Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises Carolee Schneemann
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Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Library and Information Technology Services Library Staff Books (LITS) 2010 Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises Carolee Schneemann Brian Wallace Bryn Mawr College, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_books Part of the Fine Arts Commons Custom Citation Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises. Edited by Brian Wallace. New Paltz, NY: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2010. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view from February 6 through July 25, 2010, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_books/10 For more information, please contact [email protected]. CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES FEBRUARY 6—JULY 25, 2010 SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT NEW PALTZ Published on the occasion of the Hudson Valley Masters exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, curated by Brian Wallace, on view from February 6 through July 25, 2010, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Major support for this publication was provided by the Friends of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Published by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art State University of New York at New Paltz One Hawk Drive New Paltz, New York 12561 Designed by Design, Print and Mail Services, State University of New York at New Paltz. Printed by Digital Page, LLC, Albany, NY Distributed by the State University of New York Press (www.sunypress.edu) ISBN No. 978-0-615-34823-0 Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises © 2010 Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. All rights reserved. Cover and inside cover: Partitions, 1962-3 (detail) Watercolor on paper 10 x 7 in. Back cover and inside back cover: War Mop, 1983 (installation view; detail) Mop, plexiglas, motor, custom hardware; Souvenir of Lebanon analogue video/audio transferred to digital video; monitor, player 24 x 62 x 20 in.; 5 min. 50 sec. TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 Portfolio: Carolee Schneemann, Partitions, 1962-3 9 Introduction, by Brian Wallace 14 Plates: Research 27 “Painting, What It Became,” an essay by Maura Reilly 32 Plates: Ecstasy 42 Plates: Furies 51 “Depth of Place: An Interview with Carolee Schneemann,” by Emily Caigan 62 Plates: Dwelling 77 Screening 78 Checklist of the exhibition 81 Acknowledgements 82 Contributors CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES PORTFOLIO Published here in its entirety for the first time, this group of eight works depicts and describes an unrealized work conceived for “cubicles in a gallery [4 ] space” as noted in Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy (Documentext, 1979), p 16. CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES [ 5 ] Carolee Schneemann Partitions, 1962-3 Typewriter ink on paper 11 x 8 ½ in; 7 x 8 ½ in. Watercolor on paper 10 x 7 in; 10 x 7 in.; 7 x 10 in.; 7 x 10 in.; 10 x 7 in.; 7 x 10 in. CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES [6 ] CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES [ 7 ] [8 ] CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES Introduction by Brian Wallace Cézanne does not try to use color to suggest the [ 9 ] tactile sensations that would give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty1 Over the course of her career, Carolee Schneemann interrelated aspects of Schneemann’s practice that, has produced an extensive, diverse body of work while active together to a greater or lesser extent based upon her research into the broad, deep across that entire practice, can be examined sepa- connections between the activities of the mind and rately—sequentially—as a way to outline the artist’s those of the body. Schneemann’s multi-disciplinary, way of working. deeply personal investigations—and their realization in writings, performances, films and videos, objects, Research installations, images, and hybrid forms2—celebrate Over the first decade of her mature practice, Sch- the richness, and also mourn the loss, of these neemann’s continuing recourse to research was connections among mind and body. This exhibition articulated, at first, in the language of painted form presents a range of works resulting from research (perhaps not surprisingly, given the prominence in which Schneemann has delved intensively into a of then-recent developments in so-called Abstract place she lives and works in order to investigate the Expressionism or Action Painting). Even at the very incomprehensibly complex dynamics between mind beginning, however, a drive to bring painting into the and body. world—and a concomitant drive to bring the world into the painting—is visible: paintings and construc- In her essay for this publication,3 Maura Reilly as- tions lean in to the viewing space (1961’s Sir Henry serts that Schneemann has articulated “the em- Francis Taylor; 1962’s Fur Wheel), and objects and bodied subject.” Reilly homes in on the specifics of projects are populated with traces of life and work Schneemann’s consistent deployment of the formal (accidental fire damage to 1960’s Animal Carnage concerns of painting as a medium of expression, & Kitch’s Dream leads to the intentional burnings connecting Schneemann’s artistic strategies with in the Fire Series works).4 In 1960, chance and the her political objectives while showing how the artist weather (and a proto-performance work set on a has maintained the primacy of the former in the storm-damaged tree) led to Schneemann’s early, course of articulating the latter. In the interview with crucial encounter with Artaud’s Theatre and Its the artist commissioned for this publication, Emily Double,5 and its call for a profoundly reintegrated Caigan discusses with Schneemann the ways her for(u)m of expression reuniting performance and house and her land have sustained (and challenged) audience with gesture. That Schneemann respond- her ability to live her life and make her work, and the ed to this call with vigor—and that this notion ways that art, place, and life connect to and nourish continues to resonate with the artist—can be seen one another. In this short introduction I identify four in works ranging from 1963’s Untitled (Four Fur Cut- Untitled, 1960 (detail) CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE PREMISES ting Boards) to Vesper’s Pool (2000). While I do not to appreciate the audacity of Schneemann’s leap see Schneemann’s works tending toward the state of from painted objects to photographed scenarios. It is the total work of art, these works do have a multi- can be equally difficult to see a naked female in an sensory immediacy conveyed through built elements artwork representing a step toward gender equality, and found objects and images and texts organized but so it was. around the research behind them, rather than the spaces around them. (To me, the gesamtkunst- In 1963-4, Schneemann took control of the means werk’s integrated display of self-contained power is of production and did not turn back. She pursued a at odds with Schneemann’s processual approach host of projects that have elements of photography and carries with it the danger of audience desensi- or film as well as objects (or sets—which occa- tization that Schneemann has already written about sionally receive projections or carry images) and [10 ] in connection with her performance-based works.)6 performers (who do, or do not, interrupt or other- wise interact with films, etc.). Of the works from this While the artist prepares to leave the picture plane period, Meat Joy (1964) is the best documented behind, she carries painting’s profound problems and—acknowledging the artist’s statement that the and its proffered solutions with her into the next work “developed from dream sensation images phases of her research. Take Partitions (1962-3), gathered in journals dating back to 1960”—prob- a project mentioned briefly in Schneemann’s early ably the most extensively researched. So what does writings.7 The proposed work, published here in full Schneemann’s research consist of? Looking and for the first time, consists of two typewritten pages drawing, dreaming and drawing, recording and edit- (“For five performers in an environment constructed ing street sounds, working to connect conscious and within the shelves, partitions and sliding doors at unconscious content through wordplay, and finding the Feigen-Herbert Gallery”) and six watercolors inspiration in artists as different as Soutine, The on visual aspects of the proposed production (a Supremes, and the Judson Dance Theatre dancers. sequence of scenes, stances, stagings, and transi- During the height of this research, Schneemann tions). The description and images delineate and wrote, “it was often difficult to leave the loft for my depict just how the artist, adumbrating changes job or errands. My body streamed with currents of in her overall approach at this key moment in her imagery: the interior directives varied from furtive career, is going to allow the agency of the figures to to persistent: either veiling or so intensely illuminat- overtake the suppressed expressivity of the back- ing ordinary situations that I continually felt dis- ground or landscape. In other words, a surrealist- solved, exploded, permeated by objects, events, inspired psychological intensity encoded in land- persons outside of the studio, the one place where scape (a painterly mode that reaches an apotheosis my concentration could be complete.”9 The result- in Abstract Expressionism) is being jettisoned for ing work—the exhibition includes film-to-video something plainer but of much greater expressive documentation of the event and related studies and potential: the figure, or more precisely (had Parti- images—is overwhelmingly energetic and almost un- tions been realized), the body.