Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015). 7 7 Kristine Stiles ed., Correspondence Course: an Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and her Circle (Duke University Press: Durham NC, 2010). In line with the past decade-and-a-half's overdue institutional recognition of women's and feminist art, Schneemann's popular reputation has grown fantastically with high-profile publications including an edited volume of letters and a comprehensive evaluation of her career, a retrospective exhibition at MoMA PS1, and the award of Venice Biennale's prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2017. Photographs of the action have been collected by a number of prominent museums as well as being widely reproduced in art magazines and art history textbooks. Interior Scroll has since entered the canon of twentieth-century performance art. The ‘feminist text’ scribbled upon the unfurling scroll was adapted from her film Kitch's Last Meal (1973-77) and opened with the lines 5 5 The first performance iteration also included a segment, ‘Be Prepared’, from Schneemann's publication, Parts of a Body House Book (Devon: Beau Geste Press) 1972. This second streamlined action saw Schneemann disrobe from a white sheet, paint her body with mud from a local creek, and once again read from a secreted scroll. 4 4 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (McPherson and Co.: New York, 1979/1997), p.236. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2012).Įnvisioned as a responsive intervention, the artist had anticipated that her body and its spoken words would ‘step into the fissure between live action and filmic images’. 357-376, and Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds. See, for instance, Catherine Grant, ‘A Time of One's Own’, Oxford Art Journal, vol.39, no.3, Dec 2016, pp. 3 3 Mindful of focus, I have chosen to exclude from this article the 1993 re-performance of Interior Scroll, as it opens questions about temporality and re-enactment that are addressed more thoroughly elsewhere. Two years later Schneemann staged an improvised performance of Interior Scroll at Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where she was incensed to discover her work being screened under the trivialising label ‘The Erotic Woman’. The performance notoriously culminated in the artist removing a scroll from her vagina, which she read aloud, inch by inch, to the audience. The artist then dropped the sheet and daubed paint along the contours of her body and face before assuming a sequence of static life-modelling poses. Schneemann explains the title: ‘Around twelve years old I knew a few names of ‘great artists.’ … I decided a painter named ‘Cézanne’ would be my mascot I would assume Cézanne was unquestionably a woman – after all the “anne” in it was feminine.’ Reprinted in Imaging her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (MIT Press: Cambridge M.A., 2002), p. 2 2 The book was published in three editions on 1974, 19.
During the enactment Schneemann undressed and wrapped herself in a sheet, reading aloud excerpts from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. 246.Ĭarolee Schneemann (1939-2019) first performed Interior Scroll in 1975, at an exhibition in East Hampton entitled ‘Woman Here and Now’. 1 1 Susan Gubar, ‘“The Blank Page” and Female Creativity’, Critical Inquiry vol.8, no.2, Winter 1981, pp. the female body has been feared for its power to articulate itself. It proposes Interior Scroll as a keystone for understanding Schneemann's extensive multimedia outputs, by reading the performance and its reception in relation to the framework of écriture féminine, a popular notion in poststructuralist feminist philosophy at the time of the work's production.ĭetail from Anthony McCall, photograph of Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975 ( plate 5). In this essay Schneemann's insistence on ‘clutter’ and ‘mess’ is adopted as a means of conceptualizing the artist's passionate and persistent incursions within art history. This point of agential labour was essential for a woman artist working prior to, and alongside, the emergence of second-wave feminism.
THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS MEANING REDDIT PROFESSIONAL
Schneemann seized the opportunities created by contemporary art's expanding publishing culture to document and disseminate her work as a professional artist, and communicated with a coterie of writers, curators and historians to generate a space for her work in the art-historical archive. Carolee Schneemann's performance Interior Scroll has become iconic in twentieth-century art history, yet little attention has been directed towards the artist's uncommonly active management of her work's reception and historicization.
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