Carolee Schneemann:
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963)
Photo by Icelandic artist Erró, on 35mm black and white film
Next week - October 12th to be precise - is Carolee Schneemann's birthday and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish her many happy returns ...
Her phenomenal work, Eye Body (1963), composed of 36 photographic but still essentially painterly self-portraits - or what she termed transformative-actions - staged in a constructed loft environment in which she'd assembled objects associated with bad luck and the stuff of nightmares, from broken mirrors and open umbrellas to serpents, remains one of my favourite pieces from this period.
In order to slide herself into this environment and become a living work of art, Schneemann covered her naked body in heterogeneous materials, including grease, glue, fur and feathers. One of the most powerful and most memorable of the images is a frontal nude, featuring two snakes crawling on her torso and in which her cunt is clearly visible and seems to be offered to us as a gift - which, of course, is also to say as a challenge and a provocation: I'll show you mine, if you show me yours.
Commenting on Eye Body, Schneemann has written:
"I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material - a further dimension of the construction ... [so that] I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will."
Unsurprisingly, the work caused great controversy at the time for its perceived porno-paganism. Critics accused Schneemann of narcissism and self-indulgence and described Eye Body as lewd, a word of Old English origin that has come to mean not only vulgar, but vile; immoral as well as obscene.
However, whilst it may contain elements of these things, ultimately it remains a portrait of a beautiful woman who, in her beauty and in her womanhood, transcends all such labels, all such judgements, without denying the fact that what is best in Woman is also what is most evil ...
Note: readers interested in more about Carolee Schneemann and her work can visit her webite by clicking here.
Commenting on Eye Body, Schneemann has written:
"I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material - a further dimension of the construction ... [so that] I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will."
Unsurprisingly, the work caused great controversy at the time for its perceived porno-paganism. Critics accused Schneemann of narcissism and self-indulgence and described Eye Body as lewd, a word of Old English origin that has come to mean not only vulgar, but vile; immoral as well as obscene.
However, whilst it may contain elements of these things, ultimately it remains a portrait of a beautiful woman who, in her beauty and in her womanhood, transcends all such labels, all such judgements, without denying the fact that what is best in Woman is also what is most evil ...
Note: readers interested in more about Carolee Schneemann and her work can visit her webite by clicking here.
Striking final comment - with its (essentially Biblical) summation about Womankind that might also make one think of Georg Buchner's hyperschizoid anti-hero Woyzeck and von Trier's drastic movie of grief and witchcraft, Antichrist. I await possible future posts on the physics/metaphysics of evil - is the author a closet Schellingian?
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