Essays on Modern Art: Hannah Wilke

By Justice Koolhaas

Justice Koolhaas’s Essays on Modern Art are reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works that she owned. Unusually, these works were discards; even more unusually, she obtained them on condition that each artist signed a statement disowning them as artworks.
Hannah Wilke is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. She has changed the way we think about sexuality, gender and power. Her brilliant interrogations of identity categories have been hugely influential for art practice, and they continue to challenge the viewer to engage in a critical rethinking of ‘the subject’.
To mark the fifty years since she first exhibited in New York, this E-book in the Essays on Modern Art series has an extended introductory chapter. This additional material makes it easier to spell out all of Koolhaas’s main points and explain the key quotations from her essay. This structure will help students get to the heart of this newly translated essay more easily.
Justice Koolhaas’s essay ‘Narcissus Féminine’ places the artwork she owned – Blood / Soil, as well as Wilke’s art as a whole – in its theoretical and philosophical contexts, analysing the impact on contemporary art and theory. Dealing throughout with questions about the very concept of ‘the body’, Koolhaas emphasises how blood relates to psychiatry, language and gender politics in Wilke’s oeuvre. The references in Textual Connexivities at the end of the essay makes this E-book an invaluable starting point for anyone approaching Wilke’s work for the first time.
Koolhaas’s opaque writing is rendered lucid and quotable for students and non-students alike by the translator, C. M. Cohen. This means that the uninitiated Koolhaas reader can pick and mix material from this book to suit their purposes without feeling pressured to grasp everything at once.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justice Koolhaas
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310634215

Justice Koolhaas

Born in Bloemfontein in 1940, Justice Koolhaas was raised in Utrecht and Lausanne. Her twin, Patience, died shortly after birth. Justice always felt that her philosophical interests were a search for presences that haunt everyday life beyond the reach of conventional rationality. Her recently discovered oeuvre extends theory in the humanities and arts beyond its existing frontiers and expectations.She came top her class at the Sorbonne. She studied under Roland Barthes and was privately admired and supported by several European intellectuals. Despite this, she found few doors open to her in the academy. Her sense of foreignness became integral to her work, particularly her adherence to writing in Dutch, which kept her out of print, along with other more personal reasons. Since her death in 2011, her family has committed to ensuring that all her work is published posthumously. Its purview hybridises disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to cultural studies to media studies to her most beloved subject area of all, art. Her span of theorists, writers and artists includes Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Guy Debord, Jacques Derrida, Tracey Emin, Donna Haraway, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Kruger, Jean-François Lyotard, Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hannah Wilke, Frank Zappa, and Slavoj Žižek.C.M. Cohen completed his linguistics PhD in 1980. He worked as an interpreter for the U.N. for 23 years before acting as a consultant translator whose clients have included the South African government, the Commonwealth Games committee, the Antarctic Survey, and several mining corporations. He is now retired. His friendship with Koolhaas, along with his professional experience outside academia, bring a deep empathy in his translations and introductions of her highly stylised literary and philosophical legacy.

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Copyright

Essays on Modern Art: Hannah Wilke

Justice Koolhaas

Smashwords Edition.

Copyright 2016 Justice Koolhaas.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Acknowledgements

The research and translation for this text was match-funded via the B route: application 1227H/2014.

The translator would like to, as ever, thank Sofietje and Jan. Additional thanks to Alexei Ilyarovich for steeliness in the nick of time – the 11th hour can be the most productive hour.

Cover design: D. Janssen.

'Blood / Soil' by Hannah Wilke

‘Blood / Soil’ circa early 1960s. Blood and acrylic on rebate-mounted stud wall.

Dimensions approx. 2.7m x 1.9m

Table of Contents

Translator’s Introduction

About this Book

Series Introduction

Essay Introduction 1: The Feminine

Essay Introduction 2: The Narcissist

Essay Introduction 3: The Subject

Essay Introduction 4: The Implications

Letter on Methodology

Notes on the Texts in the Series

Narcissus Féminine

Narco Sis

The Phenomenal Body

Post-Body

Body Talk

Work of the Body / Body of Work

Textual Connexivities

Also by Justice Koolhaas

Upcoming Essays on Modern Art

Creative Theory, Radical Example

Marginalabia

Translator’s Introduction

About this Book

Hannah Wilke is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. She has changed the way we think about sexuality, gender and power. Her brilliant interrogations of identity categories have been hugely influential for art practice, and they continue to challenge the viewer to engage in a critical rethinking of ‘the subject’.

To mark the fifty years since she first exhibited in New York, this E-book in the Essays on Modern Art series has an extended introductory chapter. This additional material makes it easier to spell out all of Koolhaas’s main points and explain the key quotations from her essay. This structure will help students get to the heart of this newly translated essay more easily.

Justice Koolhaas’s essay ‘Narcissus Féminine’ places the artwork she owned – Blood / Soil, as well as Wilke’s art as a whole – in its theoretical and philosophical contexts, analysing the impact on contemporary art and theory. Dealing throughout with questions about the very concept of ‘the body’, Koolhaas emphasises how blood relates to psychiatry, language and gender politics in Wilke’s oeuvre. The references in Textual Connexivities at the end of the essay makes this E-book an invaluable starting point for anyone approaching Wilke’s work for the first time.

Series Introduction

It is difficult for today’s students to find source materials that are original enough to give their assignments an edge. There are so many books and so little time. This is especially so in the labyrinthine world of art and its accompanying theories. What can another book add about the artists that form the backbone of art history? The Essays on Modern Art series offers three things: each book is short, discusses a previously unseen artwork, and carries the prestige in presenting a new and startling theorist – Justice Koolhaas.

Her thought has only recently been made available, and is introduced at length in the increasingly popular and free download, Creative Theory, Radical Example (Koolhaas 2015). Her art theory has, over five decades, covered mainstream figures and lesser known ones alike. Each of her theoretical essays, introduced by myself, is reproduced alongside at least one of each artist’s works owned by Koolhaas.

The artworks are from a collection of over fourteen hundred that she amassed between the nineteen sixties and early 2000s. These range from paintings and sculptures to videos and installations. Each was obtained in an unorthodox manner. She used her position as an outsider theorist to ingratiate herself with art professionals and hangers-on, the kind of people who typically accrete around artists once their work begins to gather some commercial and critical momentum. Sometimes this resulted in studio visits that sometimes resulted in her asking about any recent work that had been discarded. The discussion about that discarded work occasionally led to her asking to keep it, but with a proviso. She asked each artist to write a note directly onto the work itself (typically an obscured facet, such as the obverse of a painting) to the effect that the artist disowned the work and wished for it to have no market value.*

Most refused. Those who agreed will have done so for their own reasons. Either way, her proposition would have fascinated many. She claimed that she was inverting Marcel Duchamp’s assertion that if an artist declares an object is an artwork, then no matter what that object is, it is an artwork.** In this case, that artist’s authority to confer status is used for conferring the exact opposite – through what she called an ‘undesignation’. The challenge was whether undesignations could hold. Would they, on the contrary, still confer status? The