Using the time-arresting medium of photography, Hannah Wilke, who died of lymphoma in 1993, challenges the viewer to ask related questions about destiny, the future, possibility, and inevitability. Wilke began her project of self-portraiture in the early 1960s, as her mother was dying of cancer, donning Greek robes and photographing herself in sensuous poses, or sticking chewed gum on herself and photographing it, perhaps offering a 1970s New York art-scene version of a Dutch vanitas painting. If Wilke’s early images reflect Western archetypal beauty, their meaning shifts dramatically in light of the two-decade series of images that ends with larger-than-life photographs of her middle-aged, positively not beautiful self in hospital gowns, receiving chemotherapy, and losing her hair.
The series of images comes full circle: Wilke foreshadowed the end at the beginning, when she juxtaposed her self-portrait with an image of her dying mother (fig. 3). The artist is young—youthful and white as a sixteenth-century Bronzino, her eyebrows plucked high and perfect; her stereotypical red-rose lips puckered with half a smile, triangulating the nipples of her breasts; her mass of dark hair tumbling around her head as if she were aroused. She looks directly at us. Audacious. Challenging. She reiterates a scene—an icon—a caricature.
Her mother, in contrast, looks down and across, as if toward Wilke’s right breast. That gaze triangulates the young Wilke’s right nipple and the mother’s vertical mastectomy scar, rutted against her dark skin with the cluster of red welts, which must be skin metastases, edging into the taut skeleton of her shoulder. The vivid color in the photograph—black, unkempt wig (surely?), reddened lips—hints at an ersatz health.
FIGURE 3. Hannah Wilke, Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother, Selma Butter, 1978–1981. Diptych, two cibachrome photographs, 40 × 30 inches each. Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Reprinted with permission.
Thirty years later, Wilke’s final, hyper-staged photos cite the Madonna theme again. In one she uses a pale blue hospital blanket as a shroud that covers both her bald, tilted head and her now sagging breasts (fig. 4). The depths of this image do not conceal a held child, however; the cancer legacy stops here. The photos together force the question: did Wilke foresee her cancer future?
From this vantage point, we can read the first photo only in light of the later one. We know what future they embodied: Wilke haunts us with a near-inevitability.38 But if her ironically posed grace in the Madonna photo shows the certainty of disease and death, it also iterates the mocking of time afforded by the medium of photography. Photography, as Roland Barthes theorizes, gives each of us a prognosis. A short time before he was killed by a truck as he left his classroom at the Sorbonne, Barthes wrote:
One day, leaving one of my classes, someone said to me with disdain, “You talk about Death very flatly.”—As if the horror of Death were not precisely its platitude! The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most [his mother], nothing to say about her photographs, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting; I have no other resource than this irony.39
FIGURE 4. Hannah Wilke, Intra-Venus Series #4, 1992–1993. Performalist self-portrait with Donald Goddard, chromogenic supergloss print, 47½ × 71½ inches. Courtesy Donald and Helen Goddard and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
He can see it, but he can’t get at it. He has nothing to say; he can’t transform it. He can only wait. Here again, as with Bearing’s comma, the seeming timelessness of the photograph counters the time of life’s passage. Wilke’s images suggest that prognosis affects every dimension of time, not just the future; the past becomes equally mysterious and unknowable.
Lucy Grealy makes this point explicitly in her memoir Autobiography of a Face, capturing the eeriness of the past under life in prognosis, the sense of how her life’s truth and relevance might be “revealed” through diagnosis. Grealy was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma in her jaw as a child and underwent years of harrowing surgeries that attempted to reconstruct her face, disfigured by radiation treatments, until she died of a drug overdose at age thirty-nine. Here, Grealy recalls a precancer childhood memory that becomes epiphanic after diagnosis:
As I sat there on the playground’s sticky asphalt I experienced time in a new way. . . . A year before, my class had gone on a field trip to a museum where I became fascinated with a medieval chart showing how women contained minute individuals, all perfectly formed and lined up like so many sardines in a can, just below their navels. What’s more, these individuals contained more minute versions of themselves, who in turn held even more. Our fates were already perfectly mapped out within us. . . . It’s impossible for me not to revisit this twenty-year-old playground scene and wonder why I didn’t go right when I should have gone left, or alternatively, see my movements as inexorable. If the cancer was already there, it would have been discovered eventually, though probably too late. . . . Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.40
Trying “to know what the past holds,” what alternatives and what necessities it contained, can become a near obsession when a person with advanced cancer faces the flimsy pages of a medical report. When a patient learns, for example, that her cancer, though present, was undetected in earlier tests and thus unannounced in earlier reports, this realization turns the faulty reports into the material remnants of lost opportunities—of times when treatments might have been less invasive, more efficacious.
No matter how far one’s cancer has spread, virtually everybody wishes they had been diagnosed sooner. At the retreats I attended, people talked about their alternative, possible pasts: the shame of not having done self-exams, of delaying tests because of being too busy, or of not wanting to ask more of already overworked people. Sharon said: “I wasn’t politicized enough and aware enough to ask.” Liz talked about the junctures when her doctors didn’t believe her reports about her symptoms. Not believing them herself, she decided to collect evidence of her yet undiagnosed leukemia herself, storing blood in her refrigerator and photographing it. Despite the action she took on her own behalf, regret and shame filled her memories: “How could I have just let it all happen, with all these signs—how could I have, you know, gone for my course in Toronto when I had to get up five times because I was bleeding so much?” Alice asked, “How could they have missed two tumors 11 cm and 10 cm that were fused together? On my CT scan they thought my tumor was my uterus.” Tina, a nurse, asked: “How could I have had so much trust—how could I have been so lackadaisical about my own health?” When she needed to book her surgery, her nurse-colleagues told her not to book it for the fall since they were short-staffed. So she delayed and later wondered, “I’m a nurse, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t I advocate for myself?” Here is Jennifer: “When doctors did not do exams, I did not want to ask them to touch my tits.” And Christine: “She told me I was too young to have cancer, and so we just watched it metastasize.” And Lynn: “I showed him the lump and he said since it is painful, it is not cancer.” Beth: “I don’t know why I didn’t insist. I guess I just didn’t know.”41
The “how could” discussions expressed a yearning for an alternative narrative that offered better odds. The women’s stories recalled moments, imagined crossroads—places at which a different action could have resulted in a different life. Despite the possibility of illness, well people, presumably, entered these life-altering junctures. Advocacy, diagnostic tests, trust—had my friends stayed well, they never would have given such things a second thought. Entering the nexus, not one of those women perceived herself as at risk for having cancer.
CONCLUSION