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In
February-March, at PPOW gallery in SoHo, people could visit
“EMBODIED”, Carolee Schneemann’s exhibition which included seminal
recent and historic pieces: drawings, photographs, video installations,
assemblages etc that aimed to convey the pioneering work of the artist over the last four decades. One could
learn from the press release and gallery’s advertisements that “Schneemann
applications of painting, photography, video, installation and performance
have situated the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the
social body. Her work has embodied depictions of sexuality, gender and
taboo long before these issues became artistic subject matter.”
A featuring
review by Amy Newman in New York Times has contributed to create a special
aura of an outstanding retrospective of pioneering work, specially when
she quotes critics such as Jan Avgikos (“Prior
to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost
exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire”) or the artist herself
theorizing about “female sexuality was either pornography or medical concern. And
anything in between was private, not part of any cultural discussion. How
could I have any authenticity as an artist when I had no pronoun and I had
no sexuality?
The point I
would try to make in this paper is that in the context of the last decades
sophisticated feminist discourse - being it visual or written – and
debates over feminine/feminist problematical I-dentity, Carolee
Schneemann’s work should be revisited without what I would call: the ‘pioneer
complex’. I mean, yes, we acknowledge her door-opening towards body
action and multi-media approaches in performance art, but it doesn’t
make any good to 2002-Schneemann to be already considered an art history
almost closed chapter, and just labeled as the ‘first feminist
avant-garde vocabulary’ discoverer/explorer. We rather owe to an artist
of such stature a complex analysis of her creations not only from the
60’s-70’s, but of the recent ones as well, using the means of a
comparative critical approach which entails both though criticism and
honest admiration.
How has the perception/reception of a pioneering work changed over/after
four decades and generally how the label pioneering is an enemy of its
own content-in-progress - these are the issues I am trying to deal
with.
The
first work considered to be pioneering is ‘Eye
Body’ (1963) consisting of visual images (photographs taken
by the Icelandic artist Erro in Schneemann’s loft from West 29th
Street where she lives from 1962 when she moved to New York) of a
‘rehearsed’ environmental theatre/ritual with the naked Carolee as the
main actress and priestess. Trying to liberate from and react to the
European aesthetic by pushing the limits of abstract expressionism,
Schneemann created a quasi-chaotic set design composed of large painted
panels, broken mirrors and glass, motorized umbrellas, chairs, ropes,
plastic transparent curtains and her naked paint-smeared body, looking
like a tamed Salomee, specially when serpents are crawling on her chest
and belly. Here, the Body asserts only its power as a visual part of a
two-dimensional capture of a three-dimensional composition which now
includes a flesh ‘item’ amongst other materials.
The
eroticism displayed by these images and the use of the body as object with
explicit visual performative power were in the 70s interpreted as the
first steps towards a lexicon of feminist
vocabulary. I would say that nowadays ‘Eye Body’ images rather
re/present an agency of feminine erotic power, a display of ceremonial expressionist
eroticism with the female body in the center of it. |
e first
work considered to be pioneering is ‘Eye
Body’ (1963)
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‘Meat Joy’, the film considered shocking and pioneering in 1964
when it was created as a ‘kinetic theatre’, cannot impress
anymore in 2002, after decades of much stronger conceptual
emphasis on the pleasure of flesh in film, experimental theatre,
generally in arts. I therefore think it shouldn’t have been
selected as part of the exhibition at the PPOW gallery, unless it
would have only been documented or quoted in another work. The
eight bodies in ecstatic romping and Dionysian revel of mingling
limbs, buttocks, heads, ropes, dead chickens, sausages and raw
fish in front of an audience are sort of
old fashioned images now, images that belong to one or more
of the hi/stories of performance art. The same with ‘Fuses’
(1964-1967), which was at its time a pushing-limit expressionistic
self-shot heterosexual intercourse, with Schneeman and her partner
offering themselves as body-performers in this silent film of
collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking observed by the cat
Kitch. A former courageous rebellious theatre of the senses which
meanwhile has lost its power because – I would say – it lacks
a strong everlasting concept and it is only a picturesque display
of body e-motions and interactions.
Schneemann would probably reply at
this point that the concept was/is to be the image and the image
maker at the same time, in the same body. (I would add she is the
post-image-theoretician too.) Still these triple hypostases of the
artist can be found in the majority of performances in the past
decades but sustained by a strong concept that unifies them.
I mean the concept should be more
than the acknowledgement and the illustration of these three
hypostases.
Somehow paradoxically, despite the
pioneering nature of Schneemann’s performances and the
inventiveness of using different materials, she remains mainly a
painter, meaning her work, as multi-dimensional or multi-media as
it might be, it still has a logic of painting composition and not
a conceptual one. It seems to me that her creation process is
driven by an impulse to juxtapose images on which, afterwards,
Scheemann the theoretician can apply various intelligent
conceptual interpretation and not by a start concept that might
ask for those images or for no one of them. |
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When I speak about a concept, it is
not about having an idea of what she wants to convey, like the
display of the different vaginas and their re/presentations in a
more recent wall installation: “Vulva
Morphia” (1995). It is interesting though how this work is
explained on Schneemann’s web-site: “A
visceral sequence of photographs and text in which a Vulvic
personification presents an ironic analysis juxtaposing slides and
text to undermine Lacan semiotics, gender issues, Marxism, the
male art establishment, religious and cultural taboos”. Again,
it seems to me that the post-creation theory applied to the work
is overacting and somehow undermining it by revealing its
potential lack of complexity or strong conceptual root.
There is a performance by
Schneemann which doesn’t fit in my theory of her mainly
picturesque driven creativity: “Interior
Scroll” (1975). The artist stood naked on a table, her body
painted with mud, and withdrew a paper scroll from her vagina,
while reading the text previously written on it: a sort of angry
poem dedicated to a structuralist filmmaker. This time,
Schneemann’s theory and practice come together to offer a strong
performance, conceptually rich and – unexpectedly -
expressionistically poor. It is not only a body action on the
traces of Pollock physicalized painting process like in ‘Up
to and Including Her limits’ (1973-1975), but a deeper
reflection on the condition of women art, a performance which
doesn’t need any other elaborated extra explanations/theories to
be a powerful feminist manifesto.
Another chapter of Schneemann’s
work is the one that involves her cats. From Kitch, who was only a
witness in ‘Fuses’, and later the protagonist of a super 8 mm
color film ‘Kitch’s
Last meal’ (1973-1976) to ‘Infinity
Kisses’ (1981-88) and
to ‘Vesper’s Pool’
(2000) a multi channel video installation featuring another cat,
Schneemann seems to give up Eros for Thanatos. Her rituals are now
less erotic and less displaying that vivid arrogance of
pleasure/desire, but melancholic, showing loneliness and the
shadow of death. Her vibrant body – defeated by time – ceased
to be the hero/priest of her art. Which is sad because in fact the
Body was the silent volcano, the engine, the subject and the
object of her art .
Theory is again overplaying its
role, undermining the work: the well-read well-cultured Schneemann
emphasizes the mythical relation between a woman and a
feline/lioness, displays her knowledge on mythology and makes
implicit connections between herself and a priestess that changed
a sacred breath/kiss with a wild lioness, forgetting completely
that Vesper/Cluny was unfortunately only a loving poor
good-natured cat… |
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