Meeting Meat Joy

Created during the writing of a dissertation on the status—or statuses—of nudity in the performing arts, this desktop documentary by Chlo Lavalette evokes for me the structure of an onion being peeled, layer by layer. It first presents a technical problem: the Skype meeting with the great Carolee Schneemann will take place without the image of the artist, who is nevertheless being questioned about the nudity of her body in the works Site (Robert Morris, 1963) and Meat Joy (Schneemann, 1964). In return, this problem entails being seen (in other words: Chlo Lavalette cannot see Carolee Schneemann, but Schneemann can see Chlo Lavalette). Embracing this technical failure, the film transforms the discomfort it generates into a condition for emergence and for underlying questions: can nudity be displaced (from the artist’s body to the blinded gaze of the person questioning her)? Might an acknowledged technical problem also be a form of chosen nudity? And might the voice itself, ultimately, be considered a naked body?

Chlo Lavalette moves forward, visible and blind, in the night of the screen, in the opacity of thought, in the abyss carved out between feminist waves, seeking both to articulate her ideas and impressions in a language other than her own while creating a connection with Schneemann; seeking to do justice to her interpretive resistances and to extend these resistances like a probe; to write sentences that do not necessarily know where they are going, but that persist in their trajectory. “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!” Schneemann will exclaim at one point. With humor, Chlo Lavalette shows herself being shown by Schneemann, establishing within the sensitive strata of her film (black screen, voice, written words, images of motifs from works developed by Rémi Dauvergne) a state of nudity as a force of circulation between beings and artworks.

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine