 Good afternoon, and thank you for being here and joining us. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and it's a pleasure for me to welcome you to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. As most of you know, the Center opened in March of 2007. And our mission to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and to maintain a dynamic learning facility, which this forum has become for us to present discussions on feminist activism and feminist art. And we have, over the past year and a half, had five newsmaking, actually, exhibitions and scores of lectures and panel discussions. And we continue to influence supporting feminist artists and women artists in museums and also in the marketplace. So it's a very happy moment in time as we go towards this new year. We'll be having our second anniversary in March, and it has been a very, very good year and a half. Since Mora Riley, the founding curator of the Center, has left, Lauren Ross is our interim curator. She's here with us today. And this lecture would not have been possible without Lauren. So I want to thank her very much for her commitment and her assistance to making this happen. First Saturdays at the museum, as many of you know, are quite extraordinary. And it takes an entire staff of an entire museum to prepare for the crowds that descend upon us in a couple of hours. And so it was Lauren's commitment to this exhibition and to the center that made it possible for us to be here. And also that we'll be taping this lecture so that we can put it on our website during the run of the exhibition. And Hanna Wilkie's Sculpture and Sculpture is going to be presented by Tracy Fitzpatrick, as I say, plus one. And you will see why in a moment for those of you who don't know already. And I'm delighted to have this as an invitational lecture in honor of Hanna Wilkie. And we have the magnificent rosebud outside. It's lent by the Arthur M. Sackler Collections Trust for the benefit and in honor of the center. And that it is being included in the current exhibition, Burning Down the House, Building a Feminist Collection, is a wonderful, wonderful thing. So I was going to go into a whole long mystery of life having run into Tommy Schwartz, which means you know how long I've known him because most people know him. He's either Tom or Tommy Schwartz, who's president of SUNY Purchase at the New Burger Museum, which is where Tracy hails from. And I ran into him at an art table lunch. And a couple of weeks later, I invited him to a party at my house. And a couple of weeks later, I received a letter from the New Burger asking for assistance for their absolutely fabulous and fantastic Hanna Wilkie gestures, which is up in the moment. And so I returned the call. And it was Tracy. And I did what I could to assist in public programming for it. And Tommy came to my house for the party. And I said, well, I did respond positively to the letter. He said, what letter? I know. I know. It's marvelous. So he said, I don't know what you're talking about. I said, that's good news, because it means somebody is really doing their work. And I want to say that not only was Tracy doing good work in contacting me. And I very much appreciate being part of that exhibition. But she has curated an absolutely fabulous and important exhibition, which is up at the New Burger Museum. And I want to thank you for it, Tracy. And I think if you haven't been there, you should really make the trip up to see it. It will be up until January 25th. And I thank you for inviting me to participate in that. And I thank you for participating today. And we hope we're going to get this afternoon, through this afternoon, without having to call an ambulance. Because I'm going to introduce Tracy Fitzpatrick plus one. And Dr. Fitzpatrick is a curator at the New Burger Museum of Art and an assistant professor in art history in the undergraduate program and the master's degree program in modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory at Purchase College SUNY. Combining curatorial work with curricular initiatives, Fitzpatrick organizes exhibitions and teaches in the areas of modern American art and museology. Fitzpatrick has curated many exhibitions, including Facing Abstractions, Refiguring the Body in the 20th Century in 2006, Underground Art, A Centennial Celebration of the New York City Subway 2005, Another Dimension, Sculptors and Printmaking and Artful Advocacy, Cartoons from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Her forthcoming book, Art and the Subway, which will be, is that it's Art and the Subway New York Underground, right, will be released in spring of 2009. And I very much look forward to seeing that. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Henry Loost Foundation of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is, of course, a member of the AAM, Art Table, and all of those organizations that we all know and love. So she received her PhD from Rutgers University, also a great sister to this museum. And I'd like you to assist me in welcoming Tracy Fitzpatrick, plus one. All right, welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. And I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your support for the, I don't want to knock these cords down for the exhibition and for inviting me here today. And Lauren also, thank you so much for all of your help. I just put this here so I can put my water on it and put this microphone on, which I was told to do. So this talk is derived from my work on the exhibition, Kind of Wogie Gestures, which is on view at the New Berger until the 25th. I'm sorry for, I don't usually sit when I'm giving a public presentation, but if you'll excuse me, my current condition will all be better off if I sit while I'm talking. I've been interested in Wogie's work for a long time and the aspect of it that has interested me most recently is really the idea behind the exhibition, which is that she's generally thought of mainly as a performance artist, mainly as a photographer, and that somehow the roots of her practice as a sculptor seem to sort of fall by the wayside. So the idea behind the exhibition is to retrace those roots, recover some of that practice, and then link it to the performance, to the photography, link it really to almost every aspect of what she did. I think that the definitions of her as a performance artist as a photographer are a little bit narrow and that it's possible that this has occurred or these definitions have emerged because of the way people have written about her work, because of the way her photographs, particularly the photographs from her intravenous series, her last body of work, have been distributed in journals and magazines and so forth. A lot of these kinds of objects, for example, the intravenous series was, when it was originally exhibited, it was shown with sculptural components, like the black one and why not sneeze, but people don't see the installation shots of the way these objects were originally shown. They really just see the photographs and so I think this has contributed to the loss of thinking about her really as a sculptor. The why not sneeze, by the way, is related to the Duchamp piece, why not sneeze and Duchamp was one of Wilkie's very important sources. Hannah Wilkie created sculpture through gestures, simple folds of movements or simple folds and movements of materials, whether it was clay or bubblegum or play-doh, it was really gestures that turned them and herself, I'll argue, in this talk into sculpture. And here you see her in her studio in a kind of sea of her clay folds and she produced these folds throughout her career. She began experimenting with both radical form and content at a young age. Continuing this path as an undergraduate major, a sculpture major at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, she graduated from there in 1962 with a bachelor's of fine arts and a bachelor of science in education. And some of the earliest sculptures that she produced there, like this two part on the left, this two piece untitled work from about 1960, were fashioned out of plaster of Paris. These are very sort of crackly looking works. They have very fragile surfaces. You can see when you look closely at a work like this you can actually see the artist's fingerprints left in the plaster where she was working it while it was still wet. This is figurative and abstract. The work on the right is an example of painted fiberglass and metal, the anthropophonic form for 1963. This is another material that Wilkie worked in very early in her career. Wilkie described these works as quote, abstracted arm and leg-like structures reaching up with big separate centers connecting them. And they do kind of look like, or this one does look like a sort of overgrown flower and the surface is very modeled with these very rich kinds of greens. And you see the tentacles that are extruding from it. Now after working for a period of time using plaster, using fiberglass, she determined that these materials were not malleable enough. And she had also been working with clay and it's about at this moment when she really turns to clay as a mainstay of her work. And among the earliest examples of her use of clay are these very small, delicate forms she called blooms or boxes, which is a con on contemporary slang for the word vagina. And almost all of the works that Wilkie did during this period were abstracted images of the body, particularly vaginal forms to give shape to female desire, to give shape to sexual fulfillment, the anthropophonic form. Also, it has a kind of a secret, you can just make out in the center of it and you can see the white table underneath it. It has a kind of secret center to it, but it's hidden by these petal-like folds. And these were definitely images of the female body that Wilkie was making during this time. The boxes, and here you see one of her clay boxes from the early 1960s. They're these sort of deep caverns. They're constructed of layers of clay, sometimes with these, you can see in the detail, these little slits at the bottom built up by these overlapping layers where she would in this particular case add texture to the clay by pressing burlap or some other kind of fabric into the clay while it's still wet. At first she was quite reticent to talk about her, talk about the content of her work. She would explain it to her peers in school and otherwise, but she rarely revealed the subject matter of the work to her teachers at Tyler or to her earliest employers. She was quite fearful of people knowing what it was that she was making imagery of. And of course, this is very early, this is in the 1960s, not the 1970s, when it becomes more commonplace for women, particularly of the feminist art movement to make imagery like this. She was also quite reticent to reveal what she was making, the content of the work to the art world at large. She later observed in 1974 that in the early 60s, she says in the early 60s, I was scared to show my work around because you were put down if you were making images of female genitalia. Her work and the complications surrounding her revealing its contents to her teachers, her employees, demonstrate some of the key problems and paradoxes that feminist artists working later in the 1970s would face. As they argued against perceptions of gender and gendered roles through the use of clearly gendered forms. Negotiating through varied artistic and conceptual concerns, Wilkie was always adventurous, exceptionally adventurous in her exploration of the sculptural process. And there was simply nothing that was out of bounds for her in her search for malleable materials. In the 1970s, for example, she molded this raw bacon on a plate. On the right-hand side, you see one of many little Play-Doh folds that she created, kind of emphasizing the playfulness of her work. And she made kind of families of this. So this blue, this is basically, it's a round of blue and white and yellow Play-Doh that she rolled out and then turned into a fold. These are, by far, the most fragile objects or the most fragile material that she worked in, I think. Even, we'll talk about the latex in a minute, but even more fragile than the latex. This is, of anything that's on view in the exhibition at the Newburger, right now, this is the piece that I most fear something happening to. They're just incredibly fragile. I mentioned the latex a minute ago, and this is one of the earliest materials that she worked in, this liquid latex. She would create small folds out of the liquid latex. She would pour it over clay folds. She would pour it over lengths of twine. She would pour it out on a plaster of Paris surface and the plaster of Paris would kind of suck some of the moisture out of it and make it easier to work with. Among the more unusual examples of the small folds or the teazole cushion, sorry, I don't have a picture of that, but it's a small work from 1967 that she actually placed on top of artificial turf, which was a very unusual material for artists to be working with at the time. Something that emerged in the early 1960s and became popularized as a substitute for grass when it was installed in the Houston Astrodome for the first time in 1965. She would also create these very large wall pieces pouring the latex into rounds, bending it like clay and then using snaps and pushpins to piece the objects together. Some of them are very large, centerfold, for example, and early latex work was 12 feet high and five feet wide. Unfortunately, the latex formula that she used at first was not stable and so most of the, almost all of the latex pieces that she made up until about 1974 have either disintegrated or become so fragile that they can no longer be exhibited. In 75, she changed her formula and Vertical Verde for Garcia Lorca is an example of one of the pieces from that period of time based on a stanza from a poem by one of her favorite poets, Federico Garcia Lorca. And so this is from 1975 and then Rosebud, which is on loan to the Burning Down the House exhibition, I think is also 75 also, I think, 75, 76. So that also survived because it is made from this same new formula. She used a new formula of latex and then combined it with Liquitex so that it would strengthen the latex and also allow her to be able to tint the objects. Works like Rosebud in particular are kind of sensual and fleshy and if you haven't seen it, it's out right as you first walk into the exhibition here. It has sort of soft petal-like folds which are very kind of vulnerable in appearance. In 1972, the critic, Douglas Crint, described the early versions of these very vulnerable looking objects as not only vulnerable in their ability to be undone, unsnapped, but also to be that they were sort of crying out to be touched. The vulnerability of Wilkie's work, which Crint observed, was particularly important or became particularly important to her artistic production. So bacon, raw bacon would rot. The thin rounds of Play-Doh could crack under the slightest amount of pressure. She observed in 1975, the same year she began working with the new latex formula, quote, one strength of American art right now is that we're involved in a culture that's about destructiveness. Some of the best art has a planned obsolescence. So although she didn't know that her earliest latex pieces would fall apart, it was something that she not only endured, but also eventually came to appreciate as a critical part of her process. This idea of vulnerability, of potential violation, is a theme that runs through her body of work, particularly in objects that appear fragile, easily torn, broken, and that it's important to remember that she, Wilkie, the artist is always in control to a certain degree of those objects that appear fragile of that violation. One of the ways that she explored this idea was to start exhibiting work on the floor. And she did this for the first time in an exhibition in 1974 at Ronald Feldman Fine Art, called The Floor Show. And this is one of the most unusual works that she exhibited in The Floor Show. You can see the installation shot in 1974 and then recent photography of this work called Laundry Lint's C.O.'s. That's how it looks right now in the Newburger exhibition and the detail of one of the pieces in the upper right-hand corner. This is made literally from Laundry Lint, nothing else, that she collected over the course of about two or three years from her then-partner class, Oldenburg Stryer. And she essentially followed the same methodology that she had used in the other folded work, like the clay works and so forth. She would essentially fold flat lengths of this compressed Laundry Lint into objects. And then here, again, exhibiting on the floor, they're very kind of surprising when you look at them and their material and in how delicate they are. They give the appearance of being very easily broken apart, very easily able to disintegrate. And at the same time, they're remarkable for their color. They have this extraordinarily vivid color if you think about Laundry Lint and the Laundry Lint that comes out of your own dry or it probably doesn't always have this bright, beautiful pink hue or a yellow hue, mine does not, it tends to be rather gray. So it's remarkable that the Lint looks the way it does and it has, what Lint has in it, it has fibers and labels and hair and dust. And it is one of the ways in which she addressed feminist concerns because of course she's essentially seizing the garbage of women's labor doing the laundry, certainly what was construed as women's labor at that time and converting it into this creative production. This is another piece that she showed in the floor show, 176 one-fold gestural sculptures. This is a group of sculptures that vary in size from just an inch to over five inches in width or length placed in random patterns on the floor. Some of the forms are open, some are closed, some are smooth, some are very craggy. Together they create a kind of sea of clay forms that was first shown as 176 one-fold gestural sculptures and now is shown as 159 one-fold gestural sculptures. Very, very vulnerable, very like the Play-Doh kind of frightening to a curator installing in their exhibition space because it just sits directly on the floor and you can walk right up to it and it is a good demonstration of the way she turned to work that has a kind of vulnerability to it or experimented with that. And then another very unusual material that she installed on the floor in that exhibition was a long line of store-bought fortune cookies. In the 70s she began purchasing cookies. She would keep them in her studio and they would sort of, according to her account, slowly disappear, probably being taken by small creatures that would come into the studio at night and borrow them or nibble on them. She saw the cookies as being very related to the folds that she was making visually, conceptually and they also extremely, extremely fragile. The idea of buying store-bought objects or prefabricated objects and exhibiting them as her own work of art was of course a conceptual act, something that we now term appropriation art and clearly inspired by Duchamp again who was, as I mentioned before, sort of touched down for Wilkie. Of course, some of his best known pieces, his store-bought urinal, his store-bought bicycle wheel and stool works that he sometimes modified, referred to as ready-mades and really what Wilkie's fortune cookies are ready-mades in the spirit of Duchamp. Just some other materials that she worked in. These are works made out of kneaded eraser. She not only loved work that was conceptually challenging but also loved language and wordplay. Puns were a staple of her work. She used, this is among the earliest uses of wordplay, the kneaded eraser series which she also exhibited in the floor shell. She would fold these very small, maybe small folded sculptures out of varying sized kneaded erasers and place them on square boards. The color of the erasers vary from work to work. Color of kneaded erasers vary from eraser to eraser. Some are very, very timely, only an eighth of an inch wide. Some arranged in random patterns, as you can see in the work on the left, number four, or arranged in a grid pattern, as you can see in the work on the right. The kneaded erasers don't dry. They're pliable just like clay. They are typically used for the removal of graphite or charcoal or as a method of subtractive drawing in which the artist would actually erase, use the eraser to lighten or remove elements of drawing. They are unique in that they will absorb, unlike other erasers, they will actually absorb the color of the thing that they are erasing. So they change color, they always stay the same size, but they will wear out from overuse becoming less pliable and less absorbent. So she's really shifting the use of a tool for correction or subtraction to a tool of sculptural construction. And as she adopts the kneaded eraser, she not only modifies its use, but she also draws on it conceptually as she puns the word kneaded eraser. So in the 1970s, when she's making this work, the idea of erasure would have been particularly important to those interested in reinserting women into the art historical canon. There's also sort of the more personal aspect of it as referencing her experiences in romantic relationships. She used kneaded erasers in other ways. She used them on postcards. It's an example of just one of the postcards, Franklin's Tomb of 1976. She used them on utensils, and here you see Knife and Fork, 1974, and Saucer and Spoon of 1974, both of which are on view in the exhibition. The work on the right, I believe, has not been shown before, so it's exciting for us to have that piece in the show. These are works that evoke surrealist objects, and surrealism was something that was also very important to Wilkie in here. Just an example, I'm showing you Merritt Oppenheim's object. For 1936, this fur-lined cup, Saucer and Spoon, which is the kind of object that would have influenced Wilkie and her thinking about the pieces at the top. Kneading, whether it was kneading clay, kneading a racer, was something to which she was clearly very devoted, and among the materials that she eventually needed was her own skin. And this is a still from a video called Gestures from 1974. It was also included in the floor show, and you're seeing a still and then photographic stills turned into a series of photographs on the right hand side. This was, this is a 35 minute video, 35 plus minute video, really one of her first uses of video, and here she manipulates her flesh in the way that she manipulated all other malleable materials, really sculpting it into forms, so she would just sort of knead her face over and over and over again, creating different gestures and different facial features and expressions. After Gestures, she continued to use her body as sculptural material, and this is a performance she did in 1974 called Super Tart, who was part of a multimedia event held at the kitchen in New York City, where many, many artists were invited to give these kind of two minute performances, and here you're seeing stills from the performance. Super Tart was upon, on the title of the event, Soup and Tart, upon on the popular rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar, that the rock opera opened in 71 and was released as a film in 73, just before the year, before she did this performance. For the performance, she stood on a little, on top of a little pedestal draped with this white tablecloth worn over her shoulder and over the course of the two minutes. She struck a series of poses or tableaus, moving the cloth, her torso, her limbs, and her facial expression. Now she described this work as a transformation from the Virgin Mary in the upper left-hand corner to the crucified Christ in the lower right-hand corner, and you can see how she rolls up the material so it creates a kind of loincloth around her body in the final image that was taken from that performance. And so she's using, she's querying ideas about the boundaries of religion and faith and the body within the framework of Christianity. And at the same time, I think that this work can be placed squarely within ancient Greek sculptural traditions, which is something that's not talked about with reference to Wilkie's work all that often. By the time that she produced this, she was well aware of Greco-Roman sculpture. She had traveled to Greece. She had been to the British Museum, which of course has many, many examples of Greek sculpture. She had been to the antiquities, seen the antiquities in the original Getty Mansion during a trip to Los Angeles. Supertar is particularly reminiscent to my eye of Hellenistic traditions and Wilkie's gestures in the performance and in the stills that she chose from the performance to create the photographic version of the event evoke a spirit of Hellenistic pathos in sculpture. And the Hellenistic world sought the expression of emotions that were both transitory and fleeting. And in sculpture, those were rendered in kind of pantomimic, through pantomimic gesture, pantomimic posing that were both dramatic and exaggerated. And those are the kinds of gestures that Wilkie's creating in the Supertar performance. So her use of what's called pathos, this what's called the pathetic approach, not in the way we think of pathetic now, but linking to the word pathos was reinforced by her use of the drapery, and in this case, the white tablecloth. One of the things that Greek sculpture was most praised for was the way in which Greek sculptors evoked what's called emnus in their work. And this was the idea of a sculpture that was full of life or full of breath, literally full of breath. And this was a level of sculptural accuracy that most all Greek sculptors aspired to. And there was a kind of magic deemed a magic to the sculptures where a sculpture that appeared almost animated, lifelike. And here we see Wilkie making his life sculptures, these living sculptures. This is something that was highly, highly praised among the Greek world. There was also ecstatic writing about these sculptors, meaning writing in the arts about how these sculptures looked as though they were literally alive, and that they required, sometimes required watchful eyes, or they required being chained to their pedestals so that they wouldn't just leap up and run off. An example, often cited example, is a marble cow by the sculptor Myron, which was on the Acropolis in Athens. And according to descriptions of the cow, the cow was so lifelike that shepherd boys would try to yoke it, and calves would try to suckle from it, bulls would try to mount it. There's no particular evidence that Wilkie was thinking about this particular aspect of Greek sculpture when she made these works, but there's no question that her idea, her use of the Greek tradition, and thinking about the way she positioned her body and the way she used drapery, is rooted in that tradition of the living sculpture, the kind of Greco-Roman living sculpture. This was also tied to the way in which marble gods and goddesses were treated. So for example, on the left you're looking at a votive that's reflective of the way that Athena Parthenos would have looked like, and then on the right is the Aphrodite of Nidos. These are among the most renowned representations of marble gods and goddesses who were treated like real human beings, and they were made offerings to in their temples. They were literal inhabitants of their temples. So they were prayed to, they were adorned, they were provided offerings, sometimes ritualistically bathed. In several of her living sculpture projects, she transformed herself into a goddess, often the goddess of love and beauty, Venus, the Roman version of the Greek Aphrodite, and this is a recurrent theme throughout her work. She produced latex pieces in the early 70s, Venus Basin, Venus Cushion. For the Greek world Aphrodite had multiple links to this idea of a living sculpture. It was Aphrodite who according to legend inspired the sculptor Pygmalion to fabricate his ideal woman out of ivory, naming her Galatea. Pygmalion fell in love with his creation, prayed to Aphrodite who then brought the work to life. In the fourth century Praxili's Aphrodite of Nytos was so shocking, it's so shock Greek society because it was one of the first full size, life size representations of the female nude and there is writing about the Aphrodite of Nytos similar to the writing about the cow where she had very dewy eyes that the marble created a kind of sensuality that hadn't been seen in sculpture like this before. And she used the Venus, Wilkie used the Venus figure in other life sculpture projects that she did one in an event called Life Sculpture that was orchestrated by Lil Picard at Sculpture Now in 1974, another that same year where she was also posed as Venus as a life sculpture in an event called Weight Sheets and Quiet Dots. And then one of her best known performances on July 4th, 1976, she performed by country Tiziddi at the Albright Knox Museum. There were earlier versions of this, she performed it first for cable television or version of it for cable television and an artist rights exhibition in 1975 then at the Whitney in another version of this 1976. And for the Buffalo Project which is her most fully formed version of the idea she placed these three 11 foot goddess photographs of herself along the south facade of the museum in front of Four Carriotids by Augustus St. Gaudens. The Albright Knox Museum being modeled after the Erechtheon in Greece. And here clearly she's repeating patterns that you can see, it's hard to see in the image on the left but she's repeating patterns, see I think I've got another. Yeah, you can see she's repeating the drapery in the photographs that she has on the lower half of her body. That's repeating the drapery that the Carriotids, the female figures that literally hold up the facade of the building that they are also wearing. And then on the left-hand side you see her during the My Country Tiziddi creating a chewing gum freeze. So she's working on the sidewalk with people walking by lots of children and other people where they would come and they would chew gum and then she would form little sculptures out of it. Chewing gum being one of her other signature materials that she worked with. She would take the chewed gum, create the little sculptures, put them on rag board and then you see how she arranged the rag board around the building as a kind of a freeze. The freeze, she observed that the freeze that she created was a way in which to quote, put color back into the architecture. And of course she's referencing the way in which ancient buildings, Greco-Roman buildings, which now appear white to us, actually were polychromatic when they were first made. The freeze is not only a way in which to embellish the building, but also links to, links through her love of language to a pun. And here she's of course punning the song, the traditional patriotic song My Country Tis of Day. Now the founding of the, this is July 4th, 1976, this is the Bicentennial and of course the founding of the United States was inspired by Greek ideology and the link between Greek ideology and American democracy was manifested in the importation of Greek forms to architecture in the United States in the 19th century. So if you think of the mall in Washington, that's all, you know, this Greco-Roman form, that all links back to the way our system of democracy links further back to Greek ideology. She is making a freeze that would essentially take the place of narrative on a Greek building. So the freeze is the place where you tell the story of the building or tell some other significant kind of story. Here she's forming a narrative out of these little sculptural folds that she referred to as quote, cunt forms, thus lending architectural and ideological form to her punning the word country. And also reinscribing, of course, you know, My Country Tis of the Sweet Land of Liberty and the icing land where our fathers died, this is a gender, you know what, it's a patriarchal song. It's clearly a gendered song, but actually is a song that's derived from a gender neutral song, which is God Save the Queen or God Save the King depending on what ruler happens to be in, which depending on the circumstances of monarchical rule. So she's not only reinscribing the female into this whole patriotic system, but also into the anthem itself. Version of My Country Tis of the demonstrates the ways in which she not only investigated the body as sculpture, but also queried cultural constructions of female beauty. And her reliance on ancient Greco-Roman forms, for example, played a critical role in the way she considered how beauty is defined and viewed. And of course, there's a Greek formulation of perfection, of correct proportion, is a canon that was also a gendered canon. It was based on the male body, the sort of, the perfect male body. And this is a place in which she, Wilkie, uses her work to investigate the notion of perfect. And the notion of perfection as a gendered idea and as culturally inscribed. And if you look at these two images, it's still from Super Tartte from 1974. And then one of the photographs from Intervenus, you can see how throughout her body of work, she is considering these ideas. So the Super Tartte image, she's life, she's nude, with the exception of the fabric from the waist down, her shoes. And in the, by contrast, in the Intervenus work, which is the last body of work that she does, where she effectively documents her own death from La Foma in 1993. She holds her hands up, she balances an urn of flowers on her head, striking the classical cariatid pose again, but this time the nude body is aged, the nude body is bloated, dress not in a skirt or a tablecloth but covered by bandages near her waist, protecting the wounds from her cancer treatments. And so she is, again, positioning herself as embodying the classical body, the body of Venus. But giving further revision to the way in which she investigates the classical form and, again, queries this idea of the cultural construction of perfection and the cultural construction of beauty. The chewing gum that she used in the performance in 1976, she used that about a year and a half after the first time that she started using chewing gum, which was for her SOS Starification Objects series. This is a mastication box that she produced in late 1974 for an exhibition called Artists Make Toys, which was on view in January 1975. This is an exhibition that had many different kinds of toys by a variety of artists, including Mark DeSuvaro, Oldenburg exhibited in the show with Trisha Brown and Jared Barth, they made a four-foot horse that opened up to reveal a theater inside. And then read grooms, another artist who participated in the show made a giant wooden picture puzzle. Her box, mastication box, had these unopened chewing gums, different kinds of flavors and brands, these tiny gum sculptures encased in plexiglass boxes, playing cards, and these 28 of these little photographs you see in the lower right of her with gum. She's in various poses with gum attached to her body. And by placing the gum on her body and then having herself photographed for the mastication box, she really made a kind of final collapse between her body and her sculpture. And she observed in an artist's round table in 1975, my chewing gum sculpture is about me, my body and me. I make body art where I put chewing gum sculptures on my body, I become my art, my art becomes me. And it was from the mastication box that several other works and ideas emerged. Here you see in 1975, she was invited to participate in an exhibition in Paris. And the wonderful description of what occurred when she went there and did her performance with the chewing gum, Wilkie arrived with no less than 3,000 pieces of brightly colored gum unavailable in Paris. And that's true that these kinds of colors that she was using in her gum are only available in the United States. And did a three hour performance at the opening. Amid non-stop television cameras and flashing bulbs, she offered super cherry, apple green and chocolate flavored gum to the elegantly attired guests. The chewed pieces were either returned to Wilkie who rapidly mold them into 120 sexual sculptures, push pinned to the wall or fastened to the artist's half nude body. So she saw the gum as not only a part of herself but also a part of the people who participated in the SOS project. As she said, people chew the gum for me. I make an object from the chewed gum which contains remnants of their saliva after the gum's sweetness is removed. Part of their body was in the object which was later preserved on paper as sculptural drawing. And so it's in this way that her body not only becomes part of her art but also the bodies of her audience. In the SOS project, starification was upon on the word scarification. Throughout the course of her career she framed the use of scarification in the SOS series in several ways. She linked the practice of scarring to tattoo numbers with which Jews were marked in concentration camps. And as she observed as a Jew, quote, I would have been destroyed had I been born in Europe at that time. She also related her scarification through gum to the practice of African scarification in which the body is incised with a sharp tool to create patterning and to create gendered stereotypes. I decorated, she said my body, this is her quote from her, I decorated my body relating to the African scarification wounds or to the cask system or macho male photographs with cowboy hats and guns or little uniforms made outfits and hair curlers so that they were psychological poses that related to me as emotional wounds that we carry within us that really hurt us. These kinds of scars as they pertain to Jews in the Holocaust or in African culture were modifications, they were permanent modifications of the body that fixed a kind of status of the scar, a kind of social status or status otherwise, sometimes linked to female sexuality indicating, particularly in African culture, stages of adolescence and puberty. In Wilkie's version, the scars are not fixed. They are temporary. They can be removed at any time. The SOS series is often linked to the way in which her own body was marked by her battle with lymphoma and also the way in which her mother's body was marked through her battle with breast cancer. This is a work called En Memoriam, Summer Butter Mommy from 1979 to 1983. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970 underwent a radical double mastectomy and as her, as Wilkie's sister, Marcie Charlotte, observed to me, she said, we were both devastated when she had the surgery. The surgery was on Hannah's 30th birthday. She said, in those days, a woman was put to sleep, not knowing if she would awaken without a breath. Wilkie didn't often link the SOS series to her illness, at least to critics. Really until later. It was really not until she started making photographs of her mother after her mother suffered a stroke that prompted her cancer to return that she began to link the SOS series to the way in which her mother's body was ravaged by her illness, the way in which her mother's body had disintegrated and then later the link being made to the way in which her own body would disintegrate from her own illness. Given her concern with concerns for fragility and permanence, changeability, disintegration, it may seem, and certainly did to me at first illogical, that her sculpture practice was also largely concerned with monumental art, with public art, which is probably the least well-known aspect of her practice. At the same time, she was, like most artists, very concerned about her artistic legacy and focused, I think, far more attention on this monumental, public sculpture aspect of her work than is known. She, in 1978, 1979, experimented with casting in a foundry while she was an artist in residence at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. And it was there that she created bronze models as proposals for monumental sculptures. What I'm showing you here is some cast bronze folds that she created while she was learning how to work in the foundry. Another example of a work that she produced as a monumental sculpture, this is Color Fields, Monument for Large Sculpture at Federal Plaza of 1985. This is a work that was produced for an exhibition called After Tilted Ark that was held at the storefront for art and architecture in New York City in November, 1985. And it was earlier that year that a Manhattan jury ordered the removal of Richard Serra's 1981 Tilted Ark, you see in the bottom right-hand corner. The exhibition, according to the organizers, was not intended to be critical of Serra or his sculpture, but rather to redirect the argument surrounding the piece because the argument had become so heated and divisive. They really wanted to engage in a discussion about what is public art, what work can be accepted and understood by viewers, what is the artist's responsibility, and this is Wilkie's contribution to the exhibition, these 10, what would have been large-scale paintings of colorful folds shown in a grid pattern. And just a couple of other examples of her interest in monumental sculpture. This is a drawing for a proposal for sculpture on a golf course, these had a kind of humorous side to them, and you can see the drawing on the lower right-hand showing you the models for soft pyramids, which are tiny, tiny little models made out of various materials, bronze, lead, these are undated. And so experimenting with what a golf course would look like if she was given the opportunity to create her monumental sculpture on the golf course. And then the Sotheby's series, these are a group of five drawings that she created in which she adorned advertisements for estate properties being marketed by this high-end realtor with drawings for monumental sculpture. And you can see on the right-hand side, she's essentially showing you what your big estate would look like if you gave her the opportunity to build her large sculpture on your front lawn or on your beach-front property over on the left-hand side. In the largest drawing in the series, the one in the center, she quotes a passage from Karl Marx's Duss Kapital, which was published in 1867 as a criticism of the way in which capitalism had redefined commodities from the purchase and sale of goods to the purchase and sale of labor. And this is something that his idea of exchange values, something that she addressed over and over throughout her body of work, this idea of using Marx's name as a pun, she's punning his name, she's leaving her own Marx on the estate and also sort of querying her role as a laborer, as someone, as an artist who is marketed and who has to market her work. In conclusion, making her mark on the landscape, on her body in clay, bacon, play-doh, Hannah Wookie was always concerned with the sculptural quality of her work. It was, I believe, always an underlying theme and methodology that permeated almost everything that she did from her earliest sculpture all the way through to her final series, the intravenous works. Thank you very much. I'd be happy to answer questions or stay a minute after if you don't want to. Yeah? Did she ever realize any monumental politics? No, I forgot, I should have put that in the beginning. No, it's a very good question. Not, no, not as far as I know. Although I have been asked if maybe the Newbroker would like to pay for that. I don't think the Newbroker wants to pay for that though, but it has come up. Are there any proposals that they would like to support? Anything else? Oh, I'm sorry. I was just wondering about why she changed her name that Wookie was not actually... Well, Wookie is her married name and Hannah, her first husband, and then Hannah was her middle name. So I think her original, her given name was Arlene Hannah Butter. And she did kind of work with that name Butter because Butter can be easily spread. She writes about that in any, my son's in the room now, so I'm not gonna go any further. I'd like to thank Tracy for venturing out on the eve of her new son's arrival. Actual eve. The metaphorical eve. The metaphorical eve. And for the information and bringing to life and to light some more dimensions, I think, of Hannah Wookie and her artwork. Steven Solans, who is a male feminist artist who is in this show, burning down the house, building a feminist art collection here at the center is going to be lecturing here this evening at the forum at seven o'clock. And next Saturday, December 13th, Gloria Steinem is moderating sex trafficking, the new abolitionists with a wonderful panel, and it will be in the Cantor Auditorium on the third floor. And we're going to have then a reception here at the center immediately afterwards. And Sunday, December 14th, here in the forum, Jennifer Cody Epstein is going to be here reading from and discussing her novel, The Painter from Shanghai. So again, I thank you very much, Tracy, and thank you all for being here this afternoon. Enjoy the day.