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The Obscene Body/Politic Author(S): Carolee Schneemann Source: Art Journal, Vol

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The Obscene Body/Politic Author(S): Carolee Schneemann Source: Art Journal, Vol The Obscene Body/Politic Author(s): Carolee Schneemann Source: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 4, Censorship II (Winter, 1991), pp. 28-35 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777320 Accessed: 29-08-2017 16:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Tue, 29 Aug 2017 16:47:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Obscene Body/Politic CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN subsumed, contorted. I would have to be "a spy in the house Bullets jectories of projectionof phallocratic apprehension are produce aimed our into our bodies: tra- of art."' "wounds." A smoking gun grasped in that frozen Clearly our lost and splintered history, and the ways we hand. There's a cock/dick tracing this Saturday Night Spe- now integrate our creativity and sexuality, have demanded cial directed at our "privates." Word play/gun play focus feminist explication. Women artists explore erotic imagery sexual frame-up, the dissolve, deception-the veritable because our bodies exemplify a historic battleground-we sleight of hand by which patriarchal culture constructs its are dismantling conventional sexual ideology and its punish- myths, imposes superstitions on "the facts of life." Projection ing suppressions-and because our experience of our bodies 28 deforms perception of the female body. As bizarrely conse- has not corresponded to cultural depiction. crated in Western creation myths as Athena emerging from Suppression and exclusion affected my early painting Zeus's head; as usurpative of Mother Right as the birth of in various confusing ways, starting with the acceptance and Dionysus from his father's thigh; as biologically contorted as then expulsion of a nude self-portrait from a student exhibi- a Lord Jesus born from the body of a virgin mother. Political tion at Bard College. In another incident, a painting of my and personal violence against women is twined behind/ companion (boyfriend, James Tenney), naked and asleep within this stunting defeminization of history. For many of us, (figs. 1 and 2), was the object of a joke by faculty and the layers of implicit and explicit censorship constructing our students concerning the inclusion of his penis (as an attribute social history combine with contemporary contradictions to of an actual male person they knew.) Next, a gallery invited force our radicalization. me to exhibit and then refused to hang a nude photographic Even though we live in the best of times-as our sequence titled Eye Body, made in 1963. It introduced reading, writing, research, and creative preeminence images of a shamanic ritual of the sacred erotic at a time when attest-one out of four of us will be subjected to rape; but we the female nude dwelled mainly in girlie magazines, porno- will not have been torn from our childhood sleep for a brutal graphic detective fictions, photographic reports on "primitive clitoral excision (still practiced in some Islamic cultures in natives," classical Western painting, Abstract Expressionist Africa, parts of Egypt and the Sudan, and most recently dis-memberments, and the iconic, frontal-spread paper dolls introduced into France by workers from these places). We of Pop art. Could there be any other erotic iconography? will not have endured the probable fifteen pregnancies of our In 1962 I created a loft environment, built of large fertile years (forbidden contraception or abortion); so we are panels of interlocked, rhythmic color units, broken mirrors less likely to have died giving birth; we will not be burned as and glass, lights, motorized umbrellas. I then wanted to witches or sold into slavery, and even the most transgressive combine my actual body with this work, as an integral among us may evade being locked up in an asylum. material-a further dimension to this construction, a ritu- The burgeoning recent work of women in the arts is alized set of physical transformations. The work that resulted fueled by three thousand years of fracture-the masculist was Eye Body: enforcement of self-righteous institutionalizations that have Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic, I establish my dogged our heels. My anger, when I first discovered this body as visual territory. Not only am I an image-maker, but I subtle and pervasive censorship, this excision, paralleled my explore the image values offlesh as material I choose to work later rage and confusion at being denied a feminine pronoun with. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring (The artist, he . Everyone will hand up his hat. but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke Creative man and his images) and upon discovering that my and gesture discovered by my creative female will.2 culture denies females an honorable genital. My sexuality was idealized, fetishized, but the organic experience of my Among the thirty-six "transformative actions" of Eye Body is own body was referred to as defiling, stinking, contaminat- a photograph of me; it is a frontal nude with two garden snakes ing. Bible study and graffiti under the train trestle shared crawlinga on my torso.3 The affinity of this image to that of the common deprecation. History, sexuality, and naming were Cretan serpent goddess only later became apparent to me as WINTER 1991 This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Tue, 29 Aug 2017 16:47:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms FIG. 1 Carolee Schneemann, Personae (J. T & 3 Kitch's), 1958, oil on canvas, 32 x 50 inches. Private collection. 29 FIG. 2 Carolee Schneemann, Fur Landscape, 1963, fur and house paint, 34 x 72 x 3 inches. Collection of the artist. my research into early gynocratic cultures deepened. The these roles both function as dumping grounds that cloud image is disturbing and attractive because of its association constructed differences between the erotic and the obscene. with an archaic eroticism, but its contemporary confrontation In 1964 censorship danced around my Kinetic Theater with taboos remains to be addressed. work Meat Joy, which I thought of as an erotic rite to enliven One of the startling aspects of this image of my naked my guilty culture. Conceived for the Festival of Free Expres- body is that it includes a visible clitoris. Western, masculist sion in Paris, organized by Jean-Jacques Lebel, it was first art history has been obsessed with the female nude, but theperformed there, at the Centre Culturel Am6ricain, then in image of a contemporary artist as a genitally sexed nude setsLondon, and then at Judson Memorial Church in New York, off a tireless round of inquisition: what is the meaning of this where I had choreographed for the Judson Dance Theater and "obscene" image? Why is it in the art world rather than developed a other Kinetic Theater works (fig. 4). I had in- "porno" world? Images such as this one from Eye Body tended the performers to be nude; the moral-decency rules in became classic referents as feminist art historians explored France at that time stipulated that naked male and female the sacred erotic, the shamanic body, and archetypal linkage performers were subject to arrest if they moved; they could to ancient goddess figures, which I had not yet seen in 1963 remain in the frozen positions of statues without breaking the (fig. 3). But the initial reaction of curators and critics I then law. In New York, moving or frozen nudes in public were respected was that these images were narcissistic and lewd. forbidden. I I devised scanty feather-and-fur coverings for our was told, "If you want to run around naked, don't bother the active group of nine performers. art world; if you want to paint, go and paint." In both the Paris and New York audiences, informants A measure of this Western psychosis was clarified from the local police stations and from various "moral- when I realized there were only two roles offered for me decency" to groups were present. A truncated version of the fulfill: either that of "pornographer" or that of emissary performance of at Vauxhall in London ended abruptly when Aphrodite. Both elude political and social affect insofar police as entered one door as we performers exited another, ART JOURNAL This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Tue, 29 Aug 2017 16:47:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms unexpectedly her research each equivalence is discovered Four Fur Cutting Boards (detail), 1963 Eye Body, 1963 kinetic painting Eye Body "Ice Box" (detail) Thirty-six transformative actions Thirty-six transformative actions: in kinetic-construction "Ice Box" into the archaic goddess figurations after months or after years Eye Body Thirty-six transformative actions: garden snakes Minoan priestess, 2000 B.C. From Body Collage, 1968 Owl goddess, New Guinea (serpent attributes) performance sequence revealed striking precedents for the energy which drove Still from Fuses, 1965 Sculpture, Zaire Still life from Fuses Lions mating 16-mm film orgasmic heads (self-shot) images of her lived actions concept to occupy her own body From Body Collage, 1968 Cretan ritual bull jumper, From Interior Scroll, 1976 Vulva goddess, Nigeria performance sequence 2000 B.C.
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