Carolee Schneemann

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

Viet Flakes was composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images, compiled over five years, from foreign magazines and newspapers. Schneemann uses the 8mm camera to “travel” within the photographs, producing a volatile animation.

An experimental short in which a couple engaged in lovemaking is superimposed over ocean and beach scenes.

An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search, he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

RED NEWS (1962-67) considers the interplay between media, entertainment, and violence. "I also had Red News simultaneously, that magical little film that I also found mystically by closing my eyes and putting my hands up in front of a whole wall of 16mm films and I just pulled it and it was this perfectly remarkable compendium of disasters, a little feature that they showed at contemporary movies, Movietone or something, and it was just one disaster after another. A boat blows up, motorcycle racers blow up. It was very satisfying, one explosion after another, and then it cut to Santa Claus appearing for the American Legion."

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.

Body Collage is a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage. "My intention was not simply to collage my body (as an object), but to enact movement so that the collage image would be active, found, not predetermined or posed," writes Schneemann.

Devour is a dual-channel version of the artist's multi-channel video projection installation of the same name. Schneemann notes that this work brings together "a range of images which contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments... political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace." In this dense montage, the title stands for the voraciously synthetic, head-on rush of contemporary media, and the corresponding, near-addictive impulse of its consumers.

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

Vulvic puns, jokes and ruminations on the meanings of menstrual blood activate a range of taboos surrounding cultural notions of the feminine as a metaphoric battle ground of the body and of language itself. Schneemann, naked and in red pajamas, merged her physical movements within a continuous slide projection. The projected images weave into archeology of unconscious forms, pulled to the surface of conscious recognition. This videotape is a compilation of several performances, edited by Schneemann.

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance. Sound: Carolee Schneemann. -- EAI

Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann's previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of intimacy and physicality, the erotic and the obscene, the incubation of dream enactment. Catscan centers on the death of a beloved cat as a means to ritualize more universal mourning and to bring forward ghosts of the past. As a ritual consecration, Schneemann, blindfolded, dances out of 20 yards of red fabric wound around her body. The performance, which had a duration of approximately 90 minutes and variously featured 5 to 8 performers, included a slide projection system, 15 video monitors, ladders, furniture, suitcases, and debris.

Schneemann's classic 1966 aerial "Kinetic Theatre" work was first staged at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, with eight performers moving to a score of randomized encounter on layers of rigged ropes and pulleys. One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version is enacted outdoors in trees and across the surface of a lake, in sequences directed by Schneemann.

Schneemann’s cat, Kitch, who was featured in works such as Fuses, was a major figure in Schneemann’s work for almost twenty years. The moving conclusion to her Autobiographical Trilogy documents the routines of daily life whilst time passes, a relationship winds down and death closes in: filming and recording stopped when the elderly cat died.

This is a newly restored version of documentation of the 1967 group performance Snows, which was built out of Schneemann's outrage and sorrows over the atrocities of the Vietnam War. An ethereal stage environment combining colored light panels, film projection, torn collage, hanging sacks of colored water, "snow," crusted branches, rope, foil and foam was the set and setting in which an audience-activated electronic switching system controlled elements of the performance/installation. Images from film, slide and live action propel silent, ghostly performers to become aggressor and victim, torturer and tortured, lover and beloved, as well as simply themselves in this breakthrough mixed-media film performance. (The film Viet-Flakes is a central element).

The Super 8mm film “Muñecos” (1972) — shot by the artist, Leopoldo Maler and Carolee Schneemann — combines recordings of a happening by Hirsch that took place in three cities: in Buenos Aires, London, and New York. In each, she is seen handing out 500 tiny baby dolls to bystanders, while candidly suggesting to everyone: “Have a baby!” This work was made in response to a period of strong pro-natalist and anti-contraceptive policies pushed by the Argentinian government.

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from Christmas to his incomplete opera The Sunken Bell. The hand-painted film stock heightens the impressionistic vitality of this snapshot of the 84-year-old composer, who is heard paraphrasing Freud: "Everything that you do is a matter of sex. That is the great passion of life."

About the relationship between a man and a woman.

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of animal attributes. Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions; she channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling wolf or crawling across the projection area, squealing like a pig.

Infinity Kisses - The Movie completes Schneemann's exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses - The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.

Video documentation of performance of the work hosted by De Appel, Amsterdam, in 1977 and filmed by Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas. In ABC - We print anything - In the cards (1977) Schneemann documented dreams, advice and conversations relating to her shifting relationships. She collated 315 numbered cards, containing both text and photographic imagery, which she photographed from her domestic life. Schneemann (the ‘C’ in ABC) analyses her complex set of experiences separating from ‘A’ (artist Anthony McCall) while drawing closer to ‘B’ (publisher Bruce McPherson). The cards capture the dynamic, paradoxical, humorous and contrary aspects of relationships, forming an intimate yet measured set of information.

Writes Schneemann: "Souvenir of Lebanon follows a long video pan through destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese villages. In 1982-83, Israeli ceaseless bombardments destroyed bridges, farms, roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, apartments, and historic sites and towns dating back 2000 years. The live color footage was received unexpectedly from an anonymous news photographer. It is intercut with black and white disaster stills I re-shot from daily newspapers, edited in juxtaposition with color slides of bucolic Lebanon given to me on the day the Lebanese tourist bureau in New York city closed." "Souvenir of Lebanon is the video component for the kinetic sculpture War Mop; a flailing motorized mop rises on plexiglass cams and is dropped, slapping the video monitor every eight seconds. The sound on the video recorded layers of reverberation as the mop hit the monitor."