Abstract
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. 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. This point of agential labour was essential for a woman artist working prior to, and alongside, the emergence of second‐wave feminism. 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. 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.
Highlights
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During the enactment Schneemann undressed and wrapped herself in a sheet, reading aloud excerpts from her book Cézanne,She Was a Great Painter.2The artist dropped the sheet and daubed paint along the contours of her body and face before assuming a sequence of static life-modelling poses.The performance notoriously culminated in the artist removing a scroll from her vagina, which she read aloud, inch by inch,to the audience.Two years later Schneemann staged an improvised performance of Interior Scroll atTelluride Film Festival in Colorado, where she was incensed to discover her work being screened under the trivialising label‘The EroticWoman’
The 1860’s painting, 1960’s performance and their receptions underscore how different labours and labouring subjects are valued and move into historical focus. (Suggestive of second-wave feminism’s own elisions, ‘the black serving woman of Manet’s Olympia had vanished’ in the re-enactment, yet this would not be pointed out until much later by Rebecca Schneider.17) Separated by a century, and in spite of Schneemann’s active intentions, writers mercilessly failed to acknowledge her artistic contribution to Site, and her body is configured equivalently to Meurent’s, as fetish object authorised by the male artist
Summary
Certain of Schneemann’s practices have proven trickier to engage historically, as this essay will illuminate by framing her writing precisely in relation to the themes of Interior Scroll and bringing these activities into conversation with the concept of écriture féminine.Working across film, painting, performance, installation, creative and critical writing, Schneemann left an unusually complex historical legacy By following her evocative descriptions of‘personal clutter’,‘painterly mess’ and‘handtouch sensibility’, this article embraces the discomforting ambiguity of Schneemann’s disorderly artistic activities. Most artists work within their own networks to manage their reputations, Schneemann – who passed away in March 2019 – was an exceptionally prolific writer, editor and, as Martha Barratt argues, archivist.9Yet there has been little sustained attention given to Schneemann’s unusually active role in the management of her critical legacy.This article intends to redress this omission by‘reading’ Interior Scroll as a metonym for Schneemann’s artistically and literarily labouring body, and exploring its reception history in relation to the artist’s publishing strategies.
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