Carolee Schneemann
19 Jul - 07 Dec 2014
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN
History Works
19 July - 7 December 2014
Curatorship: Annabelle Ténèze
Coordination: Eneas Bernal
Carolee Schneemann is a major American artist, renowned the world over. Belonging to a first generation of female artists who militated for consideration of women"s art, Carolee Schneemann also pioneered new video, film and performance practices, gaining a reputation for exploring issues around the human body and the place of women in society. The present exhibition however is the first to examine another aspect of her work, that of recording major events that have occurred in her lifetime and constantly reacting to history in the making. This can be traced from as far back as the liberating performances of Meat Joy (1964) or other 1960s pieces opposing war in Vietnam. They continue through to her stance on conflicts in Lebanon during the 1980s and more recently, her reactions to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 with pieces like Terminal Velocity, continue this trend. The exhibition features over thirty works, many being shown for the first time in Europe and is the first ever retrospective of Carolee Schneemann"s works in Spain. Her output is extremely varied, encompassing film, video, performances, drawing, collage, painting, photography and installations as she attempts to capture unfolding events, pursuing her quest with unflagging commitment and simultaneously constructing an updated version of the historical art genre.
Schneemann was highly active in the early 1960s in the vibrant New York art scene. At the beginning of her career she identified with Neo-Dadaism practices, as we can see in her 'painting constructions' made before she started to take part in happenings. She took part, for instance, in Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days and in Robert Morris’s Site; in dance experiments alongside the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater, and she also collaborated with the Living Theater Company. Her attraction to active art forms was confirmed in 1963 when she created Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, in which the Icelandic artist Erró photographed her while she posed and moved around the interactive installations she was preparing at her studio. Those ideas soon evolved towards a theatre of motion or “kinetic theatre” that included performance, dance, art objects and sculpture, lighting, and shortly afterwards, also cinema. Her collective performance Meat Joy was staged at the American Center in Paris as part of La Libre Expression, a festival organised by Jean-Jacques Lebel, and also at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. In it, the nude performers dance with a series of objects, paint, raw chicken and fish, in a kind of Dionysian orgy of flesh. The event was a turning point for Body Art, liberating corporal and behavioural potential while at once shocking the audience as it altered or broke with taboos such as eroticism, sexuality, nudity, pleasure, flesh, death, and so on. Schneemann’s stance as a pacifist and political activist was clearly established in 1965 when she created her collage-film Viet Flakes, in which she re-appropriated recent images from the Vietnam War against a “sound collage” composed by James Tenney, mixing pop, classical, and Vietnamese music. Two years later in New York the film was given a central place in her performance work Snows (1967), a piece presented in the Angry Arts Week: Artists against the Vietnam War. Presented that same year as part of the fringe activities for the Montreal ’67 World Expo, the performances Snows and Night Crawlers became a milestone in her political experiments withkinetic art and expanded cinema in which film broke away from the confines of the screen to include collage and other art forms.
Presenting Schneemann’s work in connection with contemporary history not only turns the public into witnesses of the artist’s interests and concerns, but also of the variety and multidisciplinarity of her production. The show Carolee Schneemann: History Works juxtaposes filmed performances and the collage effects of Meat Joy and projections of Viet Flakes and Snows and the installations More Wrong Things and Precarious, accompanied by a selection of drawings and photographs. Schneemann’s reaction to the war in Lebanon and her investigation into the history of that region in the early 1980s inspired her to create a mobile sculpture, video works and an artist’s book, apart from her striking Dust Paintings, made with thick layers of dust from the ashes of parts of burnt computers which make up abstract forms reminiscent of the remains of some lost civilisation.
Terminal Velocity, a spectacular photomontage from 2001, lends a human dimension to a historical event as the beholder draws closer to the people falling from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The image revisits the practice of “history painting” as a genre, observing from a certain perspective the torrent of digital images the media bombarded us with in the name of information. A number of prints of digital collages or video-installations such as More Wrong Things (2001) and Precarious (2009) place the spectators in the crossfire of projections and reflections clearly illustrating how, in spite of the passing of years, Schneemann continues obsessed by the issue of media exposure.
History Works
19 July - 7 December 2014
Curatorship: Annabelle Ténèze
Coordination: Eneas Bernal
Carolee Schneemann is a major American artist, renowned the world over. Belonging to a first generation of female artists who militated for consideration of women"s art, Carolee Schneemann also pioneered new video, film and performance practices, gaining a reputation for exploring issues around the human body and the place of women in society. The present exhibition however is the first to examine another aspect of her work, that of recording major events that have occurred in her lifetime and constantly reacting to history in the making. This can be traced from as far back as the liberating performances of Meat Joy (1964) or other 1960s pieces opposing war in Vietnam. They continue through to her stance on conflicts in Lebanon during the 1980s and more recently, her reactions to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 with pieces like Terminal Velocity, continue this trend. The exhibition features over thirty works, many being shown for the first time in Europe and is the first ever retrospective of Carolee Schneemann"s works in Spain. Her output is extremely varied, encompassing film, video, performances, drawing, collage, painting, photography and installations as she attempts to capture unfolding events, pursuing her quest with unflagging commitment and simultaneously constructing an updated version of the historical art genre.
Schneemann was highly active in the early 1960s in the vibrant New York art scene. At the beginning of her career she identified with Neo-Dadaism practices, as we can see in her 'painting constructions' made before she started to take part in happenings. She took part, for instance, in Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days and in Robert Morris’s Site; in dance experiments alongside the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater, and she also collaborated with the Living Theater Company. Her attraction to active art forms was confirmed in 1963 when she created Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, in which the Icelandic artist Erró photographed her while she posed and moved around the interactive installations she was preparing at her studio. Those ideas soon evolved towards a theatre of motion or “kinetic theatre” that included performance, dance, art objects and sculpture, lighting, and shortly afterwards, also cinema. Her collective performance Meat Joy was staged at the American Center in Paris as part of La Libre Expression, a festival organised by Jean-Jacques Lebel, and also at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. In it, the nude performers dance with a series of objects, paint, raw chicken and fish, in a kind of Dionysian orgy of flesh. The event was a turning point for Body Art, liberating corporal and behavioural potential while at once shocking the audience as it altered or broke with taboos such as eroticism, sexuality, nudity, pleasure, flesh, death, and so on. Schneemann’s stance as a pacifist and political activist was clearly established in 1965 when she created her collage-film Viet Flakes, in which she re-appropriated recent images from the Vietnam War against a “sound collage” composed by James Tenney, mixing pop, classical, and Vietnamese music. Two years later in New York the film was given a central place in her performance work Snows (1967), a piece presented in the Angry Arts Week: Artists against the Vietnam War. Presented that same year as part of the fringe activities for the Montreal ’67 World Expo, the performances Snows and Night Crawlers became a milestone in her political experiments withkinetic art and expanded cinema in which film broke away from the confines of the screen to include collage and other art forms.
Presenting Schneemann’s work in connection with contemporary history not only turns the public into witnesses of the artist’s interests and concerns, but also of the variety and multidisciplinarity of her production. The show Carolee Schneemann: History Works juxtaposes filmed performances and the collage effects of Meat Joy and projections of Viet Flakes and Snows and the installations More Wrong Things and Precarious, accompanied by a selection of drawings and photographs. Schneemann’s reaction to the war in Lebanon and her investigation into the history of that region in the early 1980s inspired her to create a mobile sculpture, video works and an artist’s book, apart from her striking Dust Paintings, made with thick layers of dust from the ashes of parts of burnt computers which make up abstract forms reminiscent of the remains of some lost civilisation.
Terminal Velocity, a spectacular photomontage from 2001, lends a human dimension to a historical event as the beholder draws closer to the people falling from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The image revisits the practice of “history painting” as a genre, observing from a certain perspective the torrent of digital images the media bombarded us with in the name of information. A number of prints of digital collages or video-installations such as More Wrong Things (2001) and Precarious (2009) place the spectators in the crossfire of projections and reflections clearly illustrating how, in spite of the passing of years, Schneemann continues obsessed by the issue of media exposure.