Interior Scroll, 1975 Photo credit: Anthony McCall
On August 29th, 1975, Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) presented a performance that was part of a series associated with the exhibition “Women Here and Now” at the Ashwagah Hall in East Hampton, New York. Schneemann’s piece was inspired by a dream that she’d had a year before which featured a figure “…pulling this coil out of its vagina and the message of the dream was the value of interior knowledge…”1 Schneemann’s re-enactment of this dream consisted of her standing naked on a table and then extracting a ‘scroll’ from her vagina while reading its typewritten text. The performance, as Schneemann described it, left the audience “flabbergasted, stunned, horrified, ecstatic.”2
The text that Schneemann read while performing Interior Scroll reflected on the difficulties of being a woman artist and the obstacles they encountered within the male dominated art system and more generally within the patriarchy.3
Speaking about this work some years later she remarked,
I didn’t want to pull a scroll out of my vagina and read it in public, but the culture’s terror of my making overt what it wished to suppress fueled the image: it was essential to demonstrate this lived action about “vulvic space” against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meanings.4
Schneeman’s articulation of what she called “vulvic space” coupled with her researches into the knowledge held within this interior space was given form and agency within Interior Scroll. Her performance made visible the invisible, and it stands as a landmark work within the larger frame of feminist performance art and art history. In a text titled “The Obscene Body Politic,” (1991) she addresses the multiple roles of this “translucent chamber” writing, “I thought of the vagina in many ways - physically, conceptually, as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.”5
There is much more that could be extrapolated from this pivotal work, along with a repeat performance in 1977, and a collaborative version performed by Schneemann and seven other women in 1995. However, I want to explore another aspect of this work.
Although Schneemann describes this work as a ‘scroll,’ it is technically an accordion fold work, and this feature was completely unknown to me until I came across a photograph of the work in the exhibition catalogue for “Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics,” (2022/23).”6 With this new knowledge and viewed within the larger history of artists’ accordion works, I can confidently state that this work is one of the most unknown of accordion works created during the postwar period to the present.7
Interior Scroll (detail), 1975 Photo credit: Martine Fehlbaum
The scroll is the earliest precursor to the contemporary book with a history that goes back to 2500 BCE and in the popular imagination they are often viewed as ancient repositories of sacred and religious knowledge as exemplified by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It is entirely understandable that Schneemann would choose the term ‘scroll’ to describe the vehicle through which she acknowledged the vagina as a source of both sacred and interior knowledge despite “…the deeply suppressed history of the vulva…”8 and the recognition that it is a “…powerful source of orgasmic pleasure, of birth, of transformation, of menstruation, of maternity, to show that it is not a dead, invisible place.”9
Interestingly, Schneemann’s unfolding of a scroll inscribed with texts mirrors how Medieval artists and sculptors sometimes used the scroll as a way to insert texts into their compositions, the contents of which usually consisted of “...important speech: the words of angels, of evangelists, of prophets.”10
Schneemann’s adoption of the accordion format would appear to have been a purely practical matter. Once she had committed to performing the dream she started to devise a way in which to realize her vision. Collaborating with her partner she beseeched him for help to “…show me how this works. You have to help me stuff all this inside.”11
Schneemann describes their experiments;
And the next thing I knew I was folding these little strips of paper, folding them into accordion shapes…it hurt, like all the edges were cutting so we got out a lot of cold cream. We folded up the narrative it was like a Japanese origami exercise we folded it all up because in the drawing the strip was this long. Indicating arm’s length. I said somehow I have to get something that long inside me.12
In the face of these technical issues Schneemann would eventually be successful in devising an accordion fold system in which the scroll could be smoothly extracted without tearing the paper. Schneemann envisaged the scroll and its unfolding as “…this wonderful kind of thread of knowledge that was going to be emerging,”13 and after the performance she reflected upon the role of the scroll, writing “It’s the umbilicus, it’s the rain-bow, it’s the ticker-tape, it’s the unfolding, the secrets that should be revealed because then you get to real secrets rather than degraded ones.”14,15
Schneemann’s extraction of an accordion folded scroll from within the “translucent chamber” of her vagina utilized this format's unique ability to both expand and contract, enabling her to re-enact her dream and to perform vulvic space as a place of deep interior knowledge.
Stephen Perkins, 2025
Footnotes
1. Peterson, William, Interview with Carolee Schneemann, The Act, Vol. 2/No. 1, #14, Winter/Spring, 1990, p. 55. Schneemann made a drawing of the dream the next day in which a naked woman has one leg on a chair and with her left hand is extracting a length of paper from her vagina. The drawing is dated 22 June, 1974.
2. Ibid., p. 56.
3. The text below is the one that Schneemann read and it is from her book, Cézanne, She
Was a Great Painter, 1975.
Text from Interior Scroll, 1975
BE PREPARED:
to have your brain picked
to have the pickings misunderstood
to be mistreated whether your success
increases or decreases
to have detraction move with admiration—in step
to have your time wasted
your intentions distorted
the simplest relationships in your thoughts twisted
to be USED and MISUSED
to be “copy” to be copied to want to cope out
cop out pull in and away
if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed)
they will almost never believe you really did it
(what you did do)
they will worship you they will ignore you
they will malign you they will pamper you
they will try to take what you did as their own
(a woman doesn’t understand her best discoveries after all)
they will patronize you humor you
try to sleep with you want you to transform them
with your energy
they will berate your energy
they will try to be part of your sexuality
they will deny your sexuality or your work
theywill depend on you for information for generosity
they will forget whatever help you give
they will try to be heroic for you
they will not help you when they might
they will bring problems
they will ignore your problems
a few will appreciate deeply
they will be loving you
as what you do as what you are
loving how you are being they will of course
be strong in themselves and clear they will NOT
be married to quiet tame drones they will not say
what a great mother you would be
or do you like to cook and where you might expect
understanding and appreciation you must expect NOTHING
then enjoy whatever gives-to-you
as long as it does and however
and NEVER justify yourself just do what
you feel carry it strongly yourself
4. Schneemann, Carolee, The Obscene Body Politic, 1991, at: https:www. schneemannfoundation.org/writing/the-obscene-body-politic, accessed, 3.26.25
5. Ibid.
6. Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, Yale University Press and Barbican
Art Gallery, Sept. 8, 2022 - January 8, 2023. Schneemann’s scroll from the work’s second
iteration in 1977 was also an accordion fold work.
7. A close second would be Edward Ruscha’s accordion work Every Building on the Sunset
Strip (1966) with writers only infrequently making mention of this key feature of the publication.
8. Schneemann, Carolee in: Moreland, Quinn, Forty Years of Carolee Schneemann’s
“Interior Scroll,” Hyperallergic, August 29, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/232342/forty-
years of-carolee-schneemanns-interior-scroll/, accessed 3.27.25
9. Ibid.
10. Kelly, Thomas Forrest, The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in
the Middle Ages, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London, 2019, p. 36.
11. Schneemann, Carolee in: William Peterson Interview with Schneemann, The Act, Vol. 2/
No. 1, #14, Winter/Spring 1999, p. 55.
12. Ibid., p. 55.
13. Ibid., p. 55.
14. Ibid., p. 56.
15. An interesting footnote to this text is that in 2005 Schneemann collaborated with
Vision Archive (Boulder, CO) in producing an ‘authentic’ scroll from the documentation of
her 1975 performance. The multiple consisted of a plexiglas cylinder and inside was a 4ft 4”
long inkjet printed scroll reproducing video stills from the original 1975 performance and
titled “Interior Scroll 1975-2005”. Planned in an edition of 100, only 36 were printed and
just 20 of these were completed to Schneemann’s original specifications.
https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Interior-Scroll-1975 2005-NUMBERED-
SIGNED-ARTIST/18872498215/bd, accessed 3.28.25.
