http://www.clarebyrneweeklyrites.blogspot.com/ Thought about Hannah Wilke for the first time in a long while last night. I think of her art-making though, subliminally, every time I take lint out of the dryer. That is - a lot, in the past year, which is the first year I've
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had a dryer to take lint out of. Now that I've brought her up I realize she's been right below the surface, a guiding agent, in these rites, and I've recreated her in my attempts, my experiments, over and over again. I came across a good line in an article recently - the idea was that each performance is a re-invention of a really good idea. I am reinventing, in ways, Hannah Wilke's really good idea. Though I wouldn't presume to say I'm doing it as good, as bold, as kick-ass, as her. Hannah Wilke died of cancer in early 1993, as I was going into my second semester of senior year. I came upon her sometime within those years at Connecticut College - can't remember if I just came across her artwork in the library, or more likely, Amii LeGendre - two years ahead of me and my woman-empowerment goddess - turned me on to her. I went to her posthumous IntraVenus exhibit as a new-fledged New Yorker, and could barely stand in front of her huge baby-blue terricloth madonna photos, her chemotherapy-softened beauty. She broke me down then, and she still breaks me down. Looking at her work now, though, I'm so relieved to see the mix of media. Thank god we don't have to work with the same material our whole lives. The only consistency we have is our own bodies - which aren't even that consistent, as her explicit documentations make clear. Let's mix it up. Let's be different from ourselves. Let's be many things.
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