All images courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you how it all began, because you grew up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay alongside German Jewish and European war refugees driven out of Germany by the Nazis. In this commune in Paraguay, how did you come to art, or how did art come to you?
FAITH WILDING That’s a long story (laughs). So, the Bruderhof [an evangelical Christian pacifist movement founded in Germany in 1920], basically fled Germany because of the Nazi occupation in 1938, and they went to England. My parents were English, and my father—who was a conscientious objector [in World War II]— heard of this commune, which was also an anti-war commune. So, he joined and so did my mother, to whom he was engaged. Two months after they joined, which was in early 1941, the whole commune was thrown out by the British. The only country that would take them and allow them to continue their way of life, and worship, was Paraguay. So, all of these Europeans went to Paraguay and they bought a big piece of land there. Most of them were academics—they knew nothing about agriculture, or living off the land. But they learned fast. Everything was done by hand and they grew all their food. I was born in 1943—a war baby. I grew up there and went to school there. We were trilingual: Spanish, English and German, which is also a huge advantage. I had this really interesting international upbringing in the middle of Paraguay. And most of us immigrated to the United States in 1961. So then, I started going to college there and I left the commune. I became very involved in the anti-war movement. I had been actually planning to leave the commune for a long time because it was too confining for me. I was always extremely interested in making art. We did a lot of art in the commune, a lot of craft. I can make clothes, I can weave mats. We used a lot of materials that were just growing there—palm leaves and banana leaves. I was very stimulated as a child by the environment, by nature. I was a very big reader as a child.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you about the reading, because you grew up in this religious community, and at the same time there were books. Early on, you found your heroines, mostly women like Virginia Woolf and George Sand.
Faith Wilding: I think my mother was a good model for me too, because she was really kind of a feminist. Although, you know, she had to hide it. I was always struggling against the very stern, very male religious things that went on. I was interested in bodies. I had really close girlfriends. So when I came to the States, I made a lot of friends when I went to college, and most of them were women. After I got married, we moved to Fresno and I met Suzanne Lacy. By that time, it was the late sixties. Suzanne and I started a feminist group in Fresno at the university. It grew from two people at the beginning to about 50 people. We had done a lot of research on whatever feminist material we could find. We were also doing consciousness raising. That's when Judy Chicago decided to come to Fresno. She didn't know us, but she wanted to start some kind of a feminist art program at the university. So, somebody sent her to me. I introduced it to Suzanne right away too. I worked with her on organizing the first feminist, all-women class at the university. And we found our own space, which was a huge, old warehouse that had been a community theater. We all had little studios in there, and a large area where we could do performance. It was an incredible kind of freedom because we felt safe. We were encouraging each other, we were excited. We had some open house events where lots of women came from San Francisco, and some from Los Angeles.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to hear about Virginia Woolf because I think a lot of what came after in your work, and all these pioneering feminist works, and Womanhouse, I think it all began somehow with your childhood—with Virginia Woolf.
Faith Wilding: I guess what drew me to Virginia Woolf is her language. A Room Of One's Own, of course, was super important politically—this idea that we have to have our own space. I had experienced this with the feminist program in Fresno. And it was particularly important for me because of growing up in the commune, where I never had my own space. I always had to share the room with three or four other people and everything we did in the commune was done in a group. It was frowned upon to go off in a corner and do your own thing. You were always supposed to be with the community. I was very jealous of Virginia Woolf because I felt that she had a kind of freedom. I read a great deal of British literature, and adventure stories, but mostly it was about women, and women's lives, and women's novels. I was just very drawn to that as a child because I was trying to figure out what my life was going to be. Because here I was in Paraguay going to college in the capital city of Asunción. But I only went through one year of college there because the commune decided to move everybody to America. In the US, they sent me to high school and I was totally bummed out because I was ninerteen and I was already going to college. I ended up in the home ec room because they thought I was dumb. I'm like, this is what you do at school—you learn how to clean your clothes and bake bread?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:: Jane Eyre was also important for you, no?
Faith Wilding: I know that book forward and backward. It’s extremely romantic, right? She was an orphan and she made her own way. She was so extremely convinced of what she had to do. That impressed me so much. Mr. Rochester was extremely romantic to me too. Of course, I read up on the Brontë sisters and they led really amazing, and, in many ways, tragic lives, but these were models for me, models of very productive writers and thinkers. Even though they were in very difficult circumstances, they were really out of their time too, in a certain way. They were sort of in the middle of nowhere, but they managed to get some kind of view of the world, and of their own independence. That had a very deep influence on me—that you could be independent, because that was not what I learned in the commune.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And this independence, of course, leads us to another woman who inspired you a lot, and who I've been studying—the one and only 12th-century Benedictine abbess, Hildegard von Bingen from Germany. She was many things: a scientist, a composer, she was of course a religious figure, a mystic, a healer—she was also a philosopher. She had these epiphanies and these incredible visions. I think more and more, in terms of the extinction crisis and the environmental crisis, she's being revisited as one of the earliest environmentalists. I know that she has inspired your drawings. When did you come across her? Did this also start in your childhood?
“Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm.”
- Wilding
Faith Wilding,Leaf Goddess,1976, Mixed media onpaper, framed, 41 1/2 x 53 inches.Courtesy of theartist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angele
Faith Wilding: In the commune, yes. Somewhere there was a book that was called Mystik deutscher Frauen im Mittelalter. It's about a lot of these mystics, like Hildegard von Bingen. I have done my pilgrimage to Hildegard's nunnery, which is just across the Rhine. I have spoken to her nuns. She had this thing about greenness—she calls it viriditas, “the green power.” The greenness that is basically life. In the 12th-century, she's talking about how nature is dying; nature is being overcome by human greed, and we have to protect nature. She was a fighter for nature. She also composed music. I've made artwork inspired by her.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And also a radio play. Can you talk about that?
Faith Wilding: My ex-husband was working a lot in public radio at the time. And so I made a radio play, where I basically visit Hildegard von Bingen and have a conversation with her—with me as a young child and her as a wise woman. I wove in the way I grew up in South America with how she grew up, which was very different. But we are united in our love of nature and our very fierce desire to help nature; to work with nature rather than to destroy nature. It was produced in Cologne, Germany. It was broadcast a couple of times. And then I did it in English on public radio here in the USA.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You also made paintings, like “Woman clothed in the sun” (1985), which is a portrait of Hildegard of Bingen.
Faith Wilding: Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm. I'm like, cool, very cool. This is a nun, right? She’s been in a nunnery since she was six years old and she's writing about what women can feel. And it's well known that the nuns danced, they put on garlands of flowers, and they did these festive performances in the church. She was excommunicated for a while because of the people she was friends with. Her nuns were very free. When she was excommunicated, she was told that she couldn't pray.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You kept coming back to Hildegard—you did works like Angel of history (2018). In the eighties, you did Propagations: Hildegard and I (1981). It's sort of a mix between trees, and bodies, and plants. It's not about separation from nature.It's about connection.
Faith Wilding: And also about survival in a certain way—how we’re incredibly dependent on nature at the same time as we're killing nature. And that's the kind of thing Hildegard is pointing out too. And it started way back there in the 12th-century—she was an eco person way back then. People saw the effects humans were having on nature.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Because they saw the beginnings of this colonial separation and of the extractive economy. And her work saw this necessity for a communion more than separation, which makes it so relevant for today. Also when we talk about the orgasm, one can say Hildegard almost anticipated what you and Suzanne Lacey did with your consciousness raising group. Don't you think?
Faith Wilding: You know, that’s interesting, because people came to Hildegard from all over, and very high-standing people. She talked to the Pope, she talked to the local king and prince, and she would talk to anybody. People came to her to ask, “How shall we live?” Just like they used to ask Jesus. “How should we live?” And she dictated all of her work because apparently she had terrible migraine headaches. She had all these visions. But she gave me a lot of courage, because she was really brave in what she was doing—she spent her whole life doing this.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: She was excommunicated and had her own monastery. That idea of actually making one's own monastery brings us in a way to Womanhouse, because it's interesting that you co-created your own structure, which is radical and now celebrated in Los Angeles in a new exhibition. Do you remember the day Womanhouse was invented?How was this idea born?
Faith Wilding: Well, CalArts had just been founded in LA. Judy Chicago’s best friend at the time was Miriam Schapiro, the wife of the head of the art department of CalArts. So, she persuaded her husband to invite Judy Chicago and six or so of her students from Fresno to come to CalArts, and start a feminist program there, which was very radical, of course. Then, an earthquake happened and the newly-built CalArts, and all of its floors were damaged, which meant we couldn't occupy CalArts in the fall semester. So, we were meeting in various places in the city of Los Angeles, and then our art historian, Paula Harper said, “Why don't we make a project in a house?” And that's how Womanhouse was born. So, we looked for abandoned houses and CalArts actually owned this old house, or somebody had been connected to this old house, and we got it for $2. It was pretty messed up—not a single toilet worked, all the glass windows were broken, but it was quite a large house, two stories. The first couple months of Womanhouse was just restoring it enough so that we could actually use it. And it never gets super cold in LA, but it was pretty cold because it was February, and there was no heating. There were maybe twenty people who were interested in working with Womanhouse. Some of them were from the Fresno program. Suzanne didn't join because she wanted to be in the design program at CalArts. But she was, of course, very connected to all of us. Every week, we went through consciousness raising—going around the circle and talking about our experiences as children and how we connect to the house, and to the idea of a woman's place in the house, and what making a home is. A lot of stuff came out because people have all kinds of different experiences connected to houses and homes. There was a lot of crying and acknowledgement—it's a big topic. Home is a big topic.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Was Luchita Hurtado part of the group?
Faith Wilding: She wasn't really part of the group, but she did come in, as did a couple of other artists, to do certain things. Betye Saar met with us. It was a really great chance for us to also meet up with these women artists in LA. I'm still connected to some of them, which is really great.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You did two very legendary works at Womanhouse. You did the Waiting performance—an almost Beckettian performance about waiting, but very different from Beckett. And then you also did an installation called Womb Room. Can you tell me about these two works? What kind of reaction did they get?
Faith Wilding: Yeah, well we had a performance group that Judy Chicago led. Because that was our plan from the beginning—that we would do some performances as part of the house. I was at dinner with Arlene [Raven] and Judy one night and suddenly I was like, I wanna do something about waiting —about what we've waited for, what I've waited for all my life. And so we started making a list. I still have that list. And so out of that, I crafted the “Waiting” monologue, which we worked on as a group; other people tried out how they would perform the piece. But you know, I have given permission to anybody who wants to perform it, and lots of people have performed it all over the world in all different kinds of ways, which I think is really cool. Then the other piece—I wanted to make a really primitive, simple dwelling, like a tent. In the commune, we did a lot of needle work and I could knit anything. I could sew anything, I could crochet anything. So I decided to crochet it. That was a really adventurous thing because I'd never crocheted anything huge like that, and something that was really sort of architectural. I had to figure out how to make really thick rope into a sort of net that would hold together, and people loved it. People would come in—other students while they were working on their work—and they would lie down inside it, look up, and rest a little bit. However the work was stolen, so the original Womb Room does not exist anymore.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And obviously, since then you have created so many bodies of work, and you very often work in bigger series, for example, the Wall of Wounds (1996). This is a series of one hundred Rorschach prints, which are all about a different wound: sexual wounds, political wounds. Can you tell me about the epiphany of the wounds and how you work in series?
Faith Wilding: I started thinking about the many kinds of wounds that most of us carry. And how does one represent that? That's what the Rorschach is all about—you can read things into it. I like that idea because a lot of the wounds are internal—they're the wounds of the mind, or wounds of the spirit. And who knows what form they really have. I sold them for $50 a Wound, but I also gave a lot of Wounds away. Some bought like ten or fifteen Wounds. It does seem to have echoed in people's minds. Right now I'm drawing trees. Really big drawings in graphite of trees with no leaves. They look like old monsters. They're amazing because where I live, there's all of these huge old oak trees, and elm trees, that have been standing there for over a hundred years. Now that it's winter, I can see their forms and they're just like survivors—they've seen so much life.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You also do research for some of your series, like for the Paraguay series. Of course, you needed to then go to Paraguay again, so that it became an embodied experience. But you also say that it was not about nostalgia—it’s about memory. I mean, we live in the age of more and more information, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have more memory. Amnesia is at the core of this digital age. It's also a very political work because it's about an exploited country with a very impoverished population, with an extractive, capitalist economy that destroys the environment. Can you talk a little bit about this very important body of work?
Faith Wilding: It was difficult, I hardly slept. I found it very depressing. I stayed with a family that I knew. We traveled a little bit to some of the places that I'd been to, like one of the lakes. The whole time I felt like I shouldn't have come back. I felt like time had stood still in a way. There were some changes, but they just didn’t seem to be the right changes. I felt very alienated actually, and I don't know if that was a good idea. I was pretty much in the capital city Ascención, because I couldn't travel by myself down the river and into places where I had actually grown up.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I mean, it’s almost like an oxymoron because the works are supposed to be mournful, but they're also angry. So, there are two forces in a way. Later on, there were also the Battle Dresses (1995-97) that were inspired by the women in former Yugoslavia who were raped. You also did the Armor Series (1991–94), which is another important series of work. In all these series, there seems to be this mourning, but also anger or protest.
Faith Wilding: Right. As a child, I read all of King Arthur. I mean, here I was in a pacifist commune and I'm completely crazy about knights in armor. Armor is obviously a physical thing, but it's also a psychological thing. I spent some time in Nuremberg, and they have the best collection of 10th and 11th-century armor. Every day I would go look at this armor and try to understand it. They are pieces of art in a certain way. They are beautifully decorated, a lot of them, especially the king's armor. And it’s this weird kind of metal body. I've always been very interested in all kinds of forms of the body. The many different ways in which the body appears to us. And so the armor, as a body, is a metaphor. But also, my father was a conscientious objector. I grew up in a commune that was completely anti-war. So, I had to sort of explore war, which was seen as evil in my childhood. It's sort of like, I need to know both sides. And, of course, the romance that is wound around these deadly things. War is not romantic, it's deadly.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There is also the Embryoworlds (1997-98), and there is the work exploring cyborgs and recombinants—the intersection between humans, animals, and plants. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how it's also now evolving with this current moment of the metaverse where cyborgs also play a big role. You have engaged with technology a lot—you're part of a collective called subRosa where you work with these new technologies in relation to the body, but in very tactical ways.
Faith Wilding: I'm really ignorant about how the actual machinery works. That's not my part. I think a lot about the ideas. The Embryoworlds—because there are so many issues about female fertility and what's happening with female fertility, subRosa was doing a lot of research about that and the embryos, on what they can and could become, or not become. I'm really interested in things that are becoming things. And the recombinants are partly about this also. Most of us are connected to machines all the time. I'm connected to a machine right now. What is this doing to us? How far does the body extend? Our flesh bodies have a certain amount of space and volume and that's it, but because of these machines we can extend our bodies. That gives people a lot of power. They can extend their body and what they do in the world without actually leaving home. I'd rather leave home and take my body with me into the world. But the virtual experience is not my friend for the most part. I mean, the imaginative experience is definitely my friend, but I think that's different from the virtual experience.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: It’s interesting because you grew up in a collective and you were in this commune with your parents, but then your practice always had a collective dimension, like with Womanhouse. So it's interesting how that kept continuing. Can you tell us about today and how your collective works now? Does your group have a manifesto?
Faith Wilding: (Laughs) I'll have to check. There's only two of us in the group. Hyla Willis lives in Pittsburgh. So, I would have to email and ask if we have a manifesto. We used to have a manifesto and I think it's in the subRosa book.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Many young artists are inspired by your work—by your performances, by your installations, by your drawings, but also by your activism. You were recently interviewed about activism and you said there are actually two models right now for activism. One is a kind of direct action against specific targets. And the other one is more exploratory, whose goal is to create interventions and disturbances into the public spectacle, but also disturbances into biotech or bioinformatic systems.
Faith Wilding: I'm a teacher and I definitely talk to students about that. I think that's one way in which I can still be active. But mostly I'm doing artwork and I'm trying to put some of my ideas and thinking into that work. But it's not as activist, shall we say, as many of the other things that I've done in my life.
Faith Wilding, courtesy the artist andAnat Ebgi, Los Angeles
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Do you have unrealized projects?
Faith Wilding: I have never thought about that. I mean, some things that subRosa really wanted to do we never did. I really wanted subRosa to go to South America. We didn't really succeed in doing that. So, I would have to think about an unrealized project. Right now I'm drawing trees, that's where I'm at, and I don't know what that's going to lead to.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Also, I was wondering—Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a little book that was full of advice for a young poet. What is your advice to a young artist today?
Faith Wilding: My advice to young artists is to keep working, because you just don't know what's going to come out. That's the way I go at it. I just keep working.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And of course, you work not only with visual art, but you are also a writer. I saw a fantastic conversation between you and Lucy Lippard, whom I've known for a long time. I wanted to ask what writing means in relation to your practice, and a little bit about the epiphany that led to the book you wrote, By our own hands [The woman artist's movement, Southern California, 1970-1976].
Faith Wilding: People have begged me to write my autobiography. There's pieces of it here and there, but why should I write my autobiography? I mean, who cares really? But I might, you never know. But that's a lot of work—a lot of work.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Do you have any projects that faced censorship?
Faith Wilding: That's an interesting thought. There's a few things I've done that people have not liked to see. Galleries have not wanted to hang shows up. And I can't really think of what that might be at the moment—you seem to have a much better grasp of what I've done than I do (laughs). You've been doing your homework. I think I would like to do a book in which I just kind of ramble around and show a lot of pictures, but don't hold me to it.