Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kristine Stiles is Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Marina Abramovic and States of Mind: Dan & Lia Perjovschi and co-editor of Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings.

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose painting, photography, film, video, performance art, and installation works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the National Film Theatre (London), and Anthology Film Archives. She is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association and the author of Imaging Her Erotics; More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings; and Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter.

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"Not only a revelatory stroll in Carolee Schneemann's teeming archive, "Correspondence Course" demonstrates that letters, no less than canvases or installations, are works of art. An exquisitely dense meditation on address, Schneemann's revelatory letters and Kristine Stiles's deft critical framing perform a radical reconception of art history itself. At once deeply personal and profoundly philosophical, "Correspondence Course" illuminates and complicates pretty much every notion I have had about the past fifty years of avant-garde art. A brilliant, breathtaking, stunning book."--Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

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AN EPISTOLARY HISTORY OF Carolee Schneemann AND HER CIRCLE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.....................viiPREFACE...................................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS...........................xxiINTRODUCTION..............................xxv1956-1968.................................31969-1975.................................1421976-1986.................................2691987-1999.................................382INDEX.....................................491

Chapter One

The letters begin in 1956 with an exuberant Carolee Schneemann, preoccupied with charting her artistic process. That same year, she secretly married the experimental composer James Tenney, who introduced her to the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and his wife Jane, with whom Schneemann would remain friends throughout her life (figure 16). Writing to Brakhage in 1957, Schneemann expresses a passionate, prescient engagement with vision that would shape her aesthetic intentions and aims: "Where ever the eye does not dominate the form," she asserts, "I am revolted." Schneemann's early letters evince a self-reflective young woman who was also a precocious feminist with many close female friends; her letters to them are tender, empathic, and engaged as much in their lives as in her own. Schneemann's correspondence also shows an ambitious artist who emphatically insisted on equality with her husband and male colleagues. Schneemann writes about several illegal abortions and her effort to balance domesticity with the development of her art and career. Vibrant descriptions of her artistic insights join narratives of international and political events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the spraying of poisonous insecticides by the U.S. government, and the villainy of and necessity to resist the Vietnam War. During this period, Schneemann moved from painting into assemblage and became involved with the Judson Dance Theater, happenings, and film. She also wrote about "Kinetic Theater," a form of happenings that provided the structure for Meat Joy, the event she performed in Paris, London, and New York in 1964, which brought her international acclaim. Love letters to Tenney during periods of travel express Schneemann's longing at the same time as she regales him with stories of the European avant-garde. Tenney's letters recount his love, support, and poignant sense of her absence. This section ends with Schneemann's calamitous love affair in 1968, which also culminated in her divorce from Tenney, psychological breakdown, and subsequent move to Eng land. These letters provide insight into the toll "the sixties" took on those who made and lived what became its myths.

CS to Stan Brakhage 5 February 1956

There is a portrait of Jim-no longer so so ghosted-this is strong to itself & before the beard has been cut, very richly felt out.

Your poem is full of where your life is worded to mean beyond and we certainly love it & how veined it is. We finally did away with the Christmas tree before a resurrection-that would be Easter and I seem to be sickly a bedded a lot when I am not wildly dofully and it goes & goes well! Like tonight we went out for dinner, Hungarian & now feel poisoned and Jim was promoted in his ridiculous job (on my knees-we are sharing one pen) as chief typist over a group of cretans. He has this job one month from an employment agency. So even tho it pays $65. a week, we struggle on $35. a wk ($65-tax = $55.00, take home-$20.00 a wk for 1 month to the Emp. Ag.). I was to Phila to receive $100 award purchase for the little etching of last year "Lady Asleep"-and it was a grotesque ordeal of managers & idiots & photographers & handshake & hysterical relatives-god!

Jim's job cuts him from time for working enough. He doesn't complain because we are always happier but I could rage for it. My parents bought me new dresses. I chose-expensive enough to live on for months-each one! So I can be so elegant while I worry for groceries. They are really depraved because they have peasant souls trapped in upper class hypocrisies. They don't want to know how it really is.

What has been fine is how Lipton called me one Sunday to "come right away, please" to look at 6 model sculptures for a monumental one to rise 14 to 20 feet in the middle of a new Mit green or common. It will be the first sculpture that one can stand in. He had worked so concentratedly on possibilities he wished for other eyes, in which he believed, to share the struggle. They were all great things. Then the New York painters arcanum was very much fun, called "The Club" and a longish talking to De Kooning & meetings with all those famous I had carried suspectly and now have met & blown up or down.

Worked Christ-time at the Met Museum.

[...] In the summer could we come to see you or you come somewhere that is not New York (Ah, Mallorca).

Joseph Cornell to CS 13 June 1956

Please don't speak too glowingly about my dreams re: film to Stan. [figure 17] After effusions I find it necessary to remind myself that a wicked amount of time has been consumed with them and very little to show as compared with my medium proper. I appreciate your lead of yesterday but think I shall go slow as involving people who don't know my other areas and the very difficult affair of working realistically enough so as not to get expectations up.

Very early now-dew on the typewriter. There's something not quite right with my chocolate drink. Of course, the birds haven't been fed yet! Magnificent white clouds scattered around the horizon. They won't last long but for the moment, a morning of Constable.

CS to Jack Ludwig July 1956

A lot of the time is a letter to you in and out of my mind and it's a trick that to know what you're up to I have this tremendous raveling to make first. Partly the feeling of "disappeared from the earth" is leaving the East where I always know that North is above and where everything I care about is, or has been. Now I am in Marshdale (once I lived in Shipbottom N.J. and once in West Bridgewater Vt.) and North is the top of the mountains, which are all around, and East is not on the left and South is where Jim's family live in Denver and West ...? To get where we are follow Turkey Creek Canon towards Fairplay, past the gargantuan Red Rocks phenomena (upon which some fundamentalist fanatic climbed by ropes and crampons to scrawl in five foot letters "REPENT YOU LUKE WARM CHURCH GOEER" and "JESUS HAS GOONE WHERE WILL YOU GO?" over SNARLING GULCH, on up Death Bend road to Idledale over North Turkey Creek Gorge to Evergreen and three miles on a dirt road is the Marshdale General Store behind which are three shacks and we live in them. Every folk in these parts has two cars and four horses; we have an ole Pontiac with a kittenish face and a big round grey body that moseys us back and forth very well. Now we are busted again but with a great sense of freedom-borrow money for gas and pick up and go! I will learn to drive shortly, my last innocence.

Somebody gave us a kittenish face with a weeney grey body: Kitchfrighty example of Kitchhood; fearsome warringer. Sphinx of the bent knee and curly lap, conqueress of hairy summits, naily peaks and pitfall valleys. Guardian of the sleepers, gong and scratch of the morning. Moth snatcher, egg lapper, cat napper, wood tapper, eyed latcher, neat crapper. Fluff ball. Din and Gammon. furr purr fuss buzz

Outside are cows, in abundance, wise and intent, red or black. Some ridiculous donkeys, horses; all these things grazing, chewing, and ambling on pastures strewn with rocks beneath the most tearing upwards, three-pine-thrusting mountains. This is the awesome landscape that Jim promised me, that I was warned about by other painters as there being nothing one could do with it-too spectacular, pictured on post cards. Of course I'm managing. I can use anything I feel strongly enough for and pulling the form from these things is excruciating and wonderously arduous. The painting is flaring out now that I'm into it. What we talked about once-gesture and caricature-is a problem very real to this kind of landscape. The words I have now for what I'm after is to re-enact substance. The caricature in so much contemporary painting comes from emotional effects and thus this effectiveness is the subject of the paint. Form is now at the mercy of technique rather than a technique dedicated to form. Form for me is all the possible visual elements which are the worlds of painting. And the substance I mean is visual, structural because the obsessive image, and the emotional levels will flow by themselves as each stroke is building.

CS to Louis Schanker 27 July 1956

I'm tucked away in the Colorado mountains in a fine old shack with lots of money trouble but nothing to worry over or lose time to. [plate 2] And something is really going on and I'm in the middle of it and very excited: I'v been doing landscape and pulling the form from these hills is really arduous and color blazoning and the first paintings were overflowing-too much in fact. All of a sudden this painting started making itself more than it was reenacting the substance of things I held to visually-externally; and its like finding the truest Nature I ever imagined because it is so much created in the terms of Paint. This is probably what you went through a long time ago and I just now feel really released into what I'v wanted; the color is loose and the forms are suggestive of more than just what I'v been seeing and energizing. But I'll have to find out more and follow through.

CS to Naomi Levinson 26 September 1956

We got married in a mad night dream of accommodating Phila at Ethical Culture society in a made-to-order in two days by Daddy's tailor blue silk suit (and a cashmere flannel for cold Winter) and me in an old organdy fancy and mother no hysterics or tears even.

Composer's conference led to Him getting first a Fellowship to Bennington College and now a straight Scholarship with an angel pianist-composer, Nowak. His work performed by professionals this summer and shook the place up and so beautiful and recorded so you could hear when you and Nick come to stay in our "guest" room of six here in titillating Vermont.

I am most disjointed settling again and working in labors of house till depraved towards my own painting which is waylaid. Eating off of wedding present dinner is so fine we plan to do this again several times each four enshrined nights at Phils. then to Park Ave. Suite (with Kitch and her box of shit and raw hamburger- but for $16.50 a night I figured anything went and it did) wafted by parents dedication to the right ideal in a first new real nightgown of old fashioned cotton voile and then in between scrubbing 1528.

CS to Stan Brakhage 4 April 1957

My working has changed so much since you were here last-it is hard to describe-I won't try-but the color IS the form and the color is freed to strength that I hadn't found without the seasonal sensations so close around me. There is one large and charging painting of the mill which set the work off in February. I will just let some things come out and you may find me better-god knows it takes long enough.

Every time I work well from the figure I "break" with the figure; for I don't want "it." I want its limitless possibilities for forms and spatial expressiveness. I decided for the possibilities of, say, Jim's thigh, above the limited concision of most painted "abstractions." But I have no interest in "most" at all and it was, for a time only, important to find out why. I am still seeing from De Kooning and Pollock and also Joan Mitchell. I used to expect great things of Hartigan but there is a kind of robust coarsening to her vision which more and more repeats its best effects-which were there five years ago. The specificity of Pollock I have always maintained and now Parker has written really well on it, so that my secret and tenuous (because no one else agreed or had seen it that way) belief is made fact by the critical apparatus which affects things so rightly with poetry and so wrongly with pedantry.

My ideals are all for order; but ideals are very boring in the face of Lifefullness where my instinct is all for chaos and tension ... I generate it. The vision adjusts the act of tension, which is all feeling-sensitive to the point of a scream, of displacement, unbalance, flux-to its underlying organic structure which is an order; I can think of nothing organic which can not be understood this way, for my purposes.

[...] I have been in and out of the Baudelaire with great pleasure for the shooting insights and dismay at the historical factuality of bad art taking time and place then as much as now. That he states so simply about the colorists-from nature-and the linearist-from mind-has formed one of my important mental stepping stones. And then in the flowers of evil during a dried time for work. It substantiates some oldering moldering absolute-art-love-talking and it has to with your wondrous distinction as a poet, when as a poet-you can write "we" or image "we" and it means the work for the life; therefore you can instill and sustain on any level what I am forced to receive thru memory and reality. I paint for him, live by him but when I am in a brittle work time and "we" are charged and charging and with joy if there is not good work then the I and the we lead separate meanings all in the same hours and positions. It is a case of reality exceeding the imagination which has no compensation for such immediacy ... this is the hardest part. So like Baudelaire you can use the misery and place it and isolation allows you to will or wish thru a "we" ... it is artifice. Baudelaire's third draft to a preface of f. of e. where he Writes how he cannot write, nor want any longer to teach, feel, neither excitation nor extinction. That is glorious. But when Beethoven writes he cannot work the words of his despair are ragged and horrible because they are no less than the reality he states ... and they are no more.

[...] Ruggles back and he looked at my most difficult painting with the mill forms and said: "Oh yes I recognize it-eagle mill." [plate 4] And he renews us beyond saying and we have a bouquet of courage or love together ranting and raging around the little table.

CS to Marvin Hayes 4 April 1957

You don't write yet-do you think I deserted you in n.y.; don't think that, it couldn't be true. I carry everything and everybody with me-there is not a goddamned creature dead or alive that I have ever known that I do not still carry. This may do nothing for the carried but this time in n.y. I had such need from someone that there was something I HAD to do to help them and I did and that is why all my other wishes were just carried and not carried out and that is how I have not seen you again.

I have a new idea for our oldering moldering absolute-love-art-talking and that is that-you have the wondrous distinction as a poet, as all poets; you can write "we" and it means in the work for the life; therefore you can instill and sustain where I am forced to memory and longing. I cannot paint "we." I paint for him, I live by him, but when I am, like now, in a dry work time and "we" are charged and charging and with joy if there is not good work the I and the we lead separate meanings all in the same hours and positions ... this is the hardest part. To be alone one can and must feel we and is willed and wished into all the energies comings and goings-imagination makes the misery useful and placed. Today I'v read two supreme examples of this; Cummings whose love poetry is all his poetry and Baudelaire in his third draft of a preface to Flowers of Evil; "... I have my nerves and my vertigo. I aspire to absolute rest and continuous night. Though I have sung the mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst only for a liquor unknown on earth which the pharmaceutics of heaven itself could not afford me; a liquor that contains neither vitality nor death, neither excitation nor extinction. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to will nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still to sleep, this today is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but sincere."

Now is two days later and with picking up to betterness; fine muscle ache time of taking modern dance classes here-that is their best department and Jim will take them also-a few mad-true young artists slaving with it. Painting a sun hot watered figure-like beach air and yellow warmed while around us here is a kind of tender and violent thaw-lots of rain-and startling announcements of color.

CS to Naomi Levinson 5 June 1957

What has happened to us lately and is happened is all colored now by my being pregnant. At first I felt brutally betrayed by my good witch Lilith, by my destinies and will and good luck pattern and was hysterically depressed in a lost week of waiting. By now I am on top of IT and am finding a doctor to do a "C.D." or "D.C." There were shots which didn't work and to try my father I inquired of him what to do and nightmare-like he told me exactly what he told my mother twenty years ago when she tried to abort me: castor oil and an enema. He won't help.

(Continues...)

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