Gestures - Hannah Wilke (1974)

“Gestures,” from artist Hannah Wilke, shows a relationship between gender performance and gender construction. One can relate this work, in more modern terms, to that of a culture that focuses on the concealment of age and the focus on beauty. The tugging, slapping, and pulling that Wilke does on her face could also suggest the way that women have historically been considered mere objects that can be shaped, formed, and molded at will. Wilke “unveils herself to implicate our gaze in her constitution as ‘flesh.’” [1]

Hannah Wilke was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and performance/video artist that dealt with social, political, and gender issues. Her body of works has spanned many different contemporary art movements including Abstract Expressionism (stress on creative process and individual gesture), Minimalism (the focus on the materiality of the art object), and Conceptualism (the practice of social criticism). She frequently uses her own body in her performances and artwork, dealing with issues of sexuality and gender. Wilke believed in physical and emotional self-exposure as an aesthetic and as a spiritual process of undressing the body and the soul. She has utilized many different materials in her artworks: chewing gum, clay, latex, lint, and chocolate – but her primary source of material, especially within the realm of sculpture, has been that of her own body as art object. Her aims with her performances have been to provoke critical responses from the public. Many of Wilke’s pieces are imbued with metaphoric, organic, and sexual implications brought about by the act of repetition. [2]

[1] Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota P, 1998, p. 169.
[2 ] David Winton Bell Gallery: Collections - Hannah Wilke. Retrieved 2009-12-16.