More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings (review)

112 the minnesota review REVIEWS Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings. Ed. Bruce McPherson. New Paltz, N.Y.: Documentext, 1979. 284 pp. $24.00. Woman's body has always been the subject of—and subjected to— art. As object of our aesthetic contemplation, it has, in fact, been lifted right out of its skin. Its treatment has become so formal a procedure that we refer to it as The Nude—or, even more abstractly, as "the figure"—words which can, of course, refer to images of the male, but only secondarily , as a kind of possibility or afterthought. Since at least Manet's Olympia, at any rate, our culture's regard for woman's body as pure form has been recognized as a fetishizing strategy conceived, intentionally or not, to mask the prurience of a (largely male) artworld — that is, as an actual erotics disguised as an aesthetics, and not a very healthy erotics at that. This was the effrontery ofOlympia's gaze, forcing its wholly resistant bourgeois audience to acknowledge both the relations of power that existed between itself and its objects (paintings and prostitutes) and the terms of its own essential sexuality. The body of Carolee Schneemann's work demonstrates that in the hundred years since Manet's death in 1883 things have scarcely changed. The same relations of power, the same suppression of sexual expression which challenged Manet confront Schneemann. This was indeed the point of one of her earlier performance works, a 1964 collaboration with minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, at Judson Church in New York, called Site. In Artforum (November 1980), Ted Castle recalled seeing Site performed: When the lights came up, we saw a piece of plywood painted white, in the standard size of plywood which as every "man" knows is 4 feet by 8 feet. Bob, clad in sports mufti, appeared and proceeded to pull away the outer piece of plywood. After a while, he returned and pulled away the second piece, seemingly the same. This he did several times. The last time he pulled away the piece of plywood, there was still a piece of plywood behind it, but attached to the plywood as if glued, was a naked, very beautiful Carolee designed like a statue. Castle makes a crucial mistake. Schneemann was not designed like a statue. She was not merely some convenient embodiment of that analogy between sculpture and the human body which informs most minimalist sculpture and which suggests that the body (of the work or of the person) is intentional, that it is addressed to us, and depends upon our experience of its gestures and movements or surfaces and shapes for its meaning. That may have been what Morris intended—or something like it anyway—and Schneemann no doubt went along for the ride. But she was, additionally, posed as Olympia, replete with black choker. She was charged—especially in 1964—with all sorts ofpsycho-socio sexual content, but somehow she became, instead, part of Robert Morris's minimal sculpture performance piece, fetishized once again. "For years," she says, recalling this time, "my most audacious works were viewed as if someone else inhabiting me had created them— they were considered "masculine" when seen as agressive, bold. As if I were inhabited by a stray male principle; which would be an interesting possibility—except in the early sixties this notion was used to blot out, denigrate, deflect the coherence, necessity and personal integrity of what I had made and how it was made." The substance of these lines, from the text accompanying the photodocumentation of Schneemann's 1963 Eye Body, in which she extablished her body as "visual territory" for the first time, is repeated later in More Than Meat Joy, in a 1974 "unsent letter" to Allan Kaprow: "My own title private title iron ironical title was 'Cunt Mascot.' Cunt Mascot on the men's art team. Not that I ever made love with ANY OF YOU NO! I didn't feel perceived by our group—not even sexually." This on the page where she chooses to reproduce, otherwise without commentary, Hans Namuth's photo of Morris removing the last plywood sheet for Site...