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Meat System in CologneKenneth WhitePublished online: 24 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Kenneth White (2015) Meat System in Cologne, Art Journal, 74:1, 56-77, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2014.1016339

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2014.1016339

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Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton, Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970, found computer, 16mm projectors, radios, speakers, monitors, three slide carousels, custom mirror system, custom electrical components, Persil soap flakes, and plastic sheeting; approx. 13 x 13 ft. (4 x 4 m), installation view, Kölnischer Kunstverein (artwork © Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton; photograph provided by Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)

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This work is made possible by the support and input of Carolee Schneemann. I am grateful for her generous and incisive communications. I would like to thank Nora M. Alter for her advisement under the auspices of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. My thanks to Alexander Alberro and Ron Clark. Invaluable assistance was provided by Peter Blank and Anna Fishaut of the Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University, and by the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. I would also like to thank Ilona Lütken, Archive Administrator of Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. My special thanks to Soyoung Yoon.

The epigraph is from Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” (1919), The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75.

1. Carolee Schneemann, Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (New Paltz: Trespass Press, 1975), 5.

“It is a remarkable apparatus,” said the officer to the enquiring traveller, surveying the apparatus with some admiration in his eyes, though it must have been long familiar to him.—Franz Kafka

A Remarkable Apparatus: From Meat Joy to Meat System

From Meat Joy of 1964 to the Meat System of 1970–71, the work of Carolee Schneemann intensified in its technical-libidinal character. This text describes that development by examination of two works: Lateral Splay, a performance first made in 1963 with the Judson Dance Theater, and Meat System 1: Electronic Activation

Room, a multimedia environment produced in 1970 for the exhibi-tion Happening & Fluxus at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. A close reading of these works, following the demands of the historical record, complicates prevailing accounts of Schneemann’s work based pri-marily on discourses of identity, corporeality, and so-called body

art. While not dismissing the importance of these interpretations, the present examination of the route from Meat Joy to Meat System, with an eye to then-con-temporary discourses in applied physics, cybernetics, and industrial psychology during the Cold War, especially the American escalation of the Vietnam War, provides an important revision to our understanding of Schneemann’s work and the particular import of its feminism.

This revision may be extended to even her most notorious “body-centric” performance, Interior Scroll (1975). Consider the first preparatory drawing Schneemann made for Interior Scroll, published in her artist’s book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1975).1 We see a rendering of the action the artist will make in its two iterations: a series of poses expressing an arch ritualism and a mocking challenge to the submissive role of the live nude female model. Schneemann removes from her vagina a scroll of paper on which she has written a statement of protest against the exclusion of women, and especially herself, from American experi-mental film culture. We also see two words, underlined: “the message.” Schneemann’s notation in this first articulation suggests that the work be consid-ered not only within the discourses of performance and experimental film, but also as a rearticulation of the motif of “the muse” in relation to the media theo-rist Marshall McLuhan and his famous dictum “the medium is the message.”

Comparison of the Electronic Activation Room with Wolf Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age Happening Room (1968) underscores the aggressive ambivalence particular to Schneemann’s technical-libidinal operations, which I am calling libidinal engineer-ing. Following the more prominent representations of erotic pleasure found in Meat Joy or the explicit sex acts depicted in her 16mm film Fuses (1964–66), and her move from New York to London in 1969, Schneemann’s projects were increasingly concerned with mechanisms of affective control. Her projects were distinguished by engagement with libidinal energy and its determination by media-architectural means. These concerns characterized Schneemann’s partici-pation in Happenings and Fluxus activity, and her multimedia “kinetic theater” projects Ghost Rev (1965), Snows (1967), and especially the Electronic Activation Room. The latter is a delimited space in which the rule of audiovisual technologies was concentrated, concretized, ossified—and their structuring repression perhaps over-come. At the end of the 1960s, we find in the Electronic Activation Room a sophisticated

Kenneth White

Meat System in Cologne

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2. Carolee Schneemann, “Interior Scroll” (1977), in Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 154.3. Schneemann reflected recently, “[EAT] didn’t work with me, no, this [Snows] wasn’t their project. Because Billy Klüver was very fond of Jim [James Tenney], and Jim was at Bell Labs, I had access to wonderful technicians who were excited and willing, but as usual, I felt that I was sort of sneaking in on the margins of Klüver’s friendship for Jim—he really didn’t care what I was doing. So it was a bit of a token towards Jim.” Carolee Schneemann, interviewed by Kenneth White, Third Rail 4 (Winter 2015): 15.4. Warren Weaver, foreword to LeRoy MacColl, Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms (New York: D. Van Nostrand and Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1945), vii.

contention with Cold War technocratic management of desire and affect. By 1975, “the message” is not of joy, but rather of woman-as-medium—the original “extension of man”—now turned into a ferocious “ticker tape” machine.2

Recall a formative context for Schneemann’s work of the era: Bell Laboratories and Experiments in Art Technology (EAT). Founded by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman, EAT was a series of collaborations between artists and Bell Labs scientists. Its programs included the 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering events of 1966 in New York and the Pepsi Pavilion in Expo ’70 in Osaka. EAT supported Snows with technicians and hardware. Schneemann’s partner James Tenney was an artist-in-residence at the Bell Labs Murray Hill, New Jersey, campus from 1961 to 1964.3 In the 1940s, Bell Labs was a site of intensive technological innovation in support of the war effort. One of its products was the book Fundamental Theory of Servomechanisms, published for popular consumption after the war. Warren Weaver, famed chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), provided the foreword. He writes:

The last ten years have seen a tremendous advance in the automatic control art; and the story of this advance is essentially a story of the modern servo-mechanism. The control art is an old one. With the broadest definition, it is a very ancient art; for one supposes that if Adam wished to control Eve’s vocal output, he had simple mechanisms, such as a well-balanced club, with which he doubtless brought it down a goodly number of decibels. One of the first control devices of general and important application was the centrifugal governor which James Watt invented, about 1790, to control the speed of his steam engine.4

Carolee Schneemann, Cologne notebook page, 1970, marker on paper, 9 x 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8 cm) (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photograph provided by Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)

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5. On the history of the “democratic personal-ity” in the postwar United States, especially in relation to multimedia projects, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Weaver’s words are telling. He presents casual misogynistic humor wrapped in more than a little victor’s pride. Weaver illustrates the physics of servomecha-nisms (feedback amplifiers) through a fantasy of prehistorical domestic assault. He articulates an especially brazen expression of gendered violence in American postwar culture, in particular, from within the rarefied military operations research environments of Bell Labs and the NDRC. The spontaneity of Weaver’s chauvinism belies more generalized anxieties set into discourses of technologi-cal development. The primary subject at hand, however, is the applicability of servo engineering to postwar sciences of control and communication. Weaver’s scenario, with its brutish, prelapsarian flourish, indicates the tone in which these rhetorics of automatic control circulated. In the critical context of total war, the servo is imagined as a pinnacle solution to a wide array of management prob-lems. The device and its rhetoric become reversible, forming a relay of embodied progress, scientific rigor structured by its own invention. “Simple mechanisms,” perhaps, but Weaver’s words suggest some of the fraught nature of the environ-ment compelling the search for a device of “general and important application.” In the flippant brutality of his sexism, we gain a particular view to the pressures propelling the declared aspirations for servomechanisms. The culture that gave rise to the servo was shot through with psychosexual disquiet.

At the time of Weaver’s writing, in March 1945, the “democratic personality” seemed all-but-triumphant over the authoritarian one.5 In just a few short months, however, new questions emerged regarding the consequences of nuclear weapons. Advances in the automatic control art were eclipsed by “thinking about the unthinkable,” in Herman Kahn’s famous phrase. By August, the innovations in servomechanical engineering described by Weaver seemed like quaint trivia in

Carolee Schneemann, sketch for Interior Scroll, 1974, marker on paper 8½ x 11 in. (21.6 x 27.9 cm) (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photograph provided by P.P.O.W. Gallery)

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6. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).

contrast to the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent revelations from the Manhattan Project. While development and application of automatic control technologies accelerated in their sophistication and pervasiveness, the broader popular attention focused on new theories for managing the “unthinkable” scenarios of nuclear fallout. Experimental hardware became part of game theory, strategic behavior, and cybernetics, or “control and communication in the animal and machine.”6 Weaver’s foreword offers a view to the early workings of these discourses, in particular their technical-libidinal char-acter. As we shall see through the work of Schneemann, if Eve is reduced to a force measured in decibels in need of effective modulation, then Adam’s club cannot become a club without instrumentalizing Adam himself.

This essay concerns the compulsion from which this technical-libidinal relation was formed, its process, its violence, as it was worked through in Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room. The work has received little sustained examination in the Schneemann literature. The Meat System was a site-specific project and was dismantled following the close of Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Happening & Fluxus in early January 1971. The project exists in limited published docu menta tion, con-sisting of six pages of written reflection and photographs in Schneemann’s com-pendium of performance documentation and writings, More Than Meat Joy (1979, reprinted 1997). In this essay, through consideration of unpublished materials in Schneemann’s archive, now held by Stanford University, and materials in the archive of Hans Sohm, Szeemann’s collaborator on Happening & Fluxus, we find a project of extraordinary importance. 

Carolee Schneemann, Lateral Splay, 1963, two views of performance at Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York, 2012 (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photographs © Ian Douglas)

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7. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 10.

In the Meat System, which Schneemann created in collaboration with John Lifton, she explored, in a range of media, the contingency of claims to the “auto-matic,” and the desire at work in claims to “control.” Schneemann took on the process of instrumentalization, which Herbert Marcuse, writing at the same moment, might have called introjection, the making of the subject into a servo, into an assemblage of material and ideological processes through which the subject is alienated from personal agency.7 Schneemann built her own control mechanisms, a room even, in which a multiplicity of media—photographic slide projections, motion picture projections, televisions, computers, and pop radio—were atom-ized under fine and deliberate modulation, in a kind of inversion of the Cold War command center. This technical-libidinal ambivalence has some of its basis in Schneemann’s work with the Judson Dance Theater. Examination of a recent stag-ing of Lateral Splay, a key work from the artist’s time with Judson, assists our understanding of the process by which this ambivalence intensified.

Particles Bombarding Space: Lateral Splay

In 2012, at the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York, Schneemann stepped along the perimeter of the performance floor. She executed small gestures with her hands like gentle waves, as if to test the air for minute currents. She lifted a field whistle and blew once. Fourteen performers emerged from corners of the church floor. They dispersed and cut diagonals across the full space. One looked on another, watched. The two stalked each other, then sprung.

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8. Schneemann, telephone conversation with the author, July 7, 2014.9. Ibid. Recall the words of Schneemann’s friend and collaborator Claes Oldenburg: “Gravity is my favorite form creator.” Oldenburg, “Extracts,” Artforum 4, no. 5 ( January 1966): 33. 10. Carolee Schneemann, “From the Notebooks” (1962–63), in Imaging Her Erotics, 48.

The pair grappled in their running collision. Both dropped to the floor and went slack. Moments later each would arise and separate as if recharged to find another partner with whom to collide. Performers’ bodies at rest littered the floor. Others looked for a new confrontation.

Schneemann blew on her field whistle again. The performers made crawling runs across the floor. As they hunched low, their arm swung in caricatured ape-walks. They stared ahead without expression, moving on straight paths across the floor. They were activated by “muscular instrumentalities, more animal than machine,” determined by a “physiological sense of movement and muscular direction.”8 We watched as the performers inevitably collided with one another, again and again. As before, when collision occurred they crumpled to the floor as if evacuated of their propulsion. The second episode was distinguished by rhyth-mic swish-thump sounds made by the performers’ hands and feet. No stalking. Rather, deliberate steps one to the next until halted by an exterior object. Several bumped into pillars. In one instance, a performer ambled into a spectator seated in the first row and crumpled at contact. The performers voided their agency. Their energy served simple directives.

Another burst from Schneemann’s field whistle marked the third and final sequence. Arms outstretched, backs straight, and faces set forward, the perform-ers threw themselves into circular motions. They cast their bodies between com-peting forces. They wrung themselves into the execution of actions determined to test the limits of stability. Momentum propelled their trunks and arms against the runs demanded of their legs. The participants’ feet slipped and slapped the floor, catching their bodies for a moment before they launched into another turn, drawing frenetic helixes. And again the performers crumpled to the floor at colli-sion, their hands swinging into each other, into solid pillars, at highest possible speed. The participants seemed to find grace in their momentary lift from the floor, but then always crashed, always returned, in “alignment” to the force of gravity: “We loved the collapse.”9

In the three sequences of Lateral Splay, the group enacted a kind of playful switching between autonomy and collectivity, between its particular character and its status as instrument of Schneemann’s instructions. Through their movements, the performers sought to concretize a propulsive process between control and its release, between self-consciousness and a willful giving over of their bodies. The participants’ actions suggested a network of energy in a process of continuous gen-eration and dispersal. How a body comes to move from one position to another is the primary aim of the work: for the artist, bodies—her body, those of her collabo-rators, and those of her audience—are aggressively determined by multiple forces. Lateral Splay was an analytic process by which to “manifest in space” new gestures against the structures of power that move a body from one place to another against its will. In 1962–63, at the time of her conception of Lateral Splay, Schneemann wrote:

The fundamental life of any material I use is concretized in that material’s gesture—gesticulation, gestation, source of compression (measure of ten-sion and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action. Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time. Performers or glass, fabric, wood—all are potent as variable gesture units: color, light, and sound will contrast or enforce the quality of a particular gesture’s area of action and its emotional texture.10

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11. See Danspace Project Platform 2012: Judson Now, ed. Judy Hussie-Taylor (New York: Danspace Project, 2012).

Schneemann’s alliterative series “gesture, gesticulation, gestation” suggests a material’s essence defined not by its social determination within given classes of organization, but rather by its potential energy in relation to energy applied. “Performers or glass, fabric, wood”—each is constituted by potency. Here we find a notion of ontology as potential catalysis of new relations: a metaphysics of “developing force.”

Lateral Splay was first presented with thirty performers on November 19 and 20, 1963, in Judson Dance Concert #13. Schneemann’s 2012 staging of Lateral Splay at St. Mark’s Church comprised her contribution to Judson Now, a series of events pro-duced by Danspace Project to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Judson Dance Theater, active between 1962 and 1966 at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village, New York. Judson Church was an intensive environment of creativity. It is difficult to overestimate the Judson Dance Theater’s impact on late-twentieth-century art. The present ubiquity of intermedia experimentation and the incor-poration of everyday gestures and common materials may trace their origins in part to the pathbreaking work of its participants.11 Schneemann presented several projects at Judson, including Newspaper Event (1963), Chromelodeon (1963), and Meat Joy, restaged in 1964 after productions in Paris and London. In the group, Schneemann was a painter among dancers. She sought to break the planar surface of the canvas, understanding painting as a premise as much as a medium. In 1979 Schneemann reflected that Lateral Splay functioned as “an explosive and linear refrain, a propulsive jet of movement cutting through the sequences of other works and the materials of the environment.” She continued, “It involves a maxi-mum expenditure of directed energy; in rehearsals we practiced with the sense

Carolee Schneemann, Lateral Splay, 1963, performance view, Judson Dance Theater, Judson Church, New York, 1963 (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photograph by Lisa Kahane)

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12. Carolee Schneemann, “Lateral Splay” (1979), in More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1979), 47. 13. Carolee Schneemann, “Snows” (1966/1977), in ibid., 148–149.

that the runners were particles bombarding space.”12 Schneemann sought to ground optical privilege within a complex body. And she explored its aggregate “units of time” across a range of media.

Electronic Activation Room

Kinetic theater was Schneemann’s term for her heterogeneous mode of produc-tion in Meat Joy and other works of that period. Kinetic theater was a process of intervention against suppressive cultural conceits, in particular the relegation of women to domestic bliss. The term referred to a constellation of tactics deter-mined by the artist’s access to materials. Schneemann sought materials dismissed as scraps from industrial construction and furriers, discarded meat, and especially the refuse of the day-to-day demands of domestic life. The works became increas-ingly complex. Ghost Rev and Snows incorporated film projections, strobe systems, and motion sensors, with elements of live performance, alongside the common matter Schneemann collected from New York streets. The works are now consid-ered classics of so-called expanded cinema. “I wanted the mechanical gestures of machine parts to equal performers’ movements—exposed as part of the total environment to which they contribute particular effects,” Schneemann wrote of the development of Snows.13 This equivalence of machines and performers begins to specify the materialism of Schneemann’s libidinal engineering.

Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton, Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970, installation views, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970 (artwork © Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton; photographs provided by Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)

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Made in collaboration with the artist John Lifton, the Electronic Activation Room extrapolated the “propulsive jets of movement,” her formulation of performers as “particles bombarding space,” into an environment. Her work came to accrue more menace. Schneemann and Lifton conceived the Electronic Activation Room in London and built it in Cologne for Szeemann’s Happening & Fluxus at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. The Electronic Activation Room was a site of concentrated, cacophonous media technologies triggered by the audience’s presence. The artists sought to respond to the increasingly mediated culture of the 1960s, and in particular American military intervention in Vietnam, by amplifying what mediation com-modified, removed, and effaced. Indeed, the Meat System understood media tech-nologies not as the mode by which the conflict was represented, but rather as its defining condition. Media technologies did not clarify, did not make sense, rather were a process of obfuscation, division, and violence. Here, for Schneemann and Lifton, was an unbearable tautology presumed as the terms of everyday life: cul-ture became a sequence of involuntary responses induced under a “method of limits,” as it is called in psychophysics, determined by the same techniques of aggression. Again and again, viewers triggered audio and visual circuits responsive to their movement. In this way a viewer was relegated to a conduit of culpability, a subject of stimulus-response dynamics in a predetermined range of interactiv-ity, a mute positivism. In this context, joy—a central propulsion for Schneemann’s earlier projects—turned into acrid ambivalence, racing into fury.

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14. Carolee Schneemann, “Electronic Activation Room,” in ibid., 203.

The Electronic Activation Room barraged viewers with projections of Vietnam atrocity photographs, clips from radio, and pop songs. German television broad-casts spewed from stacks of monitors. Slide and film projections of Schneemann’s previous kinetic theater projects overlapped. The images lost their representa-tional coherence in their numerous appearances. They were further atomized by a custom-made mirror-box apparatus operated by servo motors (devices related to those acclaimed by Weaver in 1945).14 Together, the images became a semi-abstract swirl of light and motion with fleeting evocations of the matters they depicted. This materiality was underscored by Schneemann and Lifton’s treatment of the walls of their area, which they covered with white paper in irregular man-ner. The paper drooped and curled away from the wall, resulting in a fragmentary sense of depth and weight to the images, which broke across the white paper “screens.” In addition, a screen of discarded nylon Organza, a synthetic fabric, was suspended in the space. Mirror pieces affixed to the fabric by Schneemann and Lifton pulled at the material, further breaking the integrity of the projection lights. The images peeled away as if they disintegrated on contact, not unlike the flesh of the napalm victims who flickered from the projectors.

Photojournalistic images of the Vietnam War appeared by means of multiple forms of mediation. In the Electronic Activation Room, the images were presented

Carolee Schneemann and John Lifton, Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room, 1970, modified computer and mirror-box compo-nents, Cologne, 1970 (photographs provided by Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)

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John Lifton and Carolee Schneemann in their area of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970 (photograph © Balthazar, provided by Carolee Schneemann)

through 35mm slides and motion picture film used in and documenting Snows, material which was inclusive of Viet Flakes (1965), Schneemann’s seven-minute, 8mm film with a sound collage by Tenney. For Viet Flakes, Schneemann recorded photographs of the conflict by means of a handheld camera augmented by an assemblage of common drugstore magnifying glasses taped to its lens. By the movement of this makeshift, responsive lens, the photographs were “reanimated,” imbued with a shuddering kineticism. This action alerts the viewer to the contingent hands grasping the camera and searching the images with an intuitive roving. It also gives a fleeting sense of new life in the victims depicted. The corpses are induced back to life, through the blurred Ben-Day dots: the ashen-faced assailants shimmer from the haze of small-gauge celluloid. They are thawed from their photochemical fixity, momentarily liberated from their immu-tability, by the camera’s roving. Yet the simulation remains as such, a simulation: not a reconstitution of lost agency, but rather implication of the viewer in the intractable horror.15 Here we find a crucial component of Schneemann’s articula-tion of the violence of mediation and of war as mediation, a concomitant process of elision, exclusion, and violence literalized through the effects of the mirror-box servo system and wall treatment.

In the Kunstverein, Schneemann and Lifton were allotted a space of four by four meters, cordoned by three walls. They enclosed their space further with a temporary fourth wall. They ringed the space with media apparatuses. The machines, while set at the walls, pressed inward, turning the space’s square dimensions circular. The central area was the throw space for the projectors, their beams crisscrossing each other at the viewer’s only available position of experi-ence. A viewer was forced to step into the target point of multiple audiovisual

15. Erica Levin discusses the photojournalism used by Schneemann in “Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows,” in Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, ed. Kenneth White (London: Black Dog, 2015), 224–51.

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16. Schneemann, telephone conversation with the author, July 7, 2014.17. Carolee Schneemann in public remarks at the symposium “Carolee Schneemann: Then and Now,” Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, October 19, 2012. 18. Schneemann, “Lateral Splay,” in More Than Meat Joy, 47.

transmissions. The Electronic Activation Room was not a display of electronic devices as aesthetic objects (as in the work of Nam June Paik), nor were they simply sup-ports for the presentation of prerecorded sounds and images. Rather they dis-sected these devices’ presumed capability to produce coherence. The result was a multisensory attack which sought to evoke in form and content the violent events endured by others that seem as remote and ascetic as the technologies used in their communication: not simply the violence of war, but the violence of watch-ing war, at a distance. No TV set in one corner, stereo in another: rather an over-abundance of devices, which, by means of their massed presence, imposed an affective force contradictory to their commercial intention. Like Lateral Splay, the Electronic Activation Room alerts a viewer to the body as an instrument that is too easily determined by external powers. In the performance, participants rehearsed a series of directions that made visible the contrived codes of corporeal move-ment, of walking, running, body language, and material weight, the forces at work in one’s body. In the Electronic Activation Room, a viewer was seized in a feed-back loop lurching into overload. Here the human body was incorporated as only a servomechanism, participating through a delimited range of factors—presence, movement—without consent, a “score” by which apathy was set as an untenable position against the violence depicted.

This affective pressure was complicated by another material that disturbed the viewer’s navigation: on the floor of the space the artists spread Persil soap flakes. Persil, produced by the Düsseldorf-based corporation Henkel, was adver-tised with the promise of “self-acting” progress and efficiency in housewives’ chores. In the Kuntsverein, Persil was appropriated in disruptive overabundance. Boxes and boxes of the detergent were dashed across the space, extending the roughhewn character of the paper scrap walls. The chemical powder shifted and gathered in piles both coarse and slick. Set among clear plastic inflatables, the floor covering gave way to a viewer’s footsteps, diminishing one’s proprioceptive confidence. Hyperaware of the uneven, pliant surface, viewers contended with multiple demands on their attention. Shards of bright projector light scattered around them, on the flaking wall-screens, on the nylon-mirror assemblage, on their own bodies. “More luscious than severe,” Schneemann reflected, in the sense of a smooth trap of passive-aggression, shutting one inside the machine.16 It was a kind of living room blown apart: rather than couches or overstuffed reclin-ers, viewers found themselves among the synthetic innards of these objects. The guts of postwar middle-class life were strewn across the space.

The soap flakes and inflatables required unnatural gestures from the viewers, forcing them to pick their way through the material, lifting legs, compensating unsure balance with arms outstretched and jerking stiffly, peering through the changing light for their next foothold. Soap flakes stuck to their skin, clung on their clothes. It lifted from the floor. Dark mounds rose into the ambit of projected light. Viewers cast shadows unrecognizable as their own, further pitched and bro-ken by the mirrored nylon. They could only continue to trigger the sensors as they tried to make sense of the surroundings in the audiovisual spew. Schneemann and Lifton wished to “merge” the audience and the images.17 In this way, the Electronic Activation Room expands on Lateral Splay: “When collision occurred [between partici-pants running at highest possible speed and an obstacle in their space] the runner had to meet the obstacle at full speed, merge with it, and fall down.”18 Perhaps

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19. See Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 62–99; Kathy O’Dell, “Fluxus Feminus,” TDR 41, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 43–60; and Anette Kubitza, “Flux-proof or ‘sometimes no one can read labels in the dark’: Carolee Schneemann and the Fluxus Paradox,” in Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, 206–15.20. Carolee Schneemann, letter to Harald Szeemann, July 31, 1970, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Hanns Sohm, Happening & Fluxus Köln 1970, Korrespondenz.

through the grating experience of the Electronic Activation Room, Schneemann and Lifton posit, the spectator would recognize herself as a performer for machines, as a machine. The given networks of control and communication would splinter apart. Passivity would be untenable, unbearable. To enter the Electronic Activation Room was to become the literal “meat” trapped in a tumult of paroxysmal apparatuses triggered by one’s presence. Yet the machines churned on, indifferent.

Schneemann and Lifton constructed a site-specific multimedia environment of extraordinary complexity under the auspices of a retrospective show for Happenings and Fluxus artists. The fact that she remained on deeply ambivalent terms with those cohorts is a crucial detail of this scene.19

Szeemann organized Happening & Fluxus in cooperation with Sohm, the German collector of ephemera related to Happenings, Fluxus, intermedia, Aktionism, and performance art. Schneemann proposed her contribution to the show in a letter to Szeemann dated July 31, 1970. Her words assist our understanding of the devel-opment of her aspirations from summer 1970 into autumn, when the Happening & Fluxus exhibition opened at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on November 6. Schneemann wrote: “I’m planning a simplified auto-documentation environ-ment. . . . My proposal is to assemble an inflatable room—12 to 14 ft. diameter: overlapping circular ‘walls’ of mirrored plastic; mud and st[r]aw or foam poly-urethane floor; film projector (loops); 3 slide carousels, two tape recorders, photo blow-ups.”20 Her assertion of “auto-documentation” suggests the autobio-graphical character that defined other works of the time, such as the films in the Autobiographical Trilogy, which comprises Fuses, the then-in-progress Plumb Line (1968–71), and, later, Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–78). “Environment” suggests the extrapola-tion of Happenings and Fluxus events into built space, often in coordination with electronic media, pervasive in the era. If we recall the assaultive intent of the Electronic Activation Room in its final realization, we find a poignant atomization of her résumé. Photodocumentation of Meat Joy, Water Light/Water Needle, and Snows emitted from three stacked, oscillating 35mm slide carousels and 16mm film pro-jectors. Projected simultaneously and against each other, they generated a fierce confrontation between still and moving images, between sexual pleasure and state-sponsored killing. These projections were directed into seventy-eight small, square mirrors arranged in a grid, the mirror box. The broken, overlapping images were reflected into the space, its walls ragged screens.

Schneemann’s “auto-documentation environment” hyperbolizes a process of self-erasure on two registers: one, in the immediate context of her ancillary posi-tion in the history of Happenings and Fluxus; and two, more broadly the abdica-tion of personal responsibility enabled by means of the media technologies, here a repurposed computer system controlling the motion sensors, the movement of the projectors, and the refraction of the mirror box. All the more ironic for corporeality was an explicit feature of Happening & Fluxus. For his installation at the Kunstverein, entitled TV-Ochsen, Wolf Vostell penned in a live, pregnant cow, though it was removed by authorities before the exhibition opened. Hermann Nitsch conducted an Aktionist event with animal viscera and priest’s raiments. In contrast, the Electronic Activation Room appears as a perceptive, predictive site of automatic control at the juncture of art and life. In Happening & Fluxus, a raucous congealing of international avant-garde projects, the Electronic Activation Room is a melancholic transmission from the future, mourning the passing of a culture in

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Carolee Schneemann, Cologne notebook pages, 1970, 9 x 7 in. (22.9 x 17.8 cm) (artworks © Carolee Schneemann; photographs provided by Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries).

The page at left incorporates a letter from Harald Szeemann to Schneemann dated October 6, 1970.

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which Schneemann never fit well, while also seeing through and critiquing the rising euphoric affection for multimedia. For Schneemann, the promise of expanded cinema was troubled by its participants’ stubborn disavowal of its undergirding contingency for fantasies of control, gendered bias, and prejudices of desire, suffused by hyper-militaristic imperialism generalized to the status of mass culture. Rumbling in a darkened stall at the rear of the Kunstverein, far away from Vostell’s cow pen, was another kind of cordon. The Meat System pressed on the technical-libidinal process between cause and effect itself, sought out the servos at work, materially and ideologically, to find “SPACE (a place) between desire and experience.”21 Cold War technophilia was the condition of flesh. Automatic control was the premise by which life would be administered.

Vostell’s Elektronischer dé-coll/age Happening Raum (Electronic dé-coll/age Happening Room, abbreviated as EDHR, or called Electronic Happening Room or Hommage to Dürer) assists our examination of Schneemann’s Electronic Activation Room. EDHR was produced two years prior, in 1968, for the Institute of Modern Art in Nuremberg, and for the Venice Biennale. The work comprises six television monitors set on a floor covered in broken glass. Each monitor is modified with other objects activated by simple motors. TV Set #1 includes an actual sickle slicing across its disrupted screen image and a “Vietnam ‘rake/boots’ unit”: on top of the shards of glass lay a pair each of combat boots, women’s shoes, and child’s shoes, all treated to the same dark brown-black color, like slick ash. A short rake, attached

Wolf Vostell, exhibition plan for work in Happening & Fluxus exhibition, 1970 (art-work © Wolf Vostell)

21. Carolee Schneemann, “From the Notebooks, 1963–1966” (1966), in More Than Meat Joy, 59.

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22. Wolf Vostell, “Hommage to Dürer,” Miss Vietnam and Texts of Other Happenings, trans. Carl Weissner (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1968), 35–39.23. Peter Saage, quoted in “Wolf Vostell, ‘Electronic Dé-coll/age, Happening Room,’” Media Art Net, at www.medienkunst-netz.de/works/elektronische-decollage/images/3/?desc=full, as of June 20, 2014.24. Carolee Schneemann, “Expanded Cinema: Free Form Recollections of New York” (1970), in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate, 2011), 95, emphasis in original.25. See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 41.

to a paint roller, pushes at the pile. The shoes’ leather laces entangle on the tines of the rake. TV Set #3 emits a vertically and horizontally squeezed picture. Atop the unit, a servo works the gears of a bicycle, which are attached to skis sliding over the top edge of the monitor screen. Industrial wires fixed to the tips of the skis activate small shovels, pulling and pushing the pieces of glass. TV Set #5 includes a kettle bomb studded with candy: some kind of mocking, perilous totem. Its own servomechanism works a hoe and paint-roller assemblage with a taxider-mied bird, its wings outstretched.22 A so-called honey pot (an electronic trap using motion sensors) in TV Set #3 incorporates signals of a viewer’s presence in the space by the simple computer modulating the actions of the assemblages. Vostell was assisted by the technician Peter Saage, who explained the interactive elements: “In communicating with the electronic dé-coll/age happening room, you change it. Your position in the room is reported to a computer in the form of electrical pulses derived from the photocells. During your absence, your behav-iour is temporarily adopted by self-excited pulse sources in onanic anal-ogy.”23

Vostell’s Electronic dé-coll/age Happening Room and Schneemann’s Electronic Activation Room offer two complementary modes of operation in the history of electronic spaces. In Vostell’s “onanic anal-ogy,” spectatorship is reduced to mere electrical pulses, the on-off of a remote control that activates a compulsive repetition, a horrific mimicry of ineffectual persistence. In the Electronic Activation Room, Schneemann also forced an acute confrontation with the technology by which desire and violence are determined. However, whereas Vostell’s viewers activate the system-as-carcass, Schneemann’s viewers are the meat of the system electroni-cally stitched into the images. Which is worse, Schneemann’s crowded stall seems to ask: that the visceral images are too close and too many for the viewer to attain coherence, or that the fragments one can discern in their specific ordeals and pleasures are so far away, so distant in their mediation as to evoke only one’s inconsequence against those conveyance technologies? An aggressive ambivalence was at work in the Electronic Activation Room at the very moment discourses of multi-media experimentation were reaching their historical ascendance.

Studies for Testing Energy

On September 9, 1970, in London, while producing the Electronic Activation Room, Schneemann wrote on expanded cinema: “We were expanded cinema cinema mythos living act living out art act synapse turned fragile flash frame motion out of our spines—out of our heads!”24 Schneemann makes an important distinc-tion in these poetic remarks. “We”—herself, her colleagues, her audience—were expanded cinema: that is, not necessarily a discrete technology or its application, rather, a network of technical-libidinal operations inclusive of the fraught impli-cations of bodies and machines. Schneemann’s words, especially her association of psychophysiological with photochemical processes, would seem on point with the definition of expanded-cinema-as-expanded-consciousness given by Gene Youngblood, a supporter of Schneemann’s earlier work.25 However, in contrast, we find in the artist’s work an increasing alarm at the habituated systems of determination still firmly entrenched, notwithstanding purported innovations in media technology. Schneemann’s critical acumen would reach new sophistication in the Electronic Activation Room. Andrew Uroskie argues that a broader historical view

Wolf Vostell, Elektronischer dé-coll/age Happening Raum (Electronic dé-coll/age Happening Room), 1968, installation view and detail of “Vietnam ‘rake/boots’ unit,” Institute of Modern Art, Nuremberg, 1968 (artwork © Wolf Vostell; photographs by Klaus Eschen)

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26. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).27. Donald A. Laird, “Experiments on the Physiological Cost of Noise,” Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology 4, no. 5 ( January 1929): 254.28. Charles S. Myers and Margaret K. Horsey, ibid., 251.

is necessary so to underscore the sophisticated, contradictory, and often delib-erately contrarian innovations found in expanded cinema.26 In a similar mode of historical investigation, I am arguing for Schneemann’s Electronic Activation Room within a longer, complex history of controlled environments. Germane here are discourses of industrial psychology from the 1920s.

Consider Schneemann’s collage Testing Energy (1970), published on the cover of the London poetry magazine Earth Star Ship. The man on the left is the American industrial psychologist Donald Laird, who was based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from the 1920s through the 1940s. In Laird’s tests, typists pro-duced the same standard letter over and over again in two-hour sessions. A breathing apparatus measured the typists’ caloric expenditure. Within the cus-tom-built ten-by-ten-foot test chamber, the typists were assaulted by drones of varying intensity, and up to 1,500 vibrations per second (Hz). Laird hoped to determine the decibel levels at which the typists were most efficient. Laird wrote, “Our working hypothesis is that ‘noise’ serves as a natural stimulus to the fear-reaction.”27 Laird’s editors, the British psychologists Charles S. Myers and Margaret K. Horsey, observed that “the special value of [Laird’s] communication lies in the description of the experimental methods he is employing.”28 For Schneemann, the “special value” of Laird’s communication lies in his bald display of patriarchal imposition on his female typist. Recall Weaver’s attempt to modu-late Eve. A fear-reaction was indeed successfully induced in Schneemann, and in her collage we see her retort. Laird aspired to make administrative assistants more efficient for their male managers. Now he observes chaos.

Schneemann’s concern with technology and its effects on the body reaches a culmination with Interior Scroll, which appeared at the end of a period in the artist’s career in which she immersed herself in discourses of cybernetics and informa-

Figure from Donald A. Laird, “Experiments on the Physiological Cost of Noise,” 1929, as printed in Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology 4, no. 5 ( January 1929), p. 254 (photograph in the public domain) Carolee Schneemann, Testing Energy, 1970, collage on paper, 13 x 9 in. (33 x 22.9 cm) (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photograph provided by the artist)

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tion theory. The Meat System exemplifies this research. To the right of her sketch for Interior Scroll, she wrote “the message,” underlined. For Schneemann, women’s bodies had always been the medium of a limited series of messages: housewife, maid, model, muse. The combination of “control and communication in the ani-mal and machine,” as Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics, was a conceit of male privilege. Schneemann read from the scroll, her dialogue with “a happy man, / a structuralist filmmaker”: “he said we can be friends / equally though we are not artists / equally I said we cannot / be friends equally and we / cannot be artists equally.”29 For Schneemann, any theory of messages could not be disentangled from her lived circumstances of technical-libidinal overdetermination. The popu-lar McLuhan jargon and cybernetic utopias were exactly that: jargon and utopias. They demanded evisceration. In Schneemann’s reflection, Interior Scroll emerged from the “power and possession of naming—the movement from internal thought to external signification.”30 The parameters of that movement were already fraught by what was disavowed, the unthinking brutal dailiness. Schneemann’s sur-vival depended on the production of new “gesture units,” to follow her writing on Lateral Splay, within and without the ascendant regimes of technological fetishism.

Libidinal Engineering

In Schneemann’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s, we find a radical recon-figuration of the relation between artists’ mediums and electronic mass media. By means of the historical context of automatic control, we find something less akin to the spectacular arrays of Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, and something more like the “remarkable apparatus” described in Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: that is, the notion of medium as a killing machine. Consider another collage made by Schneemann at the same time as the Electronic Activation Room, entitled Study for Testing Energy. We see a woman, flanked by wings of ripped classified advertisements solic-iting “mature and intelligent young women,” “secretary,” “copy girl.” In a turn on perspectival space, the woman is affixed as if to stand on top of an electrical trans-former while she is also fixed to the surface plane of the collage itself by a wire sup-port rod. The rod pierces the woman’s chest like an entomologist’s pin. She is stuck through like a bug. Set as she is on the transformer, her body contorted, another violence is suggested: she seems shocked, riddled with convulsions induced by a charge from the transformer. A man, an electrical engineer, tinkers below.

What occurs in representation in the collage is conceived in affective presen-tation in Electronic Activation Room. Schneemann’s project suggests that we might, to follow Kafka, find some understanding through the wounds inflicted by our con-trol systems. “It would be pointless to tell him,” the officer says of the prisoner trapped within the Apparatus that enacts both judgement and execution. “He will learn it in his own flesh.”31 In Kafka’s story, the epiphany sought by the devoted officer in his merger with the Apparatus is answered by way of an iron spike through his head. In Schneemann’s libidinal engineering, her Electronic Activation Room, we find a correlative working-through of the restive materialism that trou-bles any attributions of liberatory potential to a machine.

Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room makes a cogent turn on “thinking about the unthinkable.” The work’s stakes are set in the dynamic of thought and unthought. Servomechanism: a “tremendous advance in the automatic control

29. Schneemann, “Scroll #2” (1975), in “Interior Scroll,” Imaging Her Erotics, 159–60.30. Schneemann, “Interior Scroll,” Imaging Her Erotics, 154.31. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 79.

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art,” to recall Weaver, a discrete invention nurtured in the laboratories of MIT and Bell Telephone. However, as we learn at the end of Kafka’s story that the murder-ous apparatus is but a symptom of a generalized seduction of the penal colony inhabitants by authoritarian power, the servomechanism is yet one more iteration in the condition of control societies. By these terms we may begin to understand Schneemann’s process from Meat Joy to Meat System.

Kenneth White is a PhD candidate in the department of art and art history at Stanford University, where he is completing his dissertation, “Libidinal Engineers: Three Studies in Cybernetics and Its Discontents.” He is a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (Critical Studies 2013–14 and Studio 2014–15). White is editor of the Millennium Film Journal.

Carolee Schneemann, Study for Testing Energy, 1970, collage on paper, 13 x 8¼ in. (33 x 21 cm) (artwork © Carolee Schneemann; photograph provided by the artist)

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