Fresh Blood

Times For

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.

Viet Flakes

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.

Meat Joy

"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."

Site

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.

Kitch's Last Meal

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.

Infinity Kisses - The Movie

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.

Snows

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).

Fuses

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

Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor

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.

Grimace

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.

Oh, the Marquise de Sade...

About the relationship between a man and a woman.

Devour

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.

Body Collage

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.

Red News

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."

Home Movies 1971-81

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

Water Light/Water Needle (St. Mark's Church in the Bowery)

Eight performers, suspended from ropes, move to a score of randomized encounter. Schneemann writes that this "kinetic theatre" work was "conceived as an aerial event with ropes rigged across the canal at San Marco... finally realized at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, then later rigged in a grove of trees. The illuminated aqueous planes of Venice motivated the performers on layers of ropes which enclosed and surrounded the audience seated below." One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version features original film footage by Elaine Summers.