Tiny Imaginary Play #8

A giant velvet curtain covers the stage.

A particularly fantastic portion of Handel's messiah plays and the curtain begins to rise.

A woman is revealed standing onstage atop a small pedestal.

She is wearing a corset cinched around her middle and a long petticoat and would look like a half-dressed Elizabethan but for the dark sunglasses.

CORSET: I am here to tell you something very important. Thank you for coming, I was afraid no one was going to make it on account of all the rain. The message I bring you is not just from myself, it's a gift from the beyond, no, not God, and not aliens either, though I'm sure there's more life out there somewhere, aren't you? I am talking about history -- all of those that have come before, whose flesh begat ours, who've strutted and fretted their lives upon this planet, they're still here, no, not ghosts, though I'm sure ghosts exist also -- but more like cellular memories that inhabit me and you and that chair and that curtain. We are all vessels for that which has been, and today I'm going to speak, because that chair cannot and today you're attending to me, for which, did I mention thanks? So. Anyway. Here I go.

She takes a deep breath.

CORSET: Hold on, I think I have to take this off. Hard to breathe.

With expert hands she unlaces the corset rapidly, creating satisfying whipping noises. She pulls the laces all the way out of the eyelets.

In the moment the corset drops off her body, the woman's image wavers, then, in an instant, dissolves completely, leaving only a few sparking atoms in the air where she once stood.

The curtain falls.

(Written 3/5/11, after Solo Training Session #8)

The Imaginary Spectator: Interior Scroll

(In this new series, "The Imaginary Spectator," I narrate from an imaginary first-person perspective certain famous performances across history that I wish I'd actually seen.)

August 29th, 1975 – Dispatch from the "Women Here and Now" Festival in East Hampton, Long Island.

This evening I had the privilege of witnessing a unique performance by artist Carolee Schneeman. About twenty of us, mostly female artists from New York City, convened in the large exhibition hall to see each other’s work - primarily paintings and sculptures. In the corner, there was an empty table dimly lit by two spotlights. Schneeman entered wrapped in white sheets, carrying a paperback book and a white paint bucket filled with an unknown substance.

She placed one sheet over the table then got up on top of it, announcing that she was going to read for us from her book. She then unwrapped herself from the second sheet, revealing her costume – a small white apron covering only her lap.

Schneeman reached into the bucket and began painting the contours of her body with a mud-like substance. As it dried, the markings changed colors and crackled, transforming her image into something simultaneously wretched and ritualistic. She then performed a series of gestural poses as though she were the model at a figure drawing class.

Her anatomy was both emphasized and abstracted by the paint marks on her skin and I kept thinking about the frustrating endurance of the notion of the woman-as-ideal-form. It’s embarrassing how attached we still are –in 1975!— to the image of woman as art object. Can we not, at this late date in history, apprehend the female body as more than just something to be looked at, desired and guarded?

Moving through the poses, she read to us from her book entitled Cezanne, She was a Great Painter. The book begins something like this: "At age twelve, I knew only a few names of the great artists of history...I chose a painter named Cézanne for my mascot; I assumed unquestionably that Cézanne was a woman."

Schneeman then put down the book, stood up, and removed her apron. While full frontal nudity has become increasingly common in performance art these days, what came next was a surprise to all of us. She reached between her legs and began to extract, from her vagina, a piece of long brown paper. Hunched forward in a wide stance, she looked like she was birthing the crinkled scroll with her hands alone as midwife, nurse and doctor. As she pulled it out, she read from the text typed on the paper. I’m recreating it solely from memory, but I believe it began like this:

I met a happy man - A Structuralist filmmaker
who said, you know we like you
We think you're lovely
But don't ask us to watch your films
We don’t want to see your personal clutter, your persistence of emotions,
your hand-touch sensibility, your journalistic indulgence,
your disgusting mess, your angry gestalt.

He said do it like me – just take one thing, and follow it through
Create a system, a set, like Pythagoras!

We can be friends, he said, equally
But we cannot be artists equally

He told me he had lived once with a sculptress
I asked, does that make me a “filmmakeress?”
He said no, we think of you as a dancer.

We all watched intently, small noises erupting from the mouths of other female artists in the room, many of whom can sympathize with this feeling. The women at this conference are tired of being cast always in the role of art muse and fighting to be seen as legitimate art makers. Are the aesthetic products of our bodies, minds, and life experiences never to be valued equally with the work of our male compatriots, who seem to deny that their work too emerges from the dense soil of their bodies?

Finally, Schneeman dropped the scroll, climbed off the table and walked out, covered only by the mud-like residue of her struggle. The audience applauded thoughtfully then stood in silence for a while, looking at the detritus of this intimate performance: the book, the sheets, the crumpled brown paper.

This short performance was one of the most affective I have ever witnessed. None of us in that room will ever forget it, and I hope that Schneeman will have the opportunity to present it again. I’d like her structuralist filmmaker to experience this piece. I wonder if he’d consider it a dance recital.