The Domestic as Erotic Rite in the Art of Carolee Schneemann

Abstract

I had to understand why there were no women artists in my inherited history. I had to crack the shell, to invert, turn over, smash open. Why language and all speaking existed in only one gender – male – and all that was female was by inclusion, prescription, allowance …. why was there no female genital … the clitoris had been sliced out of cultural erotics and the vagina was a stinking ‘hole’, an absence, dead zone unless stuffed with male functional needs and fearful deforming projections. I had to find out why I believed the basis of creation was a female force denied for 2000 years. I had to put the body where the mind was. Carolee Schneemann, 19941 In this statement of 1994, published in the Performing Arts Journal, Carolee Schneemann offers a clear synopsis of her art: to put the body where the mind was. Her ambition was not merely to reclaim the female body and its sexuality but to ‘smash open’ history and replace it with herstory. Her art sets out to deconstruct and reconstruct ‘cultural erotics’. She creates and crafts a radical feminine intimacy to this end – a form of erotic rite which might be understood as revelling in Eros (the life drive) and which is as political as it is personal in its countering of Thanatos (the death drive). Schneemann advances an avant-garde, feminist jouissance, a pursuit of the pleasure drive up to and including its limits such that the erotic, mystical, and political fuse.2 This ambition began in the 1960s and before feminist artist collectives consciously turned to cultural erotics and space itself as new sites of resistance – as Schneemann explained herself, ‘In the Sixties, it’s pre-feminist analysis; I was entering into a traditional situation in a guise of radicalisation.’3 That radicalisation lay in what we might call her ‘domestic turn’ – her use of the traditional domestic object and space to stage her new erotic politics.4