For the Likes: Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus, and How We Present Ourselves Through Social Media

It’s almost impossible today not to have social media or to avoid the constant barrage of perfectly curated images that compose profile after profile. We spend so much time perfecting our digital photos, ensuring that what makes it to the grid is as close to “perfect” as possible. We worry about how we’re perceived by the nameless and faceless behind the phone screens. As we scroll through these images, it’s difficult to imagine anyone publicly sharing a less-than-flawless representation of themselves. But sort of representation is precisely what feminist artist Hannah Wilke did posthumously in 1994, when her final series, Intra-Venus, was exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987, undergoing a bone marrow transplant, among other treatments. As the treatment and cancer started to take a toll and alter her appearance, Wilke began to document the changes through portraits, watercolor self-portraits, drawings, and video recordings. In viewing and engaging with Wilke’s series, we can see how this work is in conversation with our society’s current obsession with social media and how we portray ourselves on these platforms. 

Ramona Martinez wrote for NPR in 2015 that selfies, and relatedly any image of ourselves we choose to share publicly, is a way to control how others see us. They allow us to disrupt the beauty standards we as a society have constructed. Social media images have permeated our perceptions of who we are, subliminally encouraging us to modify ourselves to fit societal prescriptions. And while there currently seems to be an attempt to shift the presentation of bodies on social media, we still reject those that don’t fit into prescribed beauty standards. Even influencers advocating self-care and relaxation on social media are seen to come with a veneer of disingenuity and artificiality. 

We can see a connection between our use of social media, our exchange of images, and Wilke’s unbounded portrayal of what cancer does to the human body. Although we claim to use social media to communicate who and what we are, those images we choose to share can show restraint, as if we’re holding back from letting people see who we are. We close ourselves off, only sharing fragments, which is one of the reasons that Wilke’s series resonates so much with me and our society today. She courageously shows the complexity of a potentially fatal illness. She’s not afraid to pull down that curtain that separates the public from the private. 

The photographs in Intra-Venus are not beautiful in a conventional way. They don’t evoke a feeling of contentment but rather discomfort. The size of the photos in the series, 71 ½” X 47 ½”, compared to the relatively small size of a smartphone, is arresting in scope and subject matter and commands attention. It screams to be looked at, making it, so you’re unable to look away. And do we want to look away from the reality of life? A fact often discarded in favor of the pretense of life without complications. Social media is a playground where we can pretend and escape the drudgery of our daily lives, but psychologically, what is the constant parade of Photoshopped and filtered images doing to us? Wilke reminds us that sometimes, our lives look nothing like what we had planned, but that shouldn’t drive us to disguise our realities.

While her oeuvre disseminated beauty, decay, sexual stereotypes, and the female body, in Intra-Venus, we see her confronting her mortality, allowing us to witness a transition that contrasts with the depictions of femininity we are used to seeing. Scrolling through platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, the images of women we encounter may feature different hairstyles, but very rarely are they of women who are losing their hair or have a shaved head, especially one that is a result of an illness like cancer. Looking at Brushstrokes #6, Wilke’s arrangement of three clumps of hair that have fallen out due to chemotherapy, we see the loss of something that is so closely tied to femininity and beauty, something that even today, when cancer patients or anyone who have lost their hair due to a health issue, try to conceal by wearing wigs.

Intra-Venus No #1, a diptych, is particularly striking as we see two posed images of Wilke in different stages of her fight against cancer, taken the year before her passing. In the photograph on the left, Wilke sits on the edge of a bed with her robe open, revealing a medical port connected to her left breast. She has on a shower cap which could potentially be hiding her hair loss. In the photograph on the right, Wilke appears healthier, posing with a flower arrangement in a white vase. She stands fully nude, staring at the camera with a smirk. Were it not for the white bandages that cover both sides of her pelvis; we may not even be cognizant that she is battling a disease that she will shortly succumb to. 

We could look at these images and compare how she presents her body to how bodies are represented through social media. While we may not see photographs like this on social media, displaying the female body is quite common, albeit with a more curated and polished look. Take how recently, Khloe Kardashian was seen several times with what looked to be a bandage on her face. After weeks of speculation from the media and fans alike, she revealed that she’d undergone a dermatological surgical procedure to remove a tumor. Although she doesn’t owe an explanation to the public, the silence specifically regarding the bandage and the subsequent attempts at masking it suggestsour society’s obsession with displaying an intact version of ourselves. Things like filters, makeup, and lighting guarantee the photograph erases or hides any blemish or mark, which Wilke refuses to do in her diptych. 

This isn’t an indictment of social media nor saying that we should renounce social media and cease participating in something that can bring us closer. It does mean that how we engage with these platforms and how they shape our understanding of ourselves should be re-evaluated. We spend an abundance of time taking shot after shot, editing the chosen one until we deem it ready to be publicly shared. Gone are the days of taking a photograph and immediately posting it to Instagram or Facebook without overthinking it. It’s difficult to say how much time Wilke spent taking each picture or how many times each was taken until she got it right. But given the technology, we can theorize that it was a much shorter process. Wilke is concerned with exhibiting her body with authenticity. She isn’t trying to deceive or manipulate the viewer’s perception of her. 

We have this infatuation with putting forth an immaculate version of ourselves, separating ourselves from the things that humanize us, that showcase our vulnerability and the fragility of human life. We’ve become so concerned with the way people see us, with the way we present ourselves as if we’re in competition with one another to identify who is closer to “perfect.” But the thing is there, perfection doesn’t exist. If it did, this existence would be quite boring. Social media permeates our daily lives, making us think that what we view on our phone screens is reality. I would argue that keeping up that pretense is exhausting. 

 But what would happen if we began to pull back some of those pretenses and curtains and made space for images more representative of our lives outside social media? What if we allow ourselves to be authentic? We would dismantle some of these walls that are built when we believe we need to be better than our followers or that we need to live like the strangers behind the accounts we follow. To be authentic would be to leave room to potentially form genuine connections with people that are predicated on an idea of who we believe them to be or believe ourselves to be. 

When discussing authenticity on social media, it is crucial also to address the impact it has on our mental health. The images that we are consistently bombarded with have a detrimental impact on the way we view ourselves, our confidence, and our self-esteem. They make us think we are inadequate if we don’t look a specific way. Through her series, Wilke confronted the emphasis we placed and continue to place on looks, forcing spectators to look beyond that which is seen. How would we, as a society infatuated with the presentation of the self, react to or receive a series like Intra-Venus, especially if it were presented via social media today?

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