February 3, 2002 New York Times Arts & Leisure, page 30 An Innovator Who Was the Eros of Her Own Art By AMY NEWMAN
If, in olden days, a glimpse of stocking was something shocking, how about eight bodies ecstatically cavorting with wet paint, plastic, rope, paper scraps, raw fish, dead chickens and sausages in front of an audience, all in the name of "Meat Joy"? The worldly art consumer, accustomed to transgressive gestures, knows that anything goes, as long as the thing doesn't violate the official orthodoxy of art-making. For artists in America in the 1960's, that meant having a signature style: ideally neat, in repudiation of Abstract Expressionism. It also meant adhering to a tightly argued and narrow aesthetic philosophy; sticking to one discipline (painting or sculpture); and, not least, being a white male. If work violated this rigidly defined decorum � and if, in addition, it was messily inclusive and not just explicitly sexual but actually sexy � the art world wasn't shocked, it was confused and embarrassed. The work was largely suppressed, censored or, worse for the artist, relegated to a critical backwater. Mention Carolee Schneemann, an artist who has performed and shown installations, paintings, assemblages, photography, films and collages regularly for the last 40 years, and the reaction will often be a winking "Isn't she the one who took off her clothes?" These days, however, when one cannot tour Chelsea galleries, or visit a Whitney Biennial, without confronting an astonishing array of explicit, sexualized imagery, accusations of prurience no longer stand in the way of acknowledging Ms. Schneemann's achievement. Her notoriously robust works, often featuring her own nude body, were once dismissively labeled narcissistic; but lately they are being recognized as pioneering. (Some of these works are currently on view at P.P.O.W. in SoHo.) As the critic Jan Avgikos wrote in Artforum in 1997, "Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire." Ms. Schneemann was one of the first artists to use appropriated images and electronic technology, incorporating projections, sound systems and all their complex paraphernalia into her installations. At one point, with the collaboration of Bell Telephone Laboratories, she had a switching system wired into auditorium seats to allow the audience's physical reactions to influence the pace of projections. Slightly younger and much younger female and male artists as varied as Hannah Wilke, Rebecca Horn, Karen Finley, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Lisa Yuskavage, the Starn brothers, Tracy Emins and Spencer Tunick have traveled trails Ms. Schneemann blazed. Today Ms. Schneemann is still a beauty. It's hard to imagine that this 61-year-old woman, statuesque and poised in elegant black pants and wine velvet jacket, so shy in front of a photographer, is the person who made "Meat Joy" (1964), who created "Fuses" (1964-67), a manipulated time- lapse film of herself and her partner making polymorphous love, or who stood naked reading from a 36-inch-long strip of paper that she withdrew from her vagina in "Interior Scroll" (1975). It is just as hard to imagine that the sky-lighted, neatly organized loft in New York's fur district, where Ms. Schneemann has lived since coming to the city in 1962, was the visually cacophonous site of "Eye Body" (1963), an almost indescribable ur-Abstract Expressionist environment of painted panels, mirrors, glass, lights, motorized umbrellas, tools and the artist, variously covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic and, sometimes, serpents. Ms. Schneemann says she understands that the erotic aspects of her art may have undermined its critical reception. But she was looking for a way of extending the characteristic gesture of Abstract Expressionism. "The implication of Abstract Expressionism was for increased energy, increased dimensionality," she said. "I had made paintings on wheels, I had sliced through my paintings, I had made layers of them and, finally, I wanted the body to enter the painting." When Ms. Schneemann was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, an actress-friend gave her Antonin Artaud's "Theater and its Double." "Artaud, Simone de Beauvoir and Wilhelm Reich � that triad was really triggering my motives," she said. But she also credited her cat, Kitch, who, after a tornado caused a tree to crash through the roof, "made an exquisite journey out the limbs and back; I wanted that inside-outside passage." She invited 10 friends and gave them cards with instructions for moving in the landscape while she watched from a window. It was her first kinetic event. "It made no sense to me, but something was pulling me away from painting," she said. "I was in anguish. Then I read in one of the art magazines about Allan Kaprow," the father of the Happening, "and I wrote to him." In 1962, when Ms. Schneemann's partner, the musician James Tenney, got a job as an experimental composer in residence at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., they moved to New York from Illinois. Mr. Tenney's colleague at Bell was the art and technology impresario Billy Kl�ver, and the couple met Claes and Pat Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg and became involved in the beginnings of the Judson Dance Theater. At the New School, Ms. Schneemann took a class with the painter Paul Brach. "He made me understand the stroke as an event in time," she said. "That's why choreographing for the Judson was so perfect. I thought of those bodies as colors in three dimensions. One person was really cadmium yellow, and another was blue." She initially had no intention of casting herself, although she played a part (clothed) in Mr. Oldenburg's "Store Days" in 1962, and (nude) as Manet's Olympia in Robert Morris's "Site" in 1964. Her nude body began to appear in her own work, in part to reclaim the female image from the male-determined archetype. "I felt it had to move out of that frozen cultural possession," she said. For her, feminism was a first principle. Looking for historical precedents while a student, she scoured European art books. "I was trying to find photographs or names that were women's names," she said. "Joan Mitchell's paintings were significant for me, and Grace George Hartigan, who in the early days signed her works G. George Hartigan. That was not lost on me." At Bard College in upstate New York, where she had been an undergraduate and where she now teaches, she had been told not to set her heart on art because she was "only a girl." "There are two things that I usually say were provoking motives for me," she said. "We had no neutral pronoun, and we had no acceptable genital depiction. The pronoun exclusion was without exception � `man and his images,' `the artist and his tools' � to the point where a review of Grandma Moses said, `Rarely does an artist in his lifetime receive the acceptance of Mary Robertson Moses.' It was so rigid: to include the feminine pronoun was to ruin the structure of English. And there was no genital reference that connected to my lived experience. Female sexuality was either pornography or a medical concern. And anything in between was private, not part of any cultural discussion. How could I have any authenticity as an artist when I had no pronoun and I had no sexuality? "A principle of my work is to give permission to see, to bring what is likely to be suppressed forward. I'm interested in investigations that have something forbidden about them. I had some innate sense that if they tell you you shouldn't do it, you'd better explore it," she said, laughing. An example is the 1988-92 installation "Cycladic Imprints," a multimedia elaboration of the double curve. "That started with a violinist friend saying whenever he played the violin he felt he had a female form in his hands, and he knew that was politically incorrect. I thought: `That's very interesting. Let's build a whole language of this political incorrectness and see where it goes.' " Although the culture's discomfort with female sexuality continues to be a subject, it is not the only arena in which Ms. Schneemann challenges visual prohibitions. "Viet-Flakes" (1967) manipulated ghastly images from the Vietnam War into a kind of structuralist film that was later included in the kinetic-theater work "Snows." "Mortal Coils" (1995) is a quiet, elegiac tribute to 17 friends who had died in the preceding three years, and "Plague Column" (1996) is a meditation on disease. Last year at the White Box in New York, she created "More Wrong Things," 14 suspended video monitors showing in very brief spurts horrific images from her collection and films sent to her from Haiti, Lebanon and Bosnia. The exhibition at P.P.O.W., which runs through March 9, is Ms. Schneemann's third New York showing in a year. (She also had a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996.) It reprises a number of the important pieces, including the taboo-teasing and oddly endearing "Infinity Kisses" (1981-87), starring the artist and her cat soul- kissing, and "Meat Joy." Recent Iris prints and additional works on paper are also on view. An index of how much times have changed is Ms. Schneemann's nomination for membership in the venerable American Academy of Arts and Sciences; another is that her papers have been bought by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. "Imaging Her Erotics," a collection of interviews and critical essays, Ms. Schneemann's writings and images from her works, has just been published by M.I.T. Press. But Ms. Schneemann still spends most of her time away from the center of art activity, in an old farmhouse in upstate New York that she's had since she was 20. "I go off and disappear into the woods," she said. "My animal self doesn't feel O.K. in the city. I'm kind of like a red fox: I want to run out and have a remarkable event, and then I want to disappear."
