“Intra-Venus”, 1994 Hannah Wilke @ PS1

“Intra-Venus” 1994
Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke’s sixteen-channel display “Intra-Venus” at P.S.1 floored me. The Intra-Venus Series was first displayed in 1994, a year after Wilke’s death resulting from lymphoma. The videos chronicle her deterioration. Her husband, Donald Goddard, filmed her in the last two years of her life. All sixteen videos are arranged chronologically in a grid from left to right so it is easy to read Wilke’s transformation from happy, middle-aged woman to unrecognizable, bald, and on the brink of death. Throughout these sixteen small windows into her last years, Wilke displays a range of emotion and experience. She sits in the tub, smiling at her husband filming and talking quietly; she solemnly takes stock of her chemotherapy-induced weight loss in the mirror. The imagery is overwhelming and hard to look at. The voyeur is turned on his head – though we are afforded the most private, most typically forbidden of views, it is not one that we want to see.

Wilke’s stated intention with this work was to bring to light the experience of the invalid, and to reject the doctrine of containment and concealment promoted by clinics and hospitals. As I watched these videos, I felt a lump rising in my throat. Seeing another human in pain is an incredibly visceral experience. And, unless one has had a loved one die of some sort of prolonged illness, most do not experience this profound level of sympathy and understanding. Despite my understanding of Wilke’s intention, and despite my own recent experience with death, at one level I felt upset with her for making other people, maybe other people who cared about her, deal with this difficult imagery of herself. Yet it is exactly this reaction that made this work resonate so strongly with me. These videos challenge the institution of ‘dignity’ as it relates to sickness and death, and they challenge our own complacency with these ideas. They also starkly make the point that millions of other people across the globe who are not born into a country with standardized hospital systems live with death in their homes, as relatives and children die simply without access to medication or expensive treatment. With her body as site, Wilke exhibits and embodies the universal experience of death, and jolts us into compassion.

This work builds on an earlier permutation of life and death juxtaposed – “A Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter” (1978-81) places an image of Wilke herself, young and pink, next to an image of her mother in the throes of breast cancer. She is emaciated and frail, and one of her breasts is missing. The other stretches thinly over visible ribs and sternum. “A Portrait of the Artist” uses the placement of two images side by side as its display strategy, implying the progression of life (young to old) while sparing us the narrative in-between. “Intra-Venus” supplies every detail from start to finish. The Intra-Venus Series marks the symmetry of mother and daughter, both succumbing to cancer, and both making use of their withering bodies to make art.