Jeanette Kohl

INTRA-VENUS

The oeuvre of American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) is permeated with cultural, psychological, and art historical refractions of the Venus/Aphrodite myth: female nudity exposed and contained by the artificiality of poses; the narcissism of the female artist as a radicalized alter ego of Venus; and ambivalent stagings that counteract and ridicule the notion of Venus as a Muse. In her late series Intra-Venus, the strikingly beautiful Wilke, dying of cancer, documents her physical decay with chilling detachment. In boldly exhibiting the obscenity of fatal illness, Wilke addresses the horror inscribed in the myth of the birth of Venus, a horror no longer sublimated by female pudor. Reading Wilke’s work alongside Didi-Huberman’s Ouvrir Venus (1999), this essay shows how the artist re-interprets Venus in an unprecedented, existential way, exploiting the full power of the mythological story and opening it up to post-feminist concepts of the body.

To my brave and beautiful daughter, Philine Johanna

I. Washed ashore—“a maiden of no human countenance”

No other painting in the history of art has characterized our notion of Venus more deeply than Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, painted in the years around 1485 for the Medici (Fig. 1).1 The young marble-like beauty in the center of the large-format painting is an intriguing eye catcher, even today.2 The captivating presence of the dreamy, nude Venus is embedded in a readily recognizable iconography—yet the image has distinctly unsettling undertones, an almost uncanny ‘subtext,’ which has been described by Aby

1 The painting has been much less discussed than Botticelli’s Primavera, which prompts

Frank Zöllner to start his chapter on the Birth of Venus with the remark: “The most famous paintings are often the most unrecognized ones” (Zöllner, Botticelli, 82; my translation). Also see Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 128–140, 263f.; Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 152–164; Levi d’Ancona, Due quadri del Botticelli, 22, 51–62. On the role of gold in the painting, see Barolsky, “Botticelli’s Golden Goddess,” 4f.

2 Its measurements are 172.5 cm × 278.5 cm (67.9 × 109.6 inches).

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Warburg and, more recently, by Georges Didi-Huberman.3 Botticelli’s painting of the foam-born Venus might have come into being as a Renaissance recreation of a celebrated work by the Greek painter Apelles, showing Venus Anadyomene rising from the sea, a lost image recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.4 As noted by many art historians following Aby Warburg, its more immediate inspiration stems from a passage in Angelo Poliziano’s Stanze written a decade before the image was painted.5

Fig. 1: Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1485. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

3 See Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 89–156, 141f.; Didi-

Huberman, Venus öffnen, 35–55. 4 For Apelles and Venus Anadyomene see Didi-Huberman, “La couleur d’écume, ou le

paradoxe d’Apelle.” Also see Campbell/Cole, Italian Renaissance Art, 254. Ronald Lightbown impugns the idea that the painting was an attempt to re-create Apelle’s Venus Andadyomene. See Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 159, 162.

5 For Poliziano as a source, see Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies;” Chastel, Art e l’Humanisme à Florence, 265–285; Meltzoff, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola, 261–265. Poliziano describes how Venus was born out of the foam of the sea, wafted toward the land on a seashell by playful zephyrs, her hair curling up and moving in the wind while she is trying to tame it with one hand, pressing the other against her youthful breast. Washed ashore, the goddess is received by the Horae, who wrap her in a star-spangled dress to cover up her nudity. See also Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 156–159. A passage in the Homeric Hymns localizes the shore on the island of Cyprus, where Aphrodite is received by the Horae, who dress her in immortal clothes. See “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6),” 1–6.

The arrival of the goddess of love, fertility, and prosperity can be understood as an allegory of the Renaissance proper: The inspirational beauty of Antiquity has finally set foot on the shores of Florence under the Medici, where humanism and the reign of Platonic love are reborn. Lorenzo il Magnifico and his family and circle could hardly have had a catchier image to glorify the Medici’s rule over Florence as an enlightened Golden Age inspired by the spirit of Antiquity.6 The painting’s protagonist is also reminiscent of the Venus de’ Medici, the famous antique marble sculpture in the possession of the Medici, which shows the antique goddess in a similar pose of the Venus pudica, her hands gracefully concealing her left breast and her pudendum.7

While the rebirth of classical Antiquity is formulated through the idea of the female body as naked jetsam, it also confronts the viewer with the nuda veritas, the naked truth of Quattrocento Neo-Platonism.8 The close relation between this subject and the Venus pudica is emphasized by Erwin Panofsky in his Studies in Iconology (1939). We also find it in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on painting, Della Pittura, where Alberti paraphrases truth as a naked figure, “pudica et verecunda” (“pudent and chaste”).9 Sandro Botticelli’s lovely blonde in her dreamy pose was, we must assume, much more than just a fashionable pin-up catering to the sophisticated, Antiquity-conscious taste of the Florentine high society. She is a mythologically and metaphorically charged figure, washed ashore by much more than erotic male fantasies. Her extraordinarily explicit frontal nudity has given rise to many attempts in the history of art to cover up and veil this nudity—and the disturbing story of her birth—with a variety of idealizing discourses on the role of aesthetics in representation.

When Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus in or around 1485, he translated the sanctioned nudity of antique sculptures into a large-format tempera painting, boldly showcasing a life-size, gleaming beauty goddess at its center. The image’s overall composition is a variation of his slightly earlier Primavera with Venus, here decently dressed, at its center (Fig. 2).

6 See Mack, “Botticelli’s Venus,” 207–237; Bredekamp, Sandro Botticelli, 34–55. 7 In this sense, Botticelli’s Venus is perhaps also an ambitious paragone statement, the

painting rivaling with one of the most iconic antique statues known to the Renaissance. Antique sculptures of the Venus pudica type were in Florentine private collections as early as the fourteenth century, mostly attributed to the famed antique sculptor Polykleitos. See Zöllner, “Policretior manu,” 458.

8 In the later Middle Ages, the Venus pudica already appears as a formal prototype for Giovanni Pisano’s allegory of temperance on the pulpit of the Pisa Cathedral of 1305–12. See Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 132.

9 Didi-Huberman, Venus öffnen, fn. 26f.

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Fig. 2: Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera, 1477–82. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Yet, while the painted allegory of spring presents a Venus who pensively looks out of the tableau, inviting the beholder to observe and join its figures’s self-absorbed roundel of gracious movements, the The Birth of Venus is a melancholically distanced presentation of a nude body in the state of emerging shame: Venus looks aside, passively presenting her bareness, her hands trying to cover up what they can. In depicting the instant immediately before the veiling of her exposed body, Botticelli confronts the observer with the logic of a striptease in reverse, the moment in which Venus’s naked beauty is about to escape our view. We glimpse her last seconds of exposed nudity, her natural state before culturalization, a privilege, which increases the ambivalence between shame and erotic tension. This Venus pudica, using a strand of her abundant, fluttering hair to cover her pudendum, shows just enough of her body to function as an erotic trigger to the (male) view, an ‘invitation’ reinforced by her avoidance of eye contact.10 Yet, Venus, in all her alluring, sexualized beauty, is also, traditionally, the embodiment of love and humanity; and, in yet another role within Botticelli’s oeuvre, she appears as the allegory of nuda veritas in his Calumny of Apelles of 1494–95, a naked blonde with the same slender, somewhat unclassical proportions (the long legs and elongated neck), a

10 See Chapkis, Beauty Secrets, 15f., for the economics of male gaze and female exposure

and the psychological assumption that for men, in order to not being confronted with their own fragility and mortality, the idealized and perfected female body pacifies and reassures the male ‘regard.’

counter-image to the allegorical figure of remorse next to her. Here, Venus as nuda veritas points upward toward heaven, where higher justice prevails.11 Botticelli clearly reused the image-type of Venus for his female allegory of the naked truth—they look practically identical. She is not only a heavenly and erotic Venus, she also stands for theoretical ideals of nakedness as an expression of uncompromised truth. Ambivalences and ambiguities of the human body, slippages between sacred and profane, entanglements of eroticism and virtue, all are highly characteristic of the Florentine Quattrocento.12

The longer we look, the more does Venus’s painted youthful body with its emphasized outlines turn into a graphic, disembodied figure, matching the abstracts ripples of the flat, green ocean—an impression underscored by the awkward and nonsensical position of her feet on the supporting shell: She is floating less on the ocean than on the picture plane, her body is not really standing on anything. Her pensive look exudes indifferent melancholy. Neither the pretty flowers, which the wind gods carry toward her, nor the welcoming and sheltering gesture of the Hora seem to have any effect on her. She appears isolated. The image of pure, untouched beauty is also an image of detachment.

Aby Warburg first described these ambivalent moments of irritation, which lead us away from the painting’s iconography and toward questions of Einfühlung, or empathy.13 Warburg aptly described the painting’s somewhat uncomfortable tension as the result of a co-existence of involvement and detachment. He noted a structural, inherent indifference, or emptiness, paired with outward gestures of movement, which create the painting’s peculiar hybridity: It appears animated not by a homogeneous narrative force but rather through generously applied ‘external’ signifiers of movements, its pathos formulae, visual sediments of hidden internal movements.14 Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is an irritatingly impassive image of micro-motions that transcend questions of style. It is a shadowless image of unresolved polarities: remoteness and empathy, distance and address, dream and reality in unresolved tension.15 Warburg notes:

11 See Didi-Huberman, Venus öffnen, 28. 12 See recently Koos, Bildnisse des Begehrens; Kohl, “Body, Mind, and Soul;” Kohl, “Icons

of Chastity, Objets d’Amour.” 13 For the aesthetic act of empathy as a style generating factor, see Warburg, “Sandro

Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 89, 141f. 14 See Settis, Pathos und Ethos, 31–73; Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 67–

91 (‘Florence I: Bodies in Motion’). 15 Horst Bredekamp notes a similar phenomenon for Botticelli’s Primavera, whose

protagonists lack internal cohesion. The way the figures are arranged and (do not) interact is aptly characterized by Bredekamp as a “Balanceakt zwischen Ansprache

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One is tempted to say, of many of Botticelli’s women and boys, that they have just woken from a dream to become aware of the world around them; however active they may be in that world, still their minds are filled with images seen in dreams.16

Georges Didi-Huberman has scrutinized Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus exactly along these lines in his brilliant essay Ouvrir Vénus (1999).17 He traces Warburg’s and the (modern) beholder’s discomfort in front of the painting back to the prehistory of the moment depicted in the painting, relating the tableau’s mood of isolation to the mythological conditions of Venus’s birth. In one of the more common versions of the myth, the birth of Venus is associated with an act of brutal castration. Her pudor is the result of horror, her beauty is born out of an ugly crime.18 Warburg quotes Poliziano’s Stanze in which the gigantic catastrophe is described:

Nel tempestoso Egeo in Grembo a Teti si vede il frusto genitale accolto, sotto diverso volger di pianeti errar per l’onde in bianca schiuma avolto; a drento nata in atti vaghi e lieti una donzella non con uman volto. (In the storm-tossed Aegean, in Tethy’s lap Floats now the procreant stem of Uranus, Beneath the sundry wheeling planets tossed By waves, and with white foam encompassed round. Within the foam is born, in joy and grace, A maiden of no human countenance. By wanton zephyrs driven to the shore, She rides upon a shell, to heaven’s delight.)19

und Vereinzelung”—a double game in which the entire play of physical and gestural interaction is struggling to cover up a structural lack of interrelation, in the sense of an ‘elegiac emptiness.’ The almost schizophrenic tension between artful interaction and emotional or expressive vacuum culminates, according to Bredekamp, in Venus’s face, “deren Hälften bei aller äusseren Harmonie wie zu zwei unterschiedlichen Personen zu passen scheinen.” (Bredekamp, Sandro Botticelli, 79, also see 15)

16 Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 141. 17 For a much shorter English version of Didi-Huberman’s Ouvrir Vénus, see Didi-

Huberman, “Opening up Venus.” 18 Didi-Huberman refers to another of Poliziano’s poems, dedicated to Aphrodite

Anadyomene, in which the author rimes horror with pudor, the latter characterizing Aphrodite’s condition in statu nascendi. See Didi-Huberman, Venus öffnen, 45, fn. 59, referencing Poliziano, Prose volgari inedite, 219f.

19 Poliziano quoted in Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 91f.

According to the myth described in Hesiod’s Theogony, Cronus cut off his father Uranus’s genitals and threw them into the sea. Aphrodite was born out of the powerful foam the divine catastrophe had produced.20 In this mythological and poetical perspective, titanic cruelty is an integral part—and the raison d’être proper—of the blonde beauty arriving at the shores of mankind. She not only heralds the enlightening, redeeming power of antique wisdom and beauty, she is also the offspring of unthinkable horror and contamination.

In The Birth of Venus we do not see any of this drama. No other painting epitomizes Warburg’s fundamental idea of the pathos formula better than Botticelli’s oddly anemic painting with its sublimation of concealed pathos into the surface of ‘bewegtes Beiwerk’—moving hair and fluttering clothes. The brutality of male sexual disempowerment through amputation merges invisibly into a frozen pose of nude female integrity, an exposure oscillating between promise and shame. Botticelli’s Venus is posing; she assumes a posture well known from antique works of art. She is a quote, and her typical posture signals integrity, the beauty of slick surfaces, and the adaption to standards of behavior that cater to male eyes and expectations.

To veil nakedness in the guise of nudity and to disincarnate the female body in idealized images in order to absolve this body (the body of Venus) from its impurities and guilt is a male strategy of suppression in the delicate economy of sex and power—yet it is also a strategy applied by art historians, as Didi-Huberman argues in Ouvrir Vénus. He scrutinizes Kenneth Clark’s distinction between nudity and nakedness and his subsequent laudation of The Birth of Venus as the depiction of heavenly ideal beauty, a Venus coelestis reflecting the moral ideality of the Virgin Mary through the aesthetic purity of her ideal all’antica nudity.21 Clark separates nudity from nakedness in that he claims for the latter a state of being undressed and feeling awkward. Nudity, however,

carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled or defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body reformed.22

20 Hesiod, Theogony, 188–203. Also see Sale, “Aphrodite in the Theogony,” 508–521.

Poliziano, in taking up the violent episode, describes quite vividly how the planets were set in motion by the event, while one could see the Titan’s severed member, his “frusto genitale,” adrift on the waves, covered in white foam, “errar per l’onde in bianca schiuma avolto.” Poliziano quoted in Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 91.

21 See Clark, The Nude, 1–25 (‘The Naked and the Nude’), 92–102 (for Botticelli). 22 Ibid., 1, 3. See also Didi-Huberman, “Opening up Venus,” 38.

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Nakedness, in his frame of reference, is related to emotions of shame and empathy whereas nudity is perceived aesthetically, through its underlying design and concept. Clark’s approach “attempts to establish a pre-eminence of aesthetic judgement on the explicit refusal of all empathy toward the image.”23

While art historians like Kenneth Clark and Ronald Lightbown praise the unsurpassed aesthetic beauty and ‘radiance’ of the painting and its female protagonist,24 Didi-Huberman deconstructs its aesthetic layers of sugar coating and—literally—cuts right to the chase of the matter: Venus is a deeply ambivalent figure, more than painted theory appealing merely to our intellectual aesthetic judgment. Longing and cruelty are inherent features washed ashore together with her, structurally entangled into her existence. George Didi-Huberman’s groundbreaking claim—that we must understand Botticelli’s Venus from the inside (Einfühlung) rather than from what the figure appears to be aesthetically—takes us beyond iconography, disegno, and the surface symptoms of elegant movements. Her perfection is as unreal as her performance. Botticelli’s Venus, dreamy, self-contained, and visually filtered through the cliché of her antique pose, is isolated from actual human nakedness to the extent where the viewer would like to ‘break her up,’ like a doll, to see what’s inside of her, to see her naked reality and to understand what exactly she is a ‘symptom’ of.

II. Appropriating Venus

One effective way of slipping underneath the ‘sacralized’ ideality of Venus as a shameful female nude catering to the male eye is to actively take female possession of her. German performance artist Ulrike Rosenbach took Botticelli’s Venus as a foil for her video piece Reflections on the Birth of Venus (Reflexionen über die Geburt der Venus) from 1976. In the video, she isolates the iconic figure from its narrative context. On a black screen, we see nothing but the bright projection of the nude goddess standing on her shell. In disassociating her from the painting’s idyllic surroundings, Rosenbach emphasizes her loneliness and artificiality. She then uses the image as a background cliché for the superimposed projection of her own image, slowly revolving around herself to the sound of Bob Dylan’s song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”25 Rosenbach, in a feminist processing of

23 Didi-Huberman, “Opening up Venus,” 39. 24 See Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 160: “There is no more radiant picture in European

Art than this.” 25 “A life-size projection of Botticelli’s 15th-century painting of Venus on the wall, in

front of it a large triangle of salt. On the triangle a shell with a small video monitor

female clichés, critically appropriates and overwrites/overrides the figure’s shameful pose. The video image assumes an electronic mirror function. It not only documents the artist’s action in front of the image of Venus, it goes on to occupy and control it. Rosenbach was one of several female artists of the 1970s who visually formulated their feminist concerns by using iconic images from art history in order to unveil the various social constructions of gender and the dominating factor of the male ‘gaze.’26 For most feminist artists of the 1970s and 80s, Venus was an anti-icon, the poster girl of sticky male fantasies—a questionable Muse pairing voyeurism with metaphors of creativity. Venus was, consequently, not invited to Judy Chicago’s landmark Dinner Party (1974–79).27

Yet another artist, Hannah Wilke, born to Jewish parents in New York City in 1940, slipped into Venus’s skin and made her the leitmotif of her work.28 Wilke was a pioneer in sexually suggestive female performances, and her body of works mirrors feminist concerns in an unusual and fascinating panorama, from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s. She was a fiercely independent artist with tremendous creative chuztpah and a startling sense of witticism. However, a chorus of critical voices of some of the more dogmatic radical second-wave feminists of the 1970s and 80s was raised against her (by Lucy Lippard, Ann-Sargent Wooster, Elizabeth Hess, Judith Barry, Sandy Flitterman, and others). Feminist criticism was spurred by the fact that Wilke was an unconventional, playful, and exceptionally beautiful young woman who instrumentalized her feminine charms openly.29 Instead

showing breakers and foam. I step inside the Venus projection. My front is white. My rear is black. The projection of Venus covers my body. I slowly begin to turn. I turn about myself for 15 minutes. The light of the projection falls on my back and disappears. Dark, night. When the light strikes my front, it is bright and clearly visible, day. A Bob Dylan song—‘Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands’—provides the music.” (<www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/reflexionen-ueber-die-geburt-der-venus/>; Sept. 24, 2013)

26 The much over-used term ‘gaze’ is problematic in itself. It is an askew translation of Lacan’s term ‘regard.’ For this, see Ingrid Rowland’s quite detailed critique of Hans Belting’s recent publication Florence and Baghdad. Renaissance Art and Arab Science.

27 See Lippard, “Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.” 28 For information on Hannah Wilke, see the webpage maintained by her sister and

nephew, Marsie and Andrew Scharlatt, <www.hannahwilke.com/> (Sept. 24, 2013). Also see the article on Wilke in Ware/Braukman, Notable American Women, 688f., in-cluding a bibliography.

29 As Amelia Jones notes, most of the 1970s’s articles and critiques of Hannah Wilke and her work start out with remarks on her stunning looks. See Jones, Body Art, 151–195 (‘The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke and the Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art’), in particular 171. She has been described as “[v]isually arresting” (Schwartz, “Art: Hannah Wilke,” 55) and “the most gorgeous face and body in town” (Frackman, “Hannah Wilke,” 28).

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of counteracting or downplaying her Venus-like looks, she used them as a trump card, not without a subtle sense of irony, which was often lost on her critics.30 Her sexualized female self-objectification was dismissed by anti-essentialist feminists as ‘regressive feminine narcissism.’ Ideological feminism did not approve of the double game of a self-aware Venus who was both, a Muse and an artist, a beauty and a feminist, subject and manipulator of (male) desire. Her work, revolving around her own body and her femininity, is deeply ambiguous, anti-ideological, and irritatingly self-centered. It foreshadows the post-feminism of artists such as Tracy Emin, Vanessa Beecroft, and Pipilotti Rist.31 In its self-distancing play with poses and props, it anticipates the conceptualism of Cindy Sherman’s ‘antiportraits.’ Although Wilke was concerned with “the creation of a formal language that is specifically female,”32 some critics were irritated by the fact that she objectified herself in her performances and her self-portraits: “In assuming the conventions associated with a stripper, […] Wilke does not make her own position clear. […] It seems her work ends up by reinforcing what it intends to subvert.”33

Anti-essentialist feminism, as it emerged in the early 1980s, was generally suspicious of the representation of the female body, particularly if it reiterated clichés and sexual patterns. The deeply ambiguous, often sexualized and ostensibly coquet performances and (self-)portraits of Hannah Wilke, her complex strategies of lure and alienation in interactive games and her positive self-identification as what one might call a ‘feminist Venus’ were hardly compatible with that. Wilke’s guideline was an “ethics of ambiguity,”34 as she characterized both her life and work, an ambiguity epitomized by Venus. Like no other female artist before her, she addressed and employed her ambivalent self-identification with Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, fertility, sexuality, and inspiration in her work.

In several studies, Amelia Jones has investigated questions of narcissism, feminism, and the role of the pose so pertaining to Wilke’s work.35 In taking

30 Lil Picard, the grande dame of counter-culture performance art, describes Wilke in an

article in Andy Warhol’s Interview as “tall, slender, a longhaired brunette, in fact she looks like a rose, but she talks like Voltaire,” and: “She, as a woman, a very beautiful woman, does not believe that women are sex objects. But she loves LOVE, men, art things, poetry, roses.” (Picard, “Hannah Wilke,” 18, 44)

31 See Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke,” 56–62. 32 Ibid., 57, fn. 2. 33 Barry/Flitterman, “Textual Strategies,” 39. Also see Hess, “Self- and Selfless

Portraits,” 93. Amelia Jones argues for Wilke’s work as decidedly feminist art. See Jones, Body Art, 170–195, in particular 171.

34 “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst,” pt. 1, n. pag. 35 See Jones, “Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism;” Jones, Body Art;

Jones, “’Everybody Dies…Even the Gorgeous.’”

Craig Owens’s definition of the ‘rhetoric of pose’ as a point of departure, Jones describes the ambivalent visual strategies Wilke applied in her works to attract and at the same time prostrate the male ‘gaze.’36 Posing, the way Owen defines it, clearly describes the main structural principle of Wilke’s ‘performalist’ works:

[T]o strike a pose is to present oneself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen, immobilized—that is, already a picture. For Lacan, the pose has a strategic value: mimicking the immobility induced by the gaze, reflecting its power back on itself, poses force it to surrender. Confronted with the pose, the gaze itself is immobilized, brought to a standstill.37

A pose can be a strong armor. It plays with the economy of looking and being looked at in a self-empowering way. In Wilke’s work, the logic of humorous distancing seems to be part of her strategy of posing. The liberating power of puns and the surprising discrepancies of word-image relations are played out in a savvy, intellectual, and rather ‘masculine’ way. As a punner, a female and feminist dandy, posing became an integral part of her work and public demeanor.38 Within this referencing framework of adopting and embodying female clichés, Venus/Aphrodite was Wilke’s preferred alter ego. In an untitled b/w photograph of 1975 (Fig. 3), she poses in a foam bath, comfortably nestled into the bathtub corner, her breasts exposed. She holds up a naked rubber toy Mickey Mouse, kissing it on its cheek.

36 See Jones, Body Art, 152–169; Owens, “The Medusa Effect,” 192. 37 Owens quoted in Jones, Body Art, 154, fn. 17. 38 Poses were a way of self-expression for Wilke. Her self and her work seem to have

been dominated by an articulation through posing, an aspect particularly important for her various forms of self-portraits, which she called ‘performalist.’ I would like to thank Hannah Wilke’s sister, Marsie Scharlatt, for generously sharing her memories and thoughts with me. Jones describes how Hannah already as a child posed in striking ways for family photos, showing an intuitive awareness for the representative potential of both her presence, the medium of role-playing, and photography. See Jones, Body Art, 300, fn. 15.

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Fig. 3: Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1975. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.39

It is highly characteristic of her often self-referential work that she returns to the same motif again in an untitled slide of 1992 (Fig. 4). The relaxed and somewhat provocative pose of the foam-born beauty of 18 years earlier now makes way for a protective pose, Wilke’s body covered with foam, her arms held up against her breasts. Her wet hair shows bald spots while she melancholically looks at the camera. The photo was taken not long before her death.40

39 B/w photograph, 8 x 10 inches. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew

Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. 40 Hannah Wilke died on January 28, 1993, at the age of 52. I am again deeply grateful

to Marsie and Andrew Scharlatt for granting the rights to reproduce these two images for the first time.

Fig. 4: Hannah Wilke, Untitled, 1992. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.41

III. The Venus Game

Wilke’s provocative preoccupation with her body, her female beauty, and her feminist appropriation of the Venus-myth show in various ways in her works since the 1960s. However, none of them are as arresting and unsettling as her last series of works, entitled Intra-Venus and produced in the two years before her death in 1993. She was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987. It is utterly ironic that it took a work dedicated to the ugly prose of her physical decay, invasive medical treatments, and, ultimately, her dying to rehabilitate Wilke as a feminist artist. Intra-Venus eclipses the stigma of having betrayed feminism by way of narcissistic self-display of beauty. Yet, in retrospect, Intra-Venus is the equally brutal and logical consequence of an oeuvre built completely around the artist and her body. Wilke, the first feminist artist using explicit vaginal imagery as a leitmotif in her sculptural work and her performances, had done her share to comment on the “tyranny of Venus”42 long before her shocking series of last images. She

41 Image from archival cibachrome slide. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and

Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. 42 The phrase is from Susan Brownmiller’s bestselling book Femininity. Brownmiller

defines femininity as a nostalgic concept of imposed limitations to women and criticizes the forceful self-idealization and fakery of women in order to compete for male attention. The pressure of being beautiful, “ornamental,” and functional to

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related to Venus as a metaphor of both beauty and tyranny, sex and cruelty. She activated the dichotomies Didi-Huberman claims as structurally inherent to the figure.43 Nakedness is stripped bare of its sugarcoating; nudity is made visible as a pose. The neat separation of aesthetic judgment and the passionless eye trained to distinguish a work of art (the pleasure of classical nudity), on the one hand, and the categories of empathy, involvement, and sexuality (the cruelty of nakedness), on the other, are collapsed. Wilke’s ‘performalist’ exhibitions of her body were almost necessarily misunderstood by an audience that was used to separate both categories. The exhibited body of a female artist with fashion-model appeal was conceived as nudity played out to please and tease the male eye, and—on top of it all—satisfy the narcissism of the artist.

However, on a closer look, Wilke’s entire oeuvre is based on her sensitivity toward the malleability and vulnerability of the female body. She first adopted vaginal imagery in the early 1960s, showcasing the female genitalia, casting light on their hidden, dark, and negative connotations—a glorification of the delicacy and poetry of female forms. The female body’s most feminine parts, in an essentialist feminist gesture, were declared as a universal symbol of womanhood.44 Her beautiful sculptures of vaginal forms, almost endless variations of an ur-feminist theme, produced in lint, latex, rubber, plaster, terracotta, and chewing gum, refer to the female body as sculptural material—a concept she inverted in her later ‘performalist’ self-portraits and performances, where her own body was used and presented as a ‘living sculpture’ based on the provocation of teasing and posing. She turned her own body into a monument, a self-determined artist taking pleasure in this remarkable contradictio in adjecto she had produced: a ‘feminist Venus.’45 In a public participation performance by Lil Picard at Sculpture Now Inc. on December 27–28, 1974, entitled White Sheets and Quiet Dots, Wilke played the part of the antique goddess (Fig. 5). Avant-garde artists like Lil Picard, who asked her to play the part, saw her as a rebellious Venus, ready to turn her erotic force of aphrodisian beauty to hollow out societal expectations.

please men is subsumed under the catchphrase “tyranny of Venus” (Brownmiller, Femininity, 24).

43 See in particular Frueh’s critical evaluation of Wilke’s art and her preoccupation with the figure of Venus in Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 141–154 (‘Hannah Wilke. The Assertion of Erotic Will’); Frueh, “Hannah Wilke.”

44 See Kubitza, “Die Tyrannei der Venus.” 45 See Fitzpatrick, “Hannah Wilke,” 40–47.

Fig. 5: Lil Picard, White Sheets and Quiet Dots, performed together with Charles Schwartz at Sculpture Now, Inc., December 27–28, 1974, with the participation of Hannah Wilke, Peter Huchinson, Geoff Hendricks. Lil Picard Papers, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.46

One image—although not nude—sums up Wilke’s early feminist, ironic, and art history conscious approach in a particularly illuminating way. For Ponder-r-rosa No. 1 (1975), the first in a series of sculptural works under this title, Wilke posed in front of her work for a photograph (Fig. 6).47

46 A video with parts of the performance is available in the public domain at

<uima.uiowa.edu/lilpicard/white-sheets-and-quiet-dots-video/#839> (Sept. 24, 2013). 47 See Solway, “Pondering Ohio,” 2–4. The photo is on page 3, the work is in a private

collection.

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Fig. 6: Hannah Wilke with Ponder-r-rosa No. 1, 1975. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.48

Ponder-r-rosa No. 1 is a wall installation of nine individual objects arranged in a diamond shape. The objects are similar but each has an individual form—sensuous black latex roses with metal snaps whose soft, layered arrangement of petals alludes to female labia.49 On the photo of Ponder-r-rosa No. 1, Wilke, in high heels, wears a short black skirt and a bright red apron. One foot lifted up against the wall, both hands in the apron’s pockets, Wilke looks like a sexy young housewife with an innocent yet somewhat mischievous smile

48 Installation of 9 latex sculptures, archival image. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle,

Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. 49 She had started working with vaginal, excremental, and phallic objects formed in

terracotta and plaster around 1960. The vaginal sculptures reoccur on a smaller scale in her Needed-Erase-Her series of 1974/75—kneaded erasers in different patterns mounted on horizontal boards, and in her series of wall works of kneaded erasers on postcards of monuments and landscapes mounted on painted boards. See Fitzpatrick, “Hannah Wilke,” 10–39, in particular 11, 33–35. Also see Goldman, “Gesture and ‘The Regeneration of the Universe,’” 6–43.

in front of this display of ‘cunt art,’50 mixing up the role of women as sexualized objects dressed and arranged to please the male gaze and her role as a producing artist. Her cheerful presence and pose takes the intellectual edge off the serene abstract pattern of black rubber ‘roses’ on the wall.51 The abstract latex objects start looking like exotic cunts, beautiful, yet also sexually aggressive by means of their material: black rubber. One wonders: What kind of housewife breeds such roses?

The installation’s title Ponder-r-rosa refers to the US steakhouse chain Ponderosa and to Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Selavy and its underlying pun, Eros c’est la vie.52 Wilke’s critical involvement with Duchamp shows in several of her works from the 1970s. While in Art School, she visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she saw Duchamp’s last work, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage… (1946–66).53 Although she admired Duchamp, she found the work “repulsive.”54 In her diptych I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver of 1977–78 (Fig. 7), which is a simulated book jacket with two photographs of her naked body, legs apart, Wilke critiques Duchamp’s work by restaging the position of the nude male body in Étant donnés.

50 The term cunt art was coined by feminists in the early 1970s to re-appropriate a

pejorative word used to denigrate female body parts and sexuality. As noted above, cunt art was not invented by Judy Chicago. Wilke commented that Chicago “said that her … paintings of lifesavers were vaginas. But a lifesaver is not a vagina.” (Huestis/Jones, “Hannah Wilke’s Art, Politics, Religion and Feminism,” 9)

51 In Art News Revised, a ‘performalist’ self-portrait taken during the exhibition of the Ponder-r-rosa series at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1975, she poses topless with her jeans open, leaning against the labial ‘roses’ of latex. Amelia Jones comments: “Typically, […] Wilke unveils her body/self among her works to instantiate herself as both their ‘subject’ and a parodic imitation of woman as conventional ‘object’ of artistic practice (the female [here almost] nude).” (Jones, Body Art, 155)

52 See Solway, “Pondering Ohio,” 2. 53 Wilke stated that she “was too young to be conscious of Duchamp in school” (Wilke

quoted in Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 30, fn. 17). Yet, when she revisited the museum together with Richard Hamilton in the mid-1970s, she became aware of the affinities between her own work and Duchamp’s, in particular their mischievous pleasure in puns, as well as Duchamp’s intellectual influence on the avant-gardes of the 1970s. However, her relation to Duchamp remained deeply ambivalent, and while his “irony was that of indifference” (Duchamp quoted in Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 33, fn. 27), hers was deeply engaged with a passionate, un-dogmatic feminism.

54 “I find Étant donnés… repulsive, which is perhaps its message. She has a distorted vagina. Its voyeuristic vulgarity justifies impotence” (Wilke quoted in Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 35). Also see Cotter, “Landscape of Eros, Through a Peephole.”

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Fig. 7: Hannah Wilke, I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, 1977–78. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.55

Stretched out on her back and photographed from above, we see a naked, female body with pubic hair, presenting itself to the viewer completely uninhibited.56 In Étant donnés, the viewer is forced to look at the naked female mannequin with its uncanny, unnatural, hairless ‘wound’ where her genitals should be through a peephole drilled into a door. Wilke demonstrates a self-aware exhibitionism, substituting the asexual, passive, and mannequin-like body of Duchamp’s nude with her own ‘real’ naked body.57 In doing so, she turns an art object into an I-object, that is, the female subject (the artist); she also objects to Duchamp’s horrifying presentation of a female body as face- and genderless corpse—a mere eye object.

Wilke frequently returned to Venus as her personal Muse and godmother of her ‘ethics of ambiguity.’ To her, “Venus envy” rather than penis envy is the main cause of gender trouble: “Any woman who has had an orgasm has no need for penis envy. […] Penis envy really equals Venus envy.”58 She

55 Performalist self-portraits with Richard Hamilton. Diptych, two cibachrome photo-

graphs, 24 x 16 inches each. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

56 The photos, ‘performalist self-portraits,’ were taken by the artist Richard Hamilton on the coastal rocks of Cadaqués in Spain. See Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 34.

57 “Tough self-love, perverse and seductive, is what Étant Donnés is about” (Cotter, “Landscape of Eros, Through a Peephole,” n. pag.).

58 Wilke quoted in Huestis/Jones, “Hannah Wilke’s Art, Politics, Religion and Feminism,” 9.

first used the pun on Freud for a series of ‘performalist self-portraits,’ Polaroid photographs taken in 1980 with artist Richard Hamilton’s head between her legs (Fig. 8).59 The shots are taken from Wilke’s seated position down toward her pubis and her slightly spread legs.

Fig. 8: Hannah Wilke, Venus Envy, 1980. Courtesy of Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.60

Emerging from underneath her pubic hair is the British artist’s bald forehead, his eyes and nose seen from behind, looking up toward Wilke with wonder and astonishment. In the sequence of three, his head seems to gradually turn down, narrowed by Wilke’s inward moving thighs. The section of his head (forehead, nose) we see in the last image looks like a giant cock between Wilke’s legs, with Hamilton’s nose and chin as its pointed head: The lover’s head becomes the Muse’s penis.

The title Venus Envy reoccurs in a 1985 poster that shows Hannah Wilke wearing a T-Shirt imprinted with “Venus Envy” over a photograph of her So Help me Hannah series shot at P.S. 1 in 1979 (Fig. 9).61 In the 48 photos taken for So Help me Hannah in the abandoned and derelict school building that then housed P.S. 1, Wilke poses naked and in high-heeled sandals holding a toy gun—a “goddess of the machine age,”62 a playfully armed Venus in the debris of civilization.

59 See Hansen et al., Hannah Wilke, cat. no. 64. Also see the recent comprehensive

catalog Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 68f. 60 Performalist self-portraits with Richard Hamilton. Triptych, three Polaroid photo-

graphs, 3¾ x 13 inches overall. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

61 See Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 34. The poster shows the artist modeling her Venus Envy T-shirt for the Grand Opening of The 5 & Dime.

62 Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 89.

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Fig. 9: Hannah Wilke at the Five and Dime, 1985. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.63

As opposed to the male “Venus envy” addressed in this poster, Wilke had earlier commented on female envy in her 1977 poster Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism, which shows her in men’s clothes, her shirt wide open, arms akimbo, her naked chest covered with little ‘one-fold’ cunt sculptures made of chewing gum.64

63 Offset poster, 11 x 17 inches. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew

Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. 64 Wilke explained her motivation for the poster as follows: “About two years after I

had done the [S.O.S; J.K.] series, there was a group of women who had asked me to create a […] statement related to the question, ‘What is Feminism and what can it become?’—So, I made ‘Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism,’ because I felt feminism could easily become fascistic if people believe that feminism is only their kind of feminism, and, not my kind of feminism, or, her kind of feminism, or, his kind of feminism” (“Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst,” pt. 1, n. pag.). Wilke countered Lucy Lippard’s criticism of her work as “confused between her role as flirt or feminist” by saying: “In other words, you can’t be a flirt and a feminist, which seemed to me to be a rather fascist statement” (ibid.).

In adopting Venus as a divine, female, and ambivalent ideal, and by demasking the male cliché of Venus as a sexy object of desire, Wilke invented a new fundamental(ist) eroticism around the goddess.65 She made witty use of her own erotic faculties, addressing and unsettling both male (envy of the independent woman) and female (envy of beautiful women) “Venus envy.” Again, Wilke mixes and opens up the conventions of femininity, of ‘nude’ vs. ‘naked,’ ideal vs. obscene, art vs. politics; and she undermines the common equation: beauty = femininity = pleasing artifice and bodily perfection. She also crosses the boundaries between mythology, religion, vanity, and camp with humor and unwaveringly feminist energy.

For Hannah Wilke Can (1974–78), she decorated a series of slotted cans with photos of herself in high heels, wearing nothing but a white loincloth. The cans were installed at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in 1978, where Wilke performed Give: Hannah Wilke Can. A Living Sculpture Needs to Make a Living.66 Her pose on the image on the cans is modeled after Botticelli’s Venus. It is one of a series of 20 b/w ‘performalist self-portrait’ photographs in Hannah Wilke Super-T-Art (1974), taken after her eponymous performance in Soup and Tart, an evening of artist’s performances at the Kitchen, NY. In both the performance and the photos, Wilke transforms herself from a Venus-like Mary Magdalene into a crucified female Christ figure (Fig. 10). The poses of her ‘living sculpture’ are calculated reenactments of artworks showing either Venus or the crucifixion. Her play with the white piece of cloth gradually morphs a chastely covered Venus into a bare breasted one, with the white ‘veil’ slowly turning into a loin cloth and her gracious femininity collapsing into the female reenactment of male suffering; a remarkable self-absorption in the mannerisms of poses ties both together, two sides of the same medal.

65 See Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 143. 66 See Fischer, “Becoming Form and Remaining Human,” 50f.; Frueh, Erotic Faculties,

146.

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Fig. 10: Hannah Wilke, Super-t-Art, 1974. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.67

In both works, Hannah Wilke Can and Super-T-Art, the artist plays with stereotypes inherent to the gendered economy of eroticism and art. The money slot in the can that shows Hannah Wilke in the eroticized pose of a Venus from her Super-T-Art series parodies the notion of the female body as commodity—the slot being a “symbolic cunt” and Wilke a “sacred whore”68 modeled after the ultimate erotic star: Venus, the ‘supertart’ of Western

67 20 b/w silver gelatin photographs, 6½ x 4½ inches each, 40¾ x 32½ inches framed.

Signed: “a three minute performance at the Kitchen, Nov., 1974. Hannah Wilke.” Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

68 Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 146f.

civilization.69 In her transformation from Wilke as Venus into Wilke as Christ, she also alludes to Christ as the ultimate ‘pin-up’ on a cross: Jesus Christ, Superstar.70 The artist’s self-empowered transgression says exactly this: Hannah Wilke Can.

Wilke’s ambivalent fascination with stardom, femininity, and the price one pays for both was highlighted in her widely reproduced S.O.S Starification Object series, a group of b/w photographs first used in the installation S.O.S Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication, which was exhibited in Artists Make Toys at the Clocktower in New York, 1975 (Fig. 11).71 The 28 photos taken by a professional photographer show Wilke’s (mostly undressed) upper body in various poses of ‘performalist self-portraits,’ equipped with accessories such as curlers, a cowboy hat, a gun, a tie, sunglasses, an apron, and a Mickey mouse.72

69 Frueh notes for another of Wilke’s works, the S.O.S Starification Object Series: “To be

‘starified’ is, in some measure, to be ill-starred, and the ‘ornaments’ decorating Wilke in S.O.S are not only scars but also stigmata. They make the model woman into a martyr. Western culture fearfully reveres Venus in the bodies of women, and she must be crucified.” (Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 143)

70 Wilke notes in relation to her S.O.S Starification Object Series: “As I do not believe in Fascist Feminism, I wish women could learn to respect that which is beautiful as well as brilliant. Like stars, we do not always shine, nor are we created equal, and only a ‘Super-star’ can shine any knight she pleases.” (Kubitza, “Die Tyrannei der Venus,” 105).

71 See Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 47–56; Hansen et al., Hannah Wilke, 27–32; Fitzpatrick, “Hannah Wilke,” 47–54; Jones, Body Art, 182–185, 194; Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 142f.

72 The photos were shot by Les Wolam. See Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 51.

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Fig. 11: Hannah Wilke, S.O.S Starification Object Series, An Adult Game of Mastication, 1974–75 (detail). Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.73

The poses and gestures are borrowed from fashion ads and works of art, like the shot of her exposed back, which is a reference to Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Baigneuse (1807).74 The photos are another attempt at making “yourself into a work of art instead of other people making you into something you might not approve of.”75 While her poses once more dismantle stereotypes of ‘sexy’ femininity, she counteracts and irritates the

73 28 b/w photographs, 7 x 5 inches each, 35¾ x 42¾ inches framed. Part of installa-

tion with game box, chewing gum sculptures, instructions, large photograph. Pur-chase and donation of Centre Pompidou Foundation and gift of Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. See Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 142f.

74 The painting is in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne. In one of Wilke’s files in her archive in Los Angeles is a photocopy showing the photograph of her nude back in comparison with Ingres’s La Baigneuse. It comes with a note from October 19, 1976, expressing the positive power of female sensuality. The direct comparison of her nude-from-behind ‘performalist’ self-portrait and Ingres’s La Baigneuse proves how aware Wilke was of art historical references in her poses.

75 “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst,” pt. 1, n. pag.

beholder’s joy of looking at the female body by covering that body with pieces of chewing gum, miniature versions of her cunt sculptures. The irritating items interrupt our perception of the young beauty in her glamour girl poses. She literally carries her sex on her face and skin. The effect is one of a strange, slightly offensive autoeroticism, displaying a power that is female and sexual in a positive, proactive, and self-determined way.

“My concern,” asserted Wilke, “is with the word translated into form, with creating a positive image to wipe out the prejudices, aggression, and fear associated with the negative connotations of pussy, cunt, box.”76 In ‘scarring’ the star in a sexually explicit way (starification equals scarification), the female body is presented as inherently wounded, showing “the internal wounds that we carry within us, that really hurt us. You know, having to ‘be pretty,’ or, being pretty, and being thought of as stupid.”77 The Venus syndrome expressed here also bears ethnic scarification:

I also remember that as a Jew, during the war, I would have been branded and buried had I not been born in America. Starification-Scarification … Jew, Black, Christian, Muslim … Labeling people instead of listening to them. Judging according to primitive prejudices. Marxism and Art. Fascist feelings, internal wounds, made from external situation….78

Even though parodistic in its exploitation of poses, the S.O.S Starification Object photo series (SOS, after all, is an emergency signal) is one of Wilke’s most autobiographical and psychological works, relating to her difficult position in the art world as an all too beautiful female artist, to her Jewishness, and her non-conformist feminism.79 The work points to the latent dilemma that women who are beautiful, witty, and successful are usually accused of conspiring with men against other women.80 Yet what

76 Wilke quoted in Frueh, Erotic Faculties, 139. 77 “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst,” pt. 1, n. pag. See ibid.: “I decorated my

body relating to the African Scarification Wounds, of the Caste System (on my head), or, macho male photographs, with cowboy hats and guns, or little uniforms … maid outfits, and hair curlers; so, they were psychological poses that related to me, as emotional wounds … the internal wounds that we carry within us, that really hurt us.” Also see Jones, Body Art, 183.

78 Wilke, “I Object,” 266. See Jones, Body Art, 183f. 79 In her notes, Wilke complains about being attacked by feminist critics for “nude pin-

ups … vulgarly accessorized … semi-nude flesh [and] … peep-show hoopla” and for “physical display […] causing more commotion than was warranted or necessary” in regards to her S.O.S work (Wilke quoted in Wooster, “Hannah Wilke,” 73). Also see Kubitza, “Die Tyrannei der Venus,” 105.

80 For an analysis of how modern and postmodern society look at female beauty, how women ‘choose’ pain to live up to beauty ideals, and how, on the other hand, feminists tried to overlook the somewhat embarrassing fact of the positive capital inherent to female beauty, see, for example, Wolf, The Beauty Myth. Also see Frueh,

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adds an interesting twist to the underlying feminist idea of female scarification by starification/objectification is that the ‘scars’ are leftovers of human mastication—the chewing gums were handed out during Wilke’s performances and chewed by the audience, then returned to her and crafted into the cunt-shaped miniature sculptures, which she stuck to her body. Made amorphous by mastication in the viewer’s mouth, the artist’s hand (re)shaped the gums to formulate femininity for/on her own body, the viewer’s spit activating the creative process, also forming a sort of ‘glue’ between the artist’s body and the participant. This sort of group participation creates an intimate level of involvement, with the “starification object” being the subject of creative activity and display at the same time. It undermines both voyeurism and merely aesthetic and detached perception: The distancing, yet reassuring ‘regard’ on a beautiful, sexualized female body (in an image, a performance, in art) is forced into an interpersonal exchange of materials and body fluids within the boundaries of the artist’s self-determined performance.81 The male voyeur’s drama/dilemma, as shown in Duchamp’s Étant donnés, is suspended and overcome.

Wilke took her own torso as a model for a series of small self-portrait figurines titled Venus Pareve (1982–84), in which nudity/nakedness plays a slightly different role (Fig. 12).

Erotic Faculties, 144: “A woman is ‘unfeminine,’ wrong, when she is not beautiful, yet if she is beautiful, she is still wrong. Wilke employs the peculiar inappropriateness of beauty in order to confront its wrongness. By being ‘improper,’ publically displaying her beauty, she has used her art ‘to create a body-consciousness for myself,’ a positive assertion of her beauty, which is erotic-for-women.”

81 An important part of Wilke’s S.O.S Starification Object Series was a board game, An Adult Game of Mastication (1974–75). Initially, the game was conceived as a multiple, yet, it remained a single prototype, consisting of a set of 48 numbered playing cards, 28 photographs to be hung on the wall in a grid, photographs of Wilke on cards, six boxes of Chiclets chewing gums, and 16 packs of different chewing gum sticks. The instructions told each player to pick a flavor, keep the package, chew the gum and pick a pose from one of the cards drawn, then hand the gum over to Wilke, who would form and place them on her body. See Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 52f.

Fig. 12: Hannah Wilke, The artist carving the clay model for her Venus Pareve sculptures, 1982. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.82

As in S.O.S Starification Object Series, she associates the idea of (food) consumption with that of a naked woman. Pareve is a dietary term in Hebrew, meaning that a food contains neither meat nor dairy. Food that is pareve can be used for many dishes and has a universal quality. In her group of Venus Pareve figurines, some in painted plaster, some made from chocolate, Wilke explicitly relates to her Jewishness, transforming her classical torso into a universal Jewish Venus.83 The appetizing presentation and material critiques the consumption of beauty and again deploys her

82 B/w photograph, 8 x 10 inches. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew

Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York. 83 Wilke’s maiden name was Arlene Hannah Butter, which prompted her to say that “as

an American girl born with the name Butter in 1940, I was often confused when I heard what it was like to be used, to be spread, to feel soft, to melt in your mouth. To also remember that as a Jew, during the war, I would have been branded and buried had I not been born in America.” (Wilke, Intercourse with…, 40f.) See Kochheister, Hannah Wilke, 145, fn. 12.

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body as fetishized object. In one photograph, Wilke stands naked in her studio, carefully crafting the model for Venus Pareve, self-absorbed as she smoothes the clay’s surface with a tool.84 The figurine is mounted on wire and sits on a pile of books with the top one showing its title: The Seeing Hand. A Treasury of Great Master Drawings by Colin Eisler. Wilke is immersed in her work, hand and eye in concentrated coordination. Again, she is nude model and producing artist at the same time, her creative act literally buttressed by the knowledge of art history (another title we see is The Artist in his Studio by Alexander Liberman) as a history of male intellectuality. Yet, the conventional image of the artist in the act of creating his own self-portrait gains feminist momentum. The photo purposefully showcases the artist in a classical and traditionally male setting while producing a traditional type of sculpture, the female nude torso: The sculptor is at work. Yet it is a she, and she is naked, forming her own representational self, a procreative, liberated Muse literally taking her image into her own hands.

IV. Venus—Opened

Had Hannah Wilke, the “sugargiver,” ever written her memoirs, we would probably encounter a number of superstar artists among her friends and lovers, some of which appear as names and acronyms in her Intercourse with… performances and video of 1977.85 Others play an immediate role in her works, like Richard Hamilton in Venus Envy. Her biography, her body (her ‘narcissism’), and her art are almost impossible to disentangle. If she was a Muse to her friends and lovers, then she certainly was a subversive one. During her relationship with Claes Oldenburg, her partner between 1969 and 1977, Wilke satirized the art world’s expectations of a Master/Muse relation. She took a photo of herself in bed with Oldenburg, which she submitted to the exhibition organizers of the 1975 show Artists Make Toys at the Clocktower in New York, instead of a photo of a work by Oldenburg

84 See Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 145. 85 See Frueh, “Hannah Wilke,” 15, 24f., 68; Jones, Body Art, 166f.; Cottingham,

“Hannah Wilke,” 58–62; Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 85–87. In the video-taped performance Intercourse with… (1977), Wilke incorporated, on the soundtrack, answering machine messages from friends, lovers, and relatives that she had used in her earlier audio installation of the same name. During the performance, Wilke assumed poses and performed a striptease, which revealed the names and initials of those who left messages written on her body. The performance took place at the London Art Museum and Library, Ontario. It anticipates works by Tracey Enim (Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, 1995) and Sophie Calle (Take Care of Yourself, 2007).

(then already an eminent figure in the art scene), for which they had asked.86 The photo shows her as a reclining naked beauty, her hair open, leaning against Oldenburg who is holding her from behind—the playful Muse in bed with the Master, as they ‘make toys,’ both of them assuming the position of the ‘artists’ in the abbreviated version of the exhibition title on the photo. Oldenburg married Coosje van Bruggen in 1977, and, in 1989, he threatened a lawsuit forcing Wilke to removed photographs she had taken of him from her University of Missouri retrospective catalog. In Dieter Daniel’s catalog Marcel Duchamp and the Avantgarde since 1950, a 1988 exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, she asks rhetorically: “Is this ready maid, having collected many of the readymades now in Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Wing owned by Peter Ludwig, owed an equal share for her part in the collaboration?”87

Wilke was never a “ready maid,” yet, she could be a ‘Miss Hurrybring’—Warburg’s ‘Fräulein Schnellbring,’ a moniker for the ninfa fiorentina, a female figure bringing the fresh air of movement, grace, and an irritating achronicity of appearance into an otherwise conventional setting, the ur-scene being the female servant in Ghirlandaio’s famous fresco The Birth of St. John the Baptist in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, who light-footedly enters the religious setting as a graceful visual relic of pagan Antiquity.88 Her movements, both the ninfa’s and Wilke’s, are energy-laden poses. They are fractured into, or rather masked by, pre-existing clichés expressing something beyond their functional appearance, ‘sedimental figures’ of importance in the artist’s creative process. Wilke was an unswerving ninfa of her own making, an unconventional artist, on the cusp of post-feminism.

Her exploitation and unmasking of female stereotypes clearly takes a more biographical and subtly emotional, subjective turn with her mother’s stroke and returning cancer in 1978. One of the most impressive, and

86 See Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke,” 59f., fn. 4. In another work, Irving Berlin’s What’ll

I Do (1978), Wilke posed bare-breasted with Oldenburg for a photo she placed in a kitchy picture frame illustration on the sheet music cover. See Hansen et al., Hannah Wilke, cat. no. 58.

87 Wilke quoted in Cottingham, “Hannah Wilke,” 62. Also see Kochheiser, Hannah Wilke, 147. Wilke’s related work What Does This Represent? What Do You Represent? (Ad Reinhart) of 1978 is both a witty response to the dominance of male thinking and power in the art world, practices of Abstract Expressionism, and her failed relationship with Oldenburg.

88 For Botticelli’s nymphs, see Dempsey, “L’amore e la figura della ninfa nell’arte di Botticelli.”

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shocking, images is the photographic color diptych Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter (1978–81) (Fig. 13).89

Fig. 13: Hannah Wilke, Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter, 1978–81. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles.90

On the left side, we see Wilke’s naked chest and face, photographed from above. Her make-up—two large dots of orange rouge, pink lipstick and mint green eye shadow—overemphasizes her pose in a clownish way. On her bare chest is an assortment of ‘ray guns’ she collected for Claes Oldenburg. They bring to mind Christ’s tools of martyrdom, yet they also remind us of apotropaic tokens. Contrasting sharply with Wilke’s portrait is that of her mother. Eyes closed, head turned sideways, her red lips smiling peacefully, Selma Butter’s emaciated torso, all bones and skin, shows a huge scar and burnt tissue where her left breast used to be. We are forced to look directly onto the battlefield of radical mastectomy, already infested again by new metastases. Wilke presents and undermines, in a most brutal yet also most private act of display, the tradition of voyeurism, the uninhibited look onto the nude female body.

The emotional complexities of the work touch upon deeply human issues, the mutual penetration of art and life—and upon the boundaries of representation itself. The work is well aware of its art historical implications:

89 See Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 99–105. 90 Diptych, two cibachrome photographs, 40 x 30 inches each. Copyright Marsie,

Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

It is a monumental Vanitas diptych about beauty and its loss, about the presence of death in life, an intimate yet also time transcending memento mori, and an eery foreshadowing of Wilke’s own disease.91 Her mother’s impending death is rendered as an homage of a loving and deeply involved eyewitness; but is also an homage to the naked truth, and it restores dignity to the presumed ‘ugliness’ of disease.92

Intra-Venus, the group of monumental photographs documenting her final illness and cancer treatment, was exhibited posthumously at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994, a year after Wilke’s death from lymphoma.93 Ironically, and tragically, Wilke’s own body turned into the battlefield of cancer that she had documented ten years before on her mother. After Hannah Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987, she underwent extensive treatment, including a bone marrow transplant. Looking back at the Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter, Intra-Venus turns into a chronicle of a death foretold.94 Intra-Venus is a sweeping blow of mixed media works: It includes monumental life-size color photographs, several of them arranged in diptychs and triptychs, watercolor self-portraits of Wilke’s face and hands, medical objects arranged as small installation pieces, ‘drawings’ made from her own hair lost during chemotherapy, and the Intra-Venus Tapes, a 16-channel videotape installation.95 Together, they form a

91 It is also a way of dealing with disease and death not only in but through art: Wilke lit

up her mother’s spirit during her disease in having her dress up and pose for a series of compelling and compassionate photographs, In Memoriam: Selma Butter (Mommy) (1979–83) and Seura Chaya (1978–89), which Wilke combined with predellas showing collages and watercolors of birds.

92 Between 1978 and her mother’s death in 1983, Wilke took thousands of photo-graphs, documenting the very close relationship and her hope that “the images of her would keep her alive” (Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 99).

93 The Intra-Venus show traveled to Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; Woodruff Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Nikolai Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen; and the Tokyo Mu-seum of Photography. It received First Place Awards in 1994 and 1996 for best show in an art gallery from the International Association of Art Critics (U.S. Sec-tion) and was reviewed in all major art magazines (Artforum, ARTnews, Art in America, Flash Art, New Yorker, Poliester, The Village Voice, Print Collector’s Newsletter, Art Issues, Art Papers, Art Newspaper, and the New York Times). See <www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhwil94.html> (Sept. 24, 2013).

94 See, most notably, Jones, “Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism,” 4–13; Jones, “’Everybody Dies…Even the Gorgeous;’” Jones, Body Art, 185–195 (‘The Body Turned Inside Out: Cancer and Narcissism’); Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 99–123 (‘In Extremis’); Goldman, “Gesture and ‘The Regeneration of the Universe,’” 38–43; Scharlatt, “To a Songbird,” 18f.; Jones, “Hannah Wilke,” 30–33; Cheney, “Hannah Wilke,” 60f.; Tierney, “Hannah Wilke,” 44–49.

95 See excerpts in the public domain at <vimeo.com/62957632> (Sept. 24, 2013)

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panorama of Wilke’s last years. The majority of the Intra-Venus photos date between December 17, 1991, and August 19, 1992 (five months before Wilke’s death). These final ‘performalist self-portraits’ were taken by her companion, Donald Goddard, whom she married a month before her death.96 When the images were shown in 1994 at Ronald Feldman Gallery, they caused a remarkable echo in the press—the beginning of a reevaluation of Wilke’s work from both feminist and post-feminist perspectives. The most compelling thing about the Intra-Venus photographs (and the entire corpus of last works) is the way in which Wilke applies her feminine creativity to the forceful, invasive, and brutal nature of illness and death, and the way in which she integrates the banality of both into works of art whose strategies of representation still revolve around her female body. She does this with sharp wit and precision, and she is as merciless as she is relentless in her concentration on just one subject: her self. We are made witnesses to Wilke’s transformation from provocative beauty to a balding, drained, and damaged cancer victim. Yet by transforming her physical and medical ‘victimization’ into art, in an unprecedented mixture of creativity, self-referentiality, and brutal matter-of-factness, she stays in charge of her self in her art until the end. Wilke refuses to let cancer dictate the rules. There is no hiding, no silence.97 And while the Intra-Venus images certainly no longer stir up “Venus envy”—they likewise avoid “Venus pity.”

This is confrontational art, and it rebuts the accusation of narcissism in a brilliant way. By inserting trauma, ugliness, and illness into the performing of her self and her body, Wilke silenced her critics:

People want others to be objects of their desire. But I became the subject and the object, objecting to manipulation. … People often gave 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 stereotypically ‘ugly.’ Everybody dies.98

Bare of the ‘beauty ingredient,’ the objectified sexual female body becomes an objectified medical female body.99 The question of naked or nude is no longer addressed through strategically exploited beauty. It turns dead serious, confronting us with the brutal side of a Venus no longer intact, a

96 See Tierney, “Hannah Wilke,” 44–49. 97 One can only imagine how Wilke herself must have felt when seeing, choosing, and

rearranging these images of her own physical decay. Her sister (in a conversation with Marsie Scharlatt, June 26, Los Angeles) remembers that at one point Wilke uttered that she wished she had never started this work. The original title was The Cure, which was then changed by Wilke to Intra-Venus.

98 Wilke quoted in Jones, Body Art, 193. Also see ibid., 185–195. 99 See Jones, “Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism,” 9.

Venus conquered by destruction, a body opened and treated by physicians in their futile attempts to halt destructions. In doing so, paradoxically, the body is brutalized and objectified from both sides, the illness and the cure. The Intra-Venus images are arresting and bewildering, and we react with a mixture of aversion and fascination to their blatant breaking of a taboo. They also irritate with their calculated, self-aware aestheticisms and the strong and obvious references to art history. In their conscious, sometimes ironic, reflection of art history they differ from other female artists thematizing cancer in the 1980s, like Nancy Fried’s terracotta sculptures of female torsos with only one breast, which evoke both the myth of the Amazons and Fried’s own mastectomy in 1986.100 However, Fried and Wilke challenge the victim mentality so closely associated with cancer—along the lines of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978), in which Sontag polemically attacks the dangers of the way we speak about cancer as a disease of repression or inhibited passion.101 Wilke clearly treats her cancer as a naked truth102—a truth, however, whose brutality flirts with artistic traditions and iconic images.

In the Intra-Venus Triptych of 1992–93 (Fig. 14), Wilke assumes poses reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe photographed on her bed in Douglas Kirkland’s famous White Sheet photo shoots, taken only months before the star’s death. Yet, the triptych’s images are by no means sexy: Large white gauze patches on Wilke’s hips mark the sites of bone marrow harvesting, her long hair is too thin to be spread out appealingly, and her body is bloated.

Fig. 14: Hannah Wilke, Intra-Venus Triptych, 1992–93. Courtesy of Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.103

100 See Fried, “Artist’s Statement.” 101 In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag criticizes the metaphorical language we use to

‘veil’ diseases and, in consequence, the assumption that they are psycho-physical manifestations of character, an insinuation that wrongly shames and silences patients.

102 Hannah Wilke wrote a song called Stand-Up, from which she quoted frequently. It was played at her funeral. Her sister, Marsie Scharlatt, recalls her reciting a particular line from that song like a mantra: ‘Exposing the truth is like nudity.’

103 Performalist self-portraits with Donald Goddard. Three chromogenic supergloss prints, 26 x 39½ inches each.

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Even more irritating is the triptych Intra-Venus Series No. 3, August 17, 1992, February 15, 1992, August 9, 1992 with its three monumental photographs showing a bald, naked Wilke in three distinctly different poses (Fig. 15). On the right, she is seated naked on a hospital toilet chair, wearing brown, plushy slippers, her head slightly tilted, her eyes looking down in resignation, hands dangling powerless from the toilet chair’s armrest. A tube connects her to an invisible infusion. What springs to mind is the iconography of the ‘seat of mercy,’ with the limp, tortured body of Christ on his Father’s lap, his reintegration into the Holy Trinity. Yet, in this image, there is no mercy. The body is what it is, almost defeated by cancer, the only relief is provided by the release of body fluids into the toilet.

Fig. 15: Hannah Wilke, Intra-Venus Series No. 3, August 17, 1992, February 15, 1992, August 9, 1992. Courtesy of Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.104

The triptych’s center image is a daring shot capturing the naked Wilke on her back in a hospital bathtub. Water is dripping on her forehead, her eyes are closed, and two pathetically thin strands of hair are floating like a little girl’s pigtails in the tub’s shallow water. Wilke’s legs are spread wide apart in a pornographic pose, revealing her vulva with its thinning pubic hair. While the camera’s focus is so aggressively aimed at the vagina, the pornographic viewpoint is undermined by the model’s ridiculous position and the shock effect of a hardly appealing female body. The difference to the early bathtub photos with a young and playful Wilke-Aphrodite could hardly be more drastic. Beauty is erased from this exhibitionist female pose and the female vulva becomes the ur-wound, the scar of the female body. There is, of

104 Performalist self-portraits with Donald Goddard. Three chromogenic supergloss

prints, 71½ x 47½ inches each.

course, a reference to Gutave Courbet’s famous L’Origine du monde (1866), yet, this is not a beautiful reclining model’s foreshortened body in white sheets. This is something else. Nancy Princenthal sums up the beholder’s unsettling experience of being forced to look at an ill subject’s sex exposed in such a confrontational, grotesque way: “The Courbet who painted […] The Origin of the World (1866) would surely have run screaming: perhaps Lacan (who once owned it) would have fled as well. This is what it comes to, Wilke seems to say. Take a good look.”105 When sex is mediated through illness, what could be “the ultimate beaver shot”106 turns into an anti-pornographic affront.

The third image shows Wilke in white hospital slippers, naked, in the pose of a Venus.107 Yet this is a battered Venus calva, who left all shame behind—and with it the social stigma of illness. Her contrapposto is elegant, while her look at the beholder is daring, distancing, and disapproving. Again, she seems to say: This is what it comes to. As An-Aphrodite, Wilke uses poses and art historical references to raise questions about the significance of the body as an ‘image’—of beauty, illness, the self. In illness, poses create a distance, an alienation from the reality of one’s sick body, which perhaps allowed her, in the first place, to keep on working creatively. Creativity in the face of impending death here blends Venus with a ‘Woman of Sorrows.’

The Intra-Venus photographs are masterful, postmodern appropriations of a feminist artist with a critical passion for the history of art. Hannah Wilke, as Intra-Venus, appears in several diptychs in different art historical ‘roles.’ In Intra-Venus Series No. 5, June 10 and May 5, 1992, we see her on the left with fuzzy remains of hair, white gown, and night robe, tubes attached to her chest, looking tired (Fig. 16).

105 Princenthal, Hannah Wilke, 113. 106 Jones, Body Art, 191. 107 Wilke wrote an arts school paper on Botticelli, in which she notes the “sadness of the

Venus (marked by her tilted head)” and her “resemblance to the ‘Madonna type’ of his earlier works.” The paper is in the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive in Los Angeles.

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Fig. 16: Hannah Wilke, Intra-Venus Series No. 5, June 10 and May 5, 1992. Courtesy of Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.108

Her mouth is obscenely wide open and reveals a tongue partly skinned from chemotherapy. Yellowish cotton balls stick out of both nostrils. On the right, she has a yellow sweater wrapped around her head like a turban. Her dark blue T-Shirt contrasts with her red lipstick and a matching raspberry-red tongue, which she sticks out in the fashion of one of Franz-Xaver Messerschmidt’s character heads. The portrait and its facial expression of outrage, anger, and disgust is at the same time a response to Barnett Newman’s abstract painting (and question) Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (1969/70).

The Diptych Intra-Venus Series No. 4, July 26 and February 19, 1992 shows a Venus/Virgin in extremis (Fig. 17). It sums up the Intra-Venus series and its haunting ambivalence between protest and bewilderment, irony and dead seriousness.

108 Performalist self-portraits with Donald Goddard. Two chromogenic supergloss

prints, 71½ x 47½ inches each.

Fig. 17: Hannah Wilke, Intra-Venus Series No. 4, July 26 and February 19, 1992. Courtesy of Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.109

On the left, Wilke’s naked upper body is in a three quarter pose against a light blue wall, her bald head turned toward us frontally, her arms covering her breasts, fingers pressed against her mouth and cheeks. An intraven(o)us injection needle is taped to her right hand, but there is no tube attached to it. Brows and eyelashes are largely gone. In a mixture of incredulity, astonishment, and resignation, she stares at the baffled viewer, a female Nosferatu, casting a dark shadow. The pose is ambivalent, perhaps ironical. The haunting image is carefully arranged against another half-length portrait, in which Wilke poses in front of a black background with closed eyes and a beatific smile on her lips, draped in a light blue hospital bedspread, a blue surgery cap showing underneath. The diptych pairs up a bald ‘Intra-Venus’ and a ‘Virgin of Cancer,’ the naked and the veiled, horror and potential bliss.

What perhaps appears as a masking of sensitivities by means of role play might, in fact, have been Wilke’s only possible strategy of transforming her creative ‘narcissism’ into showing cancer in an externalized way and coping with it. The physical and psychological wounds are translated into slightly ironical art historical metaphors—including the brutality of illness, ugliness, and death. Paradoxically, the objectification through/of the pose makes the cruelty of cancer legible in a more general, transpersonal, and human way.

109 Performalist self-portraits with Donald Goddard. Two chromogenic supergloss

prints, 71½ x 47½ inches each.

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Postscriptum: Venus de’ Medici

Hannah Wilke pursued the idea to instate Venus as an ambivalent feminist ideal with astounding persistence and precision. Her intuitive closeness to Venus consciously integrates the cruel components of the antique myth. Where Botticelli’s Venus shows the soft fluttering of hair of an impassionate, introverted, sleepwalking Venus—the hair functioning as a pathos formula, lending animation to the image from its outside in appropriated gestures and movements—Wilke’s Brushstrokes, which are part of the Intra-Venus series, display her hair lost in chemotheray, pathetic strands, relics of the artist’s body. No animation through ‘pathos’ is left (Fig. 18). Yet the pun is strong as ever.

Fig. 18: Hannah Wilke, Brushstrokes, No. 6, January 19, 1992. Museum of Modern Art, New York.110

Wilke’s bold denudations in Intra-Venus stand for the obscenity—the scandal—of fatal illness. The horror inscribed in Venus’s body is no longer

110 Artist’s hair on Arches paper, 30 x 22½ inches, 33 x 25½ inches framed. Hannah

Wilke Collection & Archive Los Angeles. Copyright Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon, and Andrew Scharlatt. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

sublimated into pudor. Intra-Venus is an opened Venus showing the amorphousness of death conquering the human form. Her body is heteronomous, her veins are opened by nurses and physicians—a Venus de’ Medici of a different kind. Her invaded body is the negative form of classical ideality; it shows what the classical nude hides: the cruelty of nakedness.

In that sense, Intra-Venus brings to mind Clemente Susini’s waxen anatomical Venus (1781–82) in the Medici Collections of the Florentine Museo la Specola (Fig. 19).111 Susini’s Venus de’ Medici is designed as a Venere scomponibile to be taken apart by medical students for study purposes—she can be opened and her inner organs can be removed.112

Fig. 19: Clemente Susini, The Medicean Venus, 1781–82. Museo di Storia Naturale, Florence.113

Yet, the object is rendered as a beautiful, classical Venus whose pose and facial expression suggest a naked woman on her sheets awaiting a lover to penetrate her body. Her soft, malleable material, the hyper-realistic coloring and her long brown hair underscore her female appeal and invite male desire to touch and open her body. Wilke’s Intra-Venus works reverse this principle of the appealing body inviting male ‘regard’ and intervention by aestheticizing its medical purpose. The cruelty of the body as a defective object open to devastation confronts us. The act of posing is turned against

111 For Susini’s famous anatomical Venus in wax, see Kádár, “Sul profilo barocco della

cosidetta Venere dei Medici in cera.” 112 See Jordanova, “La donna di cera,” 82–87; Jordanova, Sexual Visions, 44–47. 113 Copyright Museo di Storia Naturale Università di Firenze, sez. Zoologica. “La Speco-

la”/Saulo Bambi.

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its original purpose. The actual glimpse into Wilke’s open body, as in Intra-Venus Series No. 5, June 10 and May 5, 1992 (Fig. 16), where we look through her opened mouth into her sore throat, has decidedly threatening sexual implications for the male viewer: Venus shows her amorphous female interior, secreting and secretive, place of joy and of disaster.114

The artist is not afraid to play with the brutality of illness and nakedness in a social world; instead, she enacts the cruel logic of obscenity through some of her Venus ‘impersonations.’115 Wilke’s exposures in Intra-Venus show neither a nuditas naturalis (Adam and Eve), nor a nuditas virtualis (idealized innocence), nor a nudity criminalis. They demonstrate a nuditas mortalis. We encounter again the impure, heterogeneous element that Didi-Huberman detects in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—the intrinsic relation of Eros and Thanatos inherent to the myth itself. Wilke’s denudation hints to the fact that we are born naked and that we die naked—not nude.

Knowingly or not, Wilke continues Botticelli’s legacy of ambivalences, lingering even more prominently and obviously in his paintings of Camilla and the Centaur, Mars and Venus, and The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti.116 If Botticelli wanted to paint “a damned, an outcast, an anti-goddess”117 in his Venus, a goddess carrying both the deadly virus of human decay and the contagious spirit of human beauty, then Hannah Wilke brought his attempt to a brave conclusion. Her Intra-Venus images epitomize Georges Bataille’s understanding of art as a ‘cruel practice.’ They also bring to mind Bataille’s ‘anthropology of images’ ruled by the paradox that horror and dread in images amplify their attraction on the beholder.118 Yet, they are not purely cruel. There is a dichotomy of solipsistic impassion and touching astonishment in her self-exhibition—one that is quite similar to Warburg’s notion of Botticelli’s images as oscillating between the poles of detachment and Einfühlung. Yet, in Wilke’s case, it is not something lost, a dream of the antique past projecting its surreal power into an image of Renaissance Venus. It is the future—the surreal reality of death casting its shadow backwards into life—that lends an asynchronic power to Intra-Venus. In a subversive psychological mode, Wilke translates her experience with cancer

114 For the sexual implications of the opened female mouth and the relations to Freud’s

dream (a medic’s dream!) of Irma’s Injection, see Didi-Huberman, Venus öffnen, 121–126.

115 The term ‘obscene’ derives from Latin obscaena, meaning ‘offstage,’ as offensive contents were played offstage in antique drama.

116 See ibid., 57–97. 117 See ibid., 110 (my translation). Didi-Hubermann refers to Georges Bataille’s

interpretation of Manet’s Olympia for his observations on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

118 See Bataille, “L’art, exercice de cruauté,” 480–483.

into images which neutralize our basic instincts of spontaneous compassion or pity. The sadness and obscenity of the exposed and accessorized ill body appear distant in the brutal hospital-limelight of her self-staging. It is the artificiality of Wilke’s poses, their many references to art history, which dissolve both shame resulting from obscenity and pity evoked by human suffering. Wilke had the audacity to pose all the way on her via crucis of cancer. The invasions of illness and medications turned her body into an object—which she turned into material for art. Perhaps Intra-Venus is, in part, also a stubborn attempt toward autonomy—to control her art, that is, her self, not as a body, but as an image.119

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