Writing has always been a part of performance artist Carolee Schneemann’s practice. Throughout her career she produced a number of artists’ books, including Parts of a Body House Book (Beau Geste Press, 1972) and More Than Meat Joy (McPherson & Co., 1997). Additionally, she wrote regularly for art magazines and journals, much of which is collected in her 2018 Uncollected Texts (Primary Information). In addition to this, Schneemann was a life-long documentor and kept diaries and scrapbooks dating back as early as 1951, now all part of Stanford University’s archives. Following the five year embargo period on their use, the first thirty-six volumes in this collection (1951–78) are now fully digitized and available to view online, providing an invaluable free and easily accessible look at her thinking and creative process.
“Schneemann always intended for her diaries to be accessible,” explained Rachel Churner, Director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. “She saw them as a vital resource for researchers and supported both in-person access and digitization efforts to ensure their availability.” Lindsay King, who oversaw the digitization process at Stanford shared a similar sentiment, “I think she had a really clear sense that her stuff was going to be important.” The sheer volume of material alone is impressive—each diary ranges from fewer than forty pages to as many as over two hundred pages—and without the digitization, it is hard to imagine many researchers would have the time and funding necessary to spend on site reading and viewing them all in depth, now possible from the comfort of one’s own home. Schneemann’s own support of this project shows a unique foresight and reveals a desire for close, in-depth study of her process.
The diaries include much of what you would expect, notes on daily events, the ups and downs of her emotions, and mock ups and sketches related to her art practice. “I didn't feel like she was writing for posterity,” noted King, “but that she was just using it as a way to kind of record all the things that were happening. And she led a very interesting life and knew a lot of cool people.” In my own viewing, I started at first to go methodically year by year, but found instead that jumping around was more interesting, taking advantage of the thumbnail view to find more colorful (and legible) pages. For example, 1974 proved to be a colorful year, full of pink and purple highlights and writing in colored markers. In January 1974, she wrote at the top of one page, “dream of Jim…again still don’t consciously grasp the sexual power,” and across the page in big bold letters she wrote, “BIG FAT SNOW,” illustrating her characteristic blend of private thoughts and ordinary recordings. Later in the same diary she makes some sketches of her cat, who figures prominently in her art and her scrapbooks.
This blend of intimate and mundane rings true to ordinary diaries, but of course, Schneemann always had the sense that she was not ordinary. “Her diaries were an extension of her artistic and intellectual practice, and she was committed to their openness,” Churner explained. “She often mined them for her own publications and annotated and edited them throughout her life.” According to Churner, Schneemann had planned to be involved in the digitization process, but the amount of material meant that the scanning was started after her death.
The books were not straightforward to digitize. Her 1973 diary, a bright red book with an image of oranges taped to the cover, is also filled with colored writings, in addition to taped and collaged ephemera—stamps, news clippings, and taped in typed texts. This kind of gathering of materials provided a challenge to standard scanning. “The digitization team had some unusual challenges,” added King. “They said, ‘This is a curatorial question. Can we throw away the dead bee?’ The way that they phrased it to me originally was, ‘Would she have put this bee in on purpose?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don't know how it happened accidentally.’” In the end, the preservation librarian and curatorial team agreed that they did not need to save the bee (after it was digitized of course).
Schneemann’s scrapbooks, which she called “Life Books” and referred to as an “endurance piece,” are especially interesting. Rather than a traditional photo album, the books include collaging, layering, and overpainting around the photographs. In Life Book 1, she cut out the figures from photos and pasted them against landscape photos of buildings and beaches, creating photomontage scenes. Later on, she breaks up the black-and-white grid photos by adding hand drawn blue borders and backgrounds, a technique used throughout the various scrapbooks. In the last of the Life Books currently digitized, dated 1980 on the cover, she also includes a gridded sequence of black-and-white photographs of her cats, with her handwritten text describing the scene, “Tibka arrives to eat Major Grig’s food,” and so on. A few pages later, she collaged photos of cats with yellow decorative borders drawn around them, making a loving portrait of her pets.
The books often included materials stuck in, like a bee, personal notes, or ephemera from her exhibitions and performances. “She put in a note that someone left her on her dashboard about how terrible she was at parking. And so it's taped in there. And it's hilarious that it’s now in the Stanford University Libraries,” King mentioned. “She took inspiration from everyday things. I think the main takeaway is how integrated her art and her life were, that they were not separate to her.” This archival project blurs the lines between publication and reference material, productively muddying the questions around publishing artists’ diaries and sketchbooks, public and private, performance of self, and the distinction between artwork and daily life.
In the case of Carolee Schneemann, her wish to make these materials public, not as a publication for sale or just as reading room material, certainly suggests that for her, there was indeed no line between art and life. I look forward to what researchers make of this fantastic resource, available through Stanford University Libraries.