For those who don't know, Carolee Schneemann is the patron saint of raw meat orgies. A latter-day dadaist and practitioner of feminist actionism, she was making her own porn long before it was de rigueur and she was pulling sacred scrolls from her pussy when the Vagina Monologues weren't even a glimmer in the art world's eye. She is now a crazy old lady who lives with her cats, whose work is being featured in a show at the Pierre Menard Gallery that opened in Cambridge on Friday!

In the years since Schneemann first came on the scene (so to speak), a lot has changed, obviously. While some would argue we still live in the highly repressed sexual regime against which Schneemann rebelled, the facts seem to argue otherwise. While the presumption and pretension of repression still hold considerable sway in politics (which is theater, after all), our culture and personal identities are no longer organized around repression and neurosis.

Nor is this a startling new observation. Six years before Schneemann's Meat Joy, which was staged in 1964, Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelin, most famously the author of The Quest for Identity, was already pointing out a trend from symptom neuroses towards character disorders in psychoanalytic practice. Schneemann's oeuvre actually demonstrates the point. It handily catalogs the journey from repression to narcissism to living with a house full of cats.

Why am I banging on about repression and narcissism? Because a lot of the most celebrated performance art assumes widespread repression and justifies itself by exposing it. And if we are not particularly moved by the artist slathered in artful representations of menstrual blood or feces, or sticking yams up her bum, or writhing around naked with a few friends in a pile of raw meat, or are a little annoyed at the artist repeatedly shouting "fuck off!" at us when we've paid to see his show, are we not simply repressed? And isn't art just the enema the doctor ordered?

Schneemann seems to think so. "The taboos around my work are stirred up by its physicalized sensuousness," she says. She has also said that she suspects that the reason some of her works have not been celebrated or sold at all, much less for the astronomical amounts more benignly offensive art is going for these days, is that "even in the advanced trenches of the art world, there are still critics, historians in significant positions, who ignore the complex body of work by being obsessed with particular images as some form of obscenity. They can effectively prevent me from teaching at certain places. They can influence acquisition committees, so that my works are refused."

I'm not as interested in Schneemann's frustrations with lackluster sales of her work as I am in the fact that she attributes her failures to a conspiracy of prudery. The truth is likely far more prosaic: Meat Joy just doesn't match the sofa.

The conceit of art like this is that in offending it touches a chord, but the audience for art is more sophisticated than the art itself at this point. They know that to be offended would mark them as peasants, and peasants don't go to art shows. Still, there's fun in imagining a horde of philistines in the American hinterland who would be mortified by a woman slathered in chocolate, or a skinny little Yorkshire lad screaming "fuck off!" at them repeatedly.

Schneemann's product's failure to catch fire, even in the sophisticated art market, may have less to do with the inhibitions of critics and collectors than with sheer artistry. After all, if repression were the only factor, how come Cindy Sherman got one of those big, fat Macarthur "Genius Awards" a couple years after her "Sex Pictures" premiered? Sherman's prints routinely go for tens of thousands of dollars each. In the nineties an 8X10 print from the Untitled Film Stills went for an unprecedented $190,000 at auction. In 1996, New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $1 million for the complete Untitled Film Stills series.

Anyone who still believes we are a people paralyzed by stuffy social strictures and the burdens of bourgeois respectability missed the last fifteen or so years of The Jerry Springer Show, which is basically an hour-long raw meat orgy every day, and several times a day in syndication, along with American Idol, which is clearly anal-expulsive, not anal-retentive, and rap music, which is anything but repressed, and pretty much the rest of the pop culture zeitgeist.

The tension that supposedly exists between the all-powerful Christian Right and the vanguard of sexual freedom on the Left, which dominates our Culture War narrative, is mostly a failure of imagination and an admission that the generation who brought us Meat Joy is way past its expiration date. Turns out all they've got up their sleeves is Raw Meat Orgy II: Surf and Turf, and RMO III: With Special Sauce.

It may be that Schneemann's vanity precludes further exhibitions and expositions of her undercarriage (she is pushing seventy, after all), but she is still as determined as ever to expose other people's bodies. Her latest effort on display at the Menard is an already dated work, Terminal Velocity, which shows long-familiar shots of people falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers on 9-11.

Pierre Menard's director, Nathan Censullo, praises the work this way: "If this was your relative, you might be able to make their features out." Like many curators working in the contemporary art scene, Censullo relishes the irritation and occasional outrage of the rubes who take the bait: "People are going to call me screaming," he told The Dig's Julia Reischel. "One woman already has."

It reminds me of the old tree in the forest riddle. I mean, what if you threw an art show and no one screamed?

Well, no one screamed when the Mills Gallery showed Martin Creed's Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off last summer. There was some grumbling, but that was about it. And how did Cheryl Brutvan of the Museum of Fine Arts characterize the annoyance that greeted the work? As "a great emotional response."

And I guess it is, if you compare it to utter indifference.

But the truth is, annoyance is about in the middle of the Berenstein-Blavatsky Exhibition Art Emotional Response Spectrum:


Hardly a "great" reaction to art. Not like a rash or explosive diarrhea. "You haven't moved your audience until you've moved their bowels," as the great Leonid Blavatsky once said.

I can't deny that Terminal Velocity is a provocative work. It's provocative for its rejection of the humanism that is at the heart of all great art. It's provocative as a work of desperate self-promotion by a body-snatching artist—it's not the images themselves, which everybody's seen, that affect us, after all, but the appropriating of them by the artist herself, all the more appalling when you consider her fixation on the objectification of female bodies throughout her career. It is provocative as a personal statement that points back to the artist.

Schneemann's all-important artist's statement puts it this way:

This photographic grid as eulogy. Scanned sequences of images consecrate nine people — among the hundreds — falling to their inescapable deaths. The computer process allows intimate contact with each horrific isolation in the desolate shifting space. In this communal nightmare, fleeting visual attributes of nine lives become clearer by enlargement. Our own vertiginous grief, rage and sorrow envelop each frame, each fragment of photographic evidence — unexpectedly captured, made public. These enlargements personalize nine people, who in their normal work day were thrown by impact into a gravitational plunge, or chose to escape incineration by leaping into space.

Schneemann is not as brazen an artist's artist as Martin Creed (it's hard to imagine an artist who is)—there is a streak of neediness that runs through her whole body of work. And I think Terminal Velocity reflects it nicely. Like the woman who turns a stranger's funeral into a stage for the spectacle of her own grief.

Schneemann's appropriation of these pictures and the actuality of the subjective experience of horror they represent and the relish of the curator at the thought of a relative recognizing the individuals in them may be clueless or callous, but they're not taboo. Tasteless, sure, but that's art for you.

Cut through the schlock and shock—the curator's perverse glee at the communal taint of voyeurism, imagining our imagining, delighting in our delighting in the damage a picture can do to an individual—and there are useful questions here. How can we look at these pictures in a way that goes beyond the taint of mere voyeurism? How can we, as viewers of art and as human beings, subvert and transcend the bad faith and trivializing pedantry of narcissistic artists and their enablers?

The last twelve pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, offer an answer.

Foer also appropriates the image of a person falling from one of the twin towers, simply but arrestingly inverting it. Missing are the curdled implications of complicity in communal voyeurism, and the delight in mocking humanistic outrage at personal tragedy.

Foer's appropriation doesn't annoy, but somehow, through simple inversion, it manages to ennoble.  And that's truly taboo in the contemporary art world.