Throughout her career, Carolee Schneemann has worked in a wide range of media—performance, assemblage, photography, film, video, and installation. Trained as a painter, she is best known for her pioneering work in feminist performance art, using her body to explore the power of female sexuality. Against the backdrop of the broader women’s movement in the 1970s, Schneemann’s work was about liberating women from oppressive artistic and social conventions in highly personal and political works.

The thirteen photographs included in this suite document her performance, Interior Scroll, performed first in 1975 in East Hampton for the “Women Here and Now” festival and again in 1977 at the Telluride Film Festival. In this and other performance pieces, Schneemann insisted on the artist’s body as explicitly sexual. Her refusal to divorce sexual experience from art-making introduced the body of the female artist as the source of her creative and imaginative energy. For Interior Scroll, Schneemann stood naked on a table, painted her body with mud, and then slowly extracted a forty-inch-long scroll from her vagina and read from it, describing the sexism women artists encountered in the art world.

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.”