This presentation proposes to discuss the connections between erotics and the materialities of text in the publishing work of Carolee Schneemann, focusing on her first artist’s book, Parts of a Body House Book (Cullompton, Devon: Beau Geste Press, 1972). A complex literal corpus, the book is a container for a wide array of content ‘culled’ as the artist described, from ‘mounds of related material’ and a repository and guide for the reader to navigate a route through Schneemann’s multi-disciplinary practice. The anthology format of the publication includes long form texts, diary entries, poems, original artworks, scores, charts and correspondence. Through this range of material, Schneemann collated, collaged and extrapolated accounts from herself and others to configure the texts collected in the book, embodying varied and diffuse positions — interlacing the materials established the narrativization of the author as a subject collaged within each passage, framed within and without parenthesis.

Her writing, as with that of her contemporaries such as Kathy Acker, Lee Lozano and Constance DeJong, flowed from libidinal currents, and her habitation of multiple subject positions disentangled the linguistic corralling of traditional narrative associations. This, combined with siting the negation of structure as a strategy against the apparatus of capitalism, was the position adopted by many artists at the beginning of the 1970s as prose writing emerged as a form of conceptual practice, alongside poetry and performance. The performative and disruptive use of grammar and self-citation as modes of verbo-voco-visual materiality within Schneemann’s artist’s book aligns with processes incorporated in her early works, with text as a concrete formation, to be read and vocalised off the page as a materialisation of language spoken to occupy space.

Extending this translation of the emotional form of ‘concretion’ from the context of performance into publishing, the presentation will discuss a more comprehensive relationship between the engagement Schneemann had in presenting reformulations of her body as an ‘aesthetic and emergent political subject in her work’. In Parts of a Body House Book, Schneemann problematises dematerialised strategies such as the index or chart into a formulation of biological conceptualism, where properties such as the artist’s blood were combined within the processes of printing, assembling and editioning — embodied as a particular kind of affective publishing. By locating Schneemann’s eroticism within such typographic procedures it is possible to connect the contents of Parts of a Body House Book, and the eponymous text ‘Parts of a Body House’ (1957-67) to such broader distinctions that differentiate between the epistemology of the archive, through its location as repository, and its function as repertoire, as positioned within the activation of the document as a performative gesture.

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