Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. In the ’60s and ’70s, her work was ignored or dismissed by many of her fellow feminist artists, including Agnès Varda and Laura Mulvey, who found her unabashedly eroticised, corporeal approach difficult to reconcile with their critique of visual pleasure and the fetishisation of the female body. Her work is now roundly embraced for its radical reconciliation of female sexuality and subjective, creative agency.¹
Another Gaze – Can you trace your fascination with the image back to a particular point?
Carolee Schneemann – I was drawing before I could speak. I really believed that I had to make images. My childhood drawings are curious, because they’re very primitive, but they’re in sequences. So, in order to have an image – let’s say, of a person coming into a room – I would take 15 pages and strike with the line, and there might be a finger, and then more lines and a hand. They’re very curious and odd because it’s as though I were anticipating filmic time. And I had never seen a film when I was four years old. So, it began very early, and then, gradually, I remember being discouraged when it seemed that, although this is a serious preoccupation, it wasn’t considered appropriate for a girl.
AG – How did you turn from a more static medium – painting – to the moving image?
CS – It’s really the implication of abstract-expressionist energy to increase dimensionality. Motion was always part of my energy and drawings. The energy of translation: from what I was looking at, to the hand, to the page. How the body had to inflect and activate perception: that was always an element in my thinking about how to realise imagery. Starting in 1963, I was determined to include my body as subject as well as subject-maker. As I have written about and as people know, my work was considered ridiculous at the time. If you were an attractive young woman, you couldn’t add another subversive energy; you had to ensure that your body behaved in a way that conformed to patriarchal expectation. So that was a big struggle and I didn’t know that it would be such a set of contradictions for so long: that my use of the naked body would not belong to my work, not belong to my authority. Finally, that has evolved, but it took quite a while, and a lot of cultural prejudice and resistance. So it’s different now; it’s great. But, in the sixties, when I was first introducing this visual concept, it was completely rejected. My body was completely rejected.
AG – What motivated those early works?
CS – I was filming my erotic life because, while I knew what this life felt like, I wanted to see what it would look like; because, when I talked about female sexuality, people only offered me pornography. I had nothing confirming it; nothing that resembled what I thought my experience might look like. That was a struggle: to introduce a sacred erotics from a female perspective. And then the kinetic work: I began to envision the energy of painting occupying live bodies, and then I would choreograph for them. In order to teach the participants in my early kinetic theatre work what the movements would be, I had to inhabit the movement. I couldn’t just tell them what to do; I realised that I had to demonstrate it also: I had to train them. So I was moving painting into live action.
AG – The fact that you used your own body effectively as a canvas was criticised both by male audiences and also from self-identifying feminist perspectives. Fuses [1965], for example, had a lot feminist critique directed against it.
CS – Yes, it was really painful and disappointing. I was living in London when I made some of those works and feminist theory was very strict, very determined, and completely rejected my work. They could never acknowledge or understand that it was a form of resistance to the male tradition. As soon as it came to female embodiment, they said: “You must be playing into the traditions of the patriarchy.” So that was really painful at the time. But it did eventually evolve.
AG – You were reclaiming ownership over your own body, and also personal agency through your body.
CS – Yes and gradually and finally, through extended feminist history and analysis, the culture began to see my work as transgressive and aggressive, as well as being in contradistinction to inherited traditions. I was inspired by negative feelings about the use of women’s bodies by some contemporary artists: it was so mechanistic. They turned all women’s bodies into dolls. Like Hans Bellmer and Yves Klein. These men manoeuvred and manipulated the woman as part of their materiality, but it was obvious that they never made themselves vulnerable – or, when they did, they were attacked by their colleagues, and that was interesting. Jim Dine, an American artist who lived in London for many years, did an incredible solo performative work based on his diaries and psychoanalytic theory. He presented himself in a vulnerable light. And the male artists who were his friends were very antagonistic and angry with him. They didn’t want him to represent this aspect of male being.
AG – You mention vulnerability. The naked body being exposed to an outside gaze is, at once, both vulnerable but also very powerful.
CS – I’ve done works where I was very frightened of appearing with such vulnerability – sometimes naked, sometimes exposing taboo aspects of sexuality. At times, I have felt extremely vulnerable and frightened of my audience, but I had to experience the contradiction and the juxtaposition of what my lived experience was and what the culture showed. And, in these works – one, for instance, titled Ask the Goddess [1991] – I rely a great deal on archaic imagery: on Christian sacrificial imagery. And I juxtapose a sacrificial religion with the ancient goddess religions, which have an affirmative, exquisite power, and in whose stories fecundity and sexuality and empowered female energy are clearly depicted; whereas, in the Western tradition, they are always misinterpreted. It’s the same with archaic African goddess figuration. They’re always demeaned, misinterpreted, minimised. So feminist theory has to rest on non-traditional analysis and non-traditional ways of discussing form and formulation and its potential meanings against what we inherit.
There are amazing Inuit fertility figures that I have studied. These are fierce little goddesses that sometimes have big exposed vulvas that are like seashells, very defined. And they may not have any arms, because the statues were made of corn or leaves or grasses. So we are looking at reconfigured aspects of materiality, and the power of grass, corn and leaves, responding to an erotics and a fecundity. But female fecundity belongs to a female psyche and spirit; it does not belong to male possession as an attribute, as a thing that has to be controlled – which is what our historic traditions all insist upon: that we are just material to be used by male culture.
AG – When we speak about your work, we tend to focus on the central bodies and aspects of pleasure. But there are also important aspects of your work that expose pain and suffering bodies. So I wanted to talk a bit about this kind of work as well, and why you think this aspect has been perhaps a little neglected in discourse.
CS – Yeah, my work always moves between aspects of the domestic: ecstasy, normalcy, images of pleasure, insecurity, and so on. And then I constantly juxtapose this with the imposition of war, terror, rape and destruction, and the question of why this negative militaristic domination is so definitive. American culture, which presumes itself to be self-righteous and full of good cowboys, is another culture built on assassination, as is most European, and certainly British, culture. Historically, the West has taken materiality or elements that we want, and destroyed the people in whom they have their origin, so that we’ve taken them over. That domination and constant militaristic destruction is what we really inherit. Not the good guys; not the cowboys; not the American apple pie. There’s an underlying residue on which our cultures are built and I keep having to look at it. I just have to see this. What is it and why is it more taboo than anything erotic?
AG – So what is it that draws you to that “underlying residue”? And how has your work developed in this respect over the years?
CS – I suppose part of this is because, as you know, I grew up in the countryside. My dad was a rural physician, so we were in a household which was involved with accidents and physical problems. We had to bring injured people into the house and give them towels and go and get dad and just be responsive and aware. So I am really responsive to aspects of violence and destruction and the question of, what is this persistent psychosis and why it inhabits the male psyche and male power so relentlessly, so continuously through history. And that’s up to, and including, our governments today – particularly mine right now with its sinister transformations and complete assumption of domination, greed and punishment of people who might not align with their insistence on what’s righteous and correct – when this is actually corrupt and malevolent. So I just always thought I had to look at both sides, and I’ve certainly never had permission or encouragement.
But it began with Vietnam. That war completely overshadows the happiness, the ecological insights, the intensity of community that were partly formed by the civil rights movement in the United States, and by a sense of community and cultural empowerment between genders, races, and cultures. We were fighting for that, set against this overwhelming destruction of a culture that seemed to have nothing to do with us; we didn’t even know what we wanted there. What did they have that we had to steal? They didn’t even have bananas. What was going on; why did we have to eviscerate this culture? So I was studying images and their poetry and their language and, then, the atrocity photos that I accumulated in the early sixties, and with which I created my film Viet-Flakes [1965], and used as much of Vietnamese culture as I could find: their music, their poetry, their landscape, but also the violence against them. That was just a nightmare for the cultural excitement of the sixties. Sex, drugs and alcohol: there’s all that. But then it’s under this cloud.
So I worked with Vietnam and then, in the early eighties, I begin studying the destruction of Palestinian culture: mostly at the hands of the Israelis – their neighbours and their genetic doubles. These people come from the same historic strands – you can’t say that, but that’s what most studies lead me to understand. So I’m completely bewildered and obsessed with Lebanon and what’s left of Palestine.
Then this evolves into 9/11 [Terminal Velocity, 2001]: just working with those images. It’s not an in memoriam; I just wanted to get close to those images. They’re all haunting. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think I was making something ‘out of it’; it’s more that I needed to examine the details. I wanted to understand the concept of falling, where you think all the bodies have the same momentum, it’s actually completely different. And those people from 9/11 are not necessarily jumping: they have been blown out of the buildings. The buildings are exploding.
And what I am working on now (in addition to a lot of domestic images of landscapes, and things blooming, and the cats, and the water, and all the good spring transformations around where I live): my studio is full of images of dead, naked, tortured, mutilated men from Syria; there’s hundreds and hundreds of these images from a photographer who escaped, barely escaped, from Syria with his photographic works. So that, I guess, goes back to your question about the double aspect of my work and why you mention, correctly, that the work surrounding atrocity is relatively neglected in favour of looking at the naked body.
AG – What I found really interesting is that the violence to which those bodies are subjected becomes a denial of their humanity. I see a complete continuity between your work on the female body – which has also been reduced to an object – and your work on those suffering bodies from war that have been denied their humanity. You talk about getting close to these images; trying to bring the spectator or the audience closer; to create an intimacy – with both the erotic aspect and the suffering aspect. Would you say there is a form of ethics of intimacy at work?
CS – Yes, that’s interesting – what you call the ethics of intimacy. That’s a very good threshold out of which to examine the separation of pleasurable intimacy and the intimacy of looking at abuse and violence and this other realm of secret denial.
Intimacy is a huge subjective realm for me because it’s probably the most deformed, the most distorted aspect of social configuration. It was the depiction of intimacy that I could never recognise when I started to film my erotic life; its equity, its pleasurable kind of ecstasy and normalcy. Everyone thought it was bewildering because they could only approach intimacy through pornography. And it was really horrible; people kept bringing me these disgusting films, saying “Oh that must be what you need to see!” So, between the refusal of the body as a source of expressive power and pleasure and sexuality, on the one hand, and the body as mutilated, attacked and deformed, on the other, there is the question: What’s the unity here? Where does the culture go into its psychotic divide? Because somewhere they’re the same.
AG – You were also reconfiguring or rearticulating the relationship between what is private and what is public; what is personal and what is political; what is inside and what is outside.
CS – How do we negotiate what is personal from within and from without? What can become public and what is always completely personal or personalised? And how do these threads criss-cross and attach? I do a lot of research, and I don’t know any answers, but I read. The history of male obsession with blood and female sexuality – Freud and Jung, and, of course, Wilhelm Reich and Simone de Beauvoir – these have all been guidelines to try to see better what I’m looking at. But I have to insist that I’m really just a painter; I am just a visual artist wondering about things.
AG – And I guess the skin is the limit, in a way. I wanted to talk about the idea of the frame, or the boundary, and how your work transgresses these boundaries, both in an aesthetic sense and in a social sense. Your work, perhaps, destroys a sort of unity in order to embrace the more fragmented or plural aspects of things.
CS – Well, it seems that, every time there is a frame, I want to break it, or to go into it. With my early paintings, when I was 17 or 18, I started painting from historic imagery, in particular Cézanne, and then I would take a razor blade and cut into my surfaces, as if there was something beyond that I might access. The only time I want to protect the frame is when I’m raising chickens – I’ve got to keep the foxes out and build a very strong frame. But, with the paintings, a lot of the work that became sculptures were paintings that had failed, and I chopped them up: the canvas is unrolling; the wood is breaking; this painting is now a sculpture. And that was very encouraging for going beyond the frame.
There is a wonderful, an amazing, film that I hope everyone who cares about my work will see – it’s called Breaking the Frame [2011]. It’s a feature by Marielle Nitoslawska. It explores everything about me for anyone who would ever have any interest in my work. I’m very blessed with this work: it’s completely true to my history, to my spirit, and to my lived experience. And the only sounds in it are natural sounds from where I live or fragments of music by my originating partner: the composer James Tenney. It’s a wonderful work.
Very important to the structure of my work is gestalt: the fragmentation, the tear, the cut, the slice. As soon as you get away from the established boundary, there is another potentiality. And it’s risky; it’s uncertain; you’re not sure where it leads you, but I want to go there.
AG – Finally, what advice would you give to younger, emerging women artists?
CS – You have to trust yourself and you have to trust your history: what you bring to where you are. Be persistent and give yourself permission. It’s all about giving yourself permission, without having to rely on external factors: which are the ones that constrict us, constrain us and try to redefine our experience. You have to hack, chop, cut your own path.
1 Taken from Gabrielle Schwarz’s ‘Intimate Contact: Images of Suffering in the Work of Carolee Schneemann’ in Another Gaze Issue 01
Interview and photograph by Chahine Fellahi
