Afishionados,

Mom’s taking some women’s art class and apparently needs to do a report on a female artist of some sort. My immediate suggestion for her was Carolee Schneemann. Sadly, the professor (like so many professors in this day and age) has a pre-determined list of artists that the students are to choose from. And the list contains artists that people are already familiar with (O’Keefe, anyone?). Why not stir things up a bit and let the student research an artist of their choosing? Why must there always be a list? And speaking of lists, it looks as though Ms. Schneemann has found hers:

Excuse me, but your rollers are showing

For those not in the know, Carolee Schneemann’s [arguably] best-known work was her Interior Scroll performance piece (photo above). Interior Scroll was performed in East Hampton, New York and at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. For the exhibition, Schneemann “ritualistically stood naked on a table, painted her body with mud until she slowly exracted a paper scroll from her vagina while reading from it.” From her web site:

“I thought of the vagina in many ways– physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources 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 it’s 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 power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship.”

She’ll end up at the Gimcrack Hospital as a patient someday, mark my words.