|
Double
Trouble, continued
By Kathleen Wentrack
Personal/Life Processes
Schneemann's personal experiences, and life itself, intertwine through her artistic endeavors slowly making their way into work she exhibits publicly. Her project is a courageous one. The artist exposes herself not just physically at times, but emotionally and intellectually, challenging the viewer on many levels.
Fuses (1967) is one of the earliest and most striking films made by the artist. She explores new territory in the delicious handling of female sexuality and pleasure, and the ecstasy of a loving relationship. Filmed by Schneemann at home over a period of three years, scenes capture intimate moments of the artist's relationship with James Tenney. She was both filmmaker and participant in the action while engaged in heterosexual erotics. Some of the short montages of one to three seconds show the couple kissing, stroking, hugging, making love, and giving/receiving oral sex, while other images reveal details of genitals, scenes of their home, the cat watching, the beach, and views from their window. It feels like an album in motion yet seen through the distance that memory automatically brings to images held in our mind's eye. Schneemann achieves this effect through the use of short clips, the overlaying of scenes, and the physical treatment of the film itself-marking it with heat, acid, scratches and paint. As the artist describes:
| Explicit sexual imagery propels the formal structure of
Fuses…Fuses is very formal in how it is shaped; that was crucial to making it have a coherent muscular life. Visualized erotic, active bodies deflect the very structures which shape montage: viewers are distracted by the simultaneity of perceptual layers
Fuses offers. 11 |
Schneemann captures and shares lived experience, heterosexual sexuality from a woman's point of view. No woman artist had approached sex is such a direct and liberating manner. The personal had entered the art world through the feminist art movement in the 1970s, but Schneemann was there first with work like
Fuses and Eye/Body. The identity politics of the 1980s addressing issues of race and class would have been unthinkable without the art of Schneemann and other feminists. To work as "image and image maker" as she has often said, her person became integrated with the work.
|
At a moment in her life when relationships were in flux in 1976, Schneemann began recording her observations and those of friends. To examine layered contradictions and meaning, she developed a work that would chart the process,
ABC: We Print Anything - In the Cards. |
Click image to view
|
...
| Every dilemma of our life is in there, every contradiction. It was a wonderful piece to be able to create, because it came out of such chaos. My partner was leaving me and strange enough it seemed like I was falling in love with someone else. It was so confusing. So when people would talk on the phone they would give me advice…I would write that down and drop it in the drawer…Finally I looked in this drawer and I had all these notes piled up and thought maybe I could do something with this.12 |
The work consisted of two parts: a performance presented on several occasions and an artist's book in an unconventional format. Schneemann states that her performance in
Holland - at De Appel and at the Festival of Performance Art in Arnhem, both in June of
1977 - was important because it marked the full integration of three projected elements.
|
Click image to view
|
One element was slides of text she accumulated related to the life processes she was experiencing, the second was the accompanying photographs and a third was a blank screen in front of which she performed. |
Just prior to the event in Arnhem, Schneemann dreamt of a large, upholstered, gray chair and when she arrived at the location for the first time, there it was. Struggling with the chair as an inanimate partner, she moved across, on and around it while reading the texts in a direct, unmodified voice allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the information presented.
Schneemann collected cards of statements and photographs to use as the performance in
ABC, which could even be described as a book in a performance format.13
|
Click image to view
|
Published in 1977, the "book" form contains 318 index-sized cards arranged with one text card followed by a photograph card (139 in total), all placed in a handmade, blue, cloth box tied with a ribbon.14
Jan Brand, organizer of the Festival of Performance Art, was the driving force behind the book's publication. |
The text is printed on three different colored cards: the pink cards contain comments by friends; the yellow are diary extracts and elements of her dreams that reveal truths; and the blue cards contain comments by
A - the partner who was leaving, B - the one who was arriving and C - Schneemann herself.15 Schneemann intended this loose card format to allow for an open-ended reading of the work by shuffling the cards and reading them in a chosen or random order:
| I ordered the sequence very carefully in terms of elements of the time. I wanted one of the cards to say now you can shuffle. So I needed to establish an order and it has to do with certain kinds of rhythms and implications and dynamics within the statements and the fragments of the relationships. But then it's planned so that anyone can shuffle it, just like a deck of cards. You can start anywhere and end up anywhere. It's a broken novel. |
The cards, however, are numbered, so that one knows the intended order. Numerous conversations and stories intertwine and separate as a story line starts then picks up several cards later. The fragmentedness inclines the viewer/reader to make relationships between cards, and between cards and photographic images to understand the complex interrelationships taking place. But they continually change, reflecting life's processes, as if one were experiencing the relationships and uncertainties.
|
The photographs date from the year prior to the performance and often reference the text. For example, "A. told C., that he'd insist on just one
thing - B. was not to wear his moccasins," is accompanied by a photograph of those same
moccasins. |
Click image to view
|
Other conversation excerpts of daily life can be accompanied by a photograph of Schneemann with A. or B. offering insight into the dynamics of the relationships.
|
Click image to view
|
Other images include ancient goddess sculptures reflecting the artist's research of early matriarchal civilizations. One intriguing story line reveals Schneemann's personal sexual desires.16 |
Other times the references are more oblique, a nude image of Schneemann is paired with "The women agreed their energies should be directed to their personal strengths and creative will, not to an idea of 'happiness.'" This type of statement is indicative of feminist declarations found at various points
throughout the text.17
| The title of the performance work and book offers numerous connotations.
"ABC" not only represents the protagonists of the narrative, it references childhood learning and the education process of those involved. |
Click image to view
|
"We Print Anything" speaks to the unusual subject matter played out through the cards, the unfolding of an intimate and difficult moment of a relationship ending and the tentative beginning of a new one.
"In The Cards" adds a sense of prophecy as if the stars knew the outcome and they could be revealed in the cards.
Click
to continue...
home
||
news
|| conversation
|| gallery
||
archive
|| contact
us
|| about
All
images, text and graphics on the artwomen.org website
are protected by copyright.
All artists' and writers' work protected by individual copyright.
All rights reserved.
www.artwomen.org
website
design by
digiMuse
© 2000, 2001
|
