In the beginning—painting. The palette of Cézanne shoved through a kitchen blender. Thick and hasty brush strokes fly out from two dislocated centres, flushed reds intersect verdant crescents, the occasional bleeding iris is contraposed against an ochre canvas. Squint and you might think something dreadful had happened to a parrot. Pinwheel (1957) is hung off axis, inviting you to tilt your head one way, then the other, shifting your weight from hip to hip to find its pole. This is no mistake but an experiment in rotation: an artwork produced and designed to be exhibited on a potter’s wheel, spun by the viewer. Now you must attempt the spinning yourself, awkwardly contorting at the beginning of the exhibition. It’s a first lesson in the work of Carolee Schneemann: when the eye moves, so must the body.
‘Body Politics’, the retrospective of Schneemann’s work held at the Barbican in London this autumn-winter, opens with the paintings and drawings she completed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while a student first at Bard College, then Columbia, then the University of Illinois. Personae: J.T. and Three Kitchs (1957) is a portrait of her long-term partner, the composer James Tenney, whose figure emerges from the same dazzle of late-summer shades used in Pinwheel, languorous on a couch, guarded, stalked and tackled by multiple iterations of the couple’s cat, Kitch. These are the works of a painter training at the high noon of Abstract Expressionism; in Firelights (1960) we see traces of Elaine de Kooning’s influence on the twenty-one-year-old artist—jet conjurations of figures, temporary as flames, emerge through interstices of pink and gold—while in Tenebration (1961) the washed blues of Helen Frankenthaler linger under scavenged materials of fabric, pins and mesh.
This first room will surprise those whose knowledge of Schneemann derives from her later works—films, photographs and performances which, as the exhibition title suggests, centre on her use of her own, often naked, body as well as those of lovers and co-performers. It was this relaxed approach to nudity—or rather a failure to be shamed by it—that led to her transfer, as an undergraduate art student, from Bard College to Columbia University; she had used not only her male partner but also herself as a life model, an indiscretion that would become foundational to both her practice and her self-mythology. In 1991, reflecting on her belief in the inextricable relation between sexuality and creativity, she wrote, ‘I posit my female body as a locus of autonomy, pleasure, desire, and insist that as an artist I can be both image and image maker, merging two aspects of a self deeply fractured in the contemporary imagination’.footnote1
Despite her later turn to other media, Schneemann never ceased to describe herself as a painter, though her works quickly escaped the rectangular walls of the canvas. In Colorado House (1962), shown in the exhibition’s second room, it is in fact the remnants of paintings—the dismembered stretcher bars of ‘failed’ landscapes made while staying with Tenney in the Rockies one summer six years prior—that provide the sculptural form for the work. Though the title suggests a full domestic structure, the reality is two frames arranged as if in parody of a threshold—one leads to the other, neither granting exit nor entry. A whisky bottle has fallen between them, tangles of wiring adorn the upper corners as do slivers of fur, while a canvas banner with a handful of scrawled stars leans over the work. It’s a pastiche of frontier life—how many states even are there these days? Who cares, shrugs the flag—whose Western theme is taken up again in Fur Wheel (1962)—mounted next to Colorado House—Schneemann’s mechanised reprise of Pinwheel’s rotating motif. A lampshade is studded with glass and decked out in pellets, adorned with tinkering cans flattened by trucks as they passed Schneemann’s studio, and set spinning by an electrical mechanism wired through the work—Davy Crockett’s hat as midtown living room centrepiece. Here, the North American Interior merges with the American domestic—two locations whose mythologies are riddled with barely sublimated violence, yet in Schneemann’s work were also sources of pleasure and poiesis. Throughout her career, she would return to the paradoxical threshold position of Colorado House, poised at the frame’s edge, mapping the interdependence of the personal and sexual freedoms of late-twentieth-century Americans with the militarism foundational to their nation’s global hegemony.
Schneemann’s studio was not perched high in the Rockies but rather on West 29th Street on the edge of New York’s Garment District, ‘a vast, filthy old furrier’s loft’ that she rented for $68 a month from 1961 for most of her working life. Splitting her time between there and the eighteenth-century farmhouse she inherited in New Paltz, halfway between nyc and Albany, with Tenney and subsequent partners, the coordinates of her life corresponded to a certain ideal of the New York modern artist. In pictures of the pair, which comprise a significant amount of Schneemann’s autobiographical ‘Life Books’—a series of scrapbooks treated with a reverential grandiosity by the Barbican exhibitionfootnote2—they are the quintessential beatnik couple: she is strikingly beautiful and long-limbed, with the poise and photogenic qualities of a young Elizabeth Taylor; he an impish James Dean in a white T-shirt, a curl of hair permanently falling over his eyes as he puffs on endless cigarettes. Schneemann never denied charges of self-objectification but rather, as we shall see, attempted to make a practice of narcissism by claiming for herself a dual position of both object and subject—denying the pejorative associations of auto-portraiture through a rejection of the Cartesian split: ‘I do not “show” my naked body! I AM BEING MY BODY’, she wrote to a friend, outraged at years of misinterpretation by feminist critics who opposed the central role she assigned to her own image in her work.footnote3
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963), room four in the Barbican show, is the indisputable ‘turning point’ of Schneemann’s work, a series of gelatin silver portrait prints of the artist shot by the Icelandic photographer Erró. In the series, Schneemann, nude, melds with the materials of her studio, in one image pulling the face of a petulant clown, her head draped in rope braids, her neck replaced by speckled wood; in another she holds a light fixture—material for Fur Wheel?—against her torso as if preparing to try it on. While the images resist narrative interpretation, they nevertheless draw on a cinematic imagery that evokes the melodrama of early Hollywood (Schneemann’s skin is lit to an almost perfect white, only streaks of grease and chalk marking her body against the pitch black studio walls).
In the most celebrated (and reproduced) image from Eye Body, she holds several shards of glass against her face—almost certainly an allusion to Maya Deren, whom Schneemann knew in New York in the late 1950s, in the short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).footnote4 Schneemann’s face is multiplied across the glass, and further reproduced by her overlaying of other ‘shards’ of photo over the initial print: the end result is a refraction in a knife’s edge, the artist menacing herself in perfect isolation. In Deren’s film, made with her then-husband Alexander Hammid, her own image is replicated around a sunlit Los Angeles home after being reflected in a knife—an enchanted weapon she uses to shatter the mirrored mask worn by a ghoulish intruder, both herself and her male lover. For Schneemann there is no other referent, no man against or by whom the machetes of glass might be used in a violent trance, only her own face multiplied in a mirrored weapon. ‘Not only am I an image maker, but I create the image values of my flesh as material I choose to work with’, she wrote in 1976—demanding that her work be seen as an autonomous expression of her singular creativity, rather than a reaction to or rejection of what she called the ‘Art Stud Club’, to which women were admitted ‘so long as they behaved enough like the men, did work clearly in the traditions & pathways being hacked out by the men.’footnote5