Fresh Blood

I, A qk I If I could persuade the Greed god of dreams, Morpheus, to stay awake long enough to tell me his dreams, I would not expect the reductiveness of a narrative to be his telling. I might get, rather, something like Carolee Schneemann's "Fresh Blood''-A Dream Morphology. Schneemann, dressed in red pajamas, begins her piece lying on a table, twirling a plastic umbrella. Behind her is a large screen on which is projected a series of recurring images in changing order. The audience sits in a proscenium relationship to her. Schneemann recreates herself in this performance as the passive subject/character, innocent before and susceptible to the influence of her own flow of thought, art, and dream. The innocence, the autonomy of the subject/character/creator is reinforced by Schneemann's refusal to organize her dream material by a hierarchy of interpretation . Instead, the images (of the dream and her notebooks, an extension of her dream-life) are juxtaposed, and radiate discussion, thought, irony, association, and gesture. Morpheus is an allegorical god rather than a "real" god. He was constructed by Greek poets (and moralists) from the meaning of the root of his name- "morph," meaning shape or form (Morpho 58 P I CHARLES FREDERICK is also an epithet for Venus). Schneemann's piece, although composed from dream material, is not the passive flow awaiting Freudian categories: it is managed by aesthetic and political interventions . Schneemann's piece is a reperformance of dream world material in the material world of art and interpretation . It has been wrought: joined, planed, affixed, measured, textured, designed. The performer is poised between and immersed within two antagonistic worlds: the unconscious dream world, organized by its dissembling associative continuities, and the conscious world of interpretation, organized by its dissembling logical continuities . Both worlds are perilous. An audio voice-over questions the dreams of women: "are we dreaming ourselves, or dreaming the dreams of men dreaming us?" As interpretation, the problem is that Freud thought through the categories of "dream-mind" while Schneemann wants muscular and genital locations of the "dream-body. The performer is as well performing the making of art, an act of interpretation which uses the material of dream and the material of possible discourses of interI ,LOO pretation in the manipulation of space, dance, voice, and media to create the art work. In the second part, Schneemann recites the dream narrative, her voice disembodied by amplification. She is restless on stage: she sits, lies back, opens her legs in the air and V-frames the slides-there echoing a recurring image from the slides: the triangle, the pubic triangle, the shape of the unfurled umbrella, the erupting volcano, as though there were a sexual triangle among the dreamer, the dreamed, and the analysis, or the dreamer, the composer, and the performer . She kicks against the words, denying the completion of the experience of the dream, or the received means of interpretation, or even her own art-making. Under the opened blood-red pajama top are her bare breasts, the undeniable physical sign of the performer/creator. This is a woman whose dreams may not be her own, the interpretation of whose dreams certainly escapes her control. Her art work-technically clean, economically and complexly composed-is at least partly about a restlessness with the categories of space, tricks of language, and the enigma of intuition in art. Schneemann has carried some of the persistent concerns of her career into this piece, namely, space extensions, and the in- tervention of the creator on the flow of material which comprises the work. Schneemann's work has been an important part of a movement which broke the notion of space and its depiction out of the picture frame. Schneemann's feminist concerns allow her to reformulate spatial problems as questions of flow and pattern in the body, shaped particularly by a woman's biology whose rhythms, of course, differ from those of a man. Schneemann is interested in the loci of activity in and on the body, with the attendant implications and compositions. In this piece, a central image is an umbrella which becomes wany things-not interpreted as many things...