“Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.” —Carolee Schneemann
“I, too, overflow: … my body knows unheard-of songs.” —Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa
Carolee Schneemann’s solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery is a gift to Los Angeles. Her work, vision and fierce poetic intellect are not as well known here as they are in New York. Schneemann (1939–2019) is a profoundly important artist whose imagination encompassed a reinterpretation of art history through the lens of what she termed vulvic space. Through a feminine embrace of sexual power and the ecstasy of the flesh, she used her body as a vehicle and a metaphor to shape Dionysian works in performance, video, installation and sculpture. Her art expressed the belief that joy is a birthright, and from this vantage point she created works that are a profound search for freedom and a critique of the powers that seek to rob us of our freedom. Her full embrace of sensuality and sexual pleasure as feminine power informs her mythology and imbues her art with an ethos that resonates in the work of many contemporary female artists.
Schneemann was an early pioneering feminist artist whose orgiastic performance piece “Meat Joy” (1964) established her as an important artist, using her body to communicate mythic ideas and reshape art history. Fuses (1967), the experimental film that she made of herself and her partner, composer James Tenney, was a groundbreaking work. She wrote about the piece, “I began an erotic film, Fuses, in 1965, because no one else had dealt with the image of lovemaking as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement.” Her iconic piece “Interior Scroll,” in which she stood naked and read from a scroll of paper slowly drawn from her vagina and spoken aloud to an unsuspecting audience is one of her best-known works.
I first met Schneemann in an unusually fated way. During the grand opening of the new SFMOMA in 1995, I stepped outside to escape the crowd and get some fresh air. I noticed a woman in the group standing outside who seemed to be having a problem. She began to faint, and I ran over and caught her in my arms. It was Carolee. We became intimate friends, and several months later, at a party in her loft on West 29th Street in New York, I met my future wife, the artist Aline Mare. Coincidentally, the major installation piece in the Lisson exhibition, “Video Rocks” (1987), was installed in her loft at that party long ago. She was still thinking about changes she might make to it for an upcoming show.
Schneemann was guided by dreams, intuition, visions and a fierce intellect. Indeed, her writings are some of the finest critical thinking seeking to deconstruct the historical canon and place the body, both female and male, as the vector point through which oppressive forces of cultural control distort the flesh and its natural innate desires. Her art was a method to, as she wrote, “go back to the body, which is where all the splits in Western Culture occur.” She used her body as a medium and a weapon to challenge the norms of society.
The “Video Rocks” installation in this exhibition and the 50-foot-long painted scroll on paper, which may have been a study for this piece, attest to her visionary process. While visiting Los Angeles in 1985 she had a dream of rock-like shapes that suggested Monet’s “Water Lillies” hovering in the distance. She created a group of 180 mounds that look like cow patties. They are grouped together on the floor with four brightly colored plastic tubes lighting the piece from above. Behind this are five video monitors placed on the floor, showing footage of people and animals from the ankles down walking across these mounds, stepping carefully from one mound to another.
This approach to using ordinary movement as a form of natural choreography reflects her involvement with the artists, dancers and choreographers at Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. It is an extension into video of her project to “vitalize the whole body as gesture in dimensional space.” The work fills half of the gallery; the mounds suggest stepping stones in a pond. The video conveys a sense of passage from one realm to another: with each step one feels the weight of those walking, grounding and transferring a feeling of gravity to the physical sculptures.
Her paintings from the Dust Series in this exhibition express her horror at the death and devastation wrought by the war in Lebanon during the 1980s. A density of sorrow pervades these desolate surfaces, the electronic board a bleak cipher of a civilized world whose wondrous technological innovations are used to wreak havoc upon one another. Schneemann was a complex person and artist: she expressed grief and sorrow in her political works, and in contrast, explored the innate joy of life in one’s body free from the shadow of human misdeeds and the constraints of a patriarchal culture.
Her career gained attention in the 1960s and ’70s but waned for a couple of decades. Near the end of her life, as her recognition grew, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her lifetime achievements, and a major retrospective traveled through Europe and was exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York.
All of her work was an extension of painting into physical space. Her masterpiece “Up To and Including Her Limits” (1973–76), was in part an innovative leap of imagination from Jackson Pollock: using painting as a performative physical process and pushing it further, into the body as a sensual and sexual actant, leaving traces of longing, desire and memory in the marks left from her action.
Schneemann conceived of vulvic space as a place of power and wrote from this philosophical viewpoint to reinterpret art history, repositioning the female body/mind/spirit as central to the creation of art from the Paleolithic era to the present. Schneemann wrote eloquently about this profound reinterpretation of cultural history in her brilliant book Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects.
“I first wrote about ‘vulvic space’ in 1960… I chose to do research on the ‘Transmigration of the Serpent,’ never suspecting that the transmutation of serpent symbolism in the wall paintings, carvings, inscriptions of ancient cultures—this traditionally ‘phallic’ symbolism—would lead me to a concept of vulvic space… I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers.”
This exhibition is a window into one of the myriad rooms comprising the palace of Schneemann’s complex and mythic imagination. She was a powerful being whose work encompassed a profound search for physical and psychic freedom, sexual agency and a fury toward the forces of history and human nature that seek to control and destroy.