Carolee Schneemann

Corporeal surveys Carolee Schneemann’s innovative work in photography, painting, film and print mediums, which for the past four decades have consistently set art world precedents, disrupting existing boundaries. Corporeal celebrates a rare limited edition of Eye Body – Thirty Six Transformative Actions (1963), her seminal photographic series, which challenged issues of representation and gender, acknowledged as the precedent for the subsequent development of “body art”. The artist has selected 18 images printed for the first time as 20x24 inch gelatin silver prints.

Striking parallels persist between Schneemann’s seemingly disjunctive works where images of the ecstatic-erotic shift to themes of militarism and atrocity. Schneemann’s unerring and profoundly prescient eye captures four decades of political, social and sexual upheaval in an interconnected line from her ground breaking photographic/performance works “Eye Body” and “Interior Scroll”, to the 1965 anti-Vietnam War film, “Viet-Flakes”.

"Viet-Flakes (1965) is more than a documentary based on a series of photographic fragments; Schneemann constructs a sense of the violent dimensions of the war at a time when the true impact of the Vietnam War was scarcely understood. Using film as a plastic medium to create a metadocument, Schneemann gives the viewer a sense of the dimension of these atrocities, puts the war in a human perspective and goes directly to the source of the catastrophe, much in the way that the great Greek dramatists were able to situate tragedy so convincingly". -Robert C. Morgan

Recent works combining painting and computer-generated imagery in this exhibit include: “Caged Cats I & II” (2005), “Dark Pond” (2001-2005) and “Terminal Velocity” (2001) a photographic permutation of the horrific events at the World Trade Center ; here scanned sequences consecrate nine people, among the hundreds, falling to their inescapable deaths.

Carolee Schneemann, one of the most significant artists of our time has exhibited and lectured internationally. This year she is the recipient of Anonymous was a Woman grant. The New Museum of Contemporary Art featured a retrospective of her work in 1997. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, and is currently on view inTake Two. Worlds and Views. Contemporary Art from the Collection at Museum of Modern Art , NY . Her latest book, Imaging Her Erotics – Essays, Interviews, Projects was published by MIT Press.

Carolee Schneemann
Corporeal