Hannah Wilke
The classic narcissist, in love with her own image, tries to express that love in life, in art, or in both. But the woman in the multiple photographs of Gestures–grids of 9 or 12 photos arranged on three sheets–is hardly lovable at all. She thrusts her hands against her face, compressing the skin, or stretches her face by pulling at it; she covers her eyes, or places her hands beside her face as if about to pinch it. Mostly she’s rebuffing the viewer, denying the erotic pleasure usually sought in images of women by the male gaze. But the multiple shots have another effect as well. Many of the different poses seem expressions of differing personalities. As the eye goes from one image to another in the grid, they begin to cancel one another out. Woman, so often judged by her appearance, here eludes the camera’s defining eye. Each pose is a momentary mask, a superficial glimpse contradicted by the next one. Wilke’s essence lies elsewhere, beyond imagery.
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In this Duchamp (permanently installed near The Large Glass at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), one looks through a peephole in a wooden door at a magical miniature scene. In the foreground of a forest setting with an optical waterfall a sculpted female lies nude on a bed of twigs, her legs spread, shaved genitalia facing the viewer. By contrast, Wilke photographs herself from above, with her feet at the top of the shot; one no longer gazes directly into a vagina, and the inversion defamiliarizes the nude, preventing its easy assimilation into a long history of images of female genitals. What’s more, the clothes she’s taken off in order to pose nude lie scattered about, distancing us further from Duchamp’s mythic mannequin: the way you get a naked lady, Wilke seems to say, is by having an actual woman undress. A small bottle of what seems to be suntan lotion makes the point that nudity poses not only spiritual and cultural problems, but real risks to real skin.
