Carolee Schneemann’s most controversial performance took place on the occasion of the exhibition Women Here and Now ; the public was mostly made up of female artists.
The performance went more or less like this: after undressing, Schneemann climbed on a table and told that she would read from her book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter. Then she smeared lines of dark paint on her face and body, she kept the book in her hand and while reading she adopted various poses. Very slowly she pulled a long narrow strip of paper from her vagina and started to read the text written on it.
In September 1977, during the Telleride Film Festival in Colorado, she performed Interior Scroll once more.
I thought of the vagina in many ways – physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstacy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiralled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers. This source of ‘interior knowledge’ would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh … the source of conceptualizing, of interacting
with materials, of imagining the world and composing its images.
(From: INTIMACY , CultClub Edition, 2020)