Sweet and Sour and Super-t-Art

Abstract

This article examines how Hannah Wilke explored the relationship between sexual and gustatory taste in her performance ­Super-T-Art (1974), which she created for Jean Dupuy’s event Soup & Art held at the Kitchen in New York City. I argue that Wilke critiqued the ways in which women’s bodies are rendered passive objects for consumption by the male gaze through her performance — in which she enacted a series of gestures through which she wrapped and re-wrapped her naked body in a white drape while adopting poses taken from the history of western art and mass culture. As such, I assert, Wilke challenged the notion that women’s only position in the sexual exchange was that of consumable entity.In particular, I argue that Wilke uses the work to criticize how the depiction of the feminine and female body has served to reduce women to the status of consumable objects. Recognizing the consistent and complicated relationship between gustatory and sexual taste — a theme that recurred throughout her art practice more broadly — Wilke’s Super-T-Art, examines how femininity and the sexualization of women has been consistently encoded within the discourse of “taste” as a sensation. She draws upon the long-history of the euphemistic rhetoric that render’s women’s bodies passive objects for men’s consumption, specifically the ideas that aspects of the female anatomy are easily referred to in the terms of ripe fruit, cuts of meat, or sweet treats.Because sexual expression was a central aspect of Wilke’s identity as a woman, an artist, and as a feminist, I assert that Wilke therefore used her art practice to call attention to and subsequently challenge the prevailing notion that women’s roles in art and in sex are solely to be items to be enjoyed by men, to be tasted but not to taste. Through her performance in Super-T-Art, Wilke therefore challenged this prevailing conception and the status of women as items to be consumed within art history and the broader Western mass culture.