathetic, they’re polemic. (It’s like that night, Dick, when you called me “passive-aggressive” on the phone? Wrong!) Gestures throws the weirdnesses of male response to female sexuality wide open.
Meanwhile, Hannah-in-the-work was exploring much more personal and human ground.
“Ree Morton told me that when she saw the video she almost cried,” Wilke recalled several years later. “I exposed myself beyond posing and she saw past it. She saw the pathos beyond posing.”
From this point on, Hannah willingly became a self-created work of art.
In SOS Starification Object Series (1974-1979) she turns to face the camera in 3/4 profile, bare tits and jeans unzipped with one hand on her crotch. Her eyes are bare and heavy. Her long hair’s set in housewife rollers, obviously a home job. Eight bits of chewed-up gum, shaped to simulate vaginas are stuck across her face like scars or pimples. “Gum has a shape before you chew it. But when it comes out, it comes out as real garbage,” she later said. “In this society we use people up the way we use up chewing gum.” In her presence, Hannah always was extremely beautiful.
In 1977 she made another videotape called Intercourse with…in which the answering-machine messages left by her boyfriends, friends and family play as she removes the names of the most troubling, spelled out in Pres-type, from her naked body. “Become your own myth,” she started saying.
Like every other work of art, Hannah became a piece of road-kill for the artpress jackals. Torn literally apart. Her naked body straddling interpretations of the hippie-men who saw her as an avatar of sexual liberation and hostile feminists like Lucy Lippard who saw any female self-display as patriarchal putty.
Hannah started using the impossibility of her life, her artwork, and career as material. If art’s a seismographic project, when that project’s met with miscomprehension, failure must become its subject too. In 1976 she produced a poster modelled after the famous School for Visual Arts subway ads that read:
“Having a talent isn’t worth much unless you know what to do with it.” Hannah reproduced it with a photo of her fucked-up self. Portrait of the Artist as an Object: she’s wearing a crocheted apron that doesn’t hide her naked tits at all and clutching a Mickey Mouse doll. The now famous chewing gum vaginas are arranged like tiny scabs across her body. In a later poster called Marxism And Art, Hannah’s wearing a man’s shirt flung wide open to reveal bare breasts, chewed up cunts and a wide man’s tie. “Beware of Fascist Feminism,” the poster reads.
From the very start, art critics saw Hannah’s willingness to use her body in her work as an act of “narcissism” (“A harmless air of narcissism pervades this show…” New York Times, 9/20/75). This strange descriptor still follows her beyond the grave, despite the passionate efforts of writers like Amanda Jones and Laura Cottingham to refute it. In his review of Intra-Venus, Hannah’s posthumous show, Ralph Rugoff describes the artist’s startling photos of her naked cancer-ridden body as “a deeply thrilling venture into narcissism.” As if the only possible reason for a woman to publically reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one’s own objectification. As if Hannah Wilke was not brilliantly feeding back her audience’s prejudice and fear, inviting them to join her for a naked lunch.
A few smart men like Peter Frank and Gerrit Lansing recognized the strategy and wit of Hannah’s work, though not, perhaps, the boldness and the cost. The fact she was a genius. At any rate, the controversy around her work never agglomerated into major stardom. By 1980 Guy Trebay was sniffing in the Village Voice that Hannah’s vagina “is now as familiar to us as an old shoe.” Has anybody ever said this about Chris Burden’s penis?
No one apart from Hannah’s closest friends and family recognized the sweetness and idealism at the bottom of her work. Her warmth. The human-ness of her female person.
In an amazing text written in 1976, Hannah proved to be her own best critic:
“Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed…continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs… Gambling as well as gamboling… To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one. The way my smile just gleams, the way I sip my tea. To be a sugar giver instead of a salt cellar, to not sell out…”
Hannah Wilke Wittgenstein was pure female intellect, her entire gorgeous being stretched out in paradoxical proposition.
In 1979, Claes Oldenburg, Hannah’s partner since the late 1960s, changed their door-locks while she was out one day and married someone else. She recreated the collection of 50 rayguns she’d collected for his work and posed naked with them in a series of ‘performalist self portraits’ called So Help Me Hannah in which she “demonstrates” and overturns her favorite classic citations of male philosophy and art.
Hannah Wilke on Ad Reinhardt: sitting naked in a corner, feeling hopeless, head in hands, high-heeled legs apart. She’s surrounded by toy pistols and bazookas. “WHAT DOES THIS REPRESENT/WHAT DO YOU REPRESENT” the title reads.
Hannah Wilke on Karl Marx: Posed shakily on the pistons of a combustion engine in her strappy high-heeled sandals, naked body part of the machine, Hannah lunges forward in profile, toy guns in hand. EXCHANGE VALUES. (Exchange values? Whose?)
The insertion of Hannah Wilke’s complex human presence throws all slogans into question. Her beauty is compelling, but as in Gestures, her presence circumvents the pose.
“I have long since resolved to be a Jew… I regard that as more important than my art,” R.B. Kitaj and Arnold Schoenberg declared. Hannah Wilke said: “Feminism in a larger sense is intrinsically more important to me than art.” No one ever called these men bad Jews.
The bitterest irony of Hannah Wilke’s career is that her imitators who risked much less became art stars of the early ’80s. “Wilke’s projection of herself contrasts markedly with the more impersonal impersonations of…the recent work of Cindy Sherman, whose ‘dress up’ masquerades are au fond no less narcissistic, but somehow easier to accept or digest as art because they disguise the self and parody the suffering, pain and pleasure we sense as real in Wilke’s art,” Lowery Sims argued in a New Museum catalog in 1984. But by then art history had already labelled Wilke dumb, her imitators smart:
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, 1980: [Because Hannah Wilke’s art] “has no theory of the representations of women, it presents images of women as unproblematic. It does not take into account the social contradictions of ‘femininity’.” (Screen: 35–39)
Catherine Liu, 1989: “Wilke is well known for appearing nude in her work. She projects a hippylike comfort with her own nakedness. But her self exposure, which translates as some kind of rhetoric of sexual freedom for women, is too facile, too simple a formulation. The work of artists like Cindy Sherman and Aimee Rankin has shown female sexuality to be the site of as much pain as pleasure.”
(Artforum 12/89)
“Because we rejected a certain kind of theoretical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the poet Alice Notley said to me in Paris last year. Hannah Wilke spent a great deal of energy throughout her life trying to prove that she was right. If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too. Dear Dick, That’s what I realized when I fell in love with you.
“Of course, Hannah did become a monster,” I said to Warren Niesluchowski. Warren’s a friend, an artworld personality and critic, a smart and cultivated guy. We were sitting on Mike Kelley’s patio at a barbecue, catching up on news. Warren knows everyone in the artworld. He’d known Hannah since they met in 1975 at the Soho restaurant Food.
Warren chuckled. “Yes, she did. But of the wrong kind. Not a monster on the order of Picasso, or—” (and here he named several other famous males). “The problem was, she started taking everything so personally. She refused to take a leap of faith. Her work was no longer art.”
In 1985 Claes Oldenburg threatened an injunction against the University of Missouri Press. They were preparing a book of Hannah Wilke’s work and writings to accompany her first major retrospective.
In order to protect his “privacy,” Claes Oldenburg demanded that the following items be removed: 1) a photograph from Advertisements For Living that depicted Claes together with Hannah’s eight year old niece. 2) Any mention of his name in Hannah’s writings. 3) Reproduction of a collaborative poster, Artists Make Toys. 4) Quotations from a correspondence between him and Hannah that was a part of Hannah Wilke’s text, I Object.
Claes’ fame and the University’s unwillingness to defend her made it possible for Oldenburg to erase a huge portion of Hannah Wilke’s life. Eraser, Erase-her—the title of one of Wilke’s later works.
