Hannah Wilke: The Intra-Venus Photographs

Figure 1.

Hannah Wilke, July 26, 1992/February 19, 1992: #4 from INTRA-VENUS, 1992–93. Two panels: 71 1/2” x 47 1/2” each; chromagenic supergloss prints. Photo: Dennis Cowley/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Figure 2.

Hannah Wilke, December 27, 1991. #2 from INTRA-VENUS. Photo: Dennis Cowley/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Figure 3.

Hannah Wilke, June 15, 1992/January 30, 1992: #1 from INTRA-VENUS, two panels. Photo: Dennis Cowley/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Figure 4.

Hannah Wilke, August 17, 1992/February 15, 1992/August 9, 1992: #3 from INTRA-VENUS, three panels. Photo: Dennis Cowley/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Figure 5.

Hannah Wilke, Brushstrokes: January 15, 1992. Artist’s hair on Arches paper: 330 x 25 1/2”. Photo: Dennis Cowley/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

In 1994, from January 8 to February 19, the Ronald Feldman gallery exhibited Intra-Venus, ten 71 1/2” x 47 1/2” photographs, Hannah Wilke’s chronicle, between December 17, 1991, and August 19, 1992, of the effects of chemotherapy therapy on her body. She died of lymphoma on Jan. 28, 1993.

These photographs speak of forbidden subjects. They show a woman’s inflamed vagina, a mouth swollen and raw with sores, a partially bandaged torso, its left breast clamped down with IV equipment, and two gauze pads with dollops of bone marrow on them. They show a bald, naked woman getting off a commode; her body sagging forward, she is barely able to stand up.

In almost all of the photographs there is the woman’s face. Warm and smiling with long, dark hair in the earliest one, taken on December 17, 1991; anxious and fearful at the beginning of the treatment on February 20, 1992. In the last photograph, taken on August 19, 1992, her bald head lies on a pillow. The serious, sad face looks straight at the camera. It tells of resignation.

The baldness jumps out of these photographs. The effect is due in part to the unfamiliarity of a woman’s baldness, but also because it belongs to a perfectly shaped head that has the look of sculpture. More than that the baldness accuses, as if an outrage had been perpetrated. The image hints at violence and punishment inflicted. A tuft of dark hair tucked onto white paper intensifies this feeling; the small amount of hair looms large among the photographs. The date, January 15, 1992, indicates that the hair had been cut before the chemotherapy began, to preserve it in memorium.

This act of careful planning on the woman’s part brings the shocked realization that the woman in the photographs is an artist at work. She has lymphoma, and she has set out to keep a record. Her chronicle, devoid of melodramatic props that illicit pity, is of the changes occurring over an eight-month period. The photographs do not demand a reaction from the viewer; the cards are on the table. The absence of loaded symbols and of wordy explanations turns this documentation into powerful art.

Using her body as statement became a trademark of Wilke’s work. In the seventies body art was defined by the artist’s own body employed as material or as form—in performance, in photographs, and on film. It was a way for women artists to separate themselves from “male” art; the nude body pointed very directly to the difference in male and female experience. It gave artists the freedom to work subjectively: to work of and from themselves. Middle-class outrage at public nudity was certainly another positive effect.

Wilke, one of the most beautiful and radical artists of the genre, approached her body as material to be used for underlining personal and cultural statements, in her photographs and performances. In the 1974...