This performative paper examines the conditions through which Carolee Schneemann’s texts operate as feminist scores. The term ‘score’ accounts for textual artworks, as noted by Liz Kolz (2001) ,⁠ that arose around the time of John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), a musical score of performed silence described textually, without musical notation. Scores, as art practice, materialised as printed text, verbal instructions, poetically or diagrammatically described, asking to be read, performed, heard – and through these actions, reiterated and re-enacted. This presentation examines how Schneemann’s scores locate us as readers, listeners, audience in radical proximity to a multitude of bodily spaces that resist patriarchal and capitalist structures, bringing us into engagement with textual bodily spaces that resist stasis and refuse fixed representation, fusing cavities, bodily processes, imaginary bodies, her cats, her own body, bringing us very close, at times locating us inside and moving through, in encountering her work. Through my own practice of performance writing and lectures, and in articulating my proximity to my research subjects through a method I describe as “speaking with”, I look to come close to Schneemann’s haptic thinking, foregrounding methods of proximity, touch and digestion as processual feminist methods of radical making in “speaking with” her text Parts of a Body House (1957-1967) and film Kitch’s Last Meal (1976) amongst other works. What does it mean to come close, to rub up against Schneeman’s radical feminist bodily thinking in the present, and what does it offer as methods to create radical spaces to hold feminist thinking today?

https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/carolee-schneemann-body-politics/

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