Imprints and Re-Visions: Carolee Schneemann’s Visual Archeology

Imprintsand Re-Visions CaroleeSchneemann's Visual Archeology JohannesBirringer LET ME PREFACE the following pages by paying tribute to all those whose creative work and actions have heightened our critical understanding of the relations between visual representation and cultural activism at a time of crisis when our "knowledge" of bodies and sexualities is as vulnerable as our physical and moral resistance to a cumulative loss of hope. I am referring to the recent deaths ofVito Russo, David Wojnarowicz, Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke, Audre Lorde, Craig Owens and many others who succumbed to the illness that attacked their bodies. Having written about these artists or taught their work in my performance /art classes, and having shared the politics of contestation they embodied , I feel haunted by the necessity to address our losses. At the same time, we have learned so much from AIDS activism and the feminist health movement that there is an even greater need to confront the administration of research, treatment, and health care in the wider political context of those agencies and discourses that seek to control or contain bodies and sexualities. In her posthumously published book, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politicsin the Age of Epidemic (1993), the late Linda Singer argues that we are witnessing the intensification of regulatory regimes centered on phantasmatic sites of erotic danger. Those sites threaten the traditional "family values" evoked so often in the rhetoric of our governments . In Singer's view, women's sexuality occupies a crucial place within 31 these rhetorics and regulatory regimes because of the "erotic over-investment " that is afforded the feminine. Over the past three decades, and springing from a (counter)culture of sexual liberation now unthinkable, the work of visual artists such as Carolee Schneemann has depicted sexuality and the female body in ways that could now gain a new and radical significance for the struggle against disciplinary power seeking to arrest or censor those practices that exceed its logic and its economy. Announcing a new video project, Imaging Her Erotics (1993, in progress), Schneemann has started to collaborate with Maria Beatty on a "visual archeology" of her various works since her early 1960s "kinaesthetic environments" and performances. After watching the first completed segment of this video, I realize that I had seen much more than her side of the story of what came to be known as "body art" in the 1970s. Rather, the range and power of her imagemaking, which I discuss below, affirm the role of her body in her work in ways that are absolutely pertinent to contemporary debates about sexual politics in a phobic, brutalist society obsessed with a pathological fear of uncontrollable bodies. Schneemann's films and videos, and her kinetic multimedia installation Cycladic Imprints (1988/92) of which she had created other versions for New Music America, the Venice Biennale, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, were presented at Chicago's Randolph Street Gallery midway through a challenging three-week festival. Entitled "That Time of the Months" the festival featured women in a multi-faceted program of visual and performing arts, media arts, martial arts, and public discussions on issues of feminism (November 6-December 23, 1992). Although I do not want to claim a central role for Schneemann's work among the amazingly diverse voices and strategies presented in the program, it is worth listening to curator Carole Tormollan's suggestion that Re-Visions, the programmatic exhibition project in RSG's main gallery (which opened the week before the festival), presents feminist art "from a new center and not the old margins." Tormollan urges us to look at the whole range of similarities and differences among feminist strategies in theory and practice. Awareness of the history and dynamics of the internal divisions that have changed feminist discourse over the past decades is necessary in order to re-imagine the ground on which a new and empowering dialogue can take place. Creating coalitions between different positions gives women the means to re-examine their "split subjectivities," Tormollan argues, since many of the older oppositional stances within feminism were based on the paradoxical relation to a patriarchal value system that reproduced the ineq32 uities of the system...