N.Paradoxa : Issue 15

Fluxus, Flirt, Feminist?

Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Liberation and the Avant-garde of the 1960s

ISSN 1462-0426

Anette Kubitza

(This essay is based on Anette Kubitza's dissertation Fluxus, Flirt, Feminist? The Emergence and Reception of Carolee Schneemann's Body Art of the 1960s Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, forthcoming 2002.)

Schneemann's ambivalent role within the avant-garde manifested itself most pointedly in her official excommunication from the Fluxus group in the mid-1960s, a group with which Schneemann was associated through common interests and friends. Several of her performances in the early 1960s, such as her Glass Environment for Sound and Motion, were staged with well-known Fluxus artists such as Dick Higgins and Phillip Corner. She later also collaborated with Yoko Ono and Shigeko Kubota, both highly accepted members of the Fluxus group. While Schneemann cannot be considered a Fluxus artist per se, the severe judgement against her work by the ideological leader of this group, George Maciunas, who gave other female artists a fairly comfortable dwelling (35), sheds light on some of the problems that her art posed to the New York avant-garde. He characterized her work as "operatic," "political," "sexual," "metaphoric" and "messy." In a later statement, Schneemann expressed her ambivalent standing:

"fluxus can be lots of fun when the boys let you on their boat
sometimes they throw you off the boat
you have to be NEAT all your words games philosophy
and things you make have to be NEAT (except for wolf and claes
they can smear their pages its o.k.)
if you don't wear underpants or show your pussy you get pushed over the side [...]"(36)

The sexual explicitness of Schneemann's work may well have been used as a pretext to censor it in the 1960s. I want to suggest, however, that some extreme audience reactions to her work and its marginalization within the avant-garde and later in feminism are due to the fact that she injected her art with sexual passion (37).

Schneemann's particular representations of body and sexuality posed an open threat to patriarchy (and I include a good portion of the 1960s avant-garde here) by challenging a phallocentric, controlled sexuality and its visual representations. By using the naked female body permissively and by presenting sexuality, including heterosexuality, as a joyful experience, Schneemann's work also ran counter to later feminist ideas about this subject. While accepted as an initiator of feminist body and performance art and appropriated as role model by various feminist artists, her work has been continuously criticized for not complying with a narrowly defined feminist correctness in the field of vision (38).

Schneemann, one could argue, is a naïve child of the sexual revolution. Though keenly aware of women's discrimination in the art world and of the misrepresentation of women's sexuality in dominant culture, it is likely that Schneemann was one of the women who objected to early feminist analysis of the male-female power relations in the bedroom (39). Kate Millet was right, of course, when she stated that sexual intercourse does not take place in a cultural vacuum. It would be short sighted, however, to interpret Schneemann's early representations of the women's body as sheer ignorance in feminist terms. A closer look at Meat Joy shows, that by defiling the bodies of the female performers, Schneemann consciously disrupted dominant notions of the female body as beautiful spectacle and of female sexuality as pristine. And, my analysis of Fuses shows that Schneemann quite systematically undermined the very premises on which gender specific visual pleasure in the cinema is based, assumptions feminist film critics began to expose only in the mid-1970s (40).

Further, while there is no doubt that Meat Joy and Fuses are built on heterosexual lovemaking, a closer look reveals that they are not merely about heterosexuality. Amidst the tangle of bodies and materials in Meat Joy, or the grid of spots, scratches, and colors over(p)laying the sexual imagery in Fuses, it becomes impossible to define exactly what we are looking at. In those sequences, a coherent body image defined as male or female is dissolved. For Schneemann it becomes irrelevant whether we can decipher female or male body parts, plucked chicken legs or hot dogs, menstrual blood or red paint, white dots or ejaculate, as it is the complex sensual experience involved in the action that she tried to capture. The artist made bodily sensations and pleasures themselves her subject.

Schneemann's crusade for the acceptance and validity of unmediated bodily sensations continued to permeate her work into the 1980s, as the correspondence with a fellow artist testifies. After watching Schneemann, then in her early forties, performing nude in her Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology, artist colleague Dick Higgins suggested that she should find a beautiful, young feminist artist who should operate as a surrogate, a stand-in for Schneemann in her performances (41). Apart from Higgins' blatant bias against the erotic portrayal of a middle-aged woman, such a suggestion misses the core of Schneemann's work, which is exactly to criticize substitute experiences. The artist responded thus that it would be "a shame to forgo the opportunity to perform as an ambivalent-erotic. I have only one chance to be middle aged, right? So why not see what that tells? I can be the wrinkled knees I once wished off 'the stage' […], the double chin, rounded belly, etc…" (42) Schneemann's answer to Higgins' insulting suggestions emphasizes that her work centers on her body and her (sensual) experiences in an immediate way, and in that also does not make a claim to represent "everywoman".

Even Schneemann's more recent installations of the 1990s, in which the artist does not appear in person, mark a continued critical path away from the "semiotic turn" that became so popular among artists and critics in the early 1980s. For example, her installation Vulva's Morphia" (1981-96) entails a cunning criticism of society from vulva's point of view (that is Schneemann's vulva, of course). The installation consists of a laser print grid of images of goddesses, the artist's vulva, V-shaped objects of everyday life, and obscene graffiti, among others. These images are interspersed with texts, telling vulva's adverse story in a society that denies women's multi-facetted sexual pleasure. Vulva, for example, "reads Masters and Johnson and understands her vaginal orgasms have not been measured by any instrumentality and that she should only experience clitoral orgasms…" Vulva also "deciphers Lacan and Baudrillard and discovers she is only a sign, a signification of the void, of absence, of what is not male… (she is given a pen for taking notes)." Lastly, vulva "decodes Feminist Constructivist Semiotics and realizes she has no authentic feelings at all; even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions, and conditioning…" (43) One can conclude from these side-swipes aimed at feminism, that Schneemann's personal experiences did not correspond with mainstream feminist analyses, which have been, at times, quite proscriptive.

In her multimedia installation, Known/Unknown: Plague Column from 1996, Schneemann tackled the relationship between erotic and medical body, personal experience and "objectivity" of medical data, as well as conventional and alternative healing methods. Inspired by an eighteenth century pest column she encountered in an Austrian rural chapel, the artist explores the social meanings of diseases and their various treatments. Schneemann combined large columns of permutated-color laser prints of vastly enlarged healthy and unhealthy body cells, wall-texts of reactions to certain diseases and forms of treatment by friends and doctors, oranges spiked with injection needles hanging form the ceiling, and a circle of video monitors placed on a bed of polyurethan breast casts and medical hoses. Projected is a video of doctor's visits, breast examinations, and scenes from a domestic, rural life - the artist's. However, as the origins of widespread diseases such as cancer and AIDS and their successful treatment remain an object of debate, it also does not become entirely known to the viewer whether the artist herself is an affected patient, or a detached observer of potentially fatal illness.

While the artist is careful not to reveal her condition to the viewer, the following enlarged wall-text of Known/Unknown captures, I find, the quintessence of Schneemann's oeuvre: "He told her he knew a woman who had a very pretty breast reconstruction. She reminded him that the reconstructed breast had no erotic sensation at all."(44) This short dialog also highlights the challenges that accompany the preservation and exhibition of Schneemann's body art. Just a couple of years ago, the environment in which the artist performed her pioneering body action Eye Body mentioned at the beginning of this essay, was laboriously reconstructed for the show Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-79 in Los Angeles (45). However, the reconstruction, which included 36 black-and-white shots that resulted from Schneemann's body action, failed to convey the core of Schneemann's work. It remained lifeless and cold, and rather signified the absence of what it so meticulously attempted to reconstruct.

I do not mean to suggest that Schneemann's work in the 1960s and thereafter was exclusively influenced by Reich. However, I find an acknowledgement of his influence, in view of the artist's intense study of the psychologist's writings, crucial in understanding Schneemann's individual brand of sexual aesthetics and politics, as well as her continued marginalization (46). Both, Reich and Schneemann, have mined a sensitive spot in this society in their work. By making a claim for the validity and necessity of physical sensations in a sexual as well as in a cultural-political context, they are rebelling against a society preoccupied with the visual, the make-believe, the surrogate, and, last but not least, the construct.

Part 1 - first part of article

Notes

34. See Aviva Rahmani, "A Conversation on Censorship with Carolee Schneemann," M/E/A/N/I/N/G: Contemporary Art Issues (November 1989) p. 4 and MacDonald A Critical Cinema p. 141. At a later screening of Fuses at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Schneemann was called a "Deranged, Frigid, Nymphomaniac" by one viewer, and a another, a young newspaper critic accused her of having assaulted his sexuality. See Schneemann More than Meat Joy p. 195.
35. Among the female artists George Maciunas accepted into the Fluxus group were Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, and Mieko Shiomi. He, in fact, was close friends with Kubota and named her vice president of the movement, and he was deeply imrpressed by the democratic nature of Ono's early conceptual works, which he held up as an example of Fluxus ideals.
36. Carolee Schneemann quoted in: Ubi Fluxus ibi motus, 1990-1962 (Milano, Italy: Mazzotta, 1990) p. 89. Schneemann's exclusion from the American Fluxus-movement continues today. Her affiliation with that group still remains unacknowledged in major US-American compilations of Fluxus art. Editor's note: For a discussion of the relation to "mess" see Joanna Frueh 'Making a Mess, Women's Bane, Women's Pleasure' in K.Deepwell (ed) Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press) pp.142-158.
37. One can argue, that with her hedonist approach Schneemann fit more readily into the European Happenings movement which tended to be openly political, sexual, and, in particular the work of the Viennese Actionists, utterly messy. In spite of these similarities, the aggressive sexuality of these actions was quite contrary to Schneemann's positive approach.
38. At a showing of Fuses at the Art Institute in Chicago in the early 1970s, a group of lesbians became extremely angry because the film did not provide a role model for them. Fuses has further been criticized for offering the naked female body, and therefore inviting appropriation by male culture as pornography.
39. Judith Hole and Ellen Levine noted about this objection that "[W]omen who believed that they were defining their own sexuality, by virtue of their freedom to have sexual relations whenever they chose, resisted the notion that their sexuality was still defined by men." Hole and Levine Rebirth of Feminism (New York, NY: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 221. The authors also state that Anne Koedt's essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," first distributed in 1968, prior to its publication in 1970, met with resistance within the new women's movement. The authors expected that women would have felt a sense of psychological liberation at Koedt's "discovery," which countered the notion that full maturity into womanhood depended on moving from clitoral to vaginal orgasms, maintained by Freud and his followers. See pages 220f.
40. See Laura Mulvey's influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Screen 16 (Fall 1975) pp. 6-18.
41. Dick Higgins in a letter to Schneemann, March 10, 1981. Carolee Schneemann Papers, # 950001, box 37, file: Higgins, Dick, Getty Research Institute.
42. Carolee Schneemann in an undated answer to Dick Higgins. Carolee Schneemann Papers, # 950001, box 37, file: Higgins, Dick, Getty Research Institute. See the entire correspondence regarding Higgin's criticism in this file.
43. It is interesting to note that Schneemann's Vulva's Morphia was created around the same time Eve Ensler's award-winning play The Vagina Monologues was originally produced. The play, however, only debuted Off-Broadway on Valentine's Day 1998. The play, which has been performed with different casts nationally and internationally, gives voice to women's vaginal experiences, from rape to self-stimulation, and explores the power, pain, humor, wisdom, outrage and excitement hidden in women's vaginas. Carolee Schneemann's Vulva's Morphia was republished as artists pages in n.paradoxa (print version) Vol. 6 Desire and the Gaze, July 2000. pp.44, 46-47.
44. Wall-text from the installation Known/Unknown: Plague Column, 1996, exhibited at the Elga Wimmer Galery, New York City, 1996. Copies of the wall-texts are in the author's possession.
45. See also the catalog Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 149-79 (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art/Thames and Hudson, 1998), illustrations on pp. 6 and 293 of a previous reconstruction in Schneemann's Manhattan studio, which differed from the later one at the museum.
46. It is interesting to note, that Schneemann has openly rejected the interpretation of her work in Freudian terms. Schneemann, for example, does not consider the umbrella, which frequently appears in her work, as a phallic object but a manifestation of vulvic space, which unfolds when you open it. See Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 171f. At a performances of her "Up to and Including Her Limits" in the mid seventies, in which Schneemann was swinging naked in a harness, a man in the audience, well-known sociologist Erving Goffman, maintained that the artist's use of a rope evoked ideas of sado-masochistic pleasure. Schneemann objected that his interpretation disregarded the actual feelings involved, and that the motion of swinging for her triggered pleasurable childhood memories. Dick Higgins came to her aid claiming that "the rope is innocent". Schneemann related this incidence in a public lecture at the University of California in Santa Barbara, January 25, 1994.

N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 15, 2001