Sense and Sensuality: Carolee Schneemann and Feminist Art

Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essay, Interviews, Projects,The MIT Press, 2002; Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt, survey by Peggy Phelan, Phaidon, 2001.

These are books about the pleasure of the text in the widest sense. They are each sumptuously produced, visually pleasurable books that engage in intriguing ways with the pleasure of making art and the pleasure of challenging ideas. This doesn't mean that they celebrate naive and essentialist notions of what feminism is, or what it means to be a woman artist, in fact quite the contrary. It means that they foreground pleasure, wit, and subversion at that strange moment in our culture when the dynamism of popular feminism has faded. In one sense they act as correctives. In another sense they each acknowledge these new historical circumstances, and seem, in different ways, to speak back to them.

The cover of the large format Art and Feminism is striking. The front face is orange and black, topped with a half-page reproduction from one of the three parts of Genevieve Cadieux's "Hear Me with Your Eyes," a sensuous black-and-white close-up photograph of a woman's lips, her mouth open as if to speak. The back shows a full color detail from Nancy Spero's "Codex Artaud," where women's tongues swell into gold phallic forms against a background the color of vellum. What is chosen to "frame" Art and Feminism here on the cover is art that engages with subjectivity and the body in complex ways, informed by theory. It engages with the mouth and tongue and, in witty metonymies, with the eye. They are images taken from art works that embrace the viewer's pleasure and fear, euphoria and horror. They are graphic. They use varied means—photography, typescript, collage, quotation—they engage with the gaze, with tactility, texture, and expressivity and what they clearly enfold is a text that could not exist without feminism, neither outside its boundaries nor without its informing influence.

It's an interesting and in some ways a challenging choice, and it places a particular kind of feminist practice in a privileged position. Feminist art—with its historical rejection of clear stylistic traits, its refusal of categories, its pluralism and eclecticism—is a broad, inclusive domain. The speculative work of Spero and Cadieux clearly speaks within the frame of contemporary, international art. It isn't illustrative of feminist ideas, but exceeds easy categorization, activating a wide range of associations, and it is not iconic. The editors might also have chosen Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum, Eva Hesse, Niki de Saint Phalle, or Cindy Sherman. It is also clear that they would not have chosen Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, or Carolee Schneemann, who are all also excellent artists and who are included here. What is intereresting is how some important work has become overdetermined in the context of discussions about feminism, through the contexts of its extensive reproduction—and that is something I want to consider more closely.

The cover lists the 155 included artists. Like all the Phaidon books in this series it combines a section of full color images accompanied by short excerpted texts, with a section of critical and documentary writings. Each book is introduced by its researcher/editor and is prefaced by a substantial critical survey from a well-known writer in the field, in this case Peggy Phelan. Editor Helena Reckitt has divided the book into six sections: Too Much, Personalizing the Political, Differences, Identity Crises, Corporeality, and Femmes de Siècle. Now curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Museum, a former book editor and talks director at the ICA in London, Reckitt has the kind of acumen about audience that makes her able to steer a project like this through the complexities of producing a feminist art survey in 2002.

Some of those complex issues relate back to the current popular conception...