Schneemann Sounding: Embodied Sonic Systems

Carolee Schneemann’s sense of how sound works is deeply tied to how she thinks about the gestural throughout her work. A gesture emanates from a particular “source of compression” —tension, expansion, resistance. In several of her most renowned works, like Meat Joy (1964) and Snows (1967), she introduces the idea of a “body package” —packages that work, to borrow from Artaud, as “philosophical states of matter.” Schneemann’s earliest uses of sound were conceived through structures she called, “concretions” that positioned the materials of painting and collage on an equal playing field with the bio-semiotic possibilities of the body, such as Newspaper Event (1963), Lateral Splay (1963), and Chromelodeon (1963). During the same period, she created a series of compact “box” sculptures: Music Box Music, Ice Box and Controlled Burning. Though now ultimately inert in terms of active “sound,” these sculptures were initially conceived, with audio elements as central materials— the sounding of glass as it burns, the buzz of the wind-up device, and its analog delivery of halting, fragmented romantic music box tunes. These early works in a sense, were micro-studies of how sound could structure a work within-the-situation-in-which-it-occurs as opposed to emerging from some pre-existent structure such as notation, symbolism, or arrangement. They signaled works to come, such as, Meat Joy, Noise Bodies, Viet Flakes, Snows in which Schneemann’s experimentation with sound encouraged a unique kind of spatialization pushing sensual, embodied packages of once mute fur, paint, reflective surfaces, consumer products, texts—out into a complex corporeal-sonic field.