Illness and Wellness: Hannah Wilke’s Defiance of the Medical Gaze

Making art means using one’s body: whether by manipulating a paintbrush, molding clay, or simply positioning oneself behind a camera lens, the artist leaves traces of her physical presence in her work. Some artists go further, using their bodies as inspiration, or even material, for the art they create. The body, after all, is a potent subject. As human beings, we are hardwired to view each other’s physical selves with close attention. We assess one another for signs of age and beauty, strength and weakness, illness and wellness. We study another person’s face for signs of what they might be thinking or feeling. The artist Hannah Wilke, whose career from the 1960s to the 1990s is surveyed in “Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, had an intimate understanding of how looking at another person’s body can be both an expression of power and an invitation to empathy. In her early work, she deployed her womanhood and her attractiveness to challenge the way women were commodified in a highly visual culture. Later, when she was diagnosed with lymphoma, Wilke harnessed the physical signs of her illness and treatment to raise questions about the expectations we place on people whose bodies are vulnerable or unwell. Nearly thirty years after her death, Wilke still speaks to our present moment. In a culture dominated by visual information and social media, the way people present their bodies is often intimately linked to their identity and value. Wilke’s work exposes how we impose limitations on one another’s physical experiences and expressions. She boldly—and with an irrepressible sense of humor and delight—defies these limitations, illustrating how to live dynamically in the face of prejudice, illness, and close-mindedness.

An Artist of the Human Form

Wilke’s first video work, Gestures (1974), can be viewed as a thesis statement for her engagement with the human form. In the thirty-five-minute piece, Wilke is framed from the neck up, gazing at the camera as if into a mirror. Her hands move across her face, tugging on her lips and ears, lifting and closing her eyelids, massaging her cheeks. Like many of Wilke’s works, the title flirts with other interpretations. Here, “gestures” might be meant to evoke “gestation,” with Wilke offering a glimpse of some developmental process as she molds the features of her face into recognizable shapes.

Wilke made Gestures after the sudden death of her brother-in-law, and she described the piece as an effort to get “back in my body at a time when I felt emotionally lost.” In her monograph on Wilke, Nancy Princenthal writes that it is “as if she is teaching herself emotional expressions that should be instinctive but aren’t.” In addition to making art, Wilke was remaking herself, and she captured and displayed that process for her audience. From her earliest work, Wilke was fascinated by how the body—her body, specifically—and its expressions might provoke reactions in the people who observed it. Gestures illustrates the attention and curiosity with which Wilke treated her physical form. It also emphasizes the elasticity of this chosen material. No matter what Wilke does in the video, her face always relaxes back into a quiet neutrality, looking out at the viewer: she remains herself, seeing while being seen.

If Gestures distills the basic elements of Wilke’s expressiveness, her “Starification Object Series” shows how she marshals these elements to striking effect. The series includes a group of portraits from 1974, the same year she made Gestures, in which Wilke poses with various accessories, often nude from the waist up. Viewed together, they have the feel of a fashion spread. Wilke cycles through poses like a supermodel, and there’s playful array of moods on display as she decorates herself with hats, sunglasses, hair curlers, a tie, and, most intriguingly, bits of folded chewing gum.

Wilke frequently sculpted with gum, which she once described as a metaphor for the American woman: “Chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.” As recounted by Barbara Schwartz, during a panel discussion when someone remarked to Wilke, “You identify your existence with your material. Your body is a material,” she responded, “That’s what my chewing gum sculpture is about.” Karen Chernick, writing for Hyperallergic, has situated Wilke in a lineage of artists working with chewing gum, making use of the ways it activates the sensory engagement of the viewer. Gum engages our taste with its sweetness and our tactile sense with its texture; it is something we chew and fold on our tongues. In addition to including it in the “Starification” photographs, Wilke staged performances in which audience members stuck chewed gum directly onto her skin. This linking of bodies through the medium of gum is both intimate and degrading—a friction Wilke appreciated and exploited.

The gum that appears in the “Starification” series can be seen as a useful thematic bridge, tying together Wilke’s experimentations with her body with her handling of other physical materials. Throughout her career, she was drawn to pliable substances like gum, kneaded erasers, latex, and clay. Early sculptures include her “one-fold gestures,” made from terra cotta that was folded in on itself, fired, and painted. Their labial shapes and enclosure of negative space suggest female genitalia, but by displaying them by the dozen or even hundreds at a time, Wilke also emphasized the process of their construction. Like her great puns, Wilke’s work often insists on multiple simultaneous interpretations. In the one-fold sculptures, she creates tension by flirting with the tendency to read sexual innuendo into art; after all, these pieces might just as easily represent pastries, or purses, or purely abstract forms.

Wilke seems to delight in this proliferation of possibilities, in making a commentary on the objectification and anonymization of female bodies while also exhibiting her skill as a handler of raw material. The works are generous in this way, undergoing fresh transformations the longer they are looked at. Further experimentations with material—Wilke played with various colors and glazes in her collections of one-fold gestures, and even cast some out of metal—continue to open up new territories of meaning. A late iteration of multi-colored ceramics laid out on a bed of grass (Hannah Manna, from 1985-86) calls to mind flowers in a field and easter eggs on a lawn. The through-line of gesturing toward female anatomy in these experiments reminds us that Wilke remained committed to illustrating how women are objectified, and how her art might provoke its viewers into questioning their own ways of looking at women’s bodies and the forms that evoked them.

Age, Illness, and Questioning the Gaze

Wilke’s fascination with the body extended beyond sex. Her work also explores how age and illness reshape the bodies we inhabit, and how that alters the ways other people see us. Wilke first engaged this question with her sculptural works: what happens when materials age? In a series of hanging pieces, Wilke poured liquid latex on a floor of plaster, let it dry, and then peeled off the sheets and fastened them to the wall with metal snaps. The resulting sculptures, with their rippling folds, are feats of kinetic abstraction. They evoke vaginas, yes, but also discarded cocoons, termite towers, and the undersides of mushrooms—as usual with Wilke, the range of interpretations is vast. As her practice evolved, Wilke began chemically treating the latex to ensure its longevity, but many of the early pieces atrophied with time, drying and cracking. The works that survive retain a brittleness that adds to their appeal. Like her gum sculptures, the latex has a fleshy, bodily quality that gains poignancy when its colors fade and it acquires the marks of age. The works look lived-in.

The aging of Wilke’s own body appears in her later photographs, most strikingly in “Intra-Venus,” which stands among her most ambitious and complex work. Wilke received a diagnosis of lymphoma in 1987. About four years later, in 1991, her condition worsened and the treatment she received grew more aggressive. She began taking photographs of herself during this process, her body decorated now with medical bandages and intravenous lines that echo the accessories she donned in the “Starification Object Series.” As ever, Wilke frequently addresses the viewer with her gaze, and her poses can be kittenish or modelesque. The photographs retain the subversive streak of her earlier work, but instead of commenting on the objectification of women, Wilke seems to be exposing and disrupting the expectations that society places on the aging, disabled, and medically ill. The photographs brim with vitality and defiance. Lying in a tangle of sheets, Wilke looks more like a goddess or muse than a hospital patient. Despite her obvious physical vulnerability, she appears absolutely in control.

It is illuminating to contrast “Intra-Venus” with the works Wilke created, a decade earlier, of her mother, who also underwent a battle with cancer. The boldness with which Wilke exhibited her own body is muted in the portraits of her mother. Her engagement with and, often, defiance of the viewer’s gaze shifts, as the gaze becomes Wilke’s own. This contrast is best illustrated by “Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter” (1978-81). In the first half of this diptych, Wilke lies topless on the floor looking up at the lens with a hint of a smile, her cheeks, lips, and eyelids brushed with makeup. Her naked body is adorned with objects collected from former lovers. The picture is alive with the sense of mischief that marked her other self-portraits at this time. Beside her, in a second portrait with a similar composition but a dramatically different effect, Wilke’s mother is captured from the waist up, the scars of a mastectomy visible on her exposed torso and her face turned away from the camera. The contrast between the physical facts of the two women’s bodies is striking, and so is the energy that each conveys. Notable too is the contrast in Wilke’s photographic point of view: in composing her own portrait, she employs adornments and a touch of irony; in photographing her mother, she comes off as reserved, even reverent.

Throughout her career, Wilke demonstrated a willingness to toy with the viewer’s expectations of her body through her provocative compositions, poses, and accessories. The photographs of her mother’s illness are, in contrast, straightforward and spare. Wilke appears less willing to make modifications to her mother’s body. Instead, she steals glimpses of her daily life in a more documentary style. This more distant, gentle touch is evidenced in the triptych “In Memoriam: Selma Butter (Mommy)” (1979-83), where Wilke pairs photographs of her mother with arrangements of cut paper that articulate her mother’s silhouette and engage with the negative space around her. These compositions have a yearning quality, as Wilke traces her mother’s edges while remaining unable to grasp her ailing body. As ever in Wilke’s work, the viewer and the subject are at odds. In the memorial portraits, this friction is personal, and deeply moving.

Visual Culture and the Body

Wilke’s work continues to speak to us now, decades after her death. In part, this is because the visual culture that Wilke lived in has continued to expand and evolve, and the forces that influenced her remain with us today. The widespread availability of photo and video recording devices and the dominance of social media have contributed to a proliferation of images that inform the way many of us understand our bodies, our identities, and our personal narratives.

Just as Wilke commented on the objectification and commodification of women in her day, the monetization of the female-presenting body is a powerful force in contemporary life. As an example, one might look to Kim Kardashian. Of the image-makers working today, Kardashian may be Wilke’s unexpected heir: like Wilke, she exhibits her body’s youth, femininity, and attractiveness with a knowing, sometimes cheeky awareness of the viewer’s gaze. Similarly, she never seems to play a character; Wilke and Kardashian only perform themselves. But unlike Wilke, who once ironically printed a nude photo of herself on a metal can and staged a performance where she “begged” for coins, Kardashian has straightforwardly transformed her image into profit. By harnessing the attention of her audience and channeling their gaze, she has turned her own objectification into a fortune. Is that art? “Selfish,” Kardashian’s 2015 book of selfies, with its Wilke-worthy pun and striking portraits, might come close.

The conversion of visual attention into profit extends beyond the influencer sphere. One of its most potent instantiations may be the proliferation of medical crowdfunding campaigns on websites such as GoFundMe. In an American healthcare ecosystem that often brings ill and injured people to the brink of financial ruin, many turn to forms of online begging in order to pay their bills and preserve their health. Academic studies have suggested that the advice these platforms offer their users—encouraging them to emphasize the narrative of their illness and hoped-for recovery, provide consistent updates on their page, and share numerous photos and videos with their donors—emphasizes the performance of worthiness over the demonstration of need. One example given concerns titling: a campaign called “Julie’s Rally Against Cancer” is recommended over one called “I Need Money!” The authors of the study point out that “the implication is that a personal ‘rally’ against a specific illness is more compelling than an exclamation of financial need.” On medical crowdfunding platforms, users are forced to perform narratives that appeal to the sympathies of a viewing audience in order to inspire a financial donation. In many cases, a key component of this appeal involves photographs of the person with illness.

Curiously, the visual vocabulary of medical crowdfunding leans heavily on photos that feature able-bodied, healthy-looking people, rather than those with visible disability. Browsing the campaigns on GoFundMe, a viewer often encounters photographs of people in states of wellness rather than illness: the person before their diagnosis is emphasized, with the illness often described as an unexpected disruption in an otherwise affirming narrative. Donate to this campaign, they seem to say, and help our friend or family member get back to their former, healthier life. When images of ill bodies do appear, the subject is frequently making some sign of fortitude, such as a thumbs-up from a hospital bed. Optimism prevails.

What would Wilke make of this? One can imagine that, during the course of her cancer treatment, as she lost her hair and her body accrued the marks of chemotherapy—and as she spent time in hospitals and medical settings, interacting with doctors and other healthcare workers—Wilke would have felt herself subjected to what Michel Foucault called “the medical gaze.” In Foucault’s description, the medical gaze separates the body from the individual. It is cultivated by teaching hospitals and other educational institutions to enable their trainees to appreciate the physical signs of illness and to learn principles of diagnosis and treatment. The medical gaze can be dehumanizing, reducing a person to their medical condition and erasing all other traces of their identity. It seems likely that participants in medical crowdfunding are fighting against this gaze in their own way, often by presenting themselves as they wish to be seen. This preference hints at a fear of showing oneself in a state of illness or vulnerability. The medical gaze, or something like it, exerts a powerful influence on us.

Wilke’s work illustrates her ability to defy these limitations. In her “Intra-Venus” series, she refuses to identify herself purely as a victim of illness, adopting poses and accessories that emphasize her power, individuality, and self-possession. This friction is disruptive and generative. She offers no narrative; in many ways, we don’t know what to make of what we see. But Wilke—the author and subject both—seems to know exactly what she’s doing. In this sense, her image-making remains optimistic. Wilke once said, “I have always used my art to have life around me. Art is for life’s sake.”

Of course, the individuals requesting donations on medical crowdfunding sites are not making art. They are trying to make ends meet, to live a little longer. We might need to look elsewhere to find the descendants of Wilke’s life-affirming art. Perhaps they are the people who—on social media, and in film, television, and elsewhere in the visual culture—demand to be seen on their own terms. People with disabilities and chronic illness, people who are gender nonconforming, people who defy conventional notions of attractiveness and wellness, who create art with their bodies and move boldly through the world—these may be the true inheritors of Wilke’s legacy. From her pun-filled titles that demanded multiple readings, to her iterations on form and material, to the way she displayed her body in defiance of the many gazes imposed on her, Hannah Wilke showed us that one person can be many things. We are more than the way we are seen, more than the material of our bodies. She made the act of being seen into part of her performance and part of her power. She never looked away from the lens, and we are still watching her.

References

1.      Hannah Wilke, Nancy Princenthal, 2010

2.      “The Bite-Sized Art of Chewing Gum,” Karen Chernick, Hyperallergic, August 3, 2021

3.      “Methods and Materials Old and New,” Barbara Schwartz, Craft Horizons, December 1975, 46.

4.      “Producing a worthy illness: Personal crowdfunding amidst financial crisis,” Lauren S. Berliner and Nora J. Kenworthy, Social Science & Medicine 187 (2017): 233-242.

5.      The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Michel Foucault, 1963