Interior Scroll

Artist Carolee Schneemann (American, 1939–2019)

Date1975 (negative); 2009 (print)

MediumGelatin silver print Edition I/VII + 4 AP

DimensionsImage: 13 3/4 × 11 inches (34.9 × 27.9 cm);
Frame: 18 1/4 × 14 1/4 × 1 1/4 inches (46.4 × 36.2 × 3.2 cm)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineAcquired through the generosity of Peter Robbins, Class of 1974, and Jody Robbins

Terms

Photographs
Portfolio
Gelatin silver prints
Performances
Women
Nudity
American

Object number2008.094 f

Label CopyCarolee Schneemann first performed “Interior Scroll” in East Hampton, New York, in August 1975. She entered the performance space wrapped in a white sheet and carrying a bucket of paint and brushes. After undressing, she ritualistically painted her body and read from her book Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter. Schneemann then slowly extracted a scroll from her vagina and read the text below, an excerpt from her Super 8 film “Kitch’s Last Meal.” The thirteen sequential photographs in this portfolio record her historic performance. “Interior Scroll” was performed a second and last time at the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, in 1977. “I thought of the vagina in many ways—physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, and architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge; ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers. This source of ‘interior knowledge’ would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship.” —Carolee Schneemann, 1975 Following is the text that Schneemann read from the scroll during her performance: I met a happy man a structuralist filmmaker —but don’t call me that it’s something else I do— he said we are fond of you you are charming but don’t ask us to look at your films we cannot there are certain films we cannot look at the personal clutter the persistence of feelings the hand-touch sensibility the diaristic indulgence the painterly mess the dense gestalt the primitive techniques (I don’t take the advice of men who only talk to themselves) PAY ATTENTION TO CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL FILM LANGUAGE IT EXISTS FOR AND IN ONLY ONE GENDER even if you are older than me you are a monster I spawned you have slithered out of the excesses and vitality of the sixties…….. he said you can do as I do take one clear process follow its strictest implications intellectually establish a system of permutations establish their visual set…….. I said my film is concerned with DIET AND DIGESTION very well he said then why the train? the train is DEATH as there is die in diet and di in digestion then you are back to metaphors and meanings my work has no meaning beyond the logic of its systems I have done away with emotion intuition inspiration— those aggrandized habits which set artists apart from ordinary people—those unclear tendencies which are inflicted upon viewers…….. it’s true I said when I watch your films my mind wanders freely…………….. during the half hour of pulsing dots I compose letters dream of my lover write a grocery list rummage in the trunk for a missing sweater plan the drainage pipes for the root cellar……….. it is pleasant not to be manipulated he protested you are unable to appreciate the system the grid the numerical rational procedures the Pythagorean cues— I saw my failings were worthy of dismissal I’d be buried alive my works lost……… he said we can be friends equally tho we are not artists equally I said we cannot be friends equally and we cannot be artists equally he told me he had lived with a “sculptress” I asked does that make me a “film-makeress”? “Oh no,” he said. “We think of you as a dancer.”

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