Introduction “My Love I Found Two Lovers: Dancing Stone Each Other.”13

introduction “My love I found two lovers: dancing stone each other.”13 Carolee Schneemann wrote this sentence to the composer James Tenney in a letter in 1958. Presenting lovers as if entwined in dance, she located the pair in the context of the inimitable barrier of a stone, bur- dened with its immobility. The incongruity of a “dancing stone” left the rhythmical words open to layers of meaning and multiple interpreta- tions, rescuing them from sentimentality, even as Schneemann offered Tenney an expression of passion. Such is the evocative quality of her letters, epistles through which readers encounter a complex personality simultaneously eloquent and incisive, emotional and rigorous, tender and fierce, confrontational and shy, yielding and intransigent, cautious and spontaneous, as well as determined, energetic, courageous, and full of sorrow and joy. Schneemann’s thoughts ebb and flow in her letters, emphasizing aesthetic associations of language over precise meaning, all the while de- livering information, insight, and reasoned argument. Most of all, her letters are poetic. Indeed, poets were the first to grasp Schneemann’s ability to create a seductive fleshy prose, condensing feeling and experience into expressive, distilled textual form. The poet Robert Kelly was the first to publish Schneemann’s writings in 1963,14 followed by the poets Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin in 1965,15 and the poet Clayton Eshleman in 1969.16 When asked about the qualities that she believed poets admired in her style, Schneemann observed: “They recognized the density of the levels, the erotic texture of meanings—simultaneously tactile, metaphoric, and historical. The words were not just a surface, and their power evoked associations beyond the words them- selves and positioned deep images. This was something like the deep 13. Carolee Schneemann (hereafter CS) to James Tenney, 18 March 1958. Tenney died on 24 August 2006. This book celebrates their long devotion to, and lifelong love of, one another. 14. CS, “Hormones Circling” in Kelly’s mimeographed journal Matter (1963): unpaginated. 15. CS, “Meat Joy Notes as Prologue,” Some/Thing 1, no. 2 (winter 1965): 29–45. 16. CS, “Notations, 1958–1966,” Caterpillar 8–9 (1969): 30–44. image poetry of Antin and Rothenberg. I should add that my sixth grade teacher, Rose Wachter, had us do Eng lish five hours a day. I learned about poetry from her. You had to write an essay every week and read it to the group in sixth grade. For punishment you would be sent out in the fields to play. She read to us each day from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, and Shakespeare.”17 Thinking about the historic relationship between painters and poets, the sculptor Clara Westhoff Rilke wrote in 1945: “One of the princi- pal forces of modern art was recognized by a poet.”18 She referred to her husband, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and to Paul Cézanne. Reflecting on Rilke’s understanding of Cézanne’s paintings, she remembered that he visited a Cézanne exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim- Jeune in Paris nearly every day in the fall of 1907. As Rilke himself explained, these visits were “the turning point” in his understanding of painting and his appreciation that “pictures demand one’s participation.”19 The relationship between Rilke’s discernment of the significance of painting as a medium for connecting art and life and Schneemann’s sup- port by poets, who grasped the participatory poetic form of her writing and visual production, is not accidental. Schneemann’s first muse was Cézanne. She even titled her first artist’s bookCézanne, She Was A Great Painter (1974). Schneemann grasped the implications of Cézanne’s bro- ken line and the fracture of continuity between forms such that the space between definitions equivocated in incremental energy. Art historians refer to this tactile approach in Cézanne’s work as passage, or the inter- penetration of planes created by his short brush strokes that lock the picture surface together in a tightly interwoven structure while simultaneously providing movement throughout. It could be said, in this regard, that Schneemann translated the virtual kinetics of Cézanne’s passages into a dialogue between the eye and the body in space, seeing momentum where the physicality of perception could be felt as movement. The same is true of her understanding of Jackson Pollock’s strokes, where the body follows the eye into the momentum of line. Indeed, Schneemann called her version of happenings “kinetic theater” for how her work em- phasized bodily movement and corporeal interaction. Schneemann’s interest in movement transferred to her letters as well. 17. CS in conversation with the author, 8 June 1994. 18. Clara Rilke, ed., Rainer Maria Rilke Letters on Cézanne, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1985), xvii. 19. Ibid., xxii. introduction xxvi Stringing together lush adjectives, she used words as kinetic forms to express her ideas to correspondents. Portraying a student’s “pastel and shell sculptures,” for example, she commented: “So I take an opposite tack to the eager ideas to combine the white sculpture with the dark silky depth of the pastels . the reason you have them so close may not be to include or make a border, but to concentrate on the differences . to keep examining the bleached bone white plaster configured dimensionally by turning fingers: rolling, roping, pushing convexity, concavity into small fixed fantasy shapes. They are pleasing to touch for the eye to traverse.”20 In order to animate and visualize a plain noun like “plaster,” Schneemann linked adjective to adjective without punctuation, helping her reader experience the flow of plaster’s chalky quality and to see it as “bleached bone white.” One feels, senses, and inhabits the palpability of the material through her language. Then, just as the object comes into view, Schneemann activates it with the body as it is “configured dimensionally by turning fingers.” These fingers begin “rolling, roping, pushing” and moving the object into both “convexity” and “concavity” in order to make “small fixed fantasy shapes” endowed with embodied humanity. Body and object of art come to life through Schneemann’s words. Emphasizing the haptic qualities of sight, which finds her student’s objects “pleasing to touch for the eye,” Schneemann helps the reader’s imagination traverse its form as if the thing could be touched. A touch for the eye is exactly how the artist imagined an erotic inter- change between her own body and those of her spectators, as much as the word on the page linked her at a distance to a correspondent kin- esthetically. Understanding such an approach and its tie to “personal meaning,” the poet Robert Kelly observed that the “philosophical direction” of Schneemann’s work was “an Amerithing, a touch of Emer- son, a clear honest yearning towards hanging the completed work right up there, on the chandelier (life an Irish Party)”; he further described Schneemann as “a writer, a diagnost of our malaises & a deft spokes- woman of the priority of personal meaning above all. Her written texts work vigorously as a fusion of personal planh21 & the most outrageous outward! Social! Invention! [Kelly’s emphasis].”22 20. CS to Jan Peacock, 28 December 1994. 21. The “planh” was a medieval funeral lament sung by troubadours for secular audi- ences, which was current between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. It is impossible to fix precisely Kelly’s meaning; one can say only that he suggests that in addition to being audacious, Schneemann expressed a form of personal grief in her art. 22. Robert Kelly, “American Direction,” in More Than Meat Joy (New Paltz, N.Y.: Docu- mentext, 1979), 264. introduction xxvii A more practical consequence of Schneemann’s literary abilities was that she theorized the meaning of her own work long before it received serious critical attention. But she did so first and foremost in intimate letters to friends where she discussed her perceptions, processes, pref- erences, and practices. As Schneemann’s renown grew, she developed her theoretical ideas further in epistolary conversations with critics, scholars, and other artists. In this regard, Schneemann belongs to a group of artists associated with the first generation of happenings and Fluxus in the late 1950s through the mid-19 60s that theorized their own art in texts that inspired younger artists, laying the practical and theoretical foundation for body and performance art.23 These artists’ ca- pacity to explicate their own work challenged received aesthetic meanings and critical assumptions about artistic intention and also directly shaped the reception of their art and careers. In essays and letters, Schneemann discussed the changed conditions for making art, offering penetrating and insightful assessments of aesthetics, culture, and society that functioned as tutorials on the politics of culture. She also conducted protracted letter campaigns aimed at promoting an engaged performative paradigm, one that might move aesthetic concepts away from ossified models of art (such as the notion that art must remain autonomous and at an aesthetic distance from its audience). Furthermore, the model that Schneemann advanced would be foundational—however unacknowledged—for “relational aesthetics,” a theory of performance and socially engaged practices that emerged over four decades after she and others of her circle pioneered politically engaged and charged, interactive art.24 It must be said

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