excerpt
Thirty-five years on from Viet Flakes (a collage film that Carolee Schneemann
made in 1965 using pictures of the Vietnam War), Snows and Terminal Velocity (a
montage of photographs from 9/11 that show bodies falling from the World Trade
Center) reveal how much Carolee Schneemann – who is regarded as having been a
trailblazer for the first generation of feminist artists – has been a closely focused
and committed witness of the events and conflicts of her time. Although her visual art
– the mingling of disciplines in her oeuvre since the early 1960s has included painting,
assemblage, theatre and cinema in her “kinetic theater” or “expanded cinema” –
made her a recognized pioneer of performance, cinema and multimedia art, this
exhibition and its accompanying book are among the first to focus on the constant
engagement of her work with contemporary history.
Then a young painter in the bubbling new york art scene, she tried to extend the
gestural nature of her creations into space, primarily of the relief paintings that
she energetically composed using elements she found in the neo-Dadaist sphere
of Robert Rauschenberg and in the example of Joseph Cornell's Surrealist boxes.
The solution she discovered was to take her painterly gesture outside of the picture
frame, as demonstrated by her first transformative acts executed in her studio in
1963, where the results of using her body as a support for painting and assembly
were immortalized in photographs. “Get that nude down off the canvas” is part of a
plastic performance, in which she brings new life to painting by becoming one with the
matter and putting it on the same level as the world, but it is also a political act in that
a woman was reappropriating the female nude and casting out the stereotypes in a
completely novel fashion. From this point on, Schneemann began to use the human
body and its relationships as her material. in her earliest happenings, she created
situations of tense confrontations of the body of the performer with that of the viewer
on a physical level. A happening called Newspaper Event performed in new york's
Judson Theater in 1963 made current affairs an actual material when seven dancers
created sculptural forms out of piles of newspapers. in 1964, her performance Meat
Joy debuted at the American Center in Paris when Jean-Jacques Lebel organized the
first Festival de la libre expression. This orgiastic and Dionysiac production in which in
fur and feather underwear performers dance with objects, paint, chickens and fish,
was one of the first moments of body art and the liberation of the body. Starting in
1965, she integrated films into happenings in which the bodies of the performers served
as relays between the images. in Snows, the use of abstract mime – particularly the
scenes of abandonment and letting go (bodies hanging from a rope, being packed in
materials) – was the medium used for intercession and expiation for
the violence of the armed conflict presented in Viet Flakes.
[...]
The question begging to be answered on the subject of “history painting”, by which
is meant a form of art that allows the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
to be more interpreted than illustrated, is how to show what cannot be imagined,
represented or justified. The artist is obliged to avoid the two extremes of an age in
which all is made public, which, with the Second world war, the Holocaust, the atomic
bomb, etc., saw the defeat of culture: in short, the impossibility of the image and the
surfeit of images.
Annabelle Ténèze
