5×5: "Women Reclaiming Their Bodies" by Lindley Warren

The text from Schneemann’s Super 8 film, Kitch’s Last Meal, 1973-76 that she read during her Interior Scroll 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
they 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 ‘60s
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 pulseing 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 understand and appreciate
the system the grid the numerical and 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

“A landmark early feminist work, Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture comprises 148 black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s loss of 10 pounds over 37 days. Every morning she was photographed naked in the same four stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss. (The photographs from each day are arranged vertically, and the entire process can be read horizontally, like a filmstrip.) Antin’s performance purposely toyed with the traditional process of Greek sculptors, who were said to find their ideal form by chipping away at a block of marble and discarding any unnecessary material. The artist’s idea of “carving” her own body was inspired by an invitation from the Whitney Museum of Art for its biennial survey exhibition, which at the time restricted itself to the established categories of painting and sculpture, though this work was considered too conceptual for the exhibition.” The Art Institute of Chicago 

“Wilke’s project So Help Me Hannah is exemplary in it’s dynamic merging of body (the rhetoric of the pose) and mind (the “I” of cultural production): Wilke, like many feminists of the period, projects herself forward in physical action, but also explicitly lays claim to her intellectual capacity as body/self. So Help Me Hannah initially existed as a series of photographs taken in New York’s raw alternative space, P.S. 1, in 1978. The photographs show Wilke, naked, in high heels and holding a gun, captured in various poses with overlaid quotations from texts primarily by male philosophers and artists — from Edmund Burke, Marx, and Nietzsche to Daniel Buren and David Smith — regarding the relationships among individuals, art, and society.” Amelia Jones, Body Art/performing the Subject