This article reads together the work of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, as situated between film, performance, as well as dance and painting, considering what their work reveals about a specific intermedial feminist aesthetics developing at this time. It argues these traits in their work are not isolated commonalities but are shared with a wide range of feminist artists working in the 1960s and 1970s and are still echoed in contemporary feminist art. Further the article proposes to think through these intermedial relationalities as a mode of feminist aesthetics. It argues Schneemann and Rainer successfully extend the position of the female body in cinema beyond the traditional role as object to include both an embodied form of authorship, and a complex, affective performance of woman onscreen and provides the historical foundation and influence for my reading of the embodied, intermedial experiments found in feminist experimental film and media in the ensuing decades. The comparative reading of Schneeman’s film Plumb Line and Rainer’s film Lives of Performers index the artists’ shared positioning of their own bodies in the dual roles of performer and author within their films. In my analysis, this aesthetic innovation actively engages with the different embodiments of the artist/performer, the bodies onscreen and the embodied spectator the films address.
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The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann
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The Aesthetic Lives of Performers:
Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer
and Carolee Schneemann
Shana MacDonald, University of Waterloo




Abstract

    This article reads together the work of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann,
    as situated between film, performance, as well as dance and painting, considering
    what their work reveals about a specific intermedial feminist aesthetics developing
    at this time. It argues these traits in their work are not isolated commonalities but
    are shared with a wide range of feminist artists working in the 1960s and 1970s
    and are still echoed in contemporary feminist art. Further the article proposes to
    think through these intermedial relationalities as a mode of feminist aesthetics.
    It argues Schneemann and Rainer successfully extend the position of the
    female body in cinema beyond the traditional role as object to include both an
    embodied form of authorship, and a complex, affective performance of woman
    onscreen and provides the historical foundation and influence for my reading
    of the embodied, intermedial experiments found in feminist experimental film
    and media in the ensuing decades. The comparative reading of Schneeman’s
    film Plumb Line and Rainer’s film Lives of Performers index the artists’ shared
    positioning of their own bodies in the dual roles of performer and author within
    their films. In my analysis, this aesthetic innovation actively engages with the
    different embodiments of the artist/performer, the bodies onscreen and the
    embodied spectator the films address.

   The 1960s were a rich creative period in the early careers of both Yvonne
Rainer and Carolee Schneemann. In this decade both Rainer and Schneemann
established themselves as internationally recognized artists, performing and
exhibiting for the first time many of their best-known works.1 Schneemann
and Rainer developed their formative aesthetic styles in response to major shifts
unfolding in the New York art world at the time, including minimalism, Fluxus,2

1
  See Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who… Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1999); Carolee Schneeman, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings
(Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co, 1979); Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Strategies of Coherence: Narrative
Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer’, in Feminism and Film, ed. by E. Ann Kaplan (New
York: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 265–86.
2
  See ‘Experimental Women in Flux: Selective Reading in the Silverman Reference Library’
<https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/womeninflux/> [accessed 20 February

                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                      Shana MacDonald
                                             ﻿


Happenings, and performance art.3 They were thus informed by a space of
artistic experimentation whereby artists ‘were actively re-imagining what the
work of art could be’.4 For Schneeman and Rainer, as Elise Archias importantly
notes, this included a materialist oriented exploration and challenge of more
traditional forms of modernism through their bodily practices.5 Further, it is
important to point out how from early on in their careers, both artists notably
incorporated different media into their environments, performances, events and
choreography, including the use of moving image technology in conjunction
with live bodies. This incorporation of an intermedial aesthetic is central to
Schneemann and Rainer’s work including their respective films Plumb Line
(1968–1971) and Lives of Performers (1972).
   This paper offers a comparative analysis of their work, considering how their film
works in particular draw on their engagement with performance, dance, sculpture,
and painting in order to advance their direct critiques at the representational
codes and cultural conventions they sought to undermine. This comparison
considers the types of formal experimentation they each engaged with and how
this led to their different negotiations with Modernism, language, and gendered
representation. My use of the term intermedial describes aesthetic works that
construct an engaged relationality between different media. The 1960s mark the
emergent use of cinema and moving image screens within visual art environments.
This emergence is characterized most often as ‘the beginnings of an “intermedia”
condition’, or a loosening of the borders between film and art practice. 6 This
emergence produced ‘hybrid filmic objects, installations, performances and events’
in place of traditionally separated forms of film, painting or sculpture.7 This sense
of intermediality is present in expanded environments created by Schneemann
and Rainer’s art events, performances and films throughout the 1960s and are
foundational for their respective film works in the 1970s and beyond. Their
early work with intermedial environments and performances directly challenged
modernism’s attachment to medium specificity and in particular the constraints of
the static frame within painting, theatre, which they both integrated and exploded
within their respective approaches to film.8 Rainer and Schneemann explored the



2020] for more information on Rainer and Schneemann’s participation in Fluxus (and sometimes
alienation from) at this time.
3
   See Rainer, 1999; Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotic’s: Essays, Interviews, Projects
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
4
  Elise Archias, ‘The Body as an Everyday Material in the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton’,
Wreck, 3.1 (2010), 1–5 (p. 1).
5
  Elise Archias, The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (New Haven,
Conn:Yale University Press, 2016).
6
  Tanya Leighton, Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. by Tanya Leighton (London:
Tate, 2008), pp. 13–14.
7
  Ibidem.
8
  This is something Schneemann herself argues in her notebooks from 1958-1963, reprinted in
More Than Meat Joy, p. 52.

30
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


performing, represented body, and their own bodies in particular, as materials to
be used in the service of modernist critique.
   They both employ intermediality not only to offer this critique of modernism
but also to further their distinct explorations of language as a cultural system of
power and gendered representations on screen. They both successfully extend the
position of women’s body in cinema beyond the traditional role as object to include
embodied forms of authorship that consequently work to destabilize the fixity of
language and media within the structuralist and modernist frames of the 1960s and
1970s. Their representations of complex and wholly agential woman on screen
provide a historical foundation for the equally embodied, intermedial experiments
found in feminist experimental film and media in the ensuing decades.
   My comparative reading of the two artists focuses in on Schneemann’s film
Plumb Line and Rainer’s film Lives of Performers in order to index how they
each explore, in wholly distinct ways, what Rebecca Schneider calls ‘the explicit
body’ of feminist art.9 This is seen first in how Schneemann and Rainer position
their own bodies in the dual roles of performer and author within their films,
and second in how both artists directly challenge to the valorization of cinematic
specificity so common within the experimental art scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
This I argue, they both do in distinct ways through foregrounding the body of the
artist as both on screen image and author off screen. This move, or what I term
below the double gesture of the artists, pushes against the conventional fixity
of the diegetic film frame and addresses the audience in affective and visceral
ways. In my analysis, these two related aesthetic innovations actively engage with
the different embodiments of the artist/performer, the bodies onscreen, and the
embodied spectator the films address. In order to understand how their specific
aesthetic approaches developed, it is necessary to consider their histories within
this space and time of the 1960s avant-garde art scene in New York City.


Shared Histories of 1960s New York

   In the winter of 1967 Carolee Schneemann and Yvonne Rainer both participated
in Angry Arts Week — a collective event of happenings, performances, and art
inventions in New York City protesting the Vietnam War. Rainer performed
Convalescent Dance, a variation on her well-known work Trio A at the Hunter
Playhouse. Convalescent Dance sought to connect the vulnerability of her
body, at the time recovering from major surgery, and those of soldiers’ bodies
in the Vietnam War. The performance was not overtly political but rather
proposed an empathetic relationship between her ‘frailty and the condition of
soldiers wounded in action’.10 During the festival Schneemann presented her
intermedia performance Snows at the Martinique Theatre. This architecturally

9
    Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997).
10
    Ramsey Burt, Judson Dance Theatre: performative traces (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 17.

                                                                                                  31
                                        Shana MacDonald
                                               ﻿


complex performance art event combined performers and film projections with
lighting and audio sequences controlled by audience movements within in an
immersive environment. Her film Viet Flakes, which includes graphic images of
violence against Vietnamese civilians, was projected as part of the performance.
Schneemann brought these various elements together within the performance
space in order to make the viewer acutely aware of the bodily consequences
of war from their own embodied position as viewers affectively addressed by
the performance.11 Rainer’s and Schneemann’s performances took place in an
era when daily images of violence in the media prompted many women artists
to ‘make work in which bodies themselves took on the status of media’.12 Both
artists’ focus on their bodies as an art medium in these performance spaces
formally contested the political apathy and conservativism present within
dominant American culture at this time.
   Rainer arrived in New York in 1958 from San Francisco where she had
previously trained as an actor.13 Once in New York, she quickly gravitated towards
a group of dancers who were experimenting with John Cage’s practice of chance
operations and incorporating the quotidian into their performances. Rainer was
deeply influenced by both Cage and Merce Cunningham and sought to employ
their ideas within her work.14 During this period Rainer choreographed extensively,
premiering key works such as Three Satie Spoons (1961), We Shall Run (1963), and
The Mind is a Muscle (1966) which included her most famous dance Trio A. Three
Satie Spoons,15 a solo dance in three sections, developed out of workshops held by
Robert Dunn at Cunningham’s studio in 1960, where Rainer and others explored
ways to adapt Cage’s scores into choreographed dance.16 The dance includes
Rainer’s signature interests in placing everyday actions contra the psychodrama
celebrated in modern dance at this time. Rainer writes on the impact of watching
Simone Forti do an improvised dance during a workshop session, she states ‘what
[Forti] did brought the god-like image of the dancer down to human scale… It was
a beautiful alternative to the heroic posture’ that was prevalent in Rainer’s training


11
   For a detailed account of this performance see Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics (Cambridge,
MA: MIT press), pp. 60–73.
12
   Pamela M. Lee, ‘Bare Lives’, in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. by Tanya
Leighton (London: Tate, 2008), p. 140.
13
   Rainer, A Woman Who…, pp. 49–50. For a more detailed history of Rainer’s move to New York
see Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 151–97.
14
   In an interview with Christine Iles, Rainer notes: ‘The early 1960s was a very fertile time for
intermingling of avant-garde activity in all the arts, primarily through the influence of John Cage;
his writings about chance and Zen and silence affected painting, sculpture, dance and performance.
Some of this activity took place in Yoko Ono’s loft between 1960 and ‘61. Also, at the Ruben
Gallery and the Judson Church Gallery artists like Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg and Allan
Kaprow presented their work’. See Iles, ‘Life Class’, Frieze Magazine, 100 (2006) <http://www.
frieze.com/issue/article/life_class/> [accessed 12 October 2011].
15
   Rainer’s Three Satie Spoons is actually re-performed in the film Film about a woman who…
(1974).
16
   Rainer, A Woman Who…, p. 55

32
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


at the Graham School.17 It was within these group studio sessions with Forti,
her then-husband Robert Morris, and others that Rainer began incorporating
pedestrian movements and the everyday into her choreography.
   This interest was taken further in We Shall Run, where non-professionals
and dancers dressed in everyday clothing run continuously in various patterned
formations. The piece incorporated elements of the everyday (bodies, clothing,
and movements) in an effort to counter the more elaborate staging and
costuming of modern dance at the time. Again, the work was a direct response
to the feted tendencies of modern dance — ‘the ecstatic, the heroic, the regal’18
— which Rainer recalls ‘seemed very tired to us, used up, effete’.19 In contrast,
We Shall Run celebrated the ‘pedestrian, the quotidian, and the athletic’ body
foregrounding it as an equally viable subject of choreography and performance.20
Rainer describes a Robert Dunn course she attended where ‘all he did was
present various examples of chance operations: mostly chance-derived scores
created by John Cage, which could be adopted to dance’. From this course Rainer
developed her ‘own movement tendencies’ which included ‘a lot of gesture’ as
well as ‘sounds and sentences — not necessarily related to the movements that
accompany them’.21 The favorable response to this work, and later on to Trio
A, situated Rainer at the vanguard of 1960s minimalist dance. This alignment
with minimalism was explicitly supported by Rainer’s publication of the ‘NO
Manifesto’ in 1965 and ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the
Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio
A’ in 1966.22 Both texts eschew the humanist and romantic tendencies of modern
dance, adopting instead painterly minimalist principles into the realm of dance.23
   In the mid-1960s Rainer began using film, and later in the decade, narrative
structures in her choreography. These particular explorations with film and
narrative reveal Rainer’s growing tension with the minimalism she had readily
ascribed to earlier in the decades.24 These explorations and the tensions they
produced greatly impacted the direction her film work would take in the
following decades. Her earliest films made between 1967–1969 were projected


17
   Rainer, Work: 1961-1973 (Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: 1974), p. 5.
18
   Ibidem.
19
   Ibidem.
20
   Rainer, Feelings, p. 243.
21
   This quote is taken from a lengthy letter Rainer wrote to her brother Ivan Rainer reprinted in
Feelings, p. 204.
22
   On the ‘NO Manifesto’ see Rainer, ‘Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12
Mattresses Called Parts of Some Sextets,’ in Happenings and Other Acts, ed. by Mariellen R. Sandford
(London: Routledge, 1995); ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies’ was first published in
Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995).
23
   Rainer later notes that ‘the mantra of minimalist aesthetics’ required art to ‘eschew topicality,
metaphor, reference, organizational structure’. These are tendencies that are clearly present in her
dance works from the 1960s. Rainer, A Woman Who…, p. 28.
24
   Rainer offers a very candid account of the shortcomings of minimalism in relation to politics in
A Woman Who…, pp. 130–34.

                                                                                                 33
                                        Shana MacDonald
                                               ﻿


during dance performances and reflected her on-going interest in ‘the body in
motion’,25 as she sought to juxtapose the bodies moving on-stage with the more
tightly framed bodies and objects in motion onscreen.
   Schneemann also produced a significant body of work in the 1960s that
established the major themes and what Brandon Joseph notes were the
recurring formal concerns of her aesthetic practice in the ensuing six decades.26
Schneemann settled permanently in New York City in 1962 after completing her
MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.27 In the early part of the
decade Schneemann developed her painterly interest in the human figure within
and against the dominance of abstract expression at that time.28 Schneemann
cites the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, and Claes Oldenburg as
formative influences on her experiments with what she called kinetic sculpture
and kinetic theatre.29 Her earliest work includes the action-environment Eye
Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963), the performances Meat Joy
(1964) and Snows (1967), and her most well-known film Fuses (1964-67). Much
of her work at this time explored ways to re-sensitize viewers to their bodily
experiences and bring forward a politics of eroticism into what she perceived
as a thoroughly repressive dominant American culture. Amongst her distinct
interests at this time, it is in her focus on ‘liberatory politics’ that the influence
of Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and the later phenomenology of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty are most clear.30 The body in her films, photographic installations,
and on-stage performances prompted a sensual awareness in the audience
through tactile, material entanglements with other fleshy, visceral objects. Even
at this early stage Schneemann displayed an interest in the energetic interchanges
between performers on-stage/onscreen and viewers in the audience.
   For instance, Eye-Body: 36 Transformative Actions is a series of actions of
Schneemann’s nude body situated within a collaged environment made of mirrors,
glass, and motorized objects. In response to her encounters with ‘a few artists…
introducing real and literal materials to an extended canvas (or picture plane),’

25
   Quoted in Peggy Phelan, ‘Yvonne Rainer: From Dance to Film’, in A Woman Who… ed. by
Rainer, p. 8; original quote in Rainer, Work, p. 209.
26
   Brandon Joseph, ‘Carolee Schneemann’, Artforum, May 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/
print/201905/carolee-schneemann-79501> [accessed February 20, 2020] (para. 1 of 3).
27
   For a history of Schneemann’s early career and move to New York see ‘Interview’, ND 14 (1991),
reprinted in Schneemann, Imaging, pp. 113–26.
28
   Schneemann’s use of the term kinetic is in direct reference to her own personal brand of collage-
based work and performance which operates on the principles of objects and bodies in motion.
For further discussion of these ideas see Schneemann, Imaging, pp. 125, 229, 251, 256, 261.
29
   In a letter from November 1961, Schneemann observed a move in the New York art world
away from abstract expressionism, which she observed was losing popularity: ‘The gang, swinging
on top of its own scene, has finished with FEELING’ [capitalization in original], and towards
the Happenings, events and experiments of Oldenburg, Kaprow and Rauschenberg. She counts
herself as being similarly aligned in her experiments with the latter three artists. Schneemann,
‘Letter to Peter and Collie Hooven,’ in Correspondence Course: an epistolary history of Carolee
Schneemann and her circle, ed. by Kristine Stiles (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), pp. 51–54.
30
   Joseph, (para. 2 of 3).

34
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


she chose to incorporate herself in her ‘work as an additional “material”’.31 In
1963 these movements were photographed by Icelandic artist Errol to become
‘a variation of the environment itself’,32 Eye-Body reflects Schneemann’s abiding
interest in multi-disciplinary aesthetic environments and in positioning her body
as the central subject of her artwork.33 It also reveals how she sought out formal
experimentation as a means of countering the constraints she experienced as a
woman in the art world at that time. Schneemann notes:

      In 1963 when I first came to New York City and began an enormous construction, there
      was already a sense of specific exclusion of my work because I was told it resembled
      in its rhythms and its density… Cornell and Rauschenberg and that these visual
      territories were already occupied and yet I had indeed a related sense of materiality
      and energy and density in the work so I decided I would motorized the constructions
      that I was working on because the men had not already done that. I began to see
      motors as an extension of both… technology and the energy of my body.34

   This prompted Schneemann to explore how to combine her body with the
material constructions and became the impetus behind a work like Eye Body:
body as extension of painting/collage constructions.
   The piece established Schneemann’s desire to move beyond the confines of
the painting canvas and into more multi-dimensional aesthetic spaces. After
Eye-Body, Schneemann continued developing performances in complex spatial
environments that challenged the boundaries of media frames. Meat Joy, first
performed in 1964, included live performers interacting with everyday items,
such as fish, chicken, paint, and paper, and responding to a collaged musical
score. This early performance reveals Schneemann’s interest in undoing media
boundaries, an interest that finds its fullest expression in Snows which, as noted
above, combines sculptural environments, cinema and live performances and
audience participation with complex lighting and audio scores.35 In Snows,
audiences entered the back door of a performance space through ‘two floor-to-
ceiling foam rubber “mouths”’ and then crawled along planks leading from the
stage to the aisles.36 Once seated, the performance mixed film projections and


31
   Schneemann, Cezanne She Was A Great Painter (New Paltz, NY: Tresspuss Press, 1975), np.
32
   Ibidem.
33
   Schneemann, Imaging, pp. 55–56.
34
   Schneemann quoted in documentary Reclaiming the Body: Feminist Art in America (Michael
Blackwood, 1995), 10’50”-11’20” min.
35
   Schneemann describes Snows as comprised of ‘revolving light sculpture above 20x15x4 foot
rear wall construction in an open grid filled with plastic sacks containing colored water. 20x30x6
foot floor-to-ceiling collage of torn white paper. 75 white branches hung in semicircle from stage
curtain rod. Manila rope, 2 bales of pink plastic foam, 2 silver planks, floor lights. Floor covering:
plastic sheeting over silver foil. 4 contact microphones under stage floor. 30 contact microphones
placed randomly under theatre seats. 5 films, 3 16mm film projectors, 3 sound tapes, 5 speakers,
SCR switching system’, Imaging, p. 82.
36
   Ivi, p. 77.

                                                                                                   35
                                      Shana MacDonald
                                             ﻿


live performers in a dynamic power struggle that highlighted and then subverted
the dominance inherent in traditional gender hierarchies and in the encounters
between soldiers and victims of war. This mix of projection and performance
reflects a similar interest between Schneemann and Rainer to juxtapose the
bodies on screen and in the performance space in order to foreground the
intersubjective relations between art, performer, and audience.
   Schneemann and Rainer’s paths crossed early through their mutual involvement
and sometimes collaboration37 within the Judson Dance Theatre, which played a
central role in each artist’s aesthetic development.38 Both produced early forms of
performance art through their work at Judson, including Rainer’s Ordinary Dance
(1962) and Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964). Both also began working with the film
medium in the mid-1960s, most often as part of their performances and live events.
Rainer moved towards film because: ‘I wasn’t so interested in narrative as a dancer,
although at first I told stories while I danced but one of the reasons I began to think
about making films was that narrative via Hollywood had been under-utilized in
avant-garde film…’.39 Schneemann notes that she was drawn to film because ‘[p]
ainting was too slow... I needed the implicit energy of abstract expressionism to
become more materialized, more dimensional... Film became another way to paint
in time…’.40 It was in this way that her film Fuses thus ‘developed after my first
performance works. My sense of time is now pushing the frames of painting through
the exigencies and energies of my body into a lived circumstance…’.41 In both
instances, Rainer and Schneemann were pushing against the media they identified
with in their early training and incorporated film as a means of doing so. It is not to say
that dance or painting ever stopped being central to their work but that film became
a space for greater explorations of the limits of different media in conjunction with
one another. Importantly, it is at this point of Schneemann exploring the potential of
film that Amelia Jones locates her greatest interventions into modernist formalism.
As Jones notes, Schneemann’s work here is ‘dramatically intersubjective’ utterly tied
to a relationship with the audience.42 For Jones, it is the emphasis on bodies that
poses the key challenge to masculinist imperatives of modernist formalism which
from criticism to structuralism is tied to notions of disembodied/disinterestedness
of spectator and artist. Instead Schneemann successfully underscores ‘the
intersubjectivity of all artistic production and reception’.43 Likewise, one of the

37
   Erika Levin, ‘Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows’, World
Picture Journal, 8 (2013), <http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_8/Levin.html> [accessed 20
February 2020], (para. 4 of 26).
38
   For an extensive overview of Rainer and Schneemann’s histories at this time see Archias, The
Concrete Body.
39
   Iles.
40
    Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 69.
41
   Ivi, p. 70.
42
   Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), p. 3.
43
   Ivi, p. 5.

36
 The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


intellectual interventions Carrie Lambert-Beatty makes in Being Watched: Yvonne
Rainer and the 1960s is assert spectatorship as ‘a basic medium of Rainer’s work’.44
I would argue that what Lambert-Beatty define at Rainer’s ‘phenomenological
investigation of subject-object relations in minimalism’ offer an echo of what Jones
outlines as Schneemann’s exploration of intersubjectivity above, albeit in entirely
distinct ways.45 These intersubjective modes of address directed to the audience are
central to their film works, and places them at the early part of what I have outlined
elsewhere as a significant contribution by women filmmakers who occupy an artistic
place between film and performance, to experimental and avant-garde cinema.46
   Schneemann is overtly critical of society and in particular conservative social
constraints that work against women’s freedoms. Rainer is too also critical of
society and social conventions but is equally critical of herself and notions of
stable forms of subjectivity more broadly. Whereas Schneemann’s enemy is 3000
years of patriarchal, colonial, militaristic and national forms of violence and
suppression,47 Rainer pushes back in her work against the belief in a coherent self
and the coherency of narrative and artistic expression tied to it.48 Thus, they offer
meta-critiques of the 1960s milieu they worked within in different ways. With
Schneemann the focus often centered on the patriarchal hatred of women’s bodies
and how that was tied into the dehumanization of other marginalized bodies via
war. Rainer’s work offered a focus on critiques of representational structures, as
well as later on explicit power dynamics of race, class, sexuality of which her earlier
concerns with meta-narratives and dominant forms of cultural discourse provided
the groundwork for. For Schneemann the consideration of gendered language and
cultural taboos against women centered on re-valuing Eros as a means of pushing
back against violence and war. And within this, she embedded a critique of
aesthetic structures of framing as corelates to such cultural forms of containment
for both the viewers and representational bodies as static or en-framed images.
Rainer’s concern with language explored questions of affect and emotion, more
specifically cultural taboos against emotion.49 This emerges within her critique of
narrative structures and more specifically the genre of melodrama as it unfolds in
both modern dance and then later in her investigation of classical Hollywood, she




44
   Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008), p. 9.
45
   Ibidem.
46
   Shana MacDonald, ‘Modes of Intersubjective Address in the Central Character (1977) and Our
Marilyn (1987)’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 25.1 (2016), 111–34.
47
   M.M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey, ‘Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann’,
in Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), p. 116.
48
   B. Ruby Rich, ‘Yvonne Rainer. An Introduction’, in The Films of Yvonne Rainer, ed. by Yvonne
Rainer and others (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 4; E. Ann
Kaplan, Women and Film (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), p. 118; Archias, ‘The Body as an
Everyday Material’, p. 4.
49
   For more a brief discussion of emotion see Rainer, Works, p. 108.

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                                    Shana MacDonald
                                           ﻿


counters these constraints with a turn to, and emphasis on autobiography and the
everyday as a means of formally refusing the totalizing myths of subjectivity.50
   In works such as those outlined above, Schneemann and Rainer equally
challenged medium purist notions of dance, painting, sculpture, performance,
and film, and worked tirelessly against the often masculinist-informed principles
of critics, curators, teachers during that time. They individually confronted
the limitations they faced as women artists through formal experimentation;
this effectively transformed their critiques of their working environments into
comprehensive counter-aesthetic practices. Their early work reveals different
reactions to a set of aesthetic, epistemological, and cultural problems faced by
women artists in the 1960s. Schneemann and Rainer’s aesthetic responses to this
period of art offer insights into the history of feminist experimental film and
media and point to how they continue to manifest in the present. This differently
realized set of aesthetic principles in both artists work perhaps finds its clearest
expression in their film works from the later 1960s and early 1970s.


Intermedial Aesthetics in Plumb Line and Lives of Performers

   In what follows, I offer a close analysis of Schneeman’s Plumb Line and Rainer’s
Lives of Performers in order to extend the arguments made above around their
intermedial feminist aesthetic, specifically within the realm of cinematic texts.
Plumb Line, made between 1967 and 1971, is the second film in Schneemann’s
Autobiographical Trilogy. In the fifteen-minute film, Schneemann relentlessly
manipulates and distorts images of herself and a former lover in order to examine
more closely the relationship’s demise. Completed in 1972, Lives of Performers
is Rainer’s first feature-length film. The film is composed of different sections
including rich black and white images from a dance rehearsal; photographic
stills documenting a performance; scenarios enacted on a theatrical stage without
synchronized audio. These segments are intercut with a soundtrack of different
voice-overs that, at times, describe the images while, at other times, narrate the
intimate experiences of the performers. The narrative is based on a script that
was part of Rainer’s live work Performance (1972).
   In considering both Rainer and Schneeman’s films together I draw attention
to how they both express an interest in the everyday, in the breaking of painterly
and cinematic frames, and an emphasis on the embodiment of both the artist
and the audience in order to advance their very distinct formal politics. This
is most clearly seen in how Schneemann and Rainer present two very different
notions of bodies and the everyday. Rainer’s represented bodies are unadorned,
stripped down, in motion, and located within the banality of the quotidian.
Her interest in minimalism places an emphasis on the viewing environment


50
     Rainer, A Woman Who…, pp. 59–60.

38
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


and a corporeal sense of immanence rather than the transcendence sought
by high modernism. This can be clearly traced back to her move away from
modern dance in her early encounters with Dunn and Cage as noted above.
In an entirely different way Schneemann’s work viscerally explores the tactility,
sensuality, and pleasure of physical experience through a maximalist bricolage
aesthetic. Schneemann’s abiding emphasis on the human figure as an expressive
material directly confronts the loss of figuration in abstract expressionism. This
engagement with abstract painting ‘actions’ is something Elise Archias notes is
taken up by Rainer and Schneemann alike.51 Both films considered here expand
the intermedial possibilities of dance, performance, sculpture, photography, and
film. Equally the two films encourage sustained interactions between the bodies
of the performer, the spectator and the different art media evoked within the
mise en scène. Through this they both challenge existing cultural and aesthetic
codes and develop very different but lasting images of the artists body as a site
of resistance on screen.

   Plumb Line is a deeply personal account of Schneemann negotiating the
end of a romantic relationship. It is comprised of photographic stills and film
sequences of Schneemann and her lover (both alone and together), as well as
shots of buildings, European plazas, beaches, and roadways. These images are
edited into densely collaged sequences that are often split into framed quadrants
onscreen. The images are reprinted on high-contrast film stock using deeply
saturated color filters, giving the images a vibrant, textured quality. The images
are counter-posed by an equally dense soundtrack of sirens, psychedelic rock, a
cat meowing, unidentified moaning, and a recording of Schneemann speaking
while under emotional duress. Schneemann is a key player within the mise en
scène as the central character of the film. However, as the filmmaker and editor
of the images she equally exists as an external observer retrospectively engaging
with a past image of herself. This meta-authorial aspect of the film reveals
Schneemann’s important critique of how cinematic images collapse history,
memories, and personal relations into the flatness of the representational frame.
   Plumb Line begins and ends with a plumb line52 swinging pendulum-like in
front of an image of Schneemann’s former male lover.53 The image becomes
consumed by flames and burns on-screen. Schneemann’s hand then enters the
frame and inscribes the title of the film and then her name on the space where the
burned image of the man formerly was. This first image of a photographic still
frozen on screen is not just an entry point into the film, but is also an indexical


51
   See Archias, The Concrete Body; Emily Liebert, ‘Elise Archias’s The Concrete Body’, Artforum,
February        2018,      <https://www.artforum.com/print/201802/elise-archias-s-the-concrete-
body-73658> [accessed 20 February 2020].
52
   A tool that suspends a weighted object from a line in order to measure depth or verticality.
53
   The lover was a carpenter and thus the choice of a plumb line as a signifying object in the film
corresponds with it being traditionally a tool of his trade.

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                                      Shana MacDonald
                                             ﻿


framing of the film frame itself. The photographic still documents the mechanics
of the cinema — still images running twenty-four frames per second through
a projector and onto a screen. When this image is then completely destroyed,
disappearing as it is being burned it offers a comment by Schneemann on the
instability of the (projected) image. The viewers process of ‘consuming’ the
photographic image is refused as it is consumed by flames instead. There is a
violence to this act that forces the viewer to contemplate the meaning of the
man’s image burning on the screen within the film. Schneemann’s inclusion
of her own hand painting the title and signing her name offers an equally
important visual intervention as it leads viewers to think about authorship and
intention. Schneemann’s gesture of signing her name and title, filmed in real
time, exhibits a claiming of the film and the space it occupies both on screen
and in the site of exhibition. This sequence establishes a main theme of the film;
woman’s inscription of herself (and her subjectivity) over the trace of the male
image. This is strengthened by her inclusion of her body, a woman’s body, as
the agent claiming this space. The gesture is both unremarkable as artists have
been signing their work for centuries, and powerful as it documents a woman’s
body functioning as the maker and not just the bearer of an image.54 Throughout
Plumb Line Schneemann reflexively counters the on-screen image of herself
through the tactile formal process she enacts on the filmstrip. This builds on
earlier experiments Schneemann undertook in Fuses (1967), the first film of her
Autobiographical Triology. Of Fuses, Schneemann notes ‘as a painter I was free
to examine the celluloid itself: burning, baking, cutting, painting, dipping my
footage in acid, building dense layers of collage […]’.55 What is important to point
out here is that for Schneenmann the fact that she is painter and not filmmaker is
what frees her to experiment cinematically. This echoes the intermedial approach
she takes in Eye/Body, which equally builds a densely layered collage within the
sculptural-photographic environment.
   Her hand-manipulated gestures produce an aggressive, formally excessive
intervention into her role as a represented object. Indexing the tensions
between lived experience and social ideals, the film reveals an uncomfortable
dynamic between cultural fantasy and lived bodies. As Rebecca Schneider notes,
Schneemann’s aesthetic reveals how ‘woman has existence relative only to her
representation,’ and explores the ways ‘woman stands beside herself […] as a
successful or failed, compliant or belligerent copy’.56 A key example of this is
found in Schneemann’s critical analysis of her image within the film’s mise en
scène. A central image in the film is of Schneemann walking in a bright, colour-
saturated Italian piazza. She repeats this shot as a way of launching a sharp
critique of representation and viewing pleasure. In this sequence, Schneemann


54
   For a more extensive discussion of women as the bearer rather than the maker of the image see
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6–18.
55
   Schneemann, Cezanne, p. 23.
56
   Schneider, p. 51.

40
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


walks towards the camera, directly engaging the viewer’s gaze. The framing,
lighting, and angle of the shot make the action quite striking to behold — there
is undeniable visual pleasure in watching Schneemann walking. This gesture
is both an act of self-presentation and recognition of the everyday gendered
performance of walking in public space. Foregrounding this within the film
reveals her awareness that she is always already on visual display. In this scene,
Schneemann mimetically re-enacts the traditional framing of woman as spectacle
in classical Hollywood cinema.57 In the reverse shot she frames a group of well-
dressed men turning to stare as she passes by. The male gaze is indexed through
Schneemann’s editing of the footage. Catching the men in the act of looking,
Schneemann reveals two long-standing forms of voyeurism that operate in
cinematic framing and in men looking at women in public space. This sequence
successfully interrogates the syntax of the female body through the specificity of
the film medium.58 Schneemann’s camera appropriates and performs dominant
forms of looking in order to reveal their visual excess. She blurs the distinction
between the male gaze and the female spectacle by citing and enacting both
in the film frame. By placing herself wittingly as the spectacle on-view, she is
pushing an otherwise repetitive visual stereotype to a place of critique.

   In Lives of Performers, like Schneemann’s position in Plumb Line, Rainer’s
presence as both performer and director engages the audience from a position
both inside and outside the diegesis. Rainer situates herself early in this film
as a choreographer directing the actions of the performers of the title. Like
Schneemann, Rainer establishes herself as the author of the film through both the
image and the audio.59 The first image of the film shows Rainer directing a group
of dancers in a rehearsal. Rainer is heard throughout this sequence on a separate,
non-synchronized audio track, giving the dancers directions. Her voice is very
clear, engaged, and passionate while explaining certain moves and phrases to the
dancers. It is a commanding voice that matches the strength of the choreography
and the concentration of the group in the rehearsal space. Similar to Schneemann’s
signature at the beginning of Plumb Line, Rainer’s directorial presence in this early
scene places her in a position of authority over the images we encounter; it is her
choreography and her direction that we are watching. The film was made ten
years into Rainer’s career as a pivotal figure in the dance world. As such, there is
a certain degree of gravity to her presence in the film as well as a voyeuristic thrill
in seeing Rainer-the-choreographer at work. This thrill is extended in a shot of
Rainer and the group of dancers laughing together during a break. In this sequence


57
   Similar to the presentation of Rita Hayworth’s performance of Put the Blame on Mame in Gilda
(Charles Vidor, 1946) or Marlena Dietrich’s initial entrance on stage in Blonde Venus (Josef von
Sternberg, 1932), Schneemann is filmed as the central figure walking towards a purposefully
positioned camera.
58
   Mary Ann Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’, October, 17 (1981), 23–36.
59
   Here the audio and image are placed in juxtaposition to one another, and are rarely, if ever in sync.

                                                                                                     41
                                   Shana MacDonald
                                          ﻿


the viewer is a privileged witness to Rainer’s process as an artist and the particular
way she engages with others in the rehearsal space. This opening scene establishes
Rainer’s strong directorial presence, but also allows us to see her at work within her
creative process. Together, this mix of authority and intimacy in the same instance
brokers a familiarity between Rainer and the audience. As performer (Rainer the
choreographer on screen) and author (Rainer in the voice-over), she does not stand
beside her image within the frame but instead positions herself beside the viewer
through the voice-over audio and takes them into her confidence as they view the
image on screen with her. This move places the audience in a discursive exchange
with Rainer as she speaks to/about herself as an image. Here the double gesture of
Rainer both inside the film and outside the film, viewing it alongside the audience,
garners the trust of the viewer by allowing them to see the quotidian experiences
of the dance rehearsal. I would add that even if this ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of the
dance experience is itself a choreographed performance, it encourages the viewer
to identify with the voice over character of the ‘real’ Rainer. It establishes Rainer as
both performer and observer standing alongside the viewer, commenting to us on
her own artistic process. This experimental mode of address can be seen in various
forms throughout the film.
   In a later section of the film Rainer participates in a read-through of a script for
her work Performers, revealing the intimate and idiosyncratic way that she positions
herself as a vulnerable rather than impervious author. During the read-through
Rainer reads a long quote by Carl Jung that was used in the documented performance
she is describing. In response, Shirley, one of the performers in the piece, critiques
Rainer and the quote as being overly righteous. Rainer defends the quote as being
quite the opposite, however Shirley critiques both Rainer’s delivery and her taking
the quote out of context. Rainer responds, ‘Well you know Shirley that I have always
had a weakness for the sweeping revelations of great men’. At this point we hear
an audience responding with laughter over top of Rainer’s final statement: ‘That’s
why I’m going at this concert so differently’. Rainer here refers to her attempt at
a different form of storytelling. This final dialogue sequence is a clear example of
Rainer’s attempt to establish a dialogue both inside the film (as performer) and
outside the film (as commentator standing alongside the viewer). She includes other
voices on the audio to interact and contradict her position as author. Additionally,
she allows those other voices to critique her position, thus allowing herself to be a
flawed character both within the film and the author. Acknowledging ‘her weakness
for the sweeping revelations of great men’ suggests a perceived weakness on her
part and reveals her as a conflicted author engaged in an auto-critique. Again, this
invites the viewer to see up close the self-conscious reflexivity that informs her
process. Finally, her inclusion of the audience laughing over her work is an important
example of Rainer’s reflexive use of audio to reconfirm the viewer’s position as part
of the dialogue. In this instance our position as extra-diegetic viewers is mirrored
(and brought into closer proximity) by the diegetic sound of the audience in the film.
Through this audio Rainer creates a space for the viewer, acknowledging the extra-
diegetic audio as an integral and interactive part of the film.

42
     The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer


   In Plumb Line and Lives of Performers Schneemann and Rainer employ a
double gesture enacted by each artists’ inclusion of themselves in the dual role of
onscreen image and off-screen narrator. Rebecca Schneider defines the double
gesture as that which embraces both the essence and social construction of
women’s bodies, situating it as a useful formal device for revealing what is often
masked or hidden by dominant representation.60 By acknowledging women’s
bodies as both a construct and as materially specific, the double gesture unravels
the gendered illusion required or maintained by dominant culture, and I would
argue dominant representational codes in film and media. Schneemann and
Rainer present themselves as participants within the films and as authors who
externally determine the film’s form. As such, they gesture towards themselves
as representations while also as material bodies beyond their status as images.
This gesture to their roles as authors outside the film frame is a common trope
in modernist art cinema, often used to establish the filmmaker as an omnipotent
commentator of the film. Notably, Schneemann and Rainer use this reflexive
trope not to establish a position of dominance or omnipotence, but to comment
on their status as images and to reveal intimate insights into their personal faults
and vulnerabilities. This undermines the traditional assertion of the director’s
authority established by such a gesture in both modernist and classical cinema.
Double Gestures of the Artists as On and Offscreen

   My comparative reading of Plumb Line and Lives of Performers indexes
Schneemann and Rainer’s formal explorations of what Schneider calls the ‘explicit
body’61 in three distinct ways. The first is Schneemann and Rainer’s positioning of
their own bodies in the dual roles of performer and author within their films. The
second is their exploration of gendered representation. In Schneemann’s film we
see this in women’s everyday experiences of objectification and in Rainer’s through
the vulnerability of self-representation and self-critique. Both films offer highly self-
reflexive performative sequences that undermine or call into question the certainty
of the male gaze and the heroism associated with the male auteur. Finally, Rainer
and Schneemann in different ways manage to pose a challenge to cinema specificity
through foregrounding the material practices of the body that pushes against the film
frame. In my analysis, these three areas employ different types of bodies including
that of the artist/performer, the represented bodies onscreen and the embodied
spectator the films address. One reason I would suggest the everyday is taken up
by both is perhaps as Schneider points out women are the ‘public private’, being
both ‘emblematic of the private sphere’ of domesticity while being ‘simultaneously
the prime terrain of the given to be seen, the obsessional hub of public display’.62
Examining the lived everyday, from a personal perspective in both these films thus
suggests both artists seek to interrogate this particular paradox.


60
   Schneider, chapter 1.
61
   Ivi, p. 71.
62
   Ivi, p. 72 (emphasis in original).

                                                                                              43
                                 Shana MacDonald
                                        ﻿


   Both Schneemann and Rainer’s inclusion of themselves in this dual position
of image and author reveals a central illusion masked by the cinematic apparatus
— that of the separation between author and viewer. Schneemann and Rainer
simultaneously embrace themselves as both performing image and embodied
author, reflecting a shared interest in reconciling their presence as a body on
screen and also as a voice off screen. The result is that the artists somehow
stand beside the projected image and beside the viewer watching. This in turn
requires the viewer to recognize, through the intimacy of their encounter with
the author’s address, their position as spectators. This shared formal approach
reflects a broader concern in the 1960s avant-garde to promote a direct
engagement between spectator, art object and artist. Unlike the more dominant
reflexive authorial position in 1960s films, like those of Jean-Luc Godard, that
speak at rather than with an audience (often from a place of physical and moral
remove), Rainer and Schneemann seek an intimate dialogue that is based on
mutual vulnerability of artist and audience. The viewer can no longer maintain
a position of distance and voyeuristic superiority when being addressed by a
speaker who acknowledges her own internal conflicts and challenges. This
double position within the films provides a complex and affective expression
of authorial reflexivity. Rainer and Schneemann’s dual presence as image and
voice, performer and external director, guide the viewers’ engagement with
the images on screen. Schneemann and Rainer address the audience, standing
beside them, requiring the audience to participate in a dialogue with them. This
dialectic form of address seeks to break the divide between audience and screen,
viewer, filmmaker and text as well as the on and off-screen space that structures
the viewing environment. It is in this way that both artists successfully assert
the body, in differing forms, as a key element in formally refiguring the spatial
relations between image on screen and spectator in the viewing space.
   Schneemann and Rainer’s separate artistic responses to their shared milieu
has had a profound impact on the direction of feminist avant-garde film, media,
dance and performance art over the ensuing five decades. In singling out Rainer
and Schneemann in this article, I seek to reconfirm their importance as early
figures in the history of feminist experimental film and media. As many of the
crucial early feminist connections between both artists have been rendered
invisible within the history of feminist art, film, and performance criticism it is
necessary to point out these overlaps whether intentional on the part of the artists
or not. What I hope future scholarship on feminist experimental media directs
its attention to is how feminist artists have further expanded these explorations
into quotidian, intermedial, and embodied modes of representation across media
as forms of feminist interventions into dominant and reigning aesthetic demands
placed upon women and other marginalized artists.




44
