Vulva's school is the video recording of a performance made by Carolee Schneemann on January 29th 1995 at the Western Front in Vancouver.

The artist, wearing simple clothes and a pair of false horns on her head, stands in front of a lectern. She manipulates two hand puppets – a white cat and a black dog – and has them intervene from time to time in her speech.

Carolee Schneemann uses the codes of a conference through her use of the lectern and the speech she delivers. The uninterrupted flow of her narrative allows her to reappropriate the symbolic power attributed to speech and traditionally detained by men.

In the style of an author of philosophical tales from the 18th century, she relates the birth and education of “Vulva”, her main character, an incarnation of the vagina.

Schneemann lists a litany of received ideas:

- Vulva goes to school and discovers that she does not exist

- Vulva goes to church and discovers that she is obscene

- Vulva reads essentialist feminist texts, paints her face with menstrual blood and howls at the full moon.

The use of a childlike form, almost a nursery rhyme, allows Carolee Schneemann to place herself at an ironic distance from her theme. She recontextualises the role of the vagina in the history of art and culture, evoking its successive representations in ancient cultures, be they Minoan, Celtic or Sumerian.

This work of demystification of the female sexual organs is similar to that of Annie Sprinkle, a former porn actress who, from the 1990s onwards, produced performances staging her vagina.

Laetitia Rouiller