“I live for the nude rabble rousing of Carolee Schneemann”.1 These words, written in a recent Facebook post by Lena Dunham, creator of and frequently nude actor on the HBO series Girls, demonstrate Schneemann’s current role as a rightly revered goddess of feminist art. However, as Dunham’s words suggest, the American artist’s pioneering role is nearly always attributed to a small pool of performances and films, created in Paris and New York in the sixties and seventies, which centre on the artist’s own often naked body. The notorious group performance Meat Joy, a “celebration of flesh as material” that included eight nearly naked dancers, wet paint and raw fish and meat, was first presented in Paris in 1964 and then later that year at the Judson Dance Theatre in New York.2 The following year Schneemann again courted controversy with Fuses (1965), a self-shot film depicting scenes of Schneemann and her then-partner, the composer James Tenney, having sex. Perhaps the artist’s most direct feminist statement can be found in Interior Scroll (1975/77), first performed at an exhibition of paintings by women artists, in which Schneemann undressed in front of her audience and proceeded to read out a series of feminist texts written on a scroll pulled out of her vagina. At the time, these works were not only reviled by conservative critics, but ignored or dismissed by many of her fellow feminist artists, who found her unabashedly eroticised, corporeal approach difficult to reconcile with their critique of visual pleasure and the fetishisation of the female body. Now they are roundly embraced for their radical reconciliation of female sexuality and subjective, creative agency.3
Images from Interior Scroll (1975/77). Courtesy of Hales Gallery, London
Schneemann’s feminism does not, however, begin and end with iconic images of her own naked body. Counterbalancing her groundbreaking work on sex and pleasure, Schneemann has also produced an important body of work exploring pain and suffering, international disasters and violent conflicts. What is most crucial to and pervasive in all of her work, whether addressing pleasure or pain, is an approach that refuses – both in terms of subject matter and style – to renounce the artist’s own subjectivity. For Schneemann, to appropriate the familiar slogan of second-wave feminism, the personal is political – an idea which, as the art historian Mignon Nixon has pointed out, can go both ways, making politics personal as well as bringing the personal into the realm of politics.4 However, Schneemann’s work on war remains comparatively under-recognised, despite the artist’s ongoing commitment to the theme, beginning with her early anti-Vietnam war film Viet-Flakes (1965) and continuing into the 21st century with works such as Terminal Velocity (2001), Schneemann’s response to 9/11, and More Wrong Things (2001), a video installation bringing together footage from various atrocities. These works deserve further attention, and not only because of the chaos that Western interventionism continues to perpetuate around the world today. Revealed in the complex mechanics of Schneemann’s art is her own ever-present subjectivity, through which the works are able to insist on the painfully personal nature of what we often call ‘global’ issues.
For Schneemann, this insistence on the personal is foundational not just for her ethical but also for her aesthetic philosophy. The following poetic words were originally written for a film entitled Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–78) and reused in Interior Scroll:
I met a happy man
a structuralist filmmaker–
but don’t call me that
it’s something else I do–
he said we are fond of you
you are charming
but don’t ask us
to look at your films
we cannot
there are certain films
we cannot look at
the personal clutter
the persistence of feelings
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgence
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt
the primitive techniques
The offending elements of Schneemann’s work encompass subject matter (“personal clutter”), tone (“feelings”), form and materiality (“hand-touch sensibility”, “painterly mess”, “primitive techniques”). It is not simply that these elements, although often gendered in this way, are offensively and therefore subversively ‘female’ – Schneemann’s work contains no such reductive essentialism. Rather, they reveal the centrality to Schneemann of an avowedly personal approach, rooted in the concrete particularity of lived experience. Indeed, while Schneemann generally resists the incorporation of her work into pre-existing philosophical or theoretical frameworks (as might be expected from her satirical takedown of the ‘structuralist filmmaker’), convincing arguments have been made for her indebtedness to Simone de Beauvoir’s particular brand of existentialism – one based not on essential being but on the lived experience of particular subjects. Branden W. Joseph draws parallels between what he calls Schneemann’s “aesthetics of ambiguity” and de Beauvoir’s ethical critique of “impersonal universal man” as “the source of values”.5 These values, de Beauvoir argues, can only be derived from “the plurality of concrete, particular” lives in “situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself”. Schneemann’s aesthetics are similarly opposed to universalised values and abstract ‘truths’, whether of structuralist films or militaristic discourse. It is the abstraction of the latter discourse that is so powerfully undermined by the works explored in this essay. Through a range of artistic strategies, from documentary filmmaking and photomontage to painterly gestures and sculptural installations, this body of work reveals its engagement with one of feminism’s most valuable lessons: the imperative to break down the barrier between the self and the ‘other’, by attending to and connecting with the stories and experiences of unheard and silenced voices.
Schneemann’s first major foray into the territory of war is the film Viet-Flakes (1965), one of the first works of art made in protest against the ongoing Vietnam War. In the early sixties, Schneemann had begun to become aware of the United State’s devastating involvement in the war in Vietnam, which was going largely unreported in the mainstream media. She began building what she termed her ‘atrocity image collection’ of photographs collected from foreign newspapers and underground press depicting the war.6 Suffering from nightmares arising from these images, Schneemann began to compose Viet-Flakes. She used a 8mm camera, to which she had taped multiple magnifying lenses, to create an animated album of her collected atrocity images. In extreme close-up, the camera travels joltingly over the surface of these photographs, which show Vietnamese people dying, mourning or seeking to escape, the black-and-white film toned a ghostly blue. The uncomfortable, at times nauseating experience of viewing the film is heightened by the discordant soundtrack, a music collage of choppy fragments of Western classical music, pop songs and South-East Asian folk songs, composed by James Tenney (who featured in Fuses in the same year). Viet-Flakes and the performance Snows (1967) – into which the film was incorporated – created a template for subsequent projects, which continued to explore images of contemporary conflicts. Throughout the eighties, Schneemann produced the ‘Lebanon Series’, which also arose from her dreams of war following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and eventually encompassed an artist’s book, several paintings, a film and kinetic sculpture. Today, Schneemann is focused on the ongoing conflict in Syria, working with images of the corpses of victims to create new film work.7
Viet-Flakes (1965)
For Schneemann, there have always been clear parallels between the violence inflicted by patriarchal culture on the individual female body and that inflicted on communities as a whole, particularly during times of war:
Beirut fulfilled a military sexual metaphor – they could not stop jerking off on this harlot. Beirut was asking for it. They could not stop raining down their toxic ejaculations – rockets aimed into the half-moon curve of the sea. The language that’s always used – “penetrating the southern border”, “raining down bombardments”, “coming in low and hard”, “pounding villages”, “blasting off” […]. Often the valorous, unspeakable shattering of the enemy will be characterized by images of women and children in the ruins.8
The “military sexual metaphor” underlying the visual and verbal language used to represent war is significant not just for its blatantly misogynistic overtones. As Schneemann recognises, the symbolic nature of the language serves to generalise the experience of war. Abstracted, even idealised, as a heroic assertion of masculinity, war is distanced from the all-too-real experiences of its victims: the physical destruction of their bodies, families and homes.
Indeed, Schneeman, when asked about her choice to turn to the form of the documentary film, stated: “It’s a proto-feminist issue […]. Documentary work begins to seize the actuality of lived experience in its contradictions and to start tearing away the horrible aggrandised mythology that comes out of the worst of self-righteous Americana.”9 Schneemann has made it her task to bear witness to documentary footage depicting real living – and dying – bodies. But the resulting art works are not just a matter of documentation. Rather, they reflect on the ways in which we experience documentation, on how different forms of mediation can make the same image seem comfortably distant or intensely personal.
In Viet-Flakes, Schneemann’s intrusive animating techniques – what her happy structuralist filmmaker might have described as “primitive” or a “hand-touch sensibility” – highlight and enact this mediation. The camera lingers and returns to the same faces contorted with grief, using strong spotlights and zooming in impossibly close until the pixelated image disintegrates under the pressure. Mignon Nixon rightly points out the ethical implications of this process: “subjective engagement with war might deepen the psychic dimension of political responsibility.”10 Crucially, for Schneemann, subjective engagement does not imply a single, integrated perspective or moral imperative. Rather, in her dense collages – her “painterly mess” of broken images, discordant sounds and distorted film – fragmentation rules, and emphasises the multiple layers of mediation and interpretation that form our experiences of contemporary events. The only real imperative is to empathise with the lives and deaths of others.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this imperative more evident than in Schneemann’s unusually pared-back response to the attacks of September 11. Schneemann has described Terminal Velocity as a “eulogy” to the victims of this tragedy, arising less from a sense of the urgency of political action (this is certainly no call to arms for the war on terror) than as a public record of “[o]ur own vertiginous grief, rage and sorrow”.11 The work takes the form of a photomontage depicting scanned and enlarged images, arranged in seven columns and six rows, of people falling from the World Trade Centre. Each column focuses on one falling body, a series of increasingly cropped images enlarged up to the point of maximum legibility. The grid – the emblematic modernist form devoid of time, space, bodies or chaos – comes to resemble a frame-by-frame breakdown of the final moments of people falling to their deaths. Schneemann writes: “The computer process allows intimate contact with each horrific isolation […] In this communal nightmare, fleeting visual attributes of nine lives become clearer by enlargement.”12 While today the images Schneemann used may have become familiar, at the time the tragedy was nearly always depicted through the comparatively impersonal images of the towers in flames. When Terminal Velocity was first exhibited soon after the attacks, American audiences found the overwhelmingly human specificity revealed by Schneemann’s enlargements of the anonymous victims too intimate, too much to bear. As Schneemann wrote: “I have had to consider the violence of initial reactions due to facing a vulnerability which counters our American mythology of invulnerability, of sustaining heroics.”
Terminal Velocity, (2001–5)
For decades Schneemann would draw on her collection of atrocity images to make films (occasionally integrated into performances or sculptural installations), artist’s books and photomontages about global suffering. While clearly rooted, both in style and philosophy, in Schneemann’s distinctive approach to making art, on a thematic level Schneemann’s ‘war’ works always stood apart from her work exploring her own life. In 2001, however, she first presented More Wrong Things, an installation which, in a ground-breaking move, brought together Schneemann’s proliferated archive of atrocities (now featuring footage not just from Vietnam and Lebanon but also Sarajevo, Haiti, Palestine, Afghanistan and more) with another archive: footage of her own personal disasters in recent years, from the lives and deaths of her cats to the alternative therapy she was undergoing as cancer treatment, as well as short, sexually explicit fragments of celebrated past works, including Interior Scroll and Fuses. These short clips have, in various iterations of the work, been projected in blown-up format onto walls, displayed on between fourteen and seventeen monitors, suspended from the ceiling, and embedded in a tangled mess of cords and cables. Through this exposed wiring, a literal embodiment of Schneemann’s insistence on clutter, mess and exposure, the mediating processes of image-making and -viewing are turned inside out. With the clips dispersed across multiple screens, all playing out of sync, endlessly repeating, their frenetic violence accumulates – almost to the point of emotional paralysis. But not quite.
“[T]here is a boundary crossed where her pain becomes our pain. The inescapability of grief fills the room.”13 Thus one reviewer, although unable to locate the precise “mechanism” through which More Wrong Things succeeds in moving her to tears, describes the landscape of empathy the installation presents. While in previous works it was Schneemann’s insistent intervention on the surface of the images that enabled her and her viewers to make intimate contact with the depicted pain, here it is the suggestion that a direct parallel can (and should) be drawn between the ‘public’ disasters taking place around the world and the personal ill health, loss and grief from which we all suffer – and that none of this can really be kept separate from the rest of our lives, the pleasures of sex and creativity. In this work, explicitly a piece about war, technology, military conflict, and geopolitics, the resolutely inappropriate intrusion of Schneemann’s own “personal clutter” finally brings together the two strands of her art. Yes, the personal is political; but the most abstract politics also has a physical shape. It is the shape of our human bodies, in pleasure and pain.
1 Lena Dunham, ‘Peeking From Between My Fingers: some disjointed thoughts on the Famous video’, Facebook, 27 June 2016. 2 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Meat Joy’, in More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (New Paltz, NY, Documentext, 1979), p. 63. 3 See Jeff Nagy, ‘Carolee Schneemann’s Unforgivable Art’, 15 December 2016, Public Books. Nagy writes: ‘Schneemann recalls having been accused of playing into the most prurient of male fantasies’, and even Agnès Varda, director of feminist New Wave classics like Cléo de 5 à 7 and, later, Sans toit ni loi, hated the piece and deemed it irredeemably obscene. 4 Mignon Nixon, ‘Schneemann’s Personal Politics’, in Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Salzburg: Museum der Moderne and Munich: Prestel, 2015), p. 45. 5 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), pp. 17-18; quoted in Branden W. Joseph, ‘Unclear Tendencies: Carolee Schneemann’s Aesthetics of Ambiguity’, in Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, p. 40. 6 Schneemann and Duncan White, ‘On the Development of Snows and Other Early Expanded Cinema Works’, in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance and Film, ed. A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 86. 7 See ‘Vincent Honoré in Conversation with Carolee Schneemann’, Cura Magazine (Online) 8 Schneemann, ‘The Lebanon Series’, in Carolee Schneemann: Imaging her Erotics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 170. See also ‘Schneemann’s analysis of the discourse on the 1990-91 Gulf War’ in Carolee Schneemann (interviewed by Andrea Juno), Angry Women, Re/Search 13 (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991), p. 77: ‘It’s a phallocentric mania, it’s psychotic, and the language of this war has all been about ‘creaming them, surrounding and killing them, pounding them relentlessly’ […] It’s like a gang-bang, an endless rape with the heaviest battering ram, the battering cock.’ 9 Schneemann, ‘Interview with Katie Haug’, in Imaging Her Erotics, p. 37. 10 Nixon, p. 53. 11 Schneemann, ‘Terminal Velocity’, in Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, p. 286. 12. Ibid. 13 Barbara Leon, ‘Carolee Schneemann exhibit: More Wrong Things’, 21 May 2001
Gabrielle Schwarz curates and writes about contemporary art. She is web editor of Apollo magazine.
This piece first appeared in Another Gaze 01 alongside our interview with Schneemann. Please support us by buying or subscribing to our print issues.
