PHOTO BY: Andy Archer
By Tajudeen Sowole
American, Carolee Schneemann has been anaounced
as recipient of Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Venice Art Biennale 2017.
Schneemann,
b. 1939, according to a press statement recieived from the organisers, has been one of the most important artists in the development of “performance
and Body Art.”
Ghanaian born Nigerian master, El Anatsui received
the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Venice Art Biennale at the 56
th edition in 2015.
 |
| Carolee Schneemann |
The statement indicated that the decision by La Biennale’s Board of
Directors chaired by Paolo Baratta, was
reached after the recommendation of the curator of the 57th
International Art Exhibition, Christine
Macel.
«Carolee Schneemann (born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, 1939, lives
and works in the Hudson Valley, New York) has been one of the most important
figures in the development of performance and Body Art,” Macel said. “She
is a pioneer of feminist performance of the early 1960s. She has used her own
body as the prevalent material of her art. In so doing, she situates women as
both the creator and an active part of the creation itself. In opposition to
traditional representation of women merely as nude object, she has used the
naked body as a primal, archaic force which could unify energies. Her style is
direct, sexual, liberating and autobiographical. She champions the importance
of women’s sensual pleasure and she examines the possibilities of political and
personal emancipation from predominant social and aesthetic conventions.
Through the exploration of a large range of media, such as painting,
filmmaking, video art and performance, Schneemann re- writes her personal
history of art, refusing the idea of an “his-tory” narrated exclusively from
the male point of view.»
The award will be given Schneemann on Saturday, May 13, 2017 at
Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of La Biennale di Venezia, during the awards
ceremony and inauguration of the 57th Exhibition, which will open to the public
at 10:00 a.m. on that same day.
Excerpts from the press statement:
Schneemann’s work is characterized by experiments in kinetic technologies, as
well as research into archaic visual morphologies, pleasure wrested from
suppressive taboos and the body of the artist depicted in dynamic relationship
with the social body. Using a vivid range of materials and sources, she has
incorporated painting, drawing, performance, video and installation in her
work. Schneemann has transformed the definition of art, especially in regard to
the body, sexuality and gender.
Even if she is especially renowned for her performances,
Schneemann describes herself as a painter and she considers her artistic
process as having extended her painterly principles off the canvas. Since the
1950s, while studying at Bard College and then at Columbia University, she
figures in the pictorial space, introducing objects into the canvas and
creating assemblages that developed out of the paintings. Her landmark work Eye
Body (1963) marks her transition from painting to working with a much
wider range of media, such as filmmaking, video art and performance, as well as
her role as both image and image maker.
Meat Joy, a
1964 performance, is a landmark work in the development of performance art.
This Dionysian work of kinetic theatre, described by the artist as a
“celebration of flesh as material”, explored the way social dynamics change
when cultural taboos and restrictions are lifted.
Her self-shot erotic film Fuses, 1968, is composed
by explicit sexual images of lovemaking between the artist and her then
partner, composer James Tenney. Considered as the first feminist erotic film, Fuses
is an attempt to dismantle the patriarchal construction of eroticism as
well as a strong dedication to sexual freedom. Through superimposition,
collage, painting, slicing and burning, Fuses extends Schneemann’s painterly
impulses in an exploration of ecstatic sexuality.
Interior Scroll, 1975, a performance in which Schneemann, standing nude, draws a
scroll from her vagina, is an iconic piece of feminist body art, encapsulating
the sexual, political, and aesthetic concerns of the movement.
In Up to and Including her Limits, 1973-1976,
Schneemann translated gesture into performance, using her suspended body as a
mark making tool, addressing the male-dominated history of Abstract
Expressionism and action painting.
Schneemann’s work has consistently contrasted imagery of daily
intimacies and the sacred erotic with destruction and war. The atrocities of
the Vietnam War dominated the motives of her films and performances in the
1960s, including her film Viet-flakes (1965) and the multimedia kinetic
performance Snows (1967). Through video installation, photography and
painting, Schneemann explores the invasion and devastation of Lebanon in the
1980s, the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and a range of other
personal and public disasters. What unites each of these works is not just a
visual motive – representation of the atrocities of war – but also the deeply
personal, even intimate, nature of Schneemann’s eulogies and laments.
During the eighties, Schneemann continued to break down social
taboos with Infinity Kisses, 1981-88, a series of 140 photographs
representing the morning kisses she received from her cats over eight years.
Showing the intimacy between the artist and the cat, Infinity Kisses questions
the central role of the nonhuman in the artist’s erotic universe and raises
questions of interspecies communication.
Schneemann’s challenging of social boundaries persevered in Vulva’s
Morphia, 1992-97, consisting of texts, photos, drawings of
prehistorical sculptural representation of vulvas. In the installation text, a
vulva’s personification discovers that she is subject to numerous prejudices:
for example, from a pure biological point of view it is just an “amalgam of
proteins and hormones”.1
Later works of the 1990s and the 2000s, such as Mortal Coils
(1995) and Vespers Pool (2000) are centered on symbolic
and figurative representations of death, moving between conscious and
unconscious worlds. They insist on the function of art objects as mystical
channels into the death realm.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art presented Schneemann’s first
solo museum retrospective in 1996. More recently, Schneemann’s oeuvre received
new attention through the retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting
at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (Austria) in 2015. In 2017, the
exhibition will travel to the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main in
Frankfurt (Germany) and to the MoMA PS1 (New York).
1 Carolee Schneemann, «Vulva’s Morphia», in Carolee Schneemann.
Imaging her Erotics, The MIT Press, London, 2002, p. 299.
Schneemann’s works are included in major museum collections around
the world, such as: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, (Madrid), Museum
of Modern Art, (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (New
York), Tate Modern, (London), Centre Georges Pompidou, (Paris), Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, (Washington).
Selection of major exhibitions: 2017: Carolee Schneemann:
Kinetic Painting, MoMA PS1, New York, United States 2017: Carolee Schneemann:
Kinetic Painting, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2017:
Body and Soul: Performance Art – Past and Present Group Exhibition curated by
Elga Wimmer, Collateral event La Biennale 2017, Venice, Italy 2016: Further
Evidence... Exhibit A...Exhibit B... Double Gallery Solo Exhibition at PPOW
Gallery and Galerie Lelong, New York, NY 2016: Postwar – Art between the
Pacific and Atlantic 1945 – 1965, Haus der Kunst, curated by Okwui Enwezor,
Munich 2016: A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde,
1960s–1980s , The Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL 2016: Performing for The
Camera, Group Exhibition, Tate Modern, London 2015: Carolee Schneemann:
Kinetic Painting, Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria 2015: Sequences
VII, Biennial Honorary Artist, solo exhibition at Kling and Bang Gallery,
Reykjavik, Iceland 2014: Lost Meanings of The Christmas Tree, Site Specific
Installation and Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
NY 2014-2015: The Artist Institute, Year Long Artist Residency and Exhibitions
curated by Jenny Jaskey, Hunter College, New York, NY 2014: T-Space, Rhinebeck,
NY: Flange 6rpm, Solo Exhibition, Rhinebeck, NY 2014: Carolee Schneemann:
Precarious, Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, France
Carolee Schneemann: Then and Now, MUSAC, León, Spain 2013: Then and Now Carolee Schneemann:
oeuvres d’Histoire, Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart,
France 2012: Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the premises, Krannert
Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, II 2010: Carolee
Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art,
SUNY New Paltz, NY 2007: Carolee Schneemann: Breaking Borders, MOCCA, Toronto,
Canada 2002: Interior Scroll, Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard
College, New York, NY 1997: Schneemann in Bonn, Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany
1996: Carolee Schneemann: Up to and Including Her Limits, New Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York, NY 1995: Carolee Schneemann: Compositions with
Interior Scroll, Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery, Nova Scotia Moral
Coils and Up To and Including Her Limits, Kunstraum, Wien, Austria 1988: Self-Shot,
Emily Harvey Gallery, New York 1986: Recent & Early Work, Henri
Gallery, Washington, DC 1985: Recent Work, Max Hutchinson Gallery, New
York 1984: Kent State University, Department of Fine Arts, University Gallery,
Kent, OH
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
Performed Paintings and Works on Paper, Kleinart Gallery, Woodstock, New York 1983: Recent
Work, Max Hutchinson gallery, New York
Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH Works on Paper,
Rutgers University, Douglass College, New Brunswick
1982: Early Work, Max Hutchinson gallery, New York 1981: Image/Texts
and Debris Grid, Real Art Ways, Hartford, Ct
Image/Texts,
Washington Projects for the Arts, Washington
Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology, Washington Projects for the Arts, Washington 1980: Dirty
Pictures, A.I.R. Gallery, New York 1979: ABC – We Print Anything – in
the Cards, Gallery De Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Forbidden Actions, C Space, New York
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson 1977: Multiples, Archives
Francesco Conz, Italy
ABC – We Print Anything – in the Cards, Gallery De Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands
1974: Up To And Including Her Limits, University Art Museum, Berkeley,
California 1964: Meat Joy, Festival of Free Expression, Paris
The Sale, Artist’s Studio, New York 1963: Eye Body,
Artist’s Studio, New York 1962: Mink Paws Turret, Artist’s Studio, New
York.
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