Aphrodite Speaks: on the Recent Performance Art of Carolee Schneemann

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.