Posted By BillHeise on July 5, 2010

Okay so I tried to fulfill promises I made during the second week of June, and I failed. So I decided that I would get the last two promises I made to my readers fulfilled in the month of June. And once again, I failed. So the lesson for me is not to promise anything in advance. And the lesson for you is not to take me seriously when I promise things.

This week, I promise to get June’s stuff out of the way in preparation for July’s stuff.

This is my homage to Carolee Schneemann‘s Interior Scroll, a piece of performance art that was way ahead of its time. Here is a picture of it in performance:

What’s Going On Here?

The whole performance is outlined by Wikipedia:

In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with dark paint. Several times, she would take “action poses”, similar to those in figure drawing classes. Concurrently, she read from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Following this, she dropped the book and slowly extracted from her vagina a scroll from which she read.

Is He Serious?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘That’s art? No way.” (Admit it, that’s what you were thinking). And, yes, I’m serious.

Her Work in the 60s

The Wikipedia article continues with some (much needed) context:

Schneemann’s feminist scroll speech, according to performance theorist Jeanie Forte, made it seem as if “[Schneemann]‘s vagina itself is reporting [...] sexism”.

This was in line with Schneemann’s intentions. We can see this if we look at her early career as an artist. Once again, Wikipedia will have to do:

Carolee Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. Her painting work began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork. These constructs share the heavily textural characteristics found in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg, as you probably know, was one of the artists “who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.” But Schneemann found the atmosphere troubling.

Schneemann described the atmosphere in the art community at this time as misogynistic and that female artists of the time were not aware of their bodies. These works integrated influence by artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists. Schneemann chose to focus on expressiveness in her art rather than accessibility or stylishness. She still described herself as a formalist however, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance themselves from male-oriented art history.

She used her unique combination of (masculine) Formalism and her focus on her (feminine) body and changed her field from painting to abstract art.

Schneemann became involved with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to “crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, walk, go through mud”.

In 1964, she performed Meat Joy, a work that “revolved around eight partially nude figures dancing and playing with various objects and substances including wet paint, sausage, raw fish, scraps of paper, and raw chickens.” As a side note, the first book of hers that came to my attention was More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings. It was in the late 1980s, when I just beginning my work in graduate school. It was at this point that I wrote the first draft of my first work of fiction. I based one of my characters on a composite of Carolee Schneemann, as well as several other artists.

Art in the 70s

Inclusion was one of the themes that had been inherited from the aesthetic thought that went back to the Romantics, and Carolee felt that art had left the body—the domain of the feminine—for a sense of abstract intellectualism—a traditional domain of the masculine. Her Interior Scroll is based on her desire to have an art based, not in her head, as was the minimalist and conceptual art in which she had been trained, but in her body. The intellectual approach to art were, in her mind, masculine overtones layered onto a bi-gendered world. They were not necessary conditions of art or artists, but a byproduct of a masculine orientation to art.

As a result, Carolee was able to ‘recenter’ her art on her body, and this revealed the contradictions in society. Don’t just take my word for it. Read it here for yourselves.

I pay attention to the direction of unconscious information. There has always been something irrepressible in my work. I believe in the pure thrust of intuition, trust of the body. Putting my body in a central position in my art reveals contradictions in our culture. I resist social, erotic and aesthetic restraints, and have opened my energies to finding materials and forms which celebrate and transcend predicted directions of the work.

The sense that she is seeking transcendence, not through reason but through intuition, in her work is also one of those Romantic moments in aesthetics that I find less-than-satisfying. I am not alone. Once again, here’s Wikipedia:

Art critic Robert C. Morgan states that it is necessary to acknowledge the period during which Interior Scroll was produced in order to understand it. He argues that by placing the source of artistic creativity at the female genitals, Schneemann is changing the masculine overtones of minimalist art and conceptual art into a feminist exploration of her body.

Why Morgan’s Statement Is So Devastating To Schneemann’s Intentions

She had resisted reason and order for an intuitive free expression as the way to the transcendental, but the critic Morgan has imposed a rational, hierarchical order on her transcendental experience through the experience of history. The critic can see what (apparently) the artist cannot. Carolee has fallen into the trap of believing that because she can imagine something in her mind that she is reflecting the world as it is. But, as I have tried to show, just because we can lay claim to insight a true into our human experience, that does not give us the right to impose order on the rest of the world. In such an Enlightened world, I always seem to be on the other side. My own preference is to break the Enlightenment’s secure hold on thought.

That recognition that her upward ascent is problematic doesn’t stop her horizontal progress forward. As Wikipedia notes,

Interior Scroll, along with Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, helped pioneer many of the ideas later popularized by the off-broadway show The Vagina Monologues.

Schneemann’s Aim

Carolee used her cat, Kitsch, in her art, and we can learn things about her approach to art through Kitsch:

Her cat Kitsch, which was featured in works such as Fuses (1967) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1978), was a major figure in Schneemann’s work for almost twenty years. She used Kitch as an “objective” observer to her and Tenney’s sexual activities, as she stated that she was unaffected by human mores.

She escapes the artificial mores of the human condition in order to get back to her ‘natural’ condition, just like the Apemen. By using an animal observer, she can claim that she has transcended to male-female expression and traveled to a transcendental world beyond gender-imposed boundaries. Her body disappears even as she is fronting her body in her art.

But a quick glance at Wikipedia will reveal that Carolee’s human content, which she attempted to overcome by the use of the posture of her cat as an objective observer, was powerfully sexual.

In 1964, Schneemann began production of her film Fuses, eventually finishing it in 1967. Fuses portrayed Schneemann and her then-boyfriend James Tenney having sex as recorded by a 16 mm Bolex camera. Schneemann then altered the film by staining, burning, and directly drawing on the celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage. The segments were edited together at varying speeds and superimposed with photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney’s bodies and sexual actions.

Note the intervening process of nature in the film. The work of art is taken out of nature, mixed together at varying speeds, and then put back together again, Humpty-Dumpty-like.

Fuses was motivated by Schneemann’s desire to know if a woman’s depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art, as well as a reaction to Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving. She showed the film to her contemporaries as she worked on it in 1965 and 1966, receiving mostly positive feedback from her peers.

The Disappearance of the Body

The problem for an artist like Carolee Schneemann is that the artist must control, not only her free expression, but also the reaction of the critics. And many critics didn’t cooperate, seeing her work differently than she did herself:

Many critics though described it as “narcissistic exhibitionism” and described it as self-indulgent. She received an especially strong reaction regarding the cunnilingus scene of the film.

It’s understandable that Carolee wouldn’t want the artificial human construct of viewing woman as an object of sexual attraction to interfere with her artwork, which pointed to a higher level than the merely human. But how she can say that her transcendental posture is more human than her sexual expression is beyond me. It seems more likely that by ignoring the role of reason in her life that she has left out one of the more prominent pieces of the experience of being human. The neglect of reason causes her to try and transcend through intuition the same veil that reason had failed to transcend during the Enlightenment. And she fails, as well.

But perhaps I’m wrong:

While Fuses is viewed as a “proto-feminist” film, Schneemann feels that it was largely neglected by feminist film historians. The film lacked the fetishism and objectification of the female body as seen in much male-oriented pornography. Two years after its completion, it won a Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Selection prize.

My Argument With Schneemann’s Work

I think, however, that the fact that she can find consumers of art who are willing to overlook her bare body as a sexual symbol in favor of its asexual content as a provider of human meaning (a la the Greek idea of the body), that doesn’t make me forget what I’m looking at in Carolee’s work.

Her valuation of those who are willing to overlook her body for the intellectual content of her work represents the orientation (in my experience) of the entire artistic community, which is based on the notion that there are insiders and outsiders in the world of art. Most people are outsiders, but the select few (those agree to allow Carolee to control their perspective on her art) are allowed to participate from within. To the rest of us, they look like the minions in the children’s story who don’t point out the most obvious fact about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

This is a question that art and artists have raised time and time again (and will continue to raise in the future). That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy her work. I enjoy all sorts of art that doesn’t completely close around the questions that they raise in my lowly head. I’m not a conservative who feels the need to denounce what is challenging, different, and very sexual in favor of ‘our’ (if you’re a liberal, I mean to say ‘their’) ideas of transcendental human, asexual beauty.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to overlook the sexual content of Schneemann’s work of art, as she herself would have us do. In fact, I sort of like looking at it, just like I like looking at Louise Brooks’ body. And thus, I am not a liberal, for whom the temptations of the body must be suppressed, even as the body is fronted in the search for ‘our’ sense of transcendental beauty (if you’re a conservative, I meant to say ‘their’).

Back To Louise

My argument with Carolee Schneemann is essentially the same argument I have with the German director Pabst. As you will recall, Pabst had a problem with Louise Brooks. He was an intellectual, and she was not. She was actually living her life, and Pabst was outraged the she wasn’t acting her part in his film. She was living it. The only legitimate posture, in Pabst’s mind, was to live your live at an ironic distance. This idea travels through T. S. Eliot and Yeats right up to Creed’s video, Higher.

This intellectual approach is widespread in modern and postmodern art. It is used to divide the in-the-knowers from the outsiders, who fail to reach the only proper perspective of art (that which is dictated by the artists themselves). I think it’s wrong to approach life from a distance. I think it’s problematic for artists to force us all to look at art through a perspective which the artist controls. That perspective is itself artificial, and rings false. Moreover, (and once again, I would point you to my experience in grad school) it breeds isolation from others, rather than common purpose by requiring that people evaluate others for their inside or outside qualities on a political level before getting to know them as individuals.

The intellectual approach to art fails to connect with life as we live it. In particular, the intellectual approach forgoes death and aging, which all men must pass through. Look at Louise Brooks. She got old, and then she died. We wouldn’t want to watch her playing Lulu at 70 (or after she was dead), would we? (For those of you who would answer ‘yes,’ I will answer the question for you. The answer is ‘no.’)

The same thing holds true of Carolee Schneemann. Her attempt at transcending her body through her body was an attempt to transcend the veil of time itself, while bringing her body along with her. And this is why she thinks she can lord her power over the ‘little people’ who react to her art as if she was having sex in public for public consumption. ‘Nothing,’ she would say, ‘could be farther from the truth.’ To admit anything else would involve her in those artificial ‘human mores’ which she was determined to erase by ignoring them. She might be ashamed if she thought that there was any reason other than ‘artifice’ (like, you know, public morals, decorum, decency, etc.) that human beings adhere to rules. But she has transcended those artificial moral boundaries, as she chases more ‘natural’ boundaries.

But watching her have sex at 70 is not the same as watching her have sex at 25 (through the animal intermediary of Kitsch) in her film Fuses. Unlike Louise Brooks, who went into retirement after her career as a young, spoiled starlet waned, Carolee might just continue and have sex with someone on film. But I think the issue goes deeper than her not being young. I believe that the issue springs from her construction of the problem she has set herself. She wants to recreate the perfect view of the world that the Enlightenment had promised her. When the Enlightenment burned out over the inability of reason to climb the metaphysical heights, the Romantic period saved the metaphysical by traveling to the animal instinct.

Both ignored to a large extent the role of time in human existence.

In ignoring time for the transcendent experience of art, she has crossed over, as many artists have crossed over before her (and will again, I am sure), out of her human experience to an experience that is reserved for gods and beasts, who (after Aristotle, who said ‘But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.’) confront nature directly, rather than through an artificial, constructed, and humanly-created society.

But she survives, and she has recently made a video explaining what she thinks she was doing in her feminist art. And it’s worth watching if for no other reason than that we (okay, I) don’t want to go back to ‘what the city used to be like.’

And here it (and she) is:

A Few Last Things

Here’s a few images for you to think about when you are thinking about whether I am right to like Carolee Schneemann’s work on the Interior Scroll (which I do). She not only produced a work of art out of her vagina; she saved it. And now it’s in a museum somewhere:

And, in case you’re still doubting that this is a famous piece of artwork and not just something that appeals to me personally, take a look at this reproduction of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior scroll (found here).

And that’s what I have to say about that.

Categories: Art, Philosophy
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