Carolee Schneemann: More than Meat Joy

C I'~ Ar 4 4. PIN If to), 8 Carolee Schneemann was the first visual artist to work with the Judson Dance Theatre in the early sixties, where she pioneered her Happenings and body art and developed the personal performance mode of Kinetic Theatre. Her new book, More Than Meat Joy (Documentext, New Paltz), is a comprehensive documentary of over thirty performance works and films from 1962 to 1979, and includes letters, journals and essays on performance, sexuality, and feminism. Works such as the celebrated Meat Joy (1964), WaterLightlWater Needle (1966), and Snows (1967) are presented with photographs, scripts, and reflections on their personal and collaborative genesis. At the time of this interview, Schneemann had just returned from performing a version of HOMERUNMUSE in Buffalo , the most recent of the solo works which have occupied her in the seventies. This interview was taped by Robert Coe in March 1979. How long have you worked on More Than Meat Joy? Two years. This book has been the worst ... When you're looking for a space to perform, say under a bridge or in a tower, it's promised to you until the people who really own it say "not on your life" or you're closed down by the city or the fire department. You fight to do the work somewhere else, or turn it into something so they don't know what it is until it's too late. The thing about a book is that it's a complete form and it's very easy for it to be denied realization. A printer can go halfway through and refuse to continue. Your last group work was Thames Crawling in 1970. Why did you stop working with large groups? I'm not sure, but what I said in a pamphlet about Up To and Including Her Limits (1974-76) was that I didn't want to anymore. One of the things that happened in 1969 when I left for Europe was that I no longer wanted to be in a position of being exemplary, of being the one who saw where we all had to go. I was just going to get rid of everything, not simply a performance group but also technicians, HOMERUNMUSE, 1977 GHOST REV, 1965 rehearsals, schedules, specific performance times. I still don't want any of those things. I'm feeling a lot of resistance in myself to the framework-in performing art, not theatre-because theatre always has a fixed framework. But if you look at performing art, it's got a kind of docility and yet an enormous amount of internalized fury, anger, rebellion that would potentially, in another kind of society, go to very positive social action : action that would be physical and manifest in terms of life support , cultural coherence. So much alienation and fury indicates to me a breakdown of the utilization of the self and of its integration into a real functioning unit. Most of your work seems to be about catalyzing a certain immediacy, something that can make the work usable. Up until 1973 it was crucial to me to create a situation in which people's energies could be radicalized so they could become aware of the political nexus around them. A performance work was like a trope for the organized world outside the individual. If the audience could penetrate a performance and make a collaborative determination of the mutual situation, that could become a praxis for seeing a political situation. We had to construct a set of identifications that were availableenough for the majority of the audience to become active -not necessarily so they would "perform" but simply so they would work together in the environment. What would happen normally in that period is that they would absorb a sense of our sensitivity, attentiveness and trust with one another and begin to build their own risks out of that, incorporating our work because they needed it and wanted it and because the other kind of blind, hostile, unrelational reaction wasn't possible anymore. I don't think there is much work now that's really challenging people to participate in its ethic to that extent. A lot...