Carolee ­Schneemann: Posthumanist Pioneer

“Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool,” wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus² 2 - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 265. 294. [En italique dans le texte original]. In the view of these poststructuralist prophets, pets are the animals of psychoanalysis. They draw us “into a narcissistic contemplation” and are Oedipal in essence.³ 3 - Ibid. But I like to think that Carolee Schneemann’s work could have changed Deleuze and Guattari’s minds.

Throughout the 1980s, well before animal studies began to challenge the anthropocentric order, Schneemann bravely explored interspecies vulnerability and affect in ways that nobody else had attempted before. Flying in the face of gender stereotypes, taboos, and decorum, Schneemann showed us what universal love might look like through the gaze of an artist who knew how to use her body as a thoroughly sensitive, utterly realist, and politically charged catalyst.

Although many articles published to commemorate Schneemann’s recent death will focus on her outstanding contribution to performance and feminist theory, few, if any, will acknowledge her highly idiosyncratic and typically subversive ability to forge novel and meaningful connections with the non-human. The cats that populate and define some of her most challenging works were intimate companions, true collaborators, and unknowing avant-garde icons.

In 1974, more than twenty years before Jacques Derrida experienced the existentialist discomfort of having his naked body scrutinized by his cat⁴, 4 - Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)., Schneemann exclaimed, “THE CAT IS MY MEDIUM!”⁵ 5 - Carolee Schneemann, letter to Margaret Fisher, July 17, 1974, in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 218. .She had already worked out that animals hold the key to a kind of creative freedom that we humans have relinquished to the power of language. The disruptive creative force that cats brought into her life as an artist was based and developed on the grounds of a genuine intimacy that surpassed the notions of master and pet. As a result, her expressive potential always lay in her ability to bypass the symbol in order to access the essence of non-­human otherness and harness it as a creative driving force. In Schneemann’s view, the ability to access and experience the world outside of social prescriptions and impositions is at the root of creativity. This belief was already visible in her most iconic statement of the 1960s, Meat Joy (1964), a ground-­breaking performance that had already firmly planted her on the map as a visionary social and cultural disruptor. From the formality of a dinner party setting, Meat Joy quickly descends into a modern-day bacchanalia. The rawness of dead animal flesh recklessly flung around the scene incarnates the death of morality, the abandonment of decency, and the triumph of matter over mind.

But despite its indisputable iconic status, to Schneemann, Meat Joy also meant the epitome of a personal crisis, triggered by the political energies that so strongly defined the cultural and artistic scene of the 1960s. She felt alienated by a masculine predominance in performance art that left her disoriented. Her move away from New York City and subsequent relocation to London and Paris during the 1970s was a desperate attempt to reclaim her artistic voice, on her own terms, in a different creative space.

It was at this moment of crisis that Schneemann turned to animals in a substantially new way and that her cat, Kitch, emerged as the creative muse that propelled her career in a wholly new direction. A deliberately nonconformist Super 8 film, Kitch’s Last Meal(1976), challenges the viewer with a formally complex and open-ended diaristic account of her life with partner Anthony McCall. The film is structured around the last days of her elderly (almost twenty-year-old) female cat Kitch. Intimate and quotidian in essence, and yet thoroughly transfigured on visual and sonic terms, the film ends with the artist’s irreducible manifestation of loss at witnessing the passing of a true companion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Schneemann continued to explore the boundaries of intimacy and affect at the frontier of interspecies communication with the collaboration of two other fellow felines: Cluny and Vesper. The close-to-the-body Super 8 filmic vernacular of Kitch’s Last Meal was updated to the sometimes out-of-focus graininess of a 35mm bedside camera. Infinity Kisses I (1980–88) and Infinity Kisses II (1990–98) capitalize on the simplest low-fi realism of domestic moments charged with timeless tenderness. The images comprising this series are the documentation of a morning ritual: artist and cat exchanging full-throttle French kisses. Of the series, Schneemann has eloquently said, “the intimacy between cat and woman becomes a refraction of the viewers’ attitudes to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred.”⁶ 6 - Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003), 264. 264. .being conceived as the emblem of boundaryless affection, these images are unsettling. To some they straddle the line of bestiality. They breach the solid constituency of humanity as a separate entity from animality. But to others, they stand as powerful and brave tools to explore interspecies relations. Is this desire? Is it reciprocal? That Cluny and Vesper would, as the artist has reported, initiate the effusive exchange perhaps makes these images more intriguing. The snapshot-selfie quality of the images, which are often out of focus, and the seemingly unstaged framing cast the viewer as a silent, observing companion — close enough to perceive the event’s vibrant spontaneity.

Animal mouth and human mouth produce sites of indispensable pleasures and existential differences. The human voice and the animal voice are equalized by the silent kissing and the photographic medium that captures them. It is in the infinity of this very silence, resting on lips sharing an intimate encounter, that human-animal kinship is made visible. We see pleasure — reciprocal abandonment. There’s no master, there’s no tie. At times, it might appear that we are allowed to peer into what could be described as true interspecies love. A wordless desire to reach for one another — a will to find a union lost a couple of million years ago, here unfolding in a new human-animal poetics of tenderness and vulnerability.