Carolee Schneemann is one of the pioneers of performance, installation, and video art. Although other visual artists, such as Salvador Dali and Yves Klein, had used live self-portraiture and performance as a vehicle for public provocation, Schneemann was among the first to use her body to animate the relationship between the world of lived experience and the imagination, as well as issues of the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo. In the 1960s, her work prefigured the feminist movement's sexual self-assertion for women, and by the mid-1970s, her work anticipated the field of women's studies and its critique of patriarchal institutions. In the 1980s, she was one of the first to experiment with virtual environments.
Imaging Her Erotics integrates images from Schneemann's works in painting, collage, drawing, and video sculptures with written material drawn from the artist's journals, dream diaries, essays, and lectures. Encompassing four decades of her work, it demonstrates her profound influence on artists in all media. An opening essay by Kristine Stiles presents Schneemann's major themes and places her work in a historical context. Among other topics, the book covers Schneemann's response to the widespread use by artists of the ideas of theoreticians such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan; her relationship to male artists such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg; and reminiscences about her friends Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman, and Hannah Wilke. The book also contains essays by Jay Murphy and David Levi-Strauss and interviews with the artist by Kate Haug, Linda Montano, and Aviva Rahmani.
From the perspective of today's art world, where "transgression" has become for many little more then a quick path to fame and notoriety, it is difficult to grasp the extraordinary bravery and daring of Carolee Schneeman, the pioneering performance artist whose career is lavishly documented in this volume. Decades before "The Body" became an object of safe academic discourse, Schneeman was putting hers on the line, creating a series of films, actions and performances perhaps most notably the majestically Dionysian Meat Joy of 1964 that have become touchstones not only in the history of performance art but also in the development of feminist aesthetics. By its very nature, performance is hard to capture between the covers of a book, but the quality and extent of the images presented here, while no substitute for having been there, capture events with an almost cinematic completeness. Also here in addition to a number of interviews and essays by such critics as David Levi-Strauss and Thomas McEvilley are a number of Schneeman's own writings, which include a description of a formative encounter with poet Charles Olson, whose patriarchal warning that classical drama died when "the c began to speak," Schneeman, with characteristic inventiveness, transforms into good career advice. In fact, from a spirited examination of Valerie Solanas to an elegy for slain colleague Ana Mendieta, Schneeman's writings form the book's core, and it is good to have them in one place. What emerges most powerfully from this book which also covers (with 150 illustrations) Schneeman's work in painting, photography and video is the artist's extraordinarily generous and questing personality. In an era when so much art seems directed at the audience with a sneer, Schneeman's Emersonian optimism and joie de vivre are both example and challenge.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Complementing both Carolee Schneemann: Early & Recent Work 1960-1982 (o.p.) and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (o.p. rev. ed.), this volume includes 150 black-and-white illustrations from Schneemann's vanguard works in addition to material from her journals, dream diaries, essays, and lectures spanning four decades. Schneemann's ecstatic and shocking oeuvre addresses sensational aspects of both the erotic and the political. Both innovative and provocative, her paintings, drawings, experimental films, and collages appeal to an underground audience. She is perhaps best known for Fuses (1960), her key contribution to avant-garde cinema, and traces of her performance piece "Meat Joy" (1964) appear in the works of Annie Sprinkle, Penny Arcade, Karen Finley, and Madonna. But her subversive expressions of female sexuality and experimentation with various media have not won her mainstream recognition. This highly representative volume offers readers a full sense of the diversity of this pioneer in performance art and ardent feminist's oeuvre. It is particularly valuable to performing arts collections because Schneemann's work remains so influential. However, as is often the case with performance stills, the black-and-white photographs fail to translate each work's vitality, making it difficult to perceive the profusion of Schneemann's performance pieces. Recommended for larger academic libraries with specialized collections in feminist or performance art or experimental theater. Rebecca Tolley-Stokes, East Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Johnson City
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
For four decades, Schneemann has questioned every premise about the creating and viewing of art and Western civilization's ideal of femaleness in works that boldly dissect the taboo and the sacred. Always controversial and often misunderstood, Schneemann's intellectual and formal yet intuitive and emotional work is finally accorded the comprehensive attention it deserves in this stimulating and well-designed volume. Schneemann's writings are paired with illuminating interviews and critical assessments, and all are accompanied by reproductions of her radical films, performance pieces, and installations. A painter first, Schneemann became involved in breaking down barriers between pictorial space and "real" life after working as an artist's model and experiencing firsthand the suffocating misogyny of the early 1960s. Using her body as a medium and making the passive female nude come alive as an erotic and kinetic entity, she confronts the fears that the depiction of the female body arouse on both personal and political planes. Demanding and unsettling, Schneemann and her work are a vital force in the evolution of art and justice.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
