Needlework on Water: On the Cinematography of Carolee Schneemann
Needlework on Water: On the Cinematography of Carolee Schneemann
by Lital Dotan
Carolee Schneemann- Interior Scroll - The Cave (Image: Carolee Schneemann, 1994)
It all began with a comment. I was working with a team of artist-curators[1] to organize a show at the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, a historic remnant of an industrial era of the Hudson Valley region in New York, when a friend commented, “Oh, Carolee Schneemann filmed Interior Scroll there.”. This sparked an almost year-long project of diving into Carolee Schneemann’s ocean of archives, stories, writing and persona. Schneemann, for fifty years, lived nearby on Springtown Road in New Paltz, where I moved a few months after her passing.
Watching Schneemann’s films now, some short weeks after the historic reversal of the Roe-vs-Wade ruling by the Supreme Court, feels especially urgent. Tapping into works that were done as a protest, as a provocative critique of a male-dominated cultural era, during the late ’50s to early ’70s, when women who chose not to have kids had to go through traumatizing processes to maintain their choice of how to live. In her letters[2] Schneemann discusses in detail her first abortion in Cuba in 1959, one of several that would follow: “he pours an orange douche, of local anesthetic. Silvery clamps and pinchers, the sensation of being meat or wood held for chopping. And the ‘inside’ pain for which I find no correlatives.”[3] This description gives a whole new meaning to her seminal work Meat Joy (1964), shedding light on the layered personal, cultural and social threads which compose each of her works. To her, at that time, giving birth would mean giving up her art, and she wasn’t going to let that happen. As a young artist I remember following a similar path of thinking, until I made the radical choice of becoming a mother and artist after all. Radical is always relational, but thanks to artists like Schneemann, Marina Abramovic or Tracey Emin, I was able to make it a real and well-informed choice.
To understand Schneemann’s cinema fully, it is crucial to mention the formative relationship between Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney (her partner at the time) and Stan Brakhage.
“Brakhage is the first friend that Jim brings to me,” Schneemann recalls, “and that was fabulous… the three of us had this sense that we were going to carry major strands of change,” writes Schneemann. “We were obnoxious, visionary kids. I was going to transform the visual world. Jim was going to radicalize sound, and Stan was going to open thresholds of poetry and film.” “My relationship with Stan was always full of stress and ambivalence,” Schneemann admits. “That was terrific, harsh, loving, and very complicated, because Jim was Stan’s great love[4].
In creating the program for an outdoor screening of Schneemann’s films at Rosekill Farm in the Hudson Valley, I wanted to emphasize several core relationships in her works: that of an activist who responds to socio-political events with careful provocation, that of a female artist who attempts to reform painting (cinema, dance, sculpture and performance as an extension of painting, being both an image and image maker), and that of an artist who formalistically rejects boundaries- between art and life, personal and political or human and non-human relations. These entanglements appear in many of her films as layers, assembled with a seemingly whimsical aesthetic.
The first film in the program is Water Light/Water Needle (1966). This was an outdoor cinematic adaptation of a “kinetic theater” work first staged at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, with eight performers responding to prompts by the artist. The natural scene and camera movement brings to mind Maya Deren’s third film, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). In it Deren explored the direct relationship between movement, space, and the camera, with dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty fluidly dancing across place and time, from one location to another in defiance of geographic possibility.
Schneemann was nineteen when she met Deren and discovered Deren’s kindred passion for the exploration of myth, ritual, and female desire, as well as her ability to be both “camera eye and subject” of her films.[5]
"I was shocked by Maya’s singular struggle, her lack of money and that the attention of three ardent, naïve young artists could have value for her. I was shocked by Stan’s expectations that Maya, as the adult woman should feed us, provide care. We smoked her cigarettes, drank her whiskey, and ate bowls of noodles she prepared while she painfully debated if she should project for us her original 16mm footage of Haitian rituals. She had not been able to raise funds for prints of the rhapsodic and fierce shamanic dance entrancements, which she had been invited to join and to film[6].”
With Schneemann’s piece the singular became plural- not one dancer but a group, not a single tree that defines movement but many, a rope stretched between them, shifting between choreography in the woods and inside a lake, between movement and rest.
Body Collage (1967) is probably the purest manifestation of Schneemann’s vision that an artist could be both an image and an image maker. It documents a “paper environment” in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, turning her body into a canvas, becoming a living collage. This event was by invitation to photographers only, who “will get what they can- like a drawing class”[7]- and from their footage, utilizing their gaze, Schneemann created an invitation for an upcoming show at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. By setting this fluidity between roles and disciplines Body Collage becomes a revelatory step in understanding the Schneemann vocabulary and critique of the male gaze. .
We continue the program with Interior Scroll — The Cave (1995), filmed at the vast cave of Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale. Schneemann and seven nude women perform the ritualized actions of Interior Scroll — reading the text as each woman slowly extracts a scroll from her vagina. This film, which is the only cinematic version of Schneemann’s seminal performance Interior Scroll (1975), re-contextualizes Schneemann’s original solo performance into her language of collage and group work, bringing this piece closer to Meat Joy (1964), bringing forth the strength of Schneemann as a choreographer of complex events that are always, in her eyes, a collage, a painting.
The most recent work in this compilation is Infinity Kisses — The Movie (2008) which completes Schneemann’s exploration of human and feline sensual communication, reminding us that in Schneemann’s work, “the cat is the medium.”[8]
Fuses (1964–67) is the last film in the program. Schneemann’s self-shot erotic film which premiered in Cannes in 1967 garnered both controversy and deep respect wherever it went. First referred to by Schneemann as a “genital landscape film,”[9], this erotic, erratic collage of the intimate relationship between her and her then partner James Tenney is in fact a calculated essay or critique that responds to a cinematic language developed by Stan Brakhage, following a dissatisfaction10 of the way she was portrayed in Brakhage’s films Loving (1957) and Cats Cradle (1959). In Fuses Schneemann addresses the phallocentric repression of the female principle in avant-garde culture, reclaiming authorship over the female representation of heterosexual eroticism.”
We are watching the films projected on a barn in the woods, behind us is a lake, very similar to that depicted in Water Light/Water Needle. Schneemann was a master of blending everyday joy with the serious perception of art. It feels right, in today’s climate which denounces women’s authorship over their bodies, to celebrate Schneemann’s work in this empowering context. Immersed in this setting, the works become an accumulating proposition, a call to action rather than an invitation for a passive view of what is unfolding before us.
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This text was written by Lital Dotan as a companion to an outdoor screening of films by Carolee Schneemann in July 2022, as part of Glasshouse’s programming under “‘The Captive Spectator: On the Otherhood in Motherhood.” Special thanks to the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Rosekill Farm for supporting the project.
Notes:
[1] an/aesthetics is a sculpture show organized by Jeff Benjamin, Michael Asbill, Emilie Houssart, Marielena Ferrer and myself, initially intended to work around the Widow Jane Mine and Century House Historical Society’s Snyder Estate, until it relocated to Rosekill Art Farm.
[2] Kristine Stiles, Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (London: Duke University Press, 2010).
[3] Ibid., p. 32.
[4] Eric Smigel , “Metaphors on Vision: James Tenney and Stan Brakhage, 1951–1964,” American Music 30, no. 1 (Spring 2012), p. 67.
[5] Sally Berger, “Maya Deren’s Legacy,”, published in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York : Museum of Modern Art, 2010), p. 307.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Correspondence Course, p. 127.
[8] Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “The Cat Is My Medium: Notes on the Writing and Art of Carolee Schneemann,”, Art Journal, 74, no. 1, (2015),. pp. 5–22.
[9] Correspondence Course, p. 95.
[10] David E. James, “Carolee Schneemann: Fuses,” Millennium Film Journal; 54 (Fall 2011), p. 61.