\u201cAnyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool,\u201d wrote Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze and Fe\u0301lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 265. 294. [En italique dans le texte original]<\/span>. In the view of these poststructuralist prophets, pets are the animals of psychoanalysis. They draw us \u201cinto a narcissistic contemplation\u201d and are Oedipal in essence.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> But I like to think that Carolee Schneemann\u2019s work could have changed Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 1980s, well before animal studies began to challenge the anthropocentric order, Schneemann bravely explored interspecies vulnerability and affect in ways that nobody else had attempted before. Flying in the face of gender stereotypes, taboos, and decorum, Schneemann showed us what universal love might look like through the gaze of an artist who knew how to use her body as a thoroughly sensitive, utterly realist, and politically charged catalyst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although many articles published to commemorate Schneemann\u2019s recent death will focus on her outstanding contribution to performance and feminist theory, few, if any, will acknowledge her highly idiosyncratic and typically subversive ability to forge novel and meaningful connections with the non-human. The cats that populate and define some of her most challenging works were intimate companions, true collaborators, and unknowing avant-garde icons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1974, more than twenty years before Jacques Derrida experienced the existentialist discomfort of having his naked body scrutinized by his cat^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>,} 4 <\/a> - Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).<\/span>, Schneemann exclaimed, \u201cTHE CAT IS MY MEDIUM!\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Carolee Schneemann, letter to Margaret Fisher, July 17, 1974, in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 218. .<\/span>She had already worked out that animals hold the key to a kind of creative freedom that we humans have relinquished to the power of language. The disruptive creative force that cats brought into her life as an artist was based and developed on the grounds of a genuine intimacy that surpassed the notions of master and pet. As a result, her expressive potential always lay in her ability to bypass the symbol in order to access the essence of non-\u00adhuman otherness and harness it as a creative driving force. In Schneemann\u2019s view, the ability to access and experience the world outside of social prescriptions and impositions is at the root of creativity. This belief was already visible in her most iconic statement of the 1960s, Meat Joy<\/em> (1964), a ground-\u00adbreaking performance that had already firmly planted her on the map as a visionary social and cultural disruptor. From the formality of a dinner party setting, Meat Joy<\/em> quickly descends into a modern-day bacchanalia. The rawness of dead animal flesh recklessly flung around the scene incarnates the death of morality, the abandonment of decency, and the triumph of matter over mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But despite its indisputable iconic status, to Schneemann, Meat Joy<\/em> also meant the epitome of a personal crisis, triggered by the political energies that so strongly defined the cultural and artistic scene of the 1960s. She felt alienated by a masculine predominance in performance art that left her disoriented. Her move away from New York City and subsequent relocation to London and Paris during the 1970s was a desperate attempt to reclaim her artistic voice, on her own terms, in a different creative space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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