Charles KeifferGoucher College, ‘15December 9, 2013Art History/Criticism: American and European Avant-Gardes (AH 3090)Professor Herve Vanel and Professor Gail Husch

Reading Animality in Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses

Abstract: This paper seeks to expand upon the traditional interpretation of avant-garde artist Carolee Schneemann’s film, Fuses (1965), as primarily a document of early second-wave feminism, and attempts to read the film throughthe lens of critical animal studies and posthumanism. By comparing the cat in Fuses to the cat in Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay, “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” alongside writing by Schneemann and her critics, I show where the traditional feminist interpretation does and does not do justice to the film. The idea for this paper originated in Professor Herve Vanel’s class “American and European Avant-Gardes” while I was studying abroad at the American University of Paris. I edited and reformatted it into its current form under the direction of Professor Gail Husch at my home school of Goucher College.

The methodologies and theoretical frameworks through

which art is read, interpreted, and historicized are born

out of trends in academia, and serve to reconfigure that art

in terms of the climate of art history at the time. When

Carolee Schneemann premiered her film Fuses in 1965, it was

in the context of the fluxus movement of the New York avant‐

garde scene she associated with, alongside notably Alan

Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht,

Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama1. However, it was also in the

context of the women’s movement, and the film, along with

the rest of Schneemann’s body of work, has since been read

as much as, if not more than, a feminist statement than as a

contribution to the fluxus catalogue. While “feminist” was a

term Schneemann came to embrace in describing herself as an

artist2, through a different reading of her work I aim to

show that this may have been more circumstantial than

related to any organic qualities that her work possessed.

Feminist interpretations have since exhausted Fuses, and so by

placing the film in the more current academic discourse of

animal studies, or posthumanism, I plan to show the

historical specificity of these interpretations. However, I

also believe that both the dominant feminist interpretation

and my posthumanist interpretation are equally valid, and so

my ultimate goal with this paper is to show how all of these

(feminism, posthumanism, and relation to the avant-garde)

fit together. Hopefully this will both shine a different

light on Fuses and discourage reading Schneemann’s or any 1 Carolee Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, (1991), 312 Ibid.

other female artists’ work as only “feminist” before

considering both the historical specificity of the work and

of the terms being used to describe it.

Posthumanism, my theoretical framework here, is a

branch of critical theory aimed at (to borrow Derrida’s

term) deconstructing “the foundational assumptions of

Renaissance humanism and its legacy”3. Critiquing biases in

renaissance and enlightenment thought was the goal behind

much of postmodern and poststructuralist theory. It was

these philosophers of the 1960s, namely Foucault and

Derrida, that fed some of the ideas behind academic feminism

of the 1980s, such as that woman’s difference from man is

constructed by language with no inherent reality. Similar

concepts are being revisited today, though with more

attention paid to the human/animal dichotomy than to the

male/female dichotomy. Jacques Derrida’s 1997 essay, The

Animal That Therefore I Am, discusses the possibilities of

language and relation between animals and humans, and can be

3 Roberto Esposito, “Politics and human nature,” Angelaki, 22, (2011), 77-84, 78

used to extract new meanings from Schneeman’s Fuses. I will

compare this to the dominant feminist interpretation of the

film, considering “The Obscene Body/Politic,” a text

Schneemann published herself, alongside an essay by the film

critic Shana MacDonald on the feminist politics of Fuses.

Carolee Schneemann was born in Pennsylvannia in 1939

and grew up in rural Illinois. She studied painting in New

York City, which she later made her permanent home4. While

in New York City, she met and married the experimental

composer James Tenney, who was friends with Billy Klüver,

the physicist who had worked with Jean Tinguely and would

later found the Experiments in Art and Technology

organization with Robert Rauschenberg. It was through these

connections that Schneemann became involved in the New York

avant-garde scene of the time. At the beginning of the

1960s, she became involved with the Judson Dance Theater,

and orchestrated several performance pieces that emphasized

natural, spontaneous body movement and improvisation with

multimedia sculptural installation. As mentioned before, she

4 Oxford Art Online’s biography of Carolee Schneemann

was acquainted with Alan Kaprow, and refers to his

“Happenings” as an influence on her own work5.

Nudity became a tool in her work in the 1960s, starting

with her photography exhibition Eye Body in 1963, where she

adorned her naked body in various materials, including

snakes to, in her words, “establish my body as visual

territory.”6 (fig. 1). This was followed by 1964’s Meat Joy

performance, in which she and other performers lay covered

in raw meat. She described this performance as,

a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsionis toward the ecstatic – shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellant.7

Both Eye Body and Meat Joy were heavily censored or

rejected by many galleries and performance spaces in both

New York and Paris, which inspired Schneemann to shoot Fuses.

Looking back at her work from the 1960s, Schneemann writes

that, “I began shooting my erotic film, Fuses, in 1964. Since 5 Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, 316 Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy – Complete Performance works: Selected Writings, (1979), 527 http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/meatjoy.html

my deepest expressive and responsive life core was

considered obscene, I thought I had better see what it

looked like in my own vision.”8

Fuses was shot in double‐exposure, 16mm film using wind‐

up cameras that could only record for thirty seconds at a

time9. The film shows her and her husband, James Tenny, in

various stages of intercourse, “with layers of collaged

paper, painting and tinting added directly to the

celluloid.”10 (fig. 2-3). The shots are mostly brief, and

feel even more so with the rapidly changing colors of the

film strip, which have an almost dizzying effect on the

viewer, making it difficult to focus closely on much of the

subject matter but communicating a sense of fleeting,

ephemeral moments. The images of sex, of plant life, of

Schneemann and Tenny on the beach, and close‐ups of body

parts are interspersed with shots of a cat, first rearing

its head as if waking up and later staring directly into the

camera. The rapidly changing colors on the film suggest 8 Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, 319 Ibid.10 Shana MacDonald, Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses as Erotic Self‐Portraiture, (2007), 68

urgent movement, even when the subjects are hardly moving.

There are also shots, however, where the film does not look

to be obviously altered, and the subject is still. Here the

subject suddenly feels in focus, albeit for the brief few

seconds that they are on the screen. This includes many of

the shots of the cat. (fig. 4).

The abstract patterns that the alterations to the

celluloid make on the screen come in various colors, or

sometimes just appear as bursts of white light in abstract

shapes. The rapid pace at which we are confronted by these

abstract lines or shapes is reminiscent of the Action

Painting of the 1950s. Like with Abstract Expressionism,

Fuses speaks to something in the psyche. The erotic imagery

catches the viewer’s attention, but one still has to

mentally separate it from the constant changes in light and

color around it. By the time we have figured out what we are

seeing, the scene has changed without warning, and we are

once again challenged to distinguish erotic imagery from the

abstract color and shapes overlaid on it. As this

progresses, with seemingly no regard for what the viewer

would “like” to see (erotic imagery), the viewer begins to

feel left behind by the film, and frustrated with their own

memory’s inability to preserve the “good stuff,” the sexual

images, which are fascinating because they are shot at

angles not found in standard pornography.

As more and more colors and shapes pop up, overlaid

onto the film, it becomes more and more difficult to

remember what we have just seen. Fuses attacks the memory,

offering intrigue and then taking it away, muddling the

scenes with rapidly changing colors and shapes like

distractions in trying to summon a clear thought.

Meanwhile, the cat is always shot without overlaid

light or color, and arrests the viewer as the most

consistently focused subject. Schneemann in fact

acknowledges that the cat is the voyeur in this situation,

so what we are seeing, we are seeing through the cats’

eyes.11

This unique, animal point of view opens the door to a

new way of understanding and appreciating Fuses. In The Animal

11 MacDonald Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses as Erotic Self‐Portraiture, 69

That Therefore I Am, Derrida describes his discomfort at his cat

seeing him naked, and how this led to the epiphany that, as

long as humans have named, categorized, and exploited

animals, the animals have silently looked back at us. The

animals, Derrida writes, have always demanded something from

us with their gaze, and for him the category of “the human”

has been constructed around denying this gaze and its

demands that the holder of the gaze (the animal) be treated

with respect (i.e. not killed, trapped, or otherwise

exploited). For Derrida the category of “Man” exists on one

side of a metaphorical abyss, and on the other side are all

living things which are called animals. This abyss serves to

shield man from his own animality.12 This divide between men

and animals is discursively constructed. It functions

through language (such as that all species except “Man” can

be grouped into the category of animal) and through social

practices such as wearing clothing and engaging in politics.

To support this hypothesis, Derrida rereads the canon of the

past 200 years, and finds that no philosopher or writer has

12 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, (2008), 31

written themselves as “seen” by the animal, only as how they

see the animal.

The experience of the seeing animal, of the animalthat looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as misunderstood it. ... It is as if the men representing this configuration had seen without being seen, seen the animal without being seen by it.13

But what about Schneemann? By placing the cat as the

voyeur in Fuses, one could say that she is seeing herself as

seen by the animal. Indeed, Schneemann has said that she

made the conscious decision to show sex on film that did not

look pornographic.14 Perhaps, then, she employed the cat’s

point of view in order to remind the viewer not to watch the

film as erotic or pornographic, but to try and take the

objective and curious perspective that the cat would

presumably have.

Showing sex from a non‐pornographic, “wholly other”

perspective is what feminists had originally responded to in

Schneemann’s work. In her essay on Fuses, film critic Shana

13 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1414 Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, 29

MacDonald wrote that,

[Schneemann’s] representation of female sexuality in Fuses does not adhere to any particular code of mainstream film or art. Her image is not containedor framed by an identifiable male gaze. She does not portray the filmic image of herself as submissive or performing to please the audience. ... As a heteronormative vision of sex ... does notseriously take into account female pleasure ...

Schneemann’s vision of sex is more accommodating to women.15

MacDonald’s essay presumes that Fuses was a document of

Schneemann’s own perspective or experience of sex, or at

least, only that. However, Schneemann wrote that Fuses, along

with Eye Body and Meat Joy, “form a trio of works whose

shameless eroticism emerged from within a culture that has

lost and denied its sensory connections to dream, myth, and

the female powers,”16 and that her work explores

“associative margins in which artists are a raw material, as

nature is.”17 While the film literally is a document of

Schneemann having sex, these quotes suggest it is also about

her struggle to connect with something outside of the reach

15 Macdonald, Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses as Erotic Self‐Portraiture, 6916 Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, 3117 Ibid.

of the culture she was in. Female agency and non‐

heteronormative sexuality are certainly relevant here, but I

want to suggest that Fuses is about more than just that.

Perhaps, without fully understanding it, Schneemann’s work

was an attempt to bridge this abyssal divide between humans

and animals.

The feminist theorist Josephine Donovan wrote during

the feminist movement for animal rights that, “Speciesism is

a concept borrowed from feminist and minority group theory.

It is analogous to sexism and racism in that it privileges

one group (humans, males, whites, or Aryans) over

another.”18 This shows that the logic of fighting against

patriarchy is not so far removed from the logic of

transgressing the human‐animal divide that rejects the gaze

and the point of view of the animal, as well as the point of

view of women. Both challenge oppressive cultural systems.

It is quite possible that Schneemann had such

intentions without the ability to articulate them. In 1991,

looking back on her work, she wrote that, “in 1963‐64 there

18 Josephine Donovan, Animal Rights and Feminist Theory, 1990, 354

was no theoretical structure to ground what I was doing, no

feminist analysis to redress masculinist tradition ... no

anthropological scan of archetypes that could link our

visual images to what I called then ‘primary (primitive)

cultures.’”19

Consider then the possibility that Schneemann’s work in

the 1960s only became feminist in later years, but could

potentially speak to a wide variety of interpretations.

Further, this raises questions of the artists’ authority in

defining their own work, versus that of the art historian,

and how these definitions change over time. Does

Schneemann’s account of the art she was producing between

1963 and 1965 hold more weight than Shana MacDonald’s

feminist interpretation of it? Is it possible that when

Schneemann later encountered “feminist analysis to redress

masculinist tradition” and the “anthropological scan,” she

felt that those methodologies captured and explained what

she was doing in her work perfectly? Or is it just as likely

that they fit elements of it, and those that were not

19 Schneemann, The Obscene Body/Politic, 31

articulated, such as the human-animal relation in Fuses, were

ignored?

Madeleine Caviness writes that, “Feminist readings

cannot claim universality. The real struggle for the

feminist critic is not to validate her/his own reading by

displacing others, but to force other readings that have

been naturalized into a position of coexistence.”20 My aim

in this paper was to do exactly that, allowing the feminist

reading and the animal studies reading to coexist, not only

towards a more robust understanding of the film, but to open

a space for further posthumanist and animal studies

scholarship on works that have by now been exhausted by the

other methodologies.

20 Madeleine H. Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride anda Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum, 2 (1993), 333-362, 362