![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This article considers the archives of the American artist Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), now held between Stanford University and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, as a constitutive element of her performance practice. Analysis of items from these remarkable archives, such as sketchbooks, letters, and Life Books, in relation to her artistic output proper, aims to establish her critical attitude towards the structure of the traditional archive. Schneemann's documentation of her performance work through film and photography, and her re-use of such documentation in later projects, prompts further investigation into how time is structured in her work and restructured in its afterlife. The possible political implications of these tactics are then explored; the construction of self-image through autobiographical work, in tandem with her auto-archival practice, presents a feminist mode of inheritance in opposition to the logic of the traditional archive and the masculinist subject it presumes.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Carolee Schneemann for her time given to generously answering questions and providing material for this paper. I would like to thank Kathleen Madden and Alison Wright for introducing me to this material, and finally, Dominic Paterson for his invaluable guidance and comments on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1 Lynne Hershman, “Interview with Carolee Schneemann, March 8, 1991 (Film),” !Women Art Revolution, Stanford University Digital Collections, Stanford University, http://lib.stanford.edu/women-art-revolution/carolee-schneeman-nyc (accessed January 4, 2016).
2 Schneemann in conversation with the author, April 11, 2016: “I’m sure there's some childhood aspect to it. I wanted to save something of the ordinary that's in passage, that's in flux, like a dream disappearing, so I think the underlying motive has always been some aspect of the immersive rescue. Some things are precious or terrible or vital and I know it's all in motion and going to dissolve. And so when I was little I used to try and save impossible things such as snails … and then that began to move into very crude simple photography as a kid, box photography … and I was always writing.”
3 Schneemann's performance and correspondence archives were purchased by the Getty Research Institute in 1994; see Linda Bunting, “Finding Aid for the Carolee Schneemann Papers 1959–1994,” Online Archive of California, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf800005r9/entire_text/ (accessed April 1, 2016). Stanford University acquired much of the remaining contents in 2012.
4 This folder is to become the basis of a forthcoming book published by the Artist's Institute, New York.
5 Kristine Stiles has written briefly but persuasively about Schneemann's archive as “the stabilizing force of her being, the source of her creativity, and a critical – but wholly unknown – condition for the production and meaning of her art.” Kristine Stiles, “Schlaget Auf: The Problem with Carolee Schneemann's Paintings,” in Carolee Schneemann. Up to and Including her Limits, ed. Dan Cameron (New York: New Museum, 1997), 20.
6 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9–63. Derrida gives “consignation” as the third archontic power, meaning the faithful reproduction of the mind's content onto a durable medium, following his deconstruction of Arkhe, as “commencement,” “the originary, the first, the principle, the primitive,” as well as in the nomological sense “the arkhe of commandment,” which is linked to the domiciliation of documentation in the house of the superior magistrate, or “archon,” and thus to law (arkheion).
7 Meat Joy was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1964, as part of Festival de la Libre Expression, organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel (b. 1936). It was performed in London on June 8, 1964 at Dennison Hall, and was shown on three consecutive nights, November 16–18, 1964 at the Judson Memorial Church, New York. The Judson Dance Theater was a collective of artists and dancers that held weekly performances at this church between 1962 and 1965.
8 Michael Smith, “Theatre: Meat Joy,” The Village Voice, November 26, 1964, 17 and 25.
9 See Carrie Lambert, “Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's ‘Trio A,’” October 89 (Summer 1999): 87–112.
10 Smith, “Theatre: Meat Joy,” 25.
11 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 12–23. Although published three years after Smith's review, the text brings to their logical conclusion many of the formalist readings produced by Greenberg and his contemporaries, and can therefore be seen as being reflective of the critical environment at the time. Fried's incisive criticism attributes minimalism's failure to its “theatricality” in that it welcomes both time and the body of the viewer into the work. This is in contrast to the self-reflective, “wholly manifest” works of artists such as Anthony Caro (1924–2013), who follow Greenberg's teleological definition of medium-specificity.
12 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 23.
13 On the development of Schneemann's painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, see Sabine Breitwieser, “Kinetic Painting: Carolee Schneemann's Media,” in Carolee Schneemann. Kinetic Painting, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (London and Munich: Prestel, 2015), 12–25; and Maura Reilly, “Painting, What it Became,” in Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, ed. Kenneth White, Carolee Schneemann and Duncan McCorquodale (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 82–199.
14 Judith Olch Richards, “Oral History Interview with Carolee Schneemann, 2009, March 1,” Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-carolee-schneemann-15672 (accessed July 19, 2016).
15 Robert Haller, “Robert Haller Interviews Carolee Schneemann (11/30/1973),” Ubuweb: Sound, http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/schneemann.html (accessed April 20, 2016).
16 For a discussion of time in Schneemann's art, see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), 195–212; esp. 200–201, on the influence of Henry Focillon's La vie des formes (Paris: Leroux, 1934), English: The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan (New York: Wittenborn, 1948).
17 Carolee Schneemann, “Meat Joy Notes as Prologue,” in More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce McPherson, 2nd ed. (New York: McPherson, [1979] 1997), 64.
18 Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 64. “Istory” is a term often used by Schneemann to refer to an ungendered sense of time and history.
19 Lawrence Alloway, “Carolee Schneemann: The Body as Object and Instrument,” Art in America 68, no. 3 (March 1980): 21.
20 Schneemann to Naomi Levinson, March 12, 1958, in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 23.
21 For a description of the work, see Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 202–7; see also Kenneth White, “Meat Systems in Cologne,” Art Journal 74, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 56–77.
22 Bruce McPherson, “Introduction,” in Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, iv.
23 Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 56–57.
24 Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance. The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).
25 Ibid., 57.
26 Schneemann to Henry Sayre, July 15, 1986, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 365.
27 Schneemann to Naomi Levinson, February 1958, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 20–21.
28 Donald Kuspit, “The Triumph of Shit,” Artnet, September 2008, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit9-11-08.asp (accessed March 10, 2016).
29 Dan Tucker, “In the Flesh,” in Cameron, Carolee Schneemann, 5.
30 Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasure of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art,” Art in America 64, no. 3 (May–June 1976): 76. Amelia Jones expands on Lippard's argument in her discussion of “radical narcissism”: Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 47.
31 Schneemann to Naomi Levinson, May 28, 1958, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 28. The film Brakhage was making was Cat's Cradle (1959). Schneemann returns to this experience many times: in a letter to Robert Haller, October 23, 1977, she reports that the filming of Cat's Cradle “was an extremely frustrating event, in which I felt repressed, witnessed, appreciated but constrained” (287). See also 38, 266, and 303.
32 Schneemann to Stan Brakhage, October 31, 1958, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 18.
33 Schneemann to Philip Corner, June 17, 1962, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 59.
34 Four Fur Cutting Boards, 1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
35 “ISTORY OF A GIRL PORNOGRAPHER,” in Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 194; Schneemann's experience of “participation” in works of her male contemporaries, such as Robert Morris's Site of 1964, helped to cement this position. See Stiles, Correspondence Course, 414: she reflects that she was “immobilized and historicized … a form of historical embeddedness to be opened, revealed, re-situated by Bob's vision.”
36 See James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); and Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” in Formen der Selbstdarstellung: Festgabe für Fritz Neubert (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1956), 105–23.
37 James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 21.
38 Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers”, in Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.321.
39 “Autogynography” was a term coined by Donna C. Stanton in her essay “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?”, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donna C. Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5–22.
40 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women's Autobiographical Practices,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 6–7.
41 The influence of Schneemann's letters on Stan Brakhage's work has been discussed in James Boaden, “Revisiting Brakhage 3: Containing Carolee Schneemann,” LUX artists moving image, September 28, 2013, http://www.lux.org.uk/blog/revisiting-brakhage-3-containing-carolee-schneemann (accessed July 15, 2016).
42 Schneemann in conversation with the author, April 11, 2016.
43 Schneemann credits the film critic Scott Macdonald with giving the films the collective title Autobiographical Trilogy; see Stiles, Correspondence Course, 326, n. 151; and Scott Macdonald, “Carolee Schneemann's ‘Autobiographical Trilogy,’” Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 27–32.
44 Schneemann in conversation with the author, April 11, 2016.
45 For a discussion of media and embodied viewing in Viet Flakes, see Mignon Nixon, “Schneemann's Personal Politics,” in Breitwieser, Carolee Schneeman, 44–53.
46 Schneemann to Stan Brakhage, January 8, 1958, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 18–19; the Life Books held by Stanford date from the 1970s to the 1990s only.
47 Schneemann to Stan Brakhage, January 8, 1958, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 19.
48 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 10.
49 Brien Brothman, “DERRIDA, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Archivaria 1, no. 43 (1997): 190.
50 Stiles, Correspondence Course, 262, n. 380. McCullough quoted from his review, “Eat Movies,” San Francisco Express Times, February 25, 1969.
51 For a description of Schneemann's manipulations of the celluloid, see Kenneth White, “Introduction,” Millennium Film Journal, “Focus on Carolee Schneemann,” no. 54 (Fall 2011): 26.
52 Schneemann to Jonas Mekas, January 9, 1975, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 227.
53 Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 69.
54 Ibid., 69.
55 “From the Notebooks, London, July 1967,” in Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 124.
56 Catherine Lord, “Notes towards a Calligraphy of Rage,” in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), 442.
57 Schneemann in conversation with the author, April 11, 2016.
58 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 16.
59 Ibid., 8.
60 See Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Martha Barratt
MARTHA BARRATT is an art historian and curator and is Assistant Editor of the Burlington Magazine. Her scholarly interests are in performance art from the 1970s to the present day, with particular focus on feminist work and the use of text in performance. She studied for her MA at the University of Edinburgh in conjunction with Columbia University, New York. She writes regularly for The Burlington Magazine and for Apollo Magazine on modern and contemporary art.