#and the ig 'naturalization' of that edit as its own point of origin/reference in some cases

[caroloftheshells]

the levels of intertextuality this is on

[femmesfollesnebraska]

Carolee Schneemann at 40, Blog post at 40

This is my second in my series of blog posts on the occasion of my recent 40th birthday, and LFF’s forthcoming 10th anniversary (April 2021), writing informally around some of my favorite artists – what did they do / create their 40th year? Why do I like them so much? What’s my favorite work of theirs? Just a few words from me complemented by images, as I figure out what I’m doing at 40…at the end of each post are artworks made by me in tribute to the artist.

This week I write on Carolee Schneemann, in anticipation for my exhibit opening this week --a group show of figurative work from some stellar artists from around the area that are women. For the (brief and mask required) opening, I’ll be live scripting on a body print, some excerpts from Schneemann’s writing alongside my own musings, on women’s bodies and the importance of women making work about/with their bodies.

My first was on Judy Chicago - check it out by clicking here. Like Chicago, Schneemann was born in 1939 and during her 40th year, 1979, she created the Forbidden Action series of eight photographic documents of a guerilla performance at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands. While gallery attendants changed shifts, Schneemann quickly derobed and posed in the gallery spaces, a multilayered project protesting: 1, the fact that women are more represented in museums via nude depictions by male artists (as Guerilla Girls cleverly pointed to 10 years later in their poster print); 2, the male gaze which has primarily dictated the view of women/women’s bodies in art (and other media) (famously coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasures), and 3, both becoming the art while producing the art in an act to protest the two points above by serving as artist and model, in control of her own depiction.

Forbidden Actions - Museum Window, 1979, Photo-silkscreen on paper30 1/2 × 42 1/2 in77.5 × 108 cmEdition of 250

It’s hard for me to articulate all the ways I love this, starting of course with all of her intent above, her sneakiness getting this done in public, her proud, unabashed 40 year old body, her confrontational reclamation of her body - all of our bodies as women. Also, I do love how she silkscreened a selection from each theme onto paper and the bright and pale colors--repetition, angles and paint lines are feminine, fierce and active. I mean, come on. How fun would this be!

Forbidden Actions - Museum Sarcophagus, 1979, Photo-silkscreen of nude action, 30 1/2 × 42 1/5 in77.5 × 107.3 cm, Edition 11/250

I, too, create work as model and director / artist, via self portraiture and my body prints. I admit - I saw Yves Klein’s Anthropometries and came home and had to make body prints myself-as model, artist and director. Schneemann’s work often gets referred back to Klein, as making the body the brush as well.  Though Schneemann herself was inspired by Jackson Pollock - she made a fictional woman artist to be inspired by, named Cezanne.

Sadly, I didn’t know of Schneemann’s work/significance when I made my first series of body prints (2012).

I did vaguely know of Interior Scroll (documentation above), her 1975 performance where she stood on a table, de-robed and announced she would read one of her her books, then dropped the book and pulled a scroll from her vagina and read from it (which years later was revealed to be a letter to a critic who wouldn’t view her films, discussing intuition and bodily processes, traditionally associated with ‘woman’, against traditionally ‘male’ notions of order and rationality). Again, her defiant, unafraid use of her body just makes me swoon--along with the heavy, multilayered, personal and feminist intent.

But really, she only wanted to be a painter. She saw her performances, films and collages as extensions of her painting. As she said, “I didn’t want to pull a scroll from my vagina and read it in public...” she moreso felt the need to challenge, educate, provoke. In “The Obscene Body/Politic:”

Projection deforms perception of the female body…political and personal violence against women is twined behind/within this stunting defeminization of history….the layers of implicit and explicit censorship constructing our social history combine with contemporary contradictions to force our radicalization...Women artists explore erotic imagery because our bodies exemplify a historic battleground--we are dismantling conventional sexual ideology and its punishing suppressions--and because our experience of our bodies has not corresponded to cultural depiction.

Damn! To write with such passionate eloquence...

Indeed, some of my favorite work of Schneemann’s is her writing - articles, books, even letters. Her writing is so fiery and on point, always aware.

In a 1975 letter to poet Clayton Eshleman, who asked her why she writes to him like a “enemy-man”:

Yes indeed I fall into treating/ writing you as if you are the enemy-man rather than the individual man who has done so much to separate himself from the wall of men I describe. My exasperation is this: you have opened, unraveled, aided, opened, unraveled, aided, and used every knot and knife in your male psyche to open, unravel, and aid and within I find old wall of man—stubborn, autocratic, severe, humorless, punishing. . . . You tear me apart in your viscera mythic stew of English anal/rancid Bacon, stoked-off Velázquez, Japanese Ukiyo-e cock strut, Soutine’s blood and grub, I BELONG TO NATURE NOT TO THESE ARTIFACTS YOU CHOOSE. I AM ELECTRICAL VULVIC BOLT IN TIME. 

She never shied away from feminist conversations, and she never gave up on men - she believed in equality, and she believed men could (and did) realize feminism. She believed in showing intimacy from a woman’s point of view - her impetus for Fuses, a film-collage of her and Jim Tenney having sex.

She made playful art too - her 1995 Vulva Morphia, : an ironic and amusing story of the education of Vulva, an innocent, who initially "reads biology and understands she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires". Vulva's education progresses rapidly as she "deciphers Lacan and Baudrillard" along with other patriarchal discourses, encounters anti-female grafitti, tussles with the male art establishment and finally, ever the keen student, decodes feminist constructivist semiotics to discover that "even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions and conditioning …"

Vulva's Morphia, 1995, Mounted 36 panel photo grid with hand painting, text inserts on wood, and fans, 96 × 90 in 243.8 × 228.6 cm

Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963, Paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glass, plastic with the studio installation "Big Boards". Photographs by Icelandic artist Erró, on 35 mm black and white film.

Really, every work by Schneemann is my favorite and inspiring. Though I didn’t know it before I started creating, she absolutely inspires me and my work every single day. Perhaps the most, her Eye Body series and her reflections on it: 

I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material-- a further dimension of the construction... 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.

This is exactly how I see myself in making my body prints and self portraits and other work--and really being a woman (myself - not anyone else) in general.  Get inspired, and never forget: http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/index.html .

~Sally Brown

https://sallydeskins.wixsite.com/feministart

IG @sallery_art

Sally Brown Deskins: Tribute to Cindy Sherman / Carolee Schneemann

Sally Brown Deskins: Mother Artist (Tribute to Carolee Schneemann I)

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Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Brown Deskins.  LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.

Submissions always open!

https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing

[douglasconstruction]

7 Things I'm Totally Obsessed with This Month (July 2017 Edition)

These are thoughts, the artwork, the news stories, the tools, the food, the conversations, and whatever else we just can't get out of our heads this month.      

The Band: The Jesus and Mary Chain 

I am so completely infatuated and energized by this music right now. I've owned some of their albums for years, but it never really clicked for me until the past couple of months. 

Why? The music is so bound up in its time period. It's both pre-dated, and totally in the noisey future. To me, this sounds as fresh as when it came out. Like the Reid brothers, I grew up listening almost exclusively to 50s and 60s R&B and pop music, and then discovered punk rock when I was 12. This band has always represented that exact transition point - big, echo-y rockabilly guitars and 80s New Wave percussion with Phil Spector melodies on top. I think those just happen to be all my sweet spots. 

When the Raveonettes came out in the early 00s, I found it totally exciting. "Oh look," I thought. "They're doing Buddy Holly songs with 60s girl group vocals and big reverb-y drum machines. What a neat idea." Now, I realize - they were basically just doing the Jesus and Mary Chain. 

Recommended: Psychocandy (1985), Darklands (1987), Reverence (Single, 1992), Munki (1998)

The Instagram Account: WoodLucker Studios

Artist partners Ann Wood and Dean Lucker create these stunning paper versions of natural flora and fauna.

Yep, you read that right. That's paper.

Just soak all that in, and follow their IG ASAP. 

The Video: "Arnold"

Speaking of paper crafting, I can't stop looping this video of Arnold. 

I won't say too much here (just watch it), except that Arnold works out Powell's Books, which is only 2.7 miles away from my house, and I'm going to go see if I can meet him and watch him work. 

The TV Show: The Leftovers

I don't know why everyone isn't talking about this on the same level as the go-down-in-history shows of the moment, but I think this show is as interesting as anything on TV right now. Worth your while. 

Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez

The Short Essay: Before the Internet by Emma Rathbone

This feels particularly apt at summertime. I know there's no way to reëxperience the impossibly long July days of childhood, but, if we were to try, unplugging seems like the right place to begin. 

The Song: "Smoke Signals" by Phoebe Bridgers

The first time I heard this song, I was in shivers and tears within the first minute. What an astonishing piece of craft. If you can, listen on headphones, and just listen. Don't actually watch the video; it gives the song too much context.

Why? Cause nothing has transported me to its intended place so specifically in years (and wherever that place actually is isn't where the video takes place). This is a road trip song, and as good of a spiritual successor of "America" by Simon & Garfunkel as anything, except I think this couple actually ends up together (or, perhaps, as least meets each other.) The open optimism, the apt cultural references, and those Twin Peaks-theme guitar stabs. 

Perfect. 

The Web Comic:  How to Be Perfectly Unhappy 

I don't read the Oatmeal regularly, so perhaps they're all this great, but what a totally original way of approaching this issue. It's based on an essay by Augusten Borroughs, which I plan to soak up as soon as I get all my work done for the day. But just read it. The planet imagery and the SlargNakking might seem like a hurdle, but they'll make sense once you get to the end. 

And that end. It's beautiful. Go be not happy, ManMakers. 

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