New York, United States: self-published, 1978. 15,4×10,9 cm. 

Artist postcard / edition.

In 1978, Wilke was invited to create a series of works for New York's P.S.1. Her response was to go to the location in question and have her husband, Donald Goddard, take a series of photographs of her wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and often carrying a small gun. In the shots with the gun, Wilke's slow movements across ten television monitors was captured; these were overlaid with a recording of Wilke reading quotations from male politicians, philosophers, and artists. The photographs were made to prompt viewers to listen to the quotations in a new context and without their usual cultural preconceptions - inserting herself into positions of male power and authority, something that was emphasized by the gun. As Wilke herself put it, "after a few minutes people forget the nudity and begin to listen to what I have to say in the quotations by Nietzsche, Hitler, Oldenburg, or other artists and historians." So Help Me Hannah, as Amelia Jones argues, constitutes a dynamic merging of body and mind, seamlessly combining Wilke's self-confident (female) posturing with the intellectual content of the chosen (male) thinkers, thus inserting women into male history in a dramatic way. Goddard later recalled, "We must have taken about six hundred pictures all over the building: on the roof, in the basement, on the compressor, in the toilet. Hannah was naked the whole time. People would walk by with a kind of composed nonchalance. It was very funny and wonderful. But Hannah was very matter of fact about it." This reminiscence underscores Wilke's confidence in her own body and her use of it unflinchingly as a medium in a way that had not been attempted before in the history of art. [theartstory].