Double Trouble, continued
By Kathleen Wentrack

The Body Beautiful

Schneemann's use of her beautiful body in her work wrought criticism, especially after appearing nude not only in her own work but in Store Days (1962), a Happening orchestrated by Claes Oldenburg, and in Site (1964), a Robert Morris performance. Schneemann admits that her body gave her the freedom to produce the work, but more importantly it permitted the strength of the work, in essence, using patriarchal stereotypes against themselves.²² Several feminist artists in the 1970s were criticized for using their nude bodies in their work, especially if they were beautiful.²³ In effect, women were not allowed to be beautiful and at the same time be successful with their work. Schneemann describes her intent:

In the selected pieces of Forbidden Actions (1979) that are part of this exhibition, Schneemann placed her nude, beautiful body within the museum environment and photographed the actions.

The female nude has remained a dominant motif in Western art, but often portrayed by men for heterosexual male consumption. Schneemann's project challenged this, as the artist describes:
...

Schneemann recaptures the female body for herself and other women, to be the image and the image maker. Through Forbidden Actions, she penetrates the intellectual underpinnings of the museum and traditional art history.

The private performances in Holland are part of a larger group of actions that took place at other museums including the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, in addition to several other events including a birthday party for Hermann Nitsch at a popular restaurant in Arnhem. The images of these actions were often reintroduced into the museum context via lectures Schneemann was invited to give, as with Home Run Muse (first performed in 1977). The photographs also developed into a rich body of silkscreens. Two prints in the exhibition include images taken in the Dutch museums, each produced using a detailed five-layer silkscreening process. Forbidden Actions, No.1 is composed of six photographs of the artist's nude body shot from within the museum in front of a windowsill. Arranged in a loose three-by-two grid format, three images include Schneemann's whole body while the lower three are closer, cropped views of the same images. Forbidden Actions, No.2, follows a similar loose grid format with the top four images of the artist's body interacting with the female mummy. The images repeat in a different order in second row and in two cases the images were rotated 180 degrees. The photographs are layered with silkscreened markings similar to paint strokes in subtle tones of pink, green, purple and blue. These layers add surface energy to the bodies caught in action-taking control of the female nude in the museum space. With Forbidden Actions, Schneemann symbolically undermines the patriarchal structures of Western culture which have too often defined images of the female body and traditional standards of beauty.

Murray-Wassink engages other cultural structures, questioning definitions of men and the masculine and how this affects the gay body. He crosses boundaries between the masculine and feminine creating a more fluid border than is traditionally permissible. In addition to taking these issues to task, the artist confronts something else: his gay self and how that functions within a gay subculture. The series of photographs composed by the artist and photographed by Paul Koeleman, Erotic Homosexual White Western Male Artist Self Nude (2000/2001), marks a breakthrough for Murray-Wassink professionally and personally. Issues of longstanding concern to the artist emerge. He believes that in America, one is taught to respect people that are attractive, yet, while growing up in Kansas he was told he was not one of those beautiful people. Instead, he associated shame with his own body and its physical functioning. Murray-Wassink believes that within a gay male culture, men's bodies are often severely scrutinized and he was particularly affected by this objectification.²⁷ Exposing his body through these photographic-based works provided an outlet for the artist's acceptance of his own body. In Number One of the series, the artist is viewed from behind, legs spread apart, and bent over with his left hand touching the sloping white background.²⁸ He turns to one side facing the camera/viewer, exposing his scrotum and anus, his sexual orifice. There is pleasure in this self-revelation and acceptance of his body as an integral facet of his sexuality. In Number Two, Murray-Wassink sprawls his body over luscious, red satin reminiscent of a Marilyn Monroe image. On the surface of both photographs are the words "gay," "white" and "blank," blank meaning white in Dutch. Blank could also be read in English as "fill in the _____," allowing room for the viewer's interpretation. Extremely cognizant of his sexuality, Murray-Wassink feels it crucial that the viewer know what that body represents, "gay," in its particularities. He has recently come to accept that he is attractive enough to be able to use his body in what he believes is a potentially subversive manner.²⁹

The role of beauty in Western culture and the artists' focus on these issues reveals something else at work. Joanna Frueh often discusses beauty in her writings, understanding that "discussing beauty is taboo. It is a sacred and forbidden subject because female beauty as it has been constructed in Western culture is a paradox-necessary for women yet impossible to achieve."³⁰ It is in ideal beauty where the paradox lies, for ideal beauty is a disembodied beauty, it lacks a real, functioning body. Frueh proposes a different concept of beauty, "monster/beauty" which is "the flawed and touchable, touching and smellable, vocal and mobile body that, by exceeding the merely visual, manifests a highly articulated sensual presence."³¹ Monster/beauty is in no way abject, quite the contrary, it is "an extremely articulated sensuous presence, image or situation in which the aesthetic and the erotic are inseparable."³² The vision of rewriting the concept of beauty as a body with a mind and physical experiences provides a space in which women (and men) can truly function as whole persons and aptly describes the project that Schneemann has embarked upon since Eye/Body in 1963. Furthermore, it helps explain the resistance that often confronts Schneemann's work, for "monster/beauty destabilizes both the image and ideology of female beauty"³³ and this ideology is deeply embedded in the visual constructs of Western society.

The discussion of monster/beauty can be applied to Murray-Wassink, as he feels pressured from within the gay subculture to conform to particular standards of beauty. Ideals of beauty tied solely to the outer body are difficult to maintain for Murray-Wassink who is the embodiment of monster/beauty. The aesthetic and erotic are inseparable for him and it is this aspect of Schneemann' work which has inspired him through his own explorations. Moreover, gay sexuality itself "destabilizes both the image and ideology of female beauty" as it undermines the heterosexual binary structure still at the core of Western society.³⁴

Only recently has Murray-Wassink come to realize and appreciate his body, yet it is a body that he pampers as is evident in Makeup Case (1995-2001). A black, five-shelved unit - too large to ever be carried as a makeup case - contains a variety of beauty products, from creams and ointments to nail polish and blush, collected over a six-year period. This could be viewed as succumbing to societal pressures to remain beautiful and young. Frueh builds on the concept of monster/beauty with the idea of regulation, that is, using beauty products, "sometimes regulation produces aesthetic/erotic comfort, a necessary balance that lessons painful obsessiveness or that permits a woman to finally understand, with joy, that she is beautiful…that she has discovered monster/beauty by learning to build the body of love."³⁵ Murray-Wassink similarly makes use of these products to form his "body of love," the work expressing his lived experiences as a gay man and coming to terms with this identity.

Another element of monster/beauty aptly relates and connects these two artists: messiness.³⁶ The ideal beauty is neat, clean and tidy. The physicality of the monster/beauty denies that possibility in its very natural corporeality. Frueh discusses messiness in relation to modernism stating that: "The woman artist who 'makes a mess' has not experienced success equal to men's. This is because tidiness has been and remains a norm imposed by culture on women." Schneemann herself realizes the conundrum, "We're implicitly messy so we better get cleaned up and not like the men."³⁸  Schneemann's hand markings on film as in Fuses or in the prints of Forbidden Actions, could be labeled as messy. It is acceptable for men to mark the surface, it is interpreted as a heroic gesture, viewed as phallic in its mark making. Women are not allowed the same freedom. Her early work exceeded the boundaries of the canvas to include her body as in Eye/Body and the stage of Meat Joy is a three-dimensional painting. Her body as her art is not sanitized, the image of beauty which society designates for women is uncontainable. Adding to the messiness are the fluid boundaries of Schneemann's work, not only in her unique combination of media, but in the indistinguishable boundary between her art and her life, and the fluid boundaries of the female body. Murray-Wassink refuses confinement of his body within traditional heroic, heterosexual, male imagery. In exceeding these boundaries, he too is messy, as Schneemann noted:

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