Staging the Obscene Body

Abstract

Nearly 25 years ago the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann created a loft art environment, Eye Body, in which she included her own body as one of the materials. Photos of Eye Body showing the naked, beautiful Schneemann, flowers painted on her cheeks, her breasts and body covered with splashes of paint, grease, and chalk, or lying on the floor slithered over by live snakes, speak to the shocking but also the erotic and celebratory nature of her performances. Schneemann has written of the ritual aspect of the process that could put her in a trancelike state, and of her later discovery, through the study of Earth Goddess artifacts, of the sacral implications of the body images explored in that performance (1979:52). In performances created by a number of women in the I98os, Schneemann's sacred body has been replaced by the obscene bodyaggressive, scatalogical, and sometimes pornographic. My purpose here is to gather the scattered evidence of this phenomenon, and to begin to map its location in the fraught contemporary debate over female sexuality, feminism, and pornography. What do these performances say to us about contemporary theatre practice? What does it mean that women are making these performances? And how does one begin to think about these questions: with theories of the avant-garde? Of modernist transgression? Of pornography? With the feminist pornography wars? Though one performance I will write about was unequivocally pornographic (others were borderline, most were only obscene-the boundaries smudge instantly), I started this project by trying to find out what people who have thought about it, think pornography is. At one border of the pornography debate there is a real enjoyment and tolerance of pornography. Its defenders, such as Marxist philosopher Alan Soble, see violent pornography as marginal. Soble makes little distinction