I came across Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses earlier this year during an insomniac’s trawl through YouTube, ten years after the film was first made. Each photo in the slideshow of images shows a kiss between the artist and her cat. Some kisses are damp, hot, open-mouthed; some are tight, shy pecks. Underneath, a commenter leaves their review: “lol cat ladies are mental”. I imagine this is not the first time Schneemann has encountered this particular catcall. I – a proud owner of both a cat and a large portrait tattoo of said cat – have been called a crazy cat lady too. Unloved and unlovable, women who own cats are an easy target, and offer a neat way to deride an entire gender – and species. Schneemann defies this. Her practice, which scratches away at the lacquered idols of gender, auteurship and sexuality, is full of felines. Their physical bodies feature in her performances, their ears are abstracted in her paintings and their hair is glued directly onto the celluloid surface of her film. A 1976 performance saw Schneemann suspended, naked, chalking frantic strokes on paper, while her cat Kitch watched from a nearby plinth, lightly taxidermied due to the pet’s recent death. Unfortunate Kitch was just one of Schneemann’s “muse-cats”, who she claims have “inspired and guided” her work.¹ I like to imagine the YouTube trolls beside themselves with glee at this longer history of Schneemann’s feline muses, her deviance confirmed.
Since the beginning of her career, cats and their roles on camera have advanced some of Schneemann’s most interesting artistic adventures. Kitch had a more animate part in one of her early films, Fuses (1965), where she watches her owner having sex with the artist’s then-partner, the composer James Tenney. At the end of her life, the elderly cat’s final years were immortalised on Super 8 for Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-76); the tender documentation of hundreds of ‘final’ meals ending only with the cat’s death. Infinity Kisses was created from two series of photographs featuring two cats: Cluny, from 1980 to 1988, then Vesper from 1990 to 1998. Vesper then went on to star in Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth (1992) where he negated Tenney entirely by licking, nuzzling and kissing Schneemann himself. Over a background of deep purrs, Schneemann narrates the film with tales of witchcraft, bestiality and feminism. Kitch, Cluny, Vesper: these cats have provided a medium through which Schneemann has explored the shifting shapes of sexuality and gender.
Cats and women have long been bound together, in an association muddied by gendered signification. One zoological guidebook helpfully explains that “the intense attachment that cats develop to their homes seems, at least in the context of most traditional cultures, feminine”, as is the “curvilinear design of the feline body and the cat’s rhythmic way of walking”.² In ancient Egypt, when cats were first domesticated, tomb paintings show them tethered under the chairs of the owner’s wives, gnawing on scraps of fish or bones.³ They later came to be lionised as benevolent symbols of female sexuality and fertility, their worship reaching its full expression in the idolisation of the goddess Bastet.⁴ Perhaps because of associations like these, cats were treated with more suspicion in the Christian Middle Ages. They were seen as both the familiars of witches and the form into which these witches transformed. In 1211, the Essex-born writer Gervase of Tilbury wrote about women “prowling about at night in the form of cats”,⁵ and from 1400 to 1800, tens of thousands of witches were tortured and executed across western societies, the majority of whom were women.⁶ Schneemann’s own research unearthed the fact that during this period suspected witches would often have kittens forced into their vagina, shredding them from inside.⁷ Rumour had it that if, on a night-time walk, a cat crossed your path and you struck it, a disreputable woman from the village would wake with an injury in the same place.⁸ A 16th-century tale said that when the coffin of a newly-deceased girl from Quintin, Brittany, couldn’t be lifted, it was opened and a black cat fled out. Turns out she’d sold her soul to the devil for some new clothes.⁹ Recently, rumours of a cat-killer have stalked suburban south-east London; pets have been found with heads amputated and genitals mutilated. It has since been established as the work of foxes, but not before a detective stressed the importance of catching the perpetrator due to concern that the killer would “escalate the attacks to humans, specifically vulnerable women and girls.”¹⁰ Tied together, the feminine and the feline, knotted by the fingers of men.¹¹
If I asked you to sketch the type of woman who owns a few cats, it wouldn’t be hard to guess the result. There’s probably some wild unbrushed hair, some kind of garment peppered with holes. The crazy cat ladies of popular imagination are the outliers, the old crones and the hysterics. So, too, were the women persecuted as ‘witches’, often on the edge of society: the unmarried, the widowed, the eccentric. Just as a cat won’t come to heel, these women were outside the jurisdiction of (male) control. The cat is a signifier of female sexuality, but it’s also seen as the familiar of hags, splintering off a woman’s desire into a digestible – and easily detestable – form. Women can be wrapped up with their cats, an easily disposable package. The witches and the rebels and the women who just want to be left alone are othered by misogyny and misunderstanding. Hyper-sexual, or not sexy enough: either way by damning their cats women are kept caged.
Film, of course, has played its part in furthering these stereotypes. In Cat People (1942) we encounter Irena (Simone Simon), a beauty who slips into the guise of a black panther when aroused or angered because of an ancient Serbian curse. Irena is isolated from her husband Oliver (Kent Smith), unable to make love for fear of the consequences. The filmmakers cannot let this raw sexuality exist unchecked: as Irena meets her fate, the closing shots focus on the woman for whom her husband leaves her – pure, virginal Alice (Jane Randolph). Another cat lady meets a bitter end in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). The “filthy old soomka” (Miriam Karlin) lives alone at a health farm alongside her collection of erotic art and her fleet of cats, resplendent in a green leotard. After pummeling her to death with a large sculptural cock, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) flees while the cats mewl and scatter around his feet. Any actors cast as cat-owners know that it’s probably not going to end well. Women who don’t conform often meet a bitter end.
Schneemann’s explorations of the power-play behind erotics are striking when set against this backdrop. Fuses was one such attempt to capture the experience of sex, separate from the greasy pneumatics of the emerging porn industry. The film is self-shot and edited, and is a joyous record of the pleasure of sex for two genders from a deliberately un-fetishistic viewpoint. Schneemann recollects that after screenings, “Women would sometimes cry and say ‘Thank you, thank you. This is the first time that I’ve seen a female genital and I’m going to be able to look at my own body! I’m going to look at my own vulva!’”¹² When Derrida’s cat saw him naked, the philosopher could only talk of his shame.¹³ Yet Schneemann embraces the feline gaze, films from the cat’s viewpoint and unashamedly performs for the animal. If cats had previously been used to fracture desire away from the women’s self, Schneemann reclaims her agency as a sexual being with Kitch’s help. This was the ‘60s, when the veneer of sexual liberation was often used by men who shagged whoever they liked, the contraceptive pill reducing any negative consequences. Schneemann is wonderfully, joyfully naked, and demanding pleasure. Her cat – not a symbol of her prudishness or some unquantifiable slinkiness – is her accomplice. Woman and cat, flesh and fur, reclaiming the damaging associations. Contemporaries in the art-film world were not entirely accepting of this new approach – Schneemann’s film was seen as over-sexualised exhibitionism and she was painted as a narcissist. These denunciations fail to acknowledge that she, as an actor-director, was reclaiming authority over her own image. In light of this criticism, Schneemann realised that she was only permitted “to be an image, not an image maker”.¹⁴
Schneemann’s accidental status as an art-object can be examined through the lens of two feline-themed works produced by her contemporaries. In 1964 she was part of her friend Robert Morris’s artwork Site, shortly before he found global fame as a Minimalist sculptor. Schneemann reclined, naked but for a black ribbon on her neck, while Morris rearranged planks around her: an exercise in framing. It’s a clear homage to Manet’s Olympia, where a defiantly nude woman is brought flowers by her servant as she reclines in bed, a cat at her feet. By isolating the woman, Morris excludes many things. First, and most importantly, there is the problematic erasure of the servant, a woman of colour, a painful reminder of the white privilege which allowed Schneemann to find any semblance of recognition as a woman artist at the time. The black cat is also gone – that electric, arching black cat, a symbol of unadulterated sex, that caused Zola to exclaim, “To have put such a cat into that painting, why, [Manet] must have been insane. Imagine that! A cat – and a black cat at that!”¹⁵ As she reflected on this performance, Schneemann mused that, “In the ‘collaboration’ … I became historicized and immobilized.”¹⁶ Schneemann was stripped, deprived of both Manet’s raw symbol of female sexuality and her own artistic agency.
Five years before this, Schneemann and Tenney appeared in Stan Brakhage’s Cat’s Cradle (1959) alongside Brakhage and his wife Jane. Brakhage intended the entirely silent film to show “sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a ‘medium’ cat”.¹⁷ It features a series of domestic encounters between the two couples, where the men are often seen smoking, and the women pottering around the house, or scrubbing the kitchen. Many of the shots feature Kitch, but the rapid cutting serves more to distance the cat from her owner than to set up any celluloid bond. Where Schneemann’s film offered a radical view of sexuality, Brakhage’s domestic ideal is far less blissful. Schneemann was dressed in an apron and found the filming experience “frightening”, remarking that “whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance – a terrifying experience – experiences of true dissolution.”¹⁸ Brakhage recalls that Kitch was on heat for the entirety of the filming session, and so made the cat the visual representation of sex between the two couples.¹⁹ Desire is cut away, cat-shaped – for Brakhage, this is easier than depicting a woman with any sexual agency. The apron-clad Schneemann becomes a neutered parody of the ideal domestic wife.
In her own work, Schneemann teases the limits of what can and can’t be shown, countering the silent treatment she’s given by the men with the transgression of her cat-kisses. In an interview with Artsy this year, Schneemann writes: “Cats have always been affiliated with the feminine – often in a very negative, demonic way.” For Schneemann, the independent power of cats meant that they became surrogates for the feminine, set against the typically masculine association of obedient dogs.²⁰
Her films harness this misbehaviour and force viewers to question their own world view. “The intimacy between cat and woman becomes a refraction of the viewers’ attitudes to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred.”²¹ By making sexually explicit work with her pets – at first they simply watch, but then they kiss, lick and caress her – she reclaims the feline-female connection from both the asexual crone and the superficial sexual deviant. She is a fully rounded version of herself, a proud, sexual woman.
Men own and love cats too. In 1759, when poet Christopher Smart was confined in a mental hospital, he began working on Jubilate Agno, a lengthy poem considering matters of religion and science. But when he reaches the subject of his cat Jeoffry he can’t stop describing him instead: “For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest / For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.”²² Artist and director Jean Cocteau illustrated a lot of cat books, and was even the member of a Parisian cat club. Yet there is no universally accepted ‘type’ of crazy cat man because of the long historical association of cats with women, which is used as a way to berate women for their autonomy. “In cultural history,” writes Schneemann, “the detestation of the domestic cat is always parallel to suppressed rage at difference in general and at all aspects of the female body and female orgasm in particular.”²³ Like the witches before her, Schneemann doesn’t neatly fit into the patriarchal mould, no matter how hard her collaborators and critics have tried. She kisses her cats, stuffs them and then carries them around. Like my own precious cat, she scratches the furniture, shreds the curtains and pisses all over the carpet.
1 Thyrza Nichols Goodeve ‘“The Cat Is My Medium”: Notes on the Writing and Art of Carolee Schneemann.’ Article in Art Journal 74: 5-22 (January 2015) 2 The Mythical Zoo, Boria Sax (2013), 168-69 3 The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour ed. by Dennis C Turner & Patrick Bateson (2000), 182 4 Ibid, 183 5 Ibid, 187 6 Levack, 1995: 21-26 7 Artsy 8 Robert Darnton, ‘The Great Cat Massacre’, History Today (August 1989). 9 Ibid 10 Sky News 11 This is not just a Western phenomenon. In Japanese folklore, monstrous female cats suck the blood and vitality of men. (The Domestic Cat, 189) 12 Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, 26 13 He discusses this at length in The Animal That Therefore I Am 14 Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy: performance works and selected writings. 1979 ed. Bruce R. McPherson. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1997, 194 15 John F. Moffitt, “Provocative Felinity in Manet’s Olympia,” Notes in the History of Art vol. 14, 1 (Autumn 1994): 21–31 16 Imaging Her Erotics, 35 17 By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume 1, DVD menu 18 Imaging her Erotics, 35 19 Stan Brakhage: Interviews edited by Suranjan Ganguly, 8-9 20 Ibid footnote 7 21 Imaging her Erotics, 264 22 Poetry Foundation 23 Art In America
Naomi Pallas writes and directs documentaries for the BBC. She lives in London with her cat Bo .
