All Too Touchable: Hannah Villiger at Meredith Rosen Gallery

 Scale comparison photo (my hand and Hannah’s in Work) Hannah Villiger, Work, 1980, C-print of polaroid, mounted on aluminum, image by Jacksun Bein

By JACKSUN BEIN September 6, 2024

Age seven: I am sitting in the bathtub smacking my jowl on bubblegum. I take it out of my mouth and place it right at the part of my head where all the hair directs out of. Smushing it there, I imagine the sticky circle as a kind of rubber disc, plugging up an impending breach. Maybe it is from seeing the tub-stopper’s aluminum chain sway in the lukewarm water, or maybe it is a micro-disaster of knowing that from every miniscule surface: I am spewing, ejecting, flaking. I have this body to, as Hannah Villiger writes in her working diary from 1974, ”shed one’s skin ... shed the skin of another ... shed the skin of an object.”

Hannah Villiger–who added the final H in her name as a trade with fellow artist Rut Himmelsabach, effectively palindroming herself–was a Swiss artist living from 1951 to 1997, when she passed from heart failure amidst the height of her artistic career. It was during her studies under Swiss sculptor Anton Egloff that Villiger first began to use photography as a sculptural medium, presenting an image of a 3-dimensional object she had made as the finished work.

An elephant can’t apply lotion or cut its fingernails (would you even call them fingernails, if they aren’t fingers?). Despite these incompatibilities, we share in an elephant’s inability to hide its scuffs and folds. In the light, the fingerprints on Villiger’s images set into motion a scalar collapse. Like two black holes circling around one another until that fateful instant, we are enveloped into the body that is “elephantine” (as she would refer to her work’s scale). And then just as rupturously–as the fingerprints on the aluminum surface are amongst Villiger’s new universal and no longer the proportion I see looking down as I type–we are brought into a body overwhelmingly minute.

Her panels abide by their origin-ratio, sharing the polaroid’s square image. Still though, the Block works end up aperiodic–tiling on, tiling on, tiling on, forever without repetition. “Persistent repetition turns my body into ‘a body.’ And even this ‘a body’ that has become entirely abstract will be forgotten—only the pure sound exposes. Maybe this is the reason why the images never show neither eyes nor sex.3” Though we may not see the edges, these bodies are unscathed; despite their mutations, despite their inability to consume or defecate, and despite their emergence only in that second of the flash.

This indeterminacy of edge and organ extend into the very action that captures each frame. Eyes move from the head into the tips of her fingers. Physical pressure becomes her mechanism. Her arm reaching out at an angle unprescribed, unable to look through the viewfinder–but really who needs it. Like a migraine that forces your eyelids closed–a desperate attempt to alleviate the aching–the weight of her finger pushes down.

In July of ‘88, Hannah would attribute the block as: “Heightened presence; duplication; it must be one whole, and each part must function independently; size; framework of the intermediate spaces gives a clear structure; because of the various parts more precise in the sense of more comprehensive; oversized in relation to the human being; fills up the wall, is thereby an architectural element...”
 

Hannah Villiger, Block , 1980, four c-prints of polaroid, mounted on aluminum 100.5 x 99in (255 x 251 cm), Image by Jacksun Bein
 

Block, one of two works on view at Meredith Rosen until September 21, was made 9 years after the first work Villiger entitled Block, and during the same year as her untimely death in 1997. Villiger’s works leave me with conviction that the body is not 3-dimensional, but in fact 4: determined by time, and left forever-temporary over and over again. Here, we begin to conceive of ‘space’ as a symptom of the body, and ‘time’ as a doctor dealing out diagnoses. Beautifully, this space or time question is one that photography can never seem to escape/answer either.

In the same way that I fixate on my hairs falling from their follicles and the sweat pouring through my flesh, as I look at Block: I’m waiting for the nails to drop from the wall. The metal sheets slowly crash to the floor, and the sound they make could have been comparable to the sound of a hammer on the spine, but instead is dampened by the carpet. 

Though not explicitly an element of the exhibition (eee...), I can’t help but imagine Hannah nod with satisfaction at the black of her images replicated by the darkness of the carpet, interrupted only by its overfamiliarity to feet (you know something has been touched when it has) and an inability to hide their scuffs and folds. Like me, like the elephant, like Hannah.

Another sequence unfolds in my head (let’s see if this gets past the editor) in the time it takes for me to turn my body to face Work from 1980: I take off my shoes and drag my socks across the gallery, my hair standing on ends from the static rising up through my body. I walk over to Meredith and touch her shoulder. The zap sound and the burning smell is unfamiliar to me, but seemingly not to her, as if this electricity has grown almost procedural for all visitors. I do it again fearlessly, almost as if my brain made its way–slippery, miniscule, and anonymous-through my ear canal. I want to think her ghost was there, coercing me: That is of no use here, instead use your hands. WM