‘the personal clutter… the painterly mess…’ Tracing a History of Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll

Horne, Victoria (2020) ‘the personal clutter… the painterly mess…’ Tracing a History of Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll. Art History, 43 (5). pp. 984-1006. ISSN 0141-6790

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Abstract

Carolee Schneemann's performance Interior Scroll has become iconic in twentieth‐century art history, yet little attention has been directed towards the artist's uncommonly active management of her work's reception and historicization. Schneemann seized the opportunities created by contemporary art's expanding publishing culture to document and disseminate her work as a professional artist, and communicated with a coterie of writers, curators and historians to generate a space for her work in the art‐historical archive. This point of agential labour was essential for a woman artist working prior to, and alongside, the emergence of second‐wave feminism. In this essay Schneemann's insistence on ‘clutter’ and ‘mess’ is adopted as a means of conceptualizing the artist's passionate and persistent incursions within art history. It proposes Interior Scroll as a keystone for understanding Schneemann's extensive multimedia outputs, by reading the performance and its reception in relation to the framework of écriture féminine, a popular notion in poststructuralist feminist philosophy at the time of the work's production.

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