“Now we women reach to each other”: Feminist community-building in Carolee Schneemann’s bookworks

In a 1974 letter addressed to filmmaker Colen Fitzgibbon and writer-performer Kathy Acker, Carolee Schneemann describes an image that had come to her during a recent period of extreme professional and personal stress: a “vast,” rainbow-like “arc” made up of women artists of the past and present, holding one another’s hands. Filling out the arc are “bits” of texts the women had exchanged, including Fitzgibbon’s letters to Schneemann, and “Kathys book” (almost certainly a first edition copy of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula). That vision, she writes, saved her life. Schneemann’s letter shows the crucial role that correspondence and textual exchange – especially with other women artists – played in her life and career. While that role has been elucidated by Kristine Stiles, scholars of Schneemann’s oeuvre very rarely note that the artist used her letters (including the one cited above) as material in her artist books – though Schneemann herself regarded those books as important works. Adopting Ulises Carrión’s term “bookworks” to describe these publications, I argue that Schneemann seized the print medium, adapted it to suit her collage-based aesthetics, and then circulated her publications in a manner intended to support and extend that “arc” of women artists. In Parts of a Body House Book (1972), Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (1974-75), and ABC–We Print Anything–In the Cards (1977), Schneemann flexes her feminist aesthetics both to demonstrate and to build feminist community.