Carolee Schneemann

For part one of her six month season, Schneemann will present a new site-specific work revisiting her enduring interest in the sensual capacities of painting. This new site-specific work returns to Schneemann’s early experiments with mixed-media environments in the 1960s, including Eye-Body: 36 Transformative Actions for the Camera (1963), in which she elaborated and deconstructed Cezanne’s optical re-organization of the picture plane, reconnecting the metonymic excursions of the eye back to the sensuous body.

When Carolee Schneemann entered the neo-avant garde of the 1960s, the materials available to artists had expanded up to an ironic limit: it seemed that a body could use everything but itself. In turning to the body as a material, Schneemann broke this basic conservatism and the taboo of erotic introspection that it had tacitly barred from art’s ongoing project of reflexivity. For Schneemann, the body’s intuitions, secret knowledges, and desires were materials to be experimentally mixed—literally and metaphorically—with every other medium: paint, film, printed matter, and the history of representation itself.

From February 13th to August 2nd, the Artist’s Institute will dedicate its program to Carolee Schneemann’s expanded conception of the body as a material, exploring its extensions and versatility. The six-month season will be divided into five parts, each following a single through-line in Schneemann’s ideas and process, including her use of dreams, intimate relationships, and inter-species communication.