Carolee Schneemann

Amigo Motel: Tell me about the MOCCA show, how it came about.

Carolee Schneemann: For many years, David Liss has been following my work and wanting to make an exhibit of it. It’s been a long wish for both of us. I think it was in the eighties when he saw my work in Montreal at Galerie Samuel Lallouz, and then other times, a retrospective in New York City in 1998 at the New Museum. He’s come to my exhibits in New York City at different galleries, and it was amazing that there was the time frame and that we could combine a Toronto show with this big exhibit in Buffalo at the same time. So the two curators have been collaborating. The spaces are very different, and the works are completely different.

AM: What have you brought to Toronto?

CS: I’ve brought major installations, many of which were made, conceived, thought of, dreamt, in Montreal or originally made in Canada.
It goes back to the eighties, when I worked a lot in Winnipeg, through the irresistible auspices of Gilles Hebert. He did a performance art festival in the eighties that somehow convinced artists from different parts of the world to come to Winnipeg in the winter, and do performances. I don’t know why I said yes. There wasn’t much money, but I got to stay in a wonderful railroad hotel with all the brass fittings, and I got the flavour of Canadian ingenuity...It was a splendid festival that, like many wonderful things in Canada, remain locked in the mythology of Winnipeg.
And then Gilles convinced me to prepare work for Plug In when Wayne Baerwaldt was there, and I had begun this very odd work of moulding rocks out of great desperation and an unhappy time. It started at home, in the Hudson valley, and I told myself: If you can make one rock, you’ll feel better today. And then it became two or three, something to think about. And I became so interested in this hand-cast process that, when I went to Winnipeg, I continued hand-casting them with a secret recipe. Soon I had hundreds of these rocks. And actually they had started with a dream, as most of the work does--a dream of circles diminishing in deep perspective, related to Monet’s water lilies, to cow plops, to bread, to Palaeolithic objects...
Snafu is my most immediate media work. It’s based on computer programme which activates four motors that pull vertically these small children’s baptismal coats dipped in plaster. They float up and down, activated by a sensor when people walk into the space. Projected on them is a horse race tipped vertically. The whole work was dreamt in Montreal. I have no idea when it’s about. I found the horse race on a live programme when I was in Nova Scotia for a James Tenney concert two years ago, and that’s what I had been dreaming of, and there it was.

AM: Tell me about Devour, the big video installation in this show. Is that a new work?

CS: Yes--relatively new.

AM: It has so much intimacy, sexuality.

CS: And violence, brutality. Someone being shot in Sarajevo. The endless destruction by my government’s militarism and technology. These endless incursions to destabilize other countries and cultures for the benefit of arms, oil, gold, whatever the underlying, invisible investment structure that drives the democracy of the U.S. Whatever this configuration is, it began to come to me in these video increments that were unexpected. Even before 9/11, I was getting videotapes from friends who worked in Haiti, photographing the brutalities there. I've always been collecting material from the destruction of Palestinian culture, the bombardments of Lebanon--I have a lot of research on that.
And then this horrific videotape from former Yugoslavia, that was a compendium made by a cooperative made by different artists and friends. It’s a mixture of a record of their losing their culture, with a small, floating statement that says: “We want you to understand that we may not have water or food or any more film, and this is the evidence of what’s destroying our society.” It’s an astonishing mix of material, and I wanted to juxtapose that with the fragility of privileged, ordinary domestic life. Images of people walking at a fair, a baby nursing, intercourse, a tree being chopped down, and the bird flying in my driveway, a plane taking off. So Devour is a work about menace, fragility and violence. Every normal image becomes saturated or contaminated by the threat of the other destructive images.

AM: Canadians feel a great deal of unearned aloofness from all that.

CS: Yes--That’s why I also come here, to enjoy a little aloofness.

AM: But it’s unearned for Canadians. They didn’t sacrifice to get it.

CS: But Canadians have not initiated these invasions and bombardments and advanced destructive uranium bombs and such. They may be part of it in some underlying structure, in which they supply materials and invest in our militarism. But they are not the initiators. Perhaps that is part of their innocence, naiveté.

AM: You’ve always been political.

CS: Yes.

AM: For all your career?

CS: Yes. But it’s been ignored because of the emphasis on the imagery of the body. This full body of work is very little known because of the physical actions of two performative works that entered the canon--Meat Joy [1964], Interior Scroll [1975] --which is great, and we’re happy about that. But my little mantra, when telling people about my work, is that the use of the body has displaced the body of work. I’m thrilled because here I’m able to see for myself the fuller body of work, and it’s wonderful to have that opportunity.

AM: Why do you think the political dimensions of your work have been ignored? What’s the edge you bring to your work that makes it difficult for people?

CS: The work is disturbing. And the political work is always very beautiful. They’re gorgeous in how they are realized, but they are also of horrific images, and they are real. The World Trade Centre piece, Terminal Velocity [2001-2005], has become a piece of visual musicality. It’s full of beats and pulses, and it’s very elegant. But its subject is twelve people falling to their deaths, either by jumping or being blown out of the window. So there’s been conflicted reaction to it--but my erotic works produce very conflicted reactions also.

AM: I think I’ll take my jacket off. I guess it’s safe.

CS: It’s very safe in here.

AM: I think it’s the particular juxtaposition between eroticism and delicacy and violence in your work that feels unsafe.

CS: But there is no sado-masochism in the work, and no punishment. And sexually, I don’t even want to be spanked, whatever that means. Punishment and pain are not part of the iconography that I’m driven by. It’s the opposite of pleasure, and what threatens it, that I have to keep looking at. Other cultures are impinged upon or destroyed by the agency of my government. I pay attention to that. I want to know a lot about the countries we’re invading and giving armaments to, just as I want to know about the countries where we are refusing birth control and medical care and maternal information.

AM: I find the intimacy in your work threatening, challenging--some word that I’m not quite getting. It disturbs my male ego. I think I have a vested interest in being non-intimate, not being given to hugs and kisses. The sight of a child nursing at a breast makes me uneasy, even though I’ve seen it many times.

CS: What about the kissing cat?

AM: It bothers me. Cats are carnivores. They are one step removed from wild cats. And there is something very foxy and sexy, and also very menacing, about cats.

CS: Something disturbing about my work could be the transition between what is considered taboo and what I don’t consider to be taboo. Take the amorousness of my cat, and the delicacy with which he insisted on kissing my mouth every morning for a prolonged period of time since he was a tiny kitten. I had to see how it looked. There are perhaps 180 of these self-shot cat kisses, and they’re fascinating. And the communication with the cat has a whole other dimension. He was a talking cat, who could put thoughts into my mind. But that’s a discussion for cat people.
Let’s go back to the discomfort with the intimacy. Most of my curators, with the exception of David Liss and the gallery PPOW, have all been gay men. Now what is that about? Every curator who really made a commitment and stuck his neck out, and my only serious collectors, relate to this intimacy and the materiality around it. But I have never had a woman museum curator interested in the work. Never.
And in this major feminist history of art-making that just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, my work is in dark section of museum. It’s kind of like putting the bad girl in a bad, lonely place. Hannah Wilke is near the bathroom. Now this is an unconscious aspect of curatorial practice, but the rest of exhibit is luminous, shining, splendid.

AM: But they put the bad girls near the bathroom!

CS: They’re not looking at the formal properties of the work. There’s this interference--the resistance to accept the assumption of intimacy. If you can’t accept this assumption, you won’t be able to see what the work is doing formally. That’s what happened with Fuses [1965] for so long. It took people years to see the structure of it because they were pleased, excited, non-plussed, repelled by the explicit sexuality. But I just have to keep making these works. I have never done a work that I thought would shock anyone. To the contrary! I’m always shocked when my work is censored.

AM: You’ve had this happen?

CS: You’re kidding! Censorship? Endless, constant. Because certain cultural people are obsessed with a few of the explicitly erotic works, they’ll never see anything else and they wouldn’t possibly invite me to exhibit.

AM: The thing that I find admirable about this work is that joining of sexuality and violence is a very strong thing to do. Not offensive, but strong. These things are closely bound up--pain, intimacy. A person who’s been shot in Sarajevo, dragging himself away, is enduring a passion, like the Crucifixion. The Passion of Christ is such a powerful theme in art. It brings us into such intimacy with the crucified God. I see an almost sacred intimacy in your work.

CS: Now let me see how many ways I disagree with you. I need to separate tenderness and sensitivity from sexuality, and juxtapose it with what could destroy it--militarism, the hyper-masculine. For me, the sacrifice of Christ is the place where the fracture between psyche and body has embedded itself ferociously, to the extent that joyfulness and spontaneity have to be earned outside of the sacred. It’s a devastating fracture, and the question for me has been why has it persisted so long and to what extent has it shaped the construction of gender. It has certainly worked well for the patriarchy of all the religions I know about, except the pantheists and witches. It also has to do with the displacement of goddess religion, and any religion that might be more equitable and pleasurable. So I definitely work in antagonism to my own inherited religious rituals.

AM: And the sacred?

CS: I am locating it in the feminist realm.


Carolee Schneemann: Breaking Borders. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West, Toronto. 24 March to 22 April 2007.
Carolee Schneemann: Remains to be Seen. CEPA Gallery, 617 Main Street, Suite 201, Buffalo, New York. 31 March to 26 May 2007.