Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde

Chapter Five: Between Dialectics, Decorum, and Collage Sabotaging Schneemann at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, London 1967

CHAPTER FIVE Between Dialectics,Decorum,and Collage Sabotaging Schneemann at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress,London 1967 Is this Blitz Heaven or another skit from the mango factory? how strange it compared with the black and white aquarian stalinists ranting and raving from the platform at the Dialectics of Liberation. —Heathcote Williams Dinner Party Politics:An Introduction On a midsummer evening in 1967, Carolee Schneemann found herself on London’s East Eisham Street, far away from the dinner party across town on West Eisham to which, only begrudgingly, she had been invited. Having already been told rather cooly “to arrive after the dinner,” Schneemann had some cause to believe the directions that led her to East instead of West Eisham were not accidental. An invited but unwelcome guest, Schneemann recalls that, once she ‹nally arrived at the party, no one spoke to her and she was left isolated in the “deadly, impenetrable atmosphere . . . [of] men in huddles passing wine to each other.”1 It is tempting to liken the passive-aggressive atmosphere of this scene to that of private conversations between members of a gentleman’s club being interrupted by the premature arrival of the evening’s questionable entertainment . For, invited though Schneemann may have been, her assumed place among the other guests is not too dif‹cult to glean from the fact that she was greeted with an air of hostility and suspicion—an air that implicitly cast Schneemann’s work as a performance artist within the realm of the morally and politically suspect and which, questioning the legitimacy of her artistic claims, relegated her work to a category of entertainment that could be privately relished while publically rejected. In 121 simplest terms, Schneemann’s arrival at West Eisham breached decorum with those who did not desire to take her seriously, and her arrival did so because it demanded entrance to the party rather than accepting the role of merely providing entertainment to the party-goers. In this regard, likening the party to a gentleman’s club is not too far off the mark. For both are closed-door affairs regulated by the economies of sexism and privilege, and both, with their comparable notions of entertainment, mesh well with that onerous mechanism of authoritarian culture that Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.”2 At ‹rst blush, looking to Marcuse for an understanding of the unwelcome reception that Schneemann encountered at this midsummer party might appear to be an odd choice. But the choice is not gratuitous. While the broader reaches of Marcuse’s theory of repressive desublimation attempt to characterize the underlying psycho-political structures that perpetuate industrial bourgeois society, two things bring his theory to the heart of that midsummer party. First, the hostility and suspicion that greeted Schneemann there largely pivoted on the assumption that her work was a prime example of what Marcuse characterized as the central failing of art within the larger context of desublimated society: namely, a kind of complicity in which artistic expression frequently neglects its critical responsibilities, opting instead for the “function of entertaining without endangering” the status quo.3 It was hardly a stretch for the members of the party to make such an assumption since Marcuse had suggested as much in his own writing, speci‹cally singling out the American avantgarde tradition to which Schneemann belonged as an example of art that had settled on a path of clever entertainments rather than forging a path of critical opposition to one-dimensional society and thought.4 Second, if I seem to give Marcuse’s ideas high currency among the partygoers, that is because Marcuse himself was among the wine-sippers snubbing Schneemann, and he was conversing with like-minded men. Indeed, whatever the similarities that those huddled men at the party bore to a gentleman’s club, they fancied themselves to be anything but the last remnants of a stodgy rear-guard. The dinner was, in fact, a welcoming party for a collection of radical thinkers. The men who attended were prominent ‹gures in the New Left, a “curious pastiche of eminent scholars and political activists”5 like Lucien Goldmann, Herbert Marcuse, John Gerassi, Jules Henry, Gregory Bateson, Erving Goffman, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, and even Allen Ginsberg—all of whom had been brought to London by an inde122 | CUTTING PERFORMANCES pendent and loosely structured organization that called itself the Institute of Phenomenological Studies. This institute was headed by a...