More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings

A new edition of the only book that documents Schneemann's complete works up to 1978. As performance art books go, this one is especially unusual for its integration of large numbers of photographs with performance scores as well as descriptive texts. Schneemann -- one of the original creators of performance art -- began making events and "happenings" in 1960. Over thirty works are documented here (this book was originally published in 1979). The range of her work has been substantial and broadly influential: from solo improvisations to large group ensemble pieces, from starkly bare stagings to multi-media and multi-sensory extravaganzas. Schneemann's performance works -- direct extensions of her equally important work as a painter and filmmaker -- have been performed throughout Europe and the United States. This book includes sections of her selected writings gathered from art and literary magazines, diaries, and journals; and it completed by a festschrift of tributes from notable artists, poets, and critics. More Than Meat Joy is vital to an understanding of the origins and intentions of performance art, as well as being the expression of an enormously important artist.

Carolee Schneemann's work questions the exclusivity of traditional western categories by creating a space of complementarity, mutuality, and integration and she has transformed the very definition of art especially with regard to discourses concerning the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

In 1998 the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, featured a retrospective of Carolee Schneemann's works from 1963 to 1996, which further confirms her place in originating issues of serious critical discourse. The exhibit included the installation "Mortal Coils" (1993-94) -- previously exhibited at the Kunstraum, Vienna -- in which a slide projection system is combined with 14 motorized ropes, flour and sand to examine taboos of death and loss. "Up To And Including Her Limits" (1979) is a 6-monitor video installation depicts multiple sequences of the live actions which produced the surrounding wall drawings. "Video Rocks" (1989) presents over a hundred hand-sculptured rocks receding to meet a wall of seven monitors on which rhythmic fragments of feet move back and forth over the virtual rocks within the videotape. Early paintings and constructions from the 1960s that include elements of sound, lights and motorized objects were exhibited, as well as drawings and photographs. The exhibition of Schneemann's works was enlarged by inclusion of photographs, film and video of such performances and multi-media installations as Eye Body (1963), Meat Joy (1964), Fuses (1964-65), Interior Scroll (1975), and Infinity Kisses (1980-91).