“Make yourself into a work of art”: Hannah Wilke’s Poses

In response to a 1978 interview question on why she used her own body to make art, Hannah Wilke wryly replied that one must “make yourself into a work of art instead of other people making you into something you might not approve of.” Wilke, well aware of the oversaturation and perpetual exploitation of the female body in American visual culture, posed herself as “a work of art” in defiance of “other people” who aimed to image her as commodity object for their own pleasure. It is in Wilke’s poses – ones that index the high and the low; classical and Renaissance art, twentieth-century pin-ups, Hollywood starlets, and fashion models – that I locate her critical resistance to such rampant objectification of the female body, which includes a feminist disruption of the Art/Female Nude dynamic. She did so by inserting herself – a conceptual physical – into her work and insisting on authorship from the viewpoint of both artist and model. By turning the camera lens on herself in works such as S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974), Wilke engaged in self-reflection as a way to consider precisely how such self-image-making operates as intervention into the visual economy of the ideal. Her S.O.S. poses purposefully evoke popular modes of image distribution and spectacle – boudoir cards, tobacco/cigarette cards, burlesque and strip club performances – in subversive mimicry of the form, thereby undermining their power to devalue subjectivity. What results is a pleasurable image produced and consumed for her own pleasure.