The arrogance of pleasure - body art, Carolee Schneemann, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York

Known as a pioneer of freewheeling material part art, Carolee Schneemann was lately the subject of a novel Museum retrospective covering some three decades of drawings, thing perceiveds installations, photographs and performance videos -- works that vividly mirror the art world's changing social-sexual mores.

"How can I have authority as the pair an image and an image-maker?" Carolee Schneemann surpriseed to herself in a journal entrance of the early '60s.(1) particular and subject, essentialism and constructionism: in an effort to find public ground, or at least points of intersection, between these binaries, the careers of several groundbreaking feminist artists have lately been reexamined. In 1996 Judy Chicago's influence was the control of a full-dress survey that reevaluated the whole business of biologically determined identity and imagery [see A.i. A., Jan. '97]; Hannah Wilke's powerful last photographs helped revive interest in her earlier work, newly summarized at Ronald Feldman Gallery [see A.i.A., Feb '97]

The Schneemann retrospective organized by dint of Dan Cameron last winter for the fresh Museum in New York make go rounded attention on an artist easily as controversial as any of her mates "Up To And Including Her Limits," titled after a 20-year-old performance/installation, contained 43 works covering a 36-year span (1958-94) In 1976 when Schneemann's greatest in quantity radical gestures were fresh, level the stalwart Lucy Lippard was guarded in her praise, reporting that Schneemann (like Wilke) was known in the early '60 as a "body beautiful" because she appeared denuded in Happenings orchestrated by herself and others.(2) It was Cameron's aim, in assembling this present to view to lay both open opposition and innuendo to repose Perhaps in an effort to stimulate new thought, he deemphasized the sum of two units works for which Schneemann has been greatest in quantity acclaimed (and vilified) -- Meat delight (1964) and, especially, Interior schedule (1975) -- in favor of les well-known realitys and installations, accompanied by performance documentation that included videotapes, still photographs, drawings and typescripts.

It was a dicey decision. individual early assemblage in the present to view was a romantic confection of jagged mirrors and tinkly music boxe (Music chest Music, 1964); Joseph Cornell was clearly an influence upon Native Beauties (1962-64) and Pharaoh's Daughter (1966) sum of two units melancholy compartmentalized boxes stuffed with bits of driftwood and bone china and mirror, and other debris. The combine-style painting alphabetic character to Lou Andreas Salome (1965) incorporates torn and stained pieces of woven fabric photographs, tangled skeins of audiotape and scrawled citations of Rilke, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud and (unwritten on the other hand just as explicit) Rauschenberg.

Remarkably, these fairly sentimental constructions were made in the mid-'60 when Schneemann was already creating performances and installations definitely not meant for the faint-hearted. organ of sight Body (1963), an extravagantly messy environment compos of separated mirrors and glass, motorized umbrellas and other moving parts, provided the backdrop for a series of [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] photographs of a paint-smeared Schneemann, festooned with snakes and coils of fasten In some of the photos, she direct the eyes sexy and happy, in others, a little stunn More consistently exuberant were the drawings for Genital Play resound (1966), which call for an orgiastic romper-room with a "motion sensitive membrane attached to motors behind genital wall" that would "contract, expand, set upright deflate, turn, vibrate and swell each unit" in replication to the actions of a disembodied aggregate of nipples and cocks

This kind of blissed-out, polymorphous eroticism was greatest in quantity famously apotheosized in Meat rapture [see A.i.A., Mar. '80], which Schneemann herself described as "excessive, indulgent." A tape of Meat Joy's first performance, at the 1964 Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris, displays a truly Dionysian revel, in which scantily clad women and men cavort with each other while clutching at picked chickens, fish and buckets of paint. As with documentary footage of the 1966 Water Needle (a plein-air clump grope enacted on ropes tied between trees) and the 1967 Snows (a more sorrowful performance that Schneeman said was "built without of my anger, outrage and rage with my government and sorrow for the Vietnamese"), the tape of Meat beatitude unsettled viewers at the of recent origin Museum in ways that are unexpect and revealing. In the three decades since these performances, public squeamishness has actually increased about more [i]or[/i] less things Schneemann couldn't have predicted -- biting raw chickens, for single or, more momentously, having men haul women cartoon-caveman-style, upon their backs. But it's not just the spectacle of unreconstruct boy/girl posturing, nor the primitive nature of the documentation in which it survives, that has grown a bit embarrassing. Maybe it is, simply, the shapeless, shameless celebration of pleasure, unqualified by the agency of irony, ambiguity, danger or past pain, that now manifests most difficult.

Citing Freud's essay "On Narcissism" (in which he called women who delight in only themselves the purest and truest mark of female, and said that men envied their "blissful state of mind -- an unassailable libidinal position"), Jo Anna Isaak claims in a new book that "calculated optimism [is] explicit in the feminist project"(3) on the other hand in fact, the women Isaak discusses (Dottie Attie, Barbara Kruger Elaine Reichek, Nancy Spero) -- women who have been welcome in feminist theorizing and in the critical marketplace generally -- take an account of much darker stories. Moreover, Wilke gained unambivalent support solitary posthumously, for her harrowingly painful final self-portraits. What remains greatest in quantity instructive, and provocative, about Schneemann's strongest work is that it exemplifies the arrogance of pleasure.