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Naked truths: Hannah Wilke in Copenhagen - Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland
Art Journal, Summer, 1999 by Debra Wacks
Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective. Exh. cat. Copenhagen: Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center and Helsinki: Helsinki City Art Museum, 1998. Essays by Saundra Goldman, Alfred M. Fischer, Laura Cottingham.
Exh. schedule: Nikolai, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, October 31-December 23, 1998; Umea Konstmuseum, Sweden, March 21-May 16, 1999; Helsinki City Art Museum; Liechtensteinische Staatiche Kunstsammlung, Lichtenstein.
You can say a Gothic church is a phallic symbol, but if I say the nave of the church is really a big vagina, people are offended.
- Hannah Wilke(1)
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Hannah Wilke no doubt would have immensely enjoyed the fact that her retrospective opened last fall in the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, for the building was once a large communal church (the Nikolaj, completed in 1517). There the artist's (often vaginally iconic) oeuvre was installed on two floors of what originally had been the central nave.
The exhibition is the result of close collaboration among the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki City Art Museum, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, and the Estate of Hannah Wilke.(2) As the first retrospective dedicated to Wilke since her death in 1993, it represents a notable attempt to acknowledge her artistic significance. This overdue recognition, however, becomes bittersweet when one learns that the exhibition is not scheduled to travel to the United States (at the time this issue went to press, no U.S. institution had accepted the show). Is it any surprise that Wilke's importance as a postwar U.S. artist is more readily celebrated by "foreign" institutions, which are drawn to, rather than frightened by, her playfully intellectual investigations of social and erotic representations of the/her body? Perhaps U.S. museums have shied away from her frank female sexuality or the fact that her art is difficult to categorize, market, digest. Her work does not fit comfortably into a particular ideology or artistic style. In fact, one of its strengths is that it must be permitted to defy typical boundaries. Elisabeth Delin Hansen and Tuula Karjalainen, curators of this retrospective, have perceived and embraced this essential fluidity.
In Copenhagen, approximately thirty-five years of Wilke's artistic production (seventy-eight works) were on display, yet the abundance of open space was striking in comparison to the more common kind of visually overpacked retrospectives. The Art Center's airy space was particularly evident on the first floor, a long room with open alcoves that offered a sweeping initial view of the various media Wilke used in her work - including photography, video, ceramic, latex, ink, paint, and, of course, chewing gum and kneaded eraser. Walking into the exhibition, one was immediately confronted by a most haunting work: a photographic diptych from Wilke's So Help Me Hannah Series, Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter (1978-81). On the left side: a nude Wilke from the waist up, her health and beauty contrasted with her mother's flail, mastectomy-scarred body on the right. The images are powerful in their representation of the mother-daughter bond wrought with the emotional and physical trauma of loss. As one of the first works in the exhibition, the piece also served as a harrowing thematic bookend, since it foreshadowed the fact that the retrospective would ultimately end with the artist's photographs of her own fight with cancer.
Despite these somber subjects, the exhibition contained many uplifting elements. Wilke's own voice, combined with soundtracks of kitschy television shows, echoed throughout the space. The noise pulled the viewer to an alcove gallery dedicated to performances of So Help Me Hannah. Ten monitors, showing five such performances from 1979 to 1985, lined a wall. Here was Wilke, nude, except for high heels and a gun, moving excruciatingly slowly across the screens as she reads aloud statements co-opted from Goethe, Ad Reinhardt, and other famous philosophers, artists, and political figures. On the opposite wall were "performalist self-portraits" of Wilke in similar "dress," parodying television cop shows in a statement against gratuitous violence.(3) I watched as viewers patiently read the many quotes recited by Wilke before they studied the nude imagery.
As I watched viewers' reactions to Wilke's work/body, an elderly Danish man began a conversation with me. He pointed to the various photographs around him and said that he saw Wilke as a symbol of sexiness (to be adored in general) and as an individual woman - a woman with particular feminist ideas conveyed through warmth and humor. He added that he appreciated Wilke's technique, because, he explained, having worked in advertising his entire life, he recognized the power of the manipulated images. In the United States Wilke's nudity is often overemphasized and consequently misunderstood. It seems to me that her art benefits from the casualness surrounding nudity in Denmark. There, her images of her body lose any sensationalism and instead become an integral element of the performances/photographs.
