Design and Desires

“Design and Desires uses the metaphoric space which was created by the works of key New York protagonists and which emerges both after the recession of the eighties and after the panhandling that allowed the larger picture from ‘The Decade Show’ convened by Marcia Tucker.”

Interview with Carolee Schneemann

born 1939 in Fox chase, KY, lives and works in New York, NY

“It started very early when I was four years old and I started making images on my father’s little prescription tablets. And they were obsessive drawings, in which each little page became an introduction to the next page. Many years later I took my babysitting money and I traveled for almost an hour to a museum in New York. I wandered through the museum and I came to the basement where I smelled an intoxicating odor that made me feel like I was falling over. And then I realized it was oil paint, and that there was a room full of people painting at easels, looking at some fruit. And the teacher asked me to come in.”

SM: If one had to describe your practice, it would be very tempting to characterize you as a performance artist.

CS: There are two mistakes there. First of all, I don’t have a practice, I have a vision. I do not practice. I know that you find the word fruitful, but it isn’t a term I like to use.

SM: Why not?

CS: It just heaps everything together. I didn’t practice the history of art practice. The word ‘practice’ sounds very predetermined somehow. And I don’t have a career. And I detest performance. I am a painter: a painter going into space and using multidimensionality as rigorously as possible given the disciplines of using space as time and examining time as space. And of course what had become known as “performance” also enabled me to include elements that I never had previously seen as exclusive, such as integrating the body as a part of an art historical construction of collage, of predimensionality, of positioning the question of the female body as I hope to inhabit it, and positioning it as a counter-thrust to the traditions I inherit. Being able to use text; being able to employ influences from music simultaneously. So what became performance I call kinetic theatre, although that is not a good term either. I’ve always stuck with “performance”, it’s just like “practice”: there is a predetermined history to it.

SM: It’s a term that has moved into the notion of live art.

CS: Yes.

SM: And how does that term describe your activities in a manner that befits it? Or do you also find that problematic?

CS: I find it more alive and suited to the history of happenings, Fluxus, body art – all the different genres that have come out of any form that is called performance. I like live art, partly because it is clumsy. But it doesn’t have the same concerns: it isn’t inhabiting the ideas of perfection, repetition, pre-existing skills, performing sexually, and most of all performing the circus.

SM: So there’s this technicality which in a sense you want to move away from?

CS: That’s right, yes. But that’s part of the history of the artists who influenced me. We were concerned with the increased materiality that was brought into actual time and against theatrical performance. Although then you get creed.

SM: Exactly. Michael Fry talks about this idea. In a strange way Thomas McEvilley also talks about this idea of the staging of the materials on culture that we now call installation art. And therefore there’s a kind of ethnicity or an identity that is inbuilt into what we carry from one culture to the other, all the spaces in the end becoming these white cubes.

CS: No, they might become books. But installation art comes directly out of happenings. And happenings have always preferred outdoor, unpredictable spaces. I mean what we were looking for in the early days were spaces that didn’t have a problematic history. And we were living in foresight because we were living in these derelict lofts. Suddenly you could find a whole space in New York half a city block long for fifty dollars a month, all rough and wretched and with no lighting fixtures. And from there you found churches and empty yards and fields and railroad stations. If you look at the history of what Charlotte Moorman took as live art, for her avant-garde performance festivals, she was rather naïve. A modestly gifted cellist from Missouri who just decided she would need to use the whole railroad station, and call the mayor and get empty trains, or say she needed a Staten Island ferry or Central Park.

Excerpted from an interview conducted by Shaheen Merali in New York, December 2006.