P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2008 Spring

Carolee Schneemann: The Cat’s Eye View

A conversation between the artist Carolee Schneemann and M.M. Serra, director of The Film-makers’ Cooperative.

Carolee Schneemann

Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

M.M. Serra: I want to talk to you about being around artists that were grouping together in the 1960s to form a new personal vision of cinema, outside the system.

Carolee Schneemann: I came to New York in the early 1960s. My companion James Tenney had composed music for Stan Brakhage films while in high school in Colorado. We became this triad of impoverished determined artists wanting to reshape our areas of aesthetics. Stan was film and poetry, Jim was music, and I was the visualities, painting and what became kinetic/performative.  The art world was so tiny then, it was possible to call John Cage and say that you were a young artist working with aspects of chance and randomness and could we all go mushroom hunting? And you could. Or to call Edgar Varese, who allowed me to be his secretary because we were so impoverished, his grand eminence who paid me three dollars an hour to sort through all his scrap books and fed me bananas in the morning. And of course it was revelatory being in Maya Deren’s life and seeing how desperate and impoverished she was.  She came back from Haiti and showed us the original ritual trance footage, but there was no money to print the film. We were hanging around expecting her to get us cigarettes and dinner.

MMS: How did the individuals and the community hold it together? What advantages did you have then that maybe don’t exist today?

CS: The open territory! Big lofts were being abandoned by small manufacturers.  They were happy to have artists come in and rewire them and sand the broken down floors.  I found half a block on West 29th street for sixty-seven dollars a month because the furriers had abandoned it.  I supported myself there by being a dog dryer in a pet shop, I was an artist’s nude model, I taught Sunday School and on Saturday I was in porno films as an extra.  You got fifty bucks to stand around in a little black dress and pretend you were drinking.  I was working on my film Fuses by then, in 1964–65, so I had submerged myself in my own erotic vision.  Of course these porno films seemed to have nothing to do with sexuality or sensuality, so it was a cultural oddity.

MMS: Fuses is a recognized masterpiece and one of the first films that shows a woman, yourself, making love. How did you come to make that film?

CS: I could never imagine it would be a “masterpiece” or even cared about. All my work comes out of a strange kind of obsessive necessity to see if I can find something that is different. There was nothing in my culture, in those years, that corresponded to lived heterosexual pleasure.  Our remarkable little female cat Kitch provided shameless visual permission. Tenney and I would be making love and if we looked over we could hear the cat purring and watching us very approvingly and I thought that the cat really should be a form of the camera. Let the cat eyes become the filming presence.

In making the film it was very important that there was no camera person in the room. This was another kind of crazy determination. I would borrow all these wind-up Bolex cameras which run for something like 30 seconds. So that determined the collage nature of Fuses.  It’s very important to remember that every one hundred feet of film had to go with a letter from a psychiatrist to Brakhage’s lab in Denver because the FBI was always looking for anything prurient, rapacious, anything that might have sex in it. I wasn’t sure what that standard might be and I was very fortunate to find a psychiatrist who agreed to send a letter that said: “The enclosed footage by my client Carolee Schneemann is an archetypal study of the cross and its various displacements.”

MMS: So when you made Fuses you were doing something that was very taboo but it is also distinguished in the way that you paint the surface and you stamp and you scratch and you treat the material properties of the film.

CS: I worked for two years to edit it. The A and B roles were done with clothespins on wire. The premise was that whatever was in my life would have to enter the film. It couldn’t be pristine. Cat hairs and dust and moths and insects would fall into it. The collage layers of the film were so fat after two years that the lab said, “It’s too fat we can’t process it.” So not only had I struggled with pornography and misogyny but now I had a terrible technical problem where they could not print the film!

MMS: But that also adds to the beauty of it because film is organic and has emulsion, not like digital medium.

CS: Well the guys at the lab had become such sweethearts and they would ask me things like, “In that blue part, kid, does she like what he’s doing to her?” And I would say, “Sure, yeah, sure, she likes what he’s doing to her otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it.” So they helped by pushing Fuses through frame by frame, by hand, and they said, “We’ll never do this again, don’t tell your friends.”