Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 7
Carolee Schneemann
Main picture: Eye Body # 5 from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera 1963, top, film strip
from Fuses, Middle, part of the Interior Scroll performance, (1975) bottom, Personae JT and the three
Kitch’s (1957), Schneemann’s painting of her then-partner James Tenney, left, a photo of Schneemann’s
‘Up to and Including Her Limits, performed nine times between 1971 and 1976.
ing with raw meat, skinned chickens and fish. Schneemann said this
“confronted a social range of current
cultural taboos and repressive conventions” and was a “celebration of
flesh as material’ and a ’Sacred Rite’.
Many critics however saw it as a glorified orgiastic food fight.
Meat Joy was followed by Fuses
an 18-minute film in which Schneeman and her partner, James Tenney, have sex while their cat Kitch,
watches from a shelf. The intention
was to explore whether a woman’s
depiction of her own sexual acts was
different from pornography. To enhance, personalise and further differentiate Fuses from porn Schneemann altered the film by staining,
burning and drawing directly onto
the celluloid itself. These segments
were then edited and played out at
various speeds and superimposed
with photographs of nature and her
sexual actions. She continued working on it through 1965 and 1966
before completing and screening
the work in 1967. It is, despite its
extreme close-ups of genitalia and
brief sequences of cunnilingus, very
much an art piece, and absolutely
not pornography, winning a special
Jury prize at Cannes two years later.
et, Schneemann was
now set on a path of being the art world’s bad
girl and she would continue to use her naked
body as a living canvas throughout
the seventies, causing further outrage and provocation, most infamously with Interior Scroll (1975).
For this work Schneemaan, again
naked and daubed with paint, culminates her performance by slowly
pulling a long, rope-like paper scroll
from her vagina. She then proceeded to read the scroll describing an
encounter where she received criticism of her films. This, according to
performance theorist Jeanie Forte,
made it seem as if Schneemann’s
Y
vagina is itself reporting sexism. Indeed, this performance is now cited
as being partly inspirational for the
later show, The Vagina Monologues.
Schneeman would continue in
this vein through the 80s and 90s
but be joined or associated by others, like Annie Sprinkle, whose
performances some would argue undermined the very values
Schneemann has so courageously fought to achieve. The art critic
Laura Cunningham went further,
stating of arts’ ‘bad girls’ that ‘Much
of the rhetoric associated with
these exhibitors reeks of unexamined self-hatred and self-contempt’.
Schneemann countered by stating
that her work was never about violence to the body, but about, in her
own words, ‘erotic, sexual, desired,
desiring’ bodies, and about the f lesh
as ‘joy’ as personified in her first
seminal work Eye Body.
In many ways, Schneemann is
an artist of her time with her per-
formances in the 60s being essentially provocative happenings’ and
her pioneering and celebrational
use of her body would perhaps now
be seen as pandering to the male
gaze rather than def lecting it by the
feminist ideals behind the f lesh. Ignored to an extent during the last
two decades, other than occasional
bouts of art controversy (Her 2001
exhibition, Terminal Velocity consisted of a group of photographs of
people falling to their deaths from
the World Trade Centre on 9/11),
Schneemaan has been celebrated
anew recently with major exhibitions at the Barbican in London
and MoMA in New York. If you haven’t seen her work before or have
perhaps been put off by the performance art tag, she is well worth
investigating and some of her images and films are truly extraordinary
and a welcome antidote to current
cancelling, censorious times.
- Nigel Wingrove
Salvation/5