Carolee Schneemann & Sands Murray-Wassink

I pay attention to the direction of unconscious information. There has always been something irrepressible in my work. I believe in the pure thrust of intuition, trust of the body. Putting my body in a central position in my art reveals contradictions in our culture. I resist social, erotic and aesthetic restraints, and have opened my energies to finding materials and forms which celebrate and transcend predicted directions of the work. -Carolee Schneemann

My work is intimate in my eyes and mind, and dependent on my context, specific person, environment and lived experience…it is primarily made to add where I feel things are missing in the gay male mind of America, and to critique, comment, and touch on those things I feel particularly taboo and painful in the U.S. mental landscape. -Sands Murray-Wassink

The work of Carolee Schneemann is empowering and liberating, particularly for the artist Sands Murray-Wassink. Both artists confront issues of a personal and sexual nature, including Western cultural taboos surrounding sex and sexual orientation, especially in the United States. Schneemann dismantles taboos integrated into society's structure and psyche, principally those pertaining to women and how women's bodies "should" be contained and controlled. A feminist before the advent of feminism in the 1970s, she broke ground in the areas of painting, performance, film and video. Her work has been a starting point for many artists including Murray-Wassink who acknowledges her influence and that of feminism in his work. A gay, American artist based in Amsterdam, he questions the role of the artist, how one is "supposed" to act and interact with his/her environment while undermining taboos surrounding the gay, male body and its sexuality.

Kathleen Wentrack

Double Trouble:
Carolee Schneemann and Sands Murray-Wassink