On Carolee Schneemann's Snows Erica Levin I Say 'I Use Materials'

Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows Erica Levin I say ‘I use materials’ but I often sense that they use me as vision from which they re- emerge in a visual world which could not speak without them. At the same time in the art world today people often say, “I’m only interested in the useless.” The Fro- Zen, the expanse of slight sensation, the twist to existing conventions: not to be shocked, disturbed, startled, not to exercise the senses thoroughly… to be left as you were found, undisturbed, confirmed in all expectation. Not what is ‘useful’ but what moves me. —Carolee Schneemann, 19631 I begin with a statement by the artist Carolee Schneemann. Notice the strange formulation she uses to describe her relationship to materials: “they use me as vision.” Consider too the way this formulation resounds in the concluding phrase, “Not what is ‘useful’ but what moves me.” Written in 1963, the note speaks to the shift in her work from painting toward the production of large-scale assemblages, environmental collages, and performances undertaken in the context of happenings and the Judson Dance Theater. Four Fur Cutting Boards (1963), for example, employs materials left behind in the artist’s studio, a former furrier’s workshop. The large painted panels incorporate items that might well appear used up and useless: a dangling hubcap, a couple of ruined umbrellas, scraps of wood, fabric, and fur. For Schneemann however, use was not the measure of value that mattered. The distinct physicality of each found element within her composition solicits a form of looking that involves the body as much as the eye. Objects are echoed in form and color by broad sweeps of pigment keyed to the scale of the artist’s own body. The making of Four Fur Cutting Boards led Schneemann to explore the possibility of including her body itself “as an integral material” in the work.2 In Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), she takes up props such as mirror shards and live snakes to arrange herself into a series of evocative poses within a visual environment dominated by the large construction. The resulting photographs include her body, bare but for the occasional stripe of paint or smudge of chalk, as one material among others. Eye Body marked a significant turn in the exploration of what Schneemann called “the image values of flesh as material.”3 The phrase suggests less an interest in the abstract body as object, used for example in early happenings, than in the particular qualities of specific bodies. Glass Environment for Sound and Movement, a work she presented in May 1962 at the Living Theatre, was built around movements conceived for individual dancers based on “the particularities and contrasts between types, each seen as vivid, distinctive.”4 The score for Glass Environment underlines Schneemann’s focus on the way bodies convey different characteristics. One dancer was to keep her actions “small, round, compact, unselfconscious” while projecting “innocence and efficiency of temperament,” another was to cultivate “controlled wildness, poignant energy.”5 When Schneemann came to lend her own body, sensate and seeing, to Eye Body, the sense of being used “as vision” registered both the resulting reorientation of perspective, situated now within the work, as well as the experience of becoming visible as a body with its own image values and characteristics. This essay charts another important turn in her work a few years later, when instead of using photography as a means to incorporate the body into the work, photographic material itself became a question of use and vision. world picture 8 Carolee Schneemann, Snows, 1967 (Photo by Herbert Migdoll) In 1967 Schneemann staged a performance entitled Snows in protest of the Vietnam War. Here attention to “the image values of flesh” necessarily took on new, politically fraught, significance. To make a work in which the body figured as material required reckoning in some way with the proliferation of images in the press depicting bodies marked by the violence of war. Political protest at this moment put immense pressure on the most graphic of these images to convey the force of dissent. In what follows I consider Schneemann’s response to that pressure in Snows, particularly as it took up feedback to frame questions about empathy and its limits that earlier works had left unexplored. Schneemann produced Snows as part of the Week of Angry Arts, an artist-organized festival of anti-war dissent that took place in New York City in the winter of 1967.6 The program involved over forty performances and events by some five hundred artists.7 During that week of protest, photographs of Vietnamese villagers disfigured by napalm and shrapnel appeared at unexpected moments: in posters plastered all over the city, as slides interrupting a poetry reading held in a university auditorium, and as blown-up enlargements attached to the flatbed truck that served a caravan traveling neighborhood to neighborhood from the Village up to Harlem, bringing anti-war poetry and performance out into the wintry streets.8 The caravan distributed twelve thousand copies of a pamphlet featuring a child suffering from napalm burns on the cover.9 Inside it cited the primary source of these images. They came from an article by William F. Pepper entitled “The Children of Vietnam” published in the January 1967 issue of the popular New Left magazine Ramparts.10 Pepper’s essay offered a first-hand account of the devastating effects of American aerial bombing on Vietnam’s civilian population. It is remembered today for the impact it had on Martin Luther King Jr.’s 2 world picture 8 decision to publically link the Civil Rights struggle to a critique of the imperialist policies behind America’s involvement in Vietnam. The article contextualizes each photograph within the narrative of the author’s experiences at various medical facilities and relocation camps. In addition to documenting the dire conditions inside hospitals overrun with patients needing urgent care, the essay includes many images of everyday life among displaced Vietnamese citizens. The most graphic images appear as small black and white photographs at the outer margins of the page. During the Week of Angry Arts, these few images of extreme bodily disfiguration were the ones that were most often reproduced, blown up, and projected. Page from William Pepper’s “The Children of Vietnam.” The caption reads: “The ‘pacification’ program undertaken by the government of Premier Ky involves the relocation of large numbers of refuges from their ancestral homes to “New Life Hamlets.” The ‘hamlet’ pictured here was built on top of a huge garbage mound.” While a number of poets and other performers participated in disseminating the most disturbing of Pepper’s photographs far and wide, other participants in the Week of Angry Arts were less confident about the use of graphic media images to galvanize support for the anti-war cause. A full-day event entitled, “An Act of Respect for the Vietnamese People,” for example, implicitly questioned the impulse to let shocking photographs speak for themselves. Musicians played Vietnamese music. Susan Sontag read Buddhist texts. There were presentations about Vietnamese rivers, villages, food, and families. “Information not emotion was to be the medium,” concluded one reporter after interviewing the event’s organizers.11 Seen in this context, Schneemann’s Snows registers much of the same ambivalence about the use of emotionally charged images, while simultaneously suggesting equal uncertainty about the efficacy of information overload as a countervailing strategy.12 This doubt emerges even in the work’s title: Snows suggests numbness, blindness, the fear 3 world picture 8 that photographic overexposure depoliticizes violence making it feel as unstoppable or as inevitable as nature. At the same time, it evokes the idea of noise or static, the buzz of an interrupted signal or information lost to entropy. Given this doubt and ambivalence Schneemann might have chosen to make a work that left both journalistic images and information aside altogether. This was the tactic pursued by Yvonne Rainer, with whom Schneemann had collaborated in the early days of the Judson Dance Theater. Rainer’s contribution to the Week of Angry Arts, Convalescent Dance, was a solo version of a work that would by 1968 be known as Trio A.13 The dance unfolds as a single ongoing movement that continues without pause, departing from the choreographic convention of phrasing movement into units each with a beginning, middle, and end. Carrie Lambert-Beatty compares it to “asentencewithnospacesbetweenwords.”14 In Rainer’s own words: “What is seen is a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through prescribed motions.” But “the demands made on the body’s (actual) energy resources” only “appear to be commensurate with the task.”15 For the Week of Angry Arts, Rainer performed Convalescent Dance as a solo while in a shaky state of recovery from a serious illness. Evidence of the gulf Rainer’s work opens up between what is seen and the demands made on the dancer’s body surfaces in critic Clive Barnes’s description of the work as “a dance of tap and gesture yet with a sense of style and feeling so that Miss Rainer, in white pants and sweater, made the whole world seem wistfully delightful.”16 His review registers none of the vulnerability or frailty of a body performing while still in the throes of recovery. Lambert-Beatty

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