Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, and: John Kelly (review)

Since its publication in 1979, Carolee Schneemann's More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings has persisted as an exemplar of performance documentation. Even more than that, it was an artist's book, with its own performative integrity. A collaboration between Schneemann and editor Bruce McPherson, More Than Meat Joy embodies the messy, vital, persistent corporeality of her oeuvre. As McPherson explains in his introduction to the second edition, published in 1997:

The two principles we used in editing and designing the book both derived from the art being presented: 1) constantly break the formal frame (the design grid) to activate the eye, and 2) lay bare the integument of personal ties but eschew sentiment. These concepts also led to structuring the book into chronological intervals and privileging photo-documentation over aesthetically pleasing "shots."We wanted to get at the feeling of action in space and time that defines a performative event; we wanted also to make "reading" about this work a process akin to its creation.

(1997:iv)

They succeeded brilliantly. The collage of images and texts immerses the reader into the inner world of Schneemann, whom McPherson aptly describes as "a visual thinker, a philosopher of the actual" (v).

Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects now extends the project through the 1980s and 1990s. This time, art historians Kristine Stiles and David Levi Strauss begin and end the volume, respectively, and other scholar/ critics lend their voices to the mix. The book is organized thematically: "Proto-Feminist Body," "Feminist Erotic Iconography," "Censorship," and "Dream Morphologies." It is visually well-mannered this time, minding the balance and clarity of the design grid.

John Kelly is a project, similar in spirit to More Than Meat Joy, that seeks to use the book format as a way to embody, for posterity, the performance artist's career to date. It is organized chronologically through Kelly's early life and training and then proceeds through each of his performance pieces. It's all beautifully packaged by J. Abbott Miller (arguably the leading text designer at work today) and Roy Brooks. Text and image claim their respective space— the overall feel is classic, yet kinetic. The artist's restless energy runs through the pages. (Day-glo orange punctuates the primarily black-and-white pages.) The cover is a thick cardboard, the front featuring a double image of a male/ female Kelly.

It may not be just coincidental that these two artists insist on making books. They are both visual artists who extended the gesture of drawing into the third dimension of performance. Both came of age within a close-knit, radical artistic community, Schneemann in the post-abstract expressionist 1960s and Kelly in the East Village club culture of the 1980s. Both found themselves compelled to perform as a way to investigate questions about gender and sexuality. Both now face issues of mortality—Schneemann is past her 60th birthday and Kelly is HIV-positive.

Imaging Her Erotics focuses on the feminist politics of Schneemann's work, so it makes sense that it feels more programmatic than More Than Meat Joy. And it is retrospective, a collection of interviews, reviews, performance descriptions, and new glosses that emphasize analysis over invention. Academic discourse frames and weaves through the volume, beginning with Kristine Stiles's opening essay, which sets up the artist's practice—what she terms an "aesthetic of the transitive eye" that moves "between the bodily eye (which dominates over actual things) and the body-as-eye (which thinks its dominion in the mind)" (4-5).

Throughout the book we hear the artist's voice, talking about the musical structure of Fuses (1965); about the "convoluted [...] way I need to work: dream, research, hands into materials, the...