Artist Flashes Creativity

In the darkened Fong Auditorium in Boylston Hall, an audience of Harvard students and art connoisseurs from other universities watched a video of naked women pulling long strips of white paper out of their vaginas.

The film, titled “Interior Scroll—The Cave,” was part of a presentation by visual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann yesterday afternoon. During her lecture, called “Disruptive Consciousness,” she showed and spoke about her work, from paintings and photographs to sculptures and short videos.

The Harvard College Women’s Center invited Schneemann, whose exhibition is opening Friday at the Pierre Menard Gallery at 10 Arrow St.

The reaction that Schneemann’s work provokes in its viewers is, she said, “unpredictable.”

Early in her career, Schneemann said, she had been dismissed as narcissistic and exhibitionist for placing herself in her own art. But, Schneemann explained, she wanted to explore if the artist could make herself an element of a collage. “My question at the time was: can I be both image and image-maker?” she said.

Schneemann also spoke about the difficulty of being a woman in what she said was a male-dominated field. She recalled being belittled by a male colleague decades ago, describing his argument as, “You can do what you want to do, but you can’t expect us to respect it.”

Since then, Schneemann has focused on graphic portrayals of the female form. “Interior Scroll—The Cave” depicts eight women, including Schneemann, pulling thin strips of paper printed with typewritten words out of their “second mouth,” as Schneemann called the vagina. In “Body Collage,” another short film, a naked Schneemann covers herself in wallpaper paste and rolls around in shredded paper.

“Body Collage” was greeted with intermittent laughter from the audience­—a reaction that pleased Schneemann. “Often I have to make something funny to make sure I’m not going to hit the audience over the head with this nightmare,” she said. “I’m happy when they chuckle because it means that they’ve gotten what I was trying to do.”

But the combination of humor and taboo that characterizes Schneemann’s work perplexed some in the audience.

“Her work brings up a lot of mixed emotions that are hard to articulate,” Anne-Marie E. Munn ’08 said.