The efficiency of the fold, done over and over, mimics the ongoingness of folding as care work, while it simultaneously creates mystery out of shallowness, dimensional form out of apparent flatness. Important too to Wilke’s work is that the fold is a gesture linked to feminized labor, what was once understood as “women’s work”: doing laundry, diapering babies, preparing dough. What was once shallow and knowable is now mysterious and deep. Desire-as curiosity, wonder, adventure, mischievousness-is activated. When something is folded-as in Wilke’s one- or two-fold, vulva-like repetitions-it is transformed, repetitively, by gesture. Our experience of the material is then upended both by the fold and by its multiplicity and uniqueness. Again, the substance of the material hasn’t changed but each folded plane acquires more difference from the next than any flat plane had to the other. A folded plane has points of entry in which we might understand the once shallow surface as it relates to depth. Once a flat plane has become a fold, the same material becomes an intriguing half-secret-the fold alerts us to the once clandestine affordance of surface. Before a flat plane is folded, we know it as surface-superficial, exposed. Folding is the gestural equivalent of paradox, in that it takes what has neither inside nor out and, without transforming its substance, gives it both. From the beginning of her practice, Wilke worked in clay and created genital-like vessels, but with her first folded pieces in the early ’70s, she found an action that worked in balance with the forms she made, so that the diverse materials she used-initially terra-cotta, and then chewing gum, erasers, rubber, and more-became a kind of proliferating record of an obsessive act. If liveliness was Wilke’s tonal norm, her go-to material was gesture, and the go-to gesture of her art in the 1970s was the fold. ©2021 Scharlatt Family, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This compounding liveliness-a liveliness that indicates something like liberation at a historical moment when many were trying to work out all that word could mean-is the prevalent tone in Wilke’s work, even when it approached caring for her mother during breast cancer treatment and then facing her own death from lymphoma at the age of fifty-two. “I become my art, my art becomes me,” she wrote in “A Letter to Women Artists” in 1975, and in a 1986 interview with Linda Montano: “I made myself into a work of art” and “my entire life is the work of art.” She said she made art to “have life all around.” If art can invite life as a force into a single life, life is art enriched by more art, which brings more life, which goes on and on this way in a process that is exponential and combinatory. Wilke developed a practice in which the boundaries between herself and her art dissolved.
Louis-is testament to art’s generative and relational potential. Hannah Wilke’s work-currently the subject of a retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. To live one’s life as art has advantages over living one’s life for art, not the least of which is that it is often more fun.
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