Carolee Schneemann – Meat Joy (1964)

Most people associate Schneemann with her 1975 Interior Scroll piece–wherein she entered where a coat, disrobed to reveal herself wearing a smock proceeded to paint an outline of herself before stripping naked and unspooling a scroll from inside her vagina and reading off a litany of negative reactions to her work by (mostly male) art critics.

Before seeing this photo, I was not familiar with Meat Joy–wherein eight people dance and play with paint, sausage, fish and raw chicken in an improvised erotic rite.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Schneemann. Interior Scroll is one of the great performance pieces ever conceived, that’s not open to debate. However, as so much of her work is based in responded to rigidly ingrained misogyny in both art history and modern art criticism, her work frequently fails to engage beyond reactionary machinations. (Meat Joy for example is seemingly simultaneously critical of while also building upon Yves Klein’s Anthropometries–and I love Klein just as much as the next art nerd girl but his work is enormously problematic.)

What I learned in researching this post is that Schneemann is likely a victim of her own success in many ways. From very early in her career, she was interested in reclaiming her own nude depiction from its cultural and art historical appropriations.

Also, I learned that in 1964 she filmed herself and her boyfriend having sex and then painted, cut and defaced the 16mm footage before editing it into a piece she titled (in a brilliantly multivalent way) Fuses.

It’s all very Stan Brakhage with whom she was friends. Apparently, she was also super interested in avant-garde music. (These two things hit very close to home for me because I was trained formally as a film maker and one of my primary motivations to create arises as a result of being completely enamored with music but a garbage musician.)

So I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that Schneemann alleged impetus for making Fuses was (according to her Wikipedia entry) “motivated by Schneemann’s desire to know if a woman’s
depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and
classical art[.]”