Pierre Dominique Gaisseau's Failure to Primitivize Meat Joy

In 1964, Carolee Schneemann was approached by Pierre Dominique Gaisseau, a French documentary filmmaker with a background in anthropology, who wanted to film Meat Joy. Gaisseau at that time was known for his 1961 film The Sky Above, and the Mud Below, which records his very difficult trek through an unmapped segment of Irian Jaya, Indonesia and the indigenous people and cultural practices he encountered along the way. The tone of the voiceover narration in Gaisseau’s film is primitivist, relying on the old binary between an unspoiled nature and the modern civilizing drive to know the unknown that ruins nature, and is wistful and regretful about it, but does it anyway. For various reasons in my view, Gaisseau’s footage of Meat Joy does a poor job of representing Schneemann’s artwork. In this paper I take the disjunct between this one instance of Meat Joy’s mediation and the work as I understand it (based on multiple sources) as an opportunity to consider the difference between two competing world views that have existed in art and thought throughout the modern period: a primitivist one that takes presence to embodied fullness to be the irreconcilable opposite to the abstract structures of culture; and one based in an understanding of everyday life as dialectical, bringing sensuous experience and representational and institutional systems into relationship. The latter is an aspect of Schneemann’s art practice that often gets overlooked today in the rush to appreciate her defense of the threatened female body.