Carolee Schneemann — The Merchant House 2.2 by The Merchant House

Carolee Schneemann Infinity Kisses

THE MERCHANT HOUSE ISSUE 2.2

Carolee Schneemann Infinity Kisses

Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses The Merchant House, Amsterdam, January 22â&#x20AC;&#x201C;April 12, 2015 The Merchant House Herengracht 254 1016 BV Amsterdam www.merchanthouse.nl Editorial & Timeline Marsha Plotnitsky is Founding Director of The Merchant House, Amsterdam Curatorial Consulting & Essay Kalliopi Minioudaki, PhD, is an independent art historian based in Athens and New York https://independent.academia.edu/ KalliopiMinioudaki Graphic Design Stefan Altenburger, Amsterdam Editing Martin Whitehead, PhD, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana Frank van Lieshout, Amsterdam Printing Veenman+, Rotterdam Photography Arend Velsink Artworks Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann Galerie Samuel Lallouz, MontrĂŠal P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York Special Thanks Andy Archer Samuel Lallouz Anneliis Beadnell of P.P.O.W Seth Castein Marie Claire van Hessen 4

Table of Contents Editorial 6 by Marsha Plotnitsky

Carolee Schneemann: Art Life Timeline

Artworks in The Merchant House Exhibition 48 Infinity Kisses II – Photogrid 1990-1998 /2004 Infinity Kisses – The Movie 2008 Beyond Her Own Body or 65 Carolee Schneemann’s Transgressions In Love, Sorrow, and Research Thoughts on Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses by Kalliopi Minioudaki, PhD

Artworks in The Merchant House Exhibition 79 Caged Cats and Other Works 1992-2005

Editorial

Anon. ceiling painting, Dutch, first half of the 18th c. The Merchant House, Amsterdam

Since the early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann has been widely acknowledged for her pioneering contribution to contemporary performance and art in both Europe and the United States. It is a privilege for The Merchant House to organize her solo exhibition and present her Infinity Kisses project for the first time in Amsterdam. Schneemann’s singular artistic vision fuses time with space, art with life, present with past. A show of her work in the birthplace of our domesticity and its artistic order— an Amsterdam canal house—creates an immediacy shattering the pure function of reality. In response to the old obsession and in reference to her early personal objectives, Schneemann stated in her 1977 interview: I had to get that nude off the canvas, frozen flesh to art history’s conjunction of perceptual erotics and an immobilizing social position.1 Coincidentally, this type of nude graces the ceiling of The Merchant House stijlkamer—Aurora, reclining on a sofa of clouds, her blood-red cloak rumpled to expose voluptuous breasts, putti and garlands in tow—generally admired as a decorative allegory. At the time the painting was installed at Herengracht 254, circa 1730, its matron and her housemaid, no less so 7

than its patron (who according to the archival records was a successful carpenter), would have—one is tempted to follow Schneemann’s train of thought—pondered over the meaning of the explicit figuration of Aurora’s body— a case of “perceptual erotics” if there had ever been one. It is also likely that in addition to the ceiling painting, the walls of such stijlkamers would have displayed a collection of portraits, genre paintings, and biblical scenes. Among them there could have found its place a rarer artwork from another time and place, painted by a woman artist, similar to, or a copy of, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and The Elders, for example. Ostensibly depicting a biblical nude—as was the norm, indeed the demand—it would have had Artemisia’s masterful hand turn Susanna’s body from an alluring vision to that of a victim weighted with the corpus of corrupt male authority or, if one were lucky enough to have Artemisia’s possible sketch, into the full-blown revolt of a naked woman with a knife pointed at her rapists. A full 400 years later, Schneemann wrote about rape: Profound issues of hidden sexual abuse and victimization of the feminine reality began to claim an explicit language and descriptive grasp in the eighties. By the time I was teaching performance in Austin, Texas (1989), rape was finally out as a major traumatic component of women’s experience to be addressed.2 8

http://stellagibsons.tumblr.com/post/105072322233/rgfellows-calanoida-susanna-and-the-elders

Nicolas Maes, The Listening Maid, 1656 As illustrated in Schama, 1988 3

Kathleen Gilje Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610 Restored and X-ray, 1998

Back in the 1700s, a possible constellation of art in the canal house confronting the male and female household could very well have included a version of Jan Steen’s or Nicolas Maes’s house scene “directly addressing the beholder and implicating [them] in the pleasures of temptation … [with] the world of the body (reinforced by globes and swords) or that of the soul lit by pure daylight. In each case, a cat, symbol of wantonness roots among the dishes as the domestic order falls apart.”3 Schneemann makes us realize that we are looking at something that has been and still has to be looked at with different eyes. Her own iconography, especially in Infinity Kisses, also includes mythology, nudity, rumpled bed linens, and a cat. Except, she dissolves the deadly forms they typically take by focusing light and lens on the world of the body stripped of all the trappings of power, not just the globe and the sword. Her technique is her powerful medium: as she “flips” the image and mirror-prints it, the cat—now profiled in high relief dominating the close-up— is “flipped” from small and wanton to a symbol of the pure delight of a common ritual or stillness. In the repeated rhythm of these mirror images of intimacy—printed from 35mm slide images taken over fourteen years—the gentle morning kiss of a cat invites us to wake up and look with a greater depth of field—ad infinitum. Schneemann crosses the disciplines of painting, sculpture, photography, and film to privilege the illicit and the ineffable, such as interspecies communication, to trigger unexpected cultural taboos, as she claims. Her bold suppression of prudery is an artistic risk, a powerful invention and an engine for change in the “boundaries between human and animal, reason and the irrational.”4 Like Artemisia, she offers a prophetic point of view. In Infinity Kisses, she continues the labor started in her early performances and films—Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, (1963), Fuses (1964-67), Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-77)—to reach for a break in the hierarchies of power in the hope of attaining Artaud’s vanishing point of a complete way of life. Marsha Plotnitsky

Carolee Schneemann: Art Life Timeline “Carolee Schneemann has been putting her body on the line for over thirty years in art…. It is the last line of resistance in the rebellion of the body against disembodied ideas of history, whether political or aesthetic” — David Levi Strauss, 1996, as quoted in Carolee Schneemann: Imaging Her Erotics, 2002, p. 317.

1939 Carolee Schneemann is born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania; eldest daughter of a rural doctor “As a girl, I was not expected to go to college.” 1 “I was drawing before I could speak.” 2

with ice-skaters because I grew up in the country and people were out on the ponds. I wanted to draw the momentum of the body.” 6 1955 Sees herself as a young woman painter in the male art world “We have inherited a torturous male tradition of vaginal terrors.” 7 “I was looking at Cézanne’s stroke—not just how he painted but how his form evolved, having to construct form. Cézanne is struggling with multiple dimensionality in his perception of form.” 8 “Could a nude woman artist be both image and image-maker?” 9

“I drew Eve” 3

“Where ever the eye does not dominate the form, I am revolted.” 10

1950 “Aesthetic childhood” and apprenticeship

1956

“From childhood, I felt myself a part of nature; saw the world as animate, expressive, alive, and sometimes responsive to my own desires.” 4 “Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials?” 5 ”It was a big struggle. I wanted to get the feeling of the body. I was preoccupied 14

Meets and secretly marries composer James Tenney; they stay together and collaborate until 1968 “While still at Bard, I run away to Maine, disappear and these are the books we have with us plus the book on color theory and we just paint and draw and study these books and smoke cigarettes …” 11 Reading D’Arcy Thompson, de Beauvoir, Focillon, Artaud “We were building an interconnective way to work, with the implications of philosophy, space, time, technologies, and the poetry of language and image.” 12

“Then I put my paintings on potter’s wheels, so that I could spin them, so that the strokes would have a literalized actualized momentum implied by Pollock and de Kooning work.” 14 “It was also inspired by Bach.” 15 Launches body-art 1960 Performs Labyrinths at Sidney, IL age 21 “I had to get that nude off the canvas, frozen flesh to art history’s conjunction of perceptual erotics and an immobilizing social position.” 16 Destined to shape performance practice

1958 Paints her cat—Kitch at breakfast with Tenney—into history “Somebody gave us a kittenish face with a weeney gray body: Kitch-frighty example of Kitchhood; fearsome warringer. Sphinx of the bent knee and curly lap …. Moth snatcher, egg lapper, cat napper, wood tapper …. Fluff ball. Din and Gammon. furr purr fuzz buzz.” 13

1959 Inspired by visual energies and movement

“I invited friends to interact physically within the altered landscape …. It had to do with the increasing dimensionality that I needed in my landscape paintings.” 17 1963 The first painter to choreograph at Judson Dance Theater Feminist kinetic theater “We formed a coherent conversation: the body as central to language, to image.” 18 15

1950s Key Works Drawings, Etchings such as Lady Asleep, Writing, Paintings such as Nude Lady, Edwards House, Colorado House, J.T. & Kitch, and Eagle Square Mill, Participation in Stan Brakhageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Experimental Films

Mill Forms – Eagle Square, 1958 Oil on Canvas 44” x 36”; 112 x 92 cm

JT + Kitch S. Shaftsbury Vermont, 1958 Oil on canvas 42” x 36.5”; 107 x 93 cm

Colorado House, 1962 Construction on plywood base: wood, wire, fur, bottles, fabric, broom handle, flag, photograph 61” x 47” x 29”; 155 x 119 x 74 cm

“Environments, happenings —concretions—are an extension of my paintingconstructions, which often have moving (motorized) sections.” 19 Signature form 1964 Meat Joy performed in Paris and London

1965 Schneemann and Tenney move into their eighteenth-century house in Springtown, NY where she continues to live and work today “I’m cooking cat food here and this is where Fuses was filmed and Kitch’s Last Meal. This is where Meat Joy was dreamt of.” 24

First dream-inspired work for kinetic theater Fuses—a self-shot erotic film—is shown as work-in-progress “Because no one else had dealt with the images of lovemaking as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement.” 20

Experiencing life through art “The sense is to try to make this base [CS’s house] work. I’ve struggled to maintain it for 26 years—more years than my age when I found or was claimed by this monument!” 25 “My work is where I live” 26

Off the canvas and outside the frame “The aesthetic, domestic, and the transcendent get all mixed up.” 21 “The cat Kitch [in Fuses] watches with complete unrestrained interest” 22 “By visualizing the cat’s point of view I was able to present our coupled images in the contexts of the rectangles and the seasons surrounding us.” 23

Radical body poetics and politics 1967 Presents a series of five films, Snows, centered on the iconic antiwar Viet-Flakes “Snows was built out of my anger, outrage, fury, and sorrow for the Vietnamese. … I wanted to integrate film and performance, while emphasizing film’s contrasting visual language— handled as tactile, palpable material…. Each film spilled out of its fixed frame, projected onto surfaces throughout the theater.” 27 19

1960s Key Works Mink Paws Turret Studio Exhibit 1962 Banana Hands1962 — Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera1963 Fur Landscapes1962 — Four Fur Cutting Boards1963 The Sale1964 — Newspaper Event1963 Chromolodeon1963 — Lateral Splay1963 Meat Joy1964 — Ghost Rev1965 — The Queen’s Dog1965 Water Light/Water Needle1966 — Snows1967 Round House1967 — Ordeals1967 — Divisions and Rubble 1967 — Night Crawlers1967 — Illinois Central1968 — Films: Fuses1964-67 — Viet-Flakes1965 Happenings with others: Store Days1962 Waves and Washes1965 by C. Oldenburg Site 1964 by Robert Morris — In the spirit of Fluxus: Bottle Music 1964 — Music box Music 1964-65 Loose Leaf 1964-66 — Flux-Shoe1970 and others

(Photography by Erró)

Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963 Gelatin silver print 20” x 20 “; 51 x 51 cm

(Courtesy of C.S.) (Courtesy of C.S.)

Fuses, 1964-1967 Self-shot 16mm film Film still

Four Fur Cutting Boards, 1963 Wooden boards, paint, lights, photographs, fabric, hubcap, motorized umbrellas 90.5” x 131” x 52”; 230 x 333 x 132 cm

(Photography by Herbert Migdoll)

Water Light/Water Needle, 1966 Outdoor aerial performance Lake Mahwah New Jersey, Havemeyer Estate

(Courtesy of C.S.) (Photography by Alec Sobelewski)

Viet-Flakes, 1965 19mm film still

Snows, 1967 Performance

1968 US government intervenes at Schneemann’s antiwar performance Illinois Central in Chicago Feminist critique Initiates signature performative lectures with the Naked Action Lecture, in ICA, London 1969 Erotic Fuses wins a special jury selection at Cannes Focus on heterosexual pleasure “There were no aspects of love-making which I would avoid; as a painter I had never accepted the visual and tactile taboos concerning specific parts of the body.” 28 Leaves for Europe after the breakup with Tenney, and spends four years living in London (1970-73) “Fuses was made as an homage to a relationship of ten years—to a man with whom I lived and worked as equal.” 29 Angers feminist and male audiences alike “Because my sex and work were harmoniously experienced I could have the audacity, or courage, to show the body as a source of varying emotive power:

poignant, funny beautiful, functional, plastic, concrete, “abstract”.” 30 “I was able to function … because the subtle and unanalyzed exclusions sparked some instinct that I did need to be present and active.” 31 1970 Included in the legendary “Happenings and Fluxus” curated by Harald Szeemann Visionary of women’s cultural reality “That [kinetic] was my theater and may actually have been the origin of kinetic sculpture in the 1960s…. Also my term for the body as a source of knowledge—eroticized body—became part of vocabulary.” 32 Innovation and visual fusion “As a painter I was free to examine the celluloid itself: burning, baking, cutting and painting it, dipping my footage in acid, and building dense layers of collage and complex A and B rolls held together with paper clips.” 33 “With Lateral Splay what I want to do … is to have a projection of it—so you have a virtual great big image—and then to explode that with real action.” 34 25

1971 The second biographical film—Plumb Line— is completed

1974 Self Publishes her second artist book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter

The cat Kitch joins the sound track “THE CAT IS MY MEDIUM … her awareness of the space and time influenced my development of my Kinetic Theater … THE CAT IS TURPENTINE!” 35

1972 Sums up women’s sexuality in the book Parts of the Body House

1975 Interior Scroll creates a stir at Women Here and Now, East Hampton, New York “This source of ‘interior knowledge’ would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship. I related womb and vagina to ‘primary knowledge.’ … I assumed the carved figurines and incised female shapes of Paleolithic, Mesolithic artifacts were carved by women.” 37

In the forefront of feminist art agendas 1973 Returns to New York with partner Anthony McCall Up To and Including Her Limits performs at the 10th Avant-Garde Festival, New York “This layering of visual information and action both presents and represents the interdependent realities of nature, science, and culture … as mediated by bodily experience, education, and memory.” By Kristine Stiles 36

Master of visual iconographies “My work presents particular difficulties because its source and its forms examine eroticism…. The content can be used to trivialize the formal complexity.” 38 Body, sexuality, gender “The culture obfuscates lived experience, the female erotic, and the sacredness of sexuality.” 39 The cat Kitch is coperformer in the 1975 Up To And Including Her Limits

1970s Key Works Portrait Partials 1970 — Rainbow Blaze1971 — Blood Work Diary 1972 — Ices Strip Train Skating 1972 Cooking with Apes 1973 — Up To and Including Her Limits 1973-77 — Americana I Ching Apple Pie 1974 Interior Scroll 1975-77 — The Men Cooperate1976 ABC – We Print Anything – In The Cards 1977 HOMERUNMUSE 1977 — Naked Action Lecture 1968 Films: Plumb Line 1971 — Reel Time 1971-72 — Kitch’s Last Meal 1973-76 — Moon in a Tree 1976 — Artist Books: Parts of a Body House 1972 — Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter 1974 — More Than Meat Joy 1979

Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-1977 Performance

29 (Photo by Henrik Gaard)

(Photo by Antony McCall)

Interior Scroll, 1975 Performance Gelatin silver print 11” x 14 “; 28 x 36 cm

“I thought of the vagina in many ways—physically, conceptually, as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.”40 Above and beyond the taboos 1976 Explores domestic themes through the eyes of a cat “Kitch’s Last Meal is a Super-8 diary film that examines an artist couple’s life through the perception of a cat. The cat was filmed eating her meals, at least one a week, until she died. Because the film started when she was 16 years old, it was already a foregone conclusion that the film couldn’t exist for many years. The cat, Kitch, a little gray female, happened to die while eating a lamb chop. Such was her agreement with my work.” 41

“Venus Vectors simply posits a female visual universe of creative variety. Its non-hierarchical nature, its participatory aspects are noted in the description of the vector images on the panels and in the performance: the human body—organic forms—sacred artifacts— common objects and symbols. Humor, daily availability of the sacred within the ordinary … (Irony, comedy, open insight).” 42 “She threatens mythological revolution” — Lucy Lippard43 1981 Premiers Fresh Blood— A Dream Morphology at the San Diego Performance Festival “Our creative work our dreams were habitually denigrated ignored if not correspondent to what the male imagination required as antagonist or consort or compliment … his dream of us so culturally pervasive that we must still ask: are we dreaming ourselves or dreaming the dreams of the men dreaming us?” 44

1979

“The Lebanon Series began as a series of dreams in 1981. The conceptual work is activated through my body— a sense of physiological invasion, impaction. The political information that’s coming 1980 to me—which anyone else Posits female visual universe might have access to— and its dream value physicalizes itself as dreams, Schneeman’s partner Bruce McPherson publishes More Than Meat Joy.

hallucination, sensations of being in a place I have never literally or actually been.” 45 “Not fetishistic or romantic, but “naturalistic”” 46 1983

“Ana! … Twelve friends and artists had these dreams related to mine, which they believed came from Ana.” 49 1987 Falls on hard times saved by occasional grants

Begins work on the war in Lebanon with War Mop “A 19-inch TV monitor is attacked by a mop rising up and falling down on a very elaborate set of Plexiglas cams. It cost a fortune to fabricate this monster. It bangs onto the front of this TV every twelve seconds…. The rubble is exquisite—stained glass and iron, archaic arches, pink stone—the sea is seen floating on the left side of ruins.” 47 Archaic quality and high-tech touch “In the case of Lebanon— as in Vietnam—my research begins with the poetry of the place…. With poetry I enter into a kind of ethos, the topographical power of language: where the political takes its voice, in a culturally specific way, and where the feminine aspects of culture are situated.” 48

“The [Gottlieb] grant arrived like a lifeline on March 14th; on the 15th my electricity was to be turned off, health insurance cancelled” 50 Dream-inspired multimedia works: Video Rocks, TV Sprouts, Images Escaping TV “In my video works I pose a question: in a video culture, what is going to be more actual and immediate, the painting itself, its literal dimension and tactility, or the videotape in which the action of the painting is compressed without any agency?” 51 Infinity Kisses I (1981-1988) —intimacy between cat and woman “Since he was a kitten, my cat Cluny woke me every morning with deep kisses. During each week—even half asleep—I reached for a hand-held Olympus camera to film our kissing. The intimacy between cat and woman

1986 Returns to painting with Hand Heart for Ana Mendieta 32

1980s Key Works Dirty Pictures 1980 — Correspondence Course 1980 Saw Over Want 1980-82 — Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology 1981-83 — Infinity Kisses I 1981-88 War Mop1983 — The Lebanon Series 1983-91 Hand Heart for Ana Mendieta 1986 — Caged Gloves 1986 — Jim’s Lungs 1986 — Venus Vectors 1987 Video Rocks 1987-88 — Cat Scan 1988

(Courtesy of C.S.) (Photography by Dan O’Connor)

War Mop, 1983 Kinetic sculpture; Plexiglas construction, mechanized mop, motor and TV Video sequences of the war in Lebanon 24” x 62” x 20”; 61 x 157 x 51 cm

Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology, 1983 C print, 2004 40” x 60”; 102 x 152 cm

(Courtesy of C.S.)

Hand Heart for Ana Mendieta, 1985 C Prints of Action (paint with blood, ashes, syrup on snow) 132” x 57”; 335 x 145 cm

(Installation image from Mocca, Toronto)

Video Rocks, 1987-88 Multimedia installation 200 hand cast rocks (cement, glass, ashes, wood), 5 video monitors, 10 Plexiglas rods with halogen lights, 2-channel video; painting (acrylic on paper) Overall 20’ x 16’; 6 x 4.9 m

becomes a refraction of the viewer’s attitude to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred.” 52 Cat correlative—a unique artistic medium

films, video, performance—things that are formed.” 54 Prefigures internetage multimedia Up To and Including Her Limits (1976)— at Venice Biennale

1988 Cat Scan—ensemble performance “A crucial dream image instructed me to open a red file folder and find within it [my cat] Cluny’s raised paw! The dream hallucination guided me to move his paw in a specific gesture…. Back in New York, I asked each performer to get books on Egypt and from these books to choose images that they wanted to activate…. They knew the piece was called Cat Scan; I did nothing to alter their assumptions that the working metaphor was of a scientific measurement, a technological interiority.” 53

1991 Filmed performance Ask the Goddess is presented at the Owen Sound festival, Canada “[I seek to give] a phrase, a sentence, an idea the primacy, the immediacy, and physicality of a stroke of paint.” 55 Video sculpture, installation, painting, performative lectures “I don’t think of [Fuses (196467)] as a documentary. It’s something different, which has to do with a desperate desire to capture passionate things in life …that can then become a process out of which work develops” 56 1992

1990 New gestural painting in Scroll Painting with Exploded TV “All my work evolves from my history as a painter: all the objects, installations,

Reexamines sexuality and cultural oppression in Unexpectedly Research and Vulva’s Morphia “I had accumulated reams of notations: female genital mutilations, the pope projecting feminism as witchcraft.” 57 37

1993

munications, as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos.” 58

San Francisco MOMA purchases Infinity Kisses I First museum sale 1995 Vulva’s Morphia in Paris, at The Pompidou Center, and Mortal Coils at The Wiener Kunstraum Mounting international fame

Performative lecture —Mysteries of the Pussies at the Porin Taidemuseo, Finland Against neglect of women artists of the 60s C.S. reads texts on feline and female abuse as she acts out tender cat motions with the museum’s librarian

1996 Retrospective—Carolee Schneemann: Up To and Including Her Limits— at the New Museum, New York (1996-1997) 1998 Infinity Kisses II (1990-1998) completes the 15-year Infinity Kisses project

1999 Experiences a minimum of financial support “I have still only sold two works to institutions in the United States of America in thirty years…. Compare that economic history to any other contemporary artist who has been acknowledged as influencing, inspiring their culture.” 1998 59 Fusion of dreaminspired and ritual art

Memorializing the cat as a spiritual signifier

Vesper’s Pool—video installation—exhibited at Artpace, San Antonio and Emily Harvey Gallery, New York

“Cluny [of Infinity Kisses I] died in 1988 …. He was reborn in Vesper in 1990 and continued the kissing expressivity until his death, of leukemia, in 1998 …. The images raise questions of interspecies com-

“In Vespers Pool, I reconstitute psychic spaces as part of ordinary phenomena…. 38

1990s Key Works Scroll Painting with Exploded TV – new paintings, Cycladic Imprints 1988-92 — Fluxus Subjective 1990 Ask the Goddess 1991 — Unexpectedly Research 1992 Vulva's Morphia 1992-97 — Mortal Coils 1994 Plague Column: Known/Unknown 1995 Infinity Kisses II 1990-98 — Mysteries of the Pussies 1998 Vesper's Pool 1999-2000 — Kosovo War prints 1999

(photography by Baruch Rafic)

Scroll Painting with Exploded TV, 1990-91 Ashes, pigment, glass, dust, ink on canvas, motorized mops, ropes, analogue video, monitors, player

(Photography by Odense)

Vesper's Pool, 2000 Multimedia Installation (Detail) Wall niches displays of found objects, photographs, and diary excerpts

Ask The Goddess, 1994 Performative Lecture at MoMA PS1

As the viewer enters the darkened gallery, seven video projections display a stream of images on a far wall of a cat (Vesper), ardently kissing a woman; these images flow vertically into a projected pool of water.“ 60

2001 Featured as a feminist founder in Art and Feminism, ed. by Peggy Phelan and Helen Reckitt, Phaidon “Profound issues of hidden sexual abuse and victimization of the feminine reality began to claim an explicit language and descriptive grasp in the eighties. By the time I was teaching performance in Austin, Texas (1989), rape was finally out as a major traumatic component of women’s experience to be addressed.” 61 Profound reflection on global horrors “The [Terminal Velocity] sequences personalize individuals who in their normal workday were thrown by impact into a gravitational plunge, or chose to escape incineration by leaping into space.” 62

“Inundated as we are with Abu Ghraib and those torture images, am I ever going to create a pile of pleasured naked bodies again?” 63 Anti-institutional and anticommercial stance 2004 Remasters performance tapes as experimental video Power of performance “Performance is an occupied territory. I opened the territory with a small band of experimenting artists, and now it belongs to a vast body of other artists. I’m concentrating on my original work. As I remind everyone, my use of the body displaced my body of work. My body of work has been large installations and multichannel videoprojection systems.” 64 Creates new work with computer activated kinetic sculpture— SNAFU—including a projected horserace 2007 Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles Celebrated in major feminist shows

2003 Multichannel video installation Devour 42

After 2000 More Wrong Things 2001 — Terminal Velocity 2001 Devour 2003-04 — SNAFU 2004 — Caged Cats 2005 Souvenir of Lebanon 1983-2006 — Americana I Ching Apple Pie 2007 — Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast 1963 2007 — Infinity Kisses–The Movie 2008 Precarious 2009 — Mysteries of the Pussies 1998-2010 Flange 6rpm 2013 — Artist Books: Imaging Her Erotics 2002

Precarious, 2009 Multichannel video installation Variable Size

(Courtesy of C.S.)

Flange 6rpm, 2011-13 Sculpture Foundry poured aluminum, 6rpm motors, foundry firewall projection

2009

Aphrodite) that ancient totem pressed to her lap between her breasts breathing three heartbeats to one of hers speeded through time.” 65

Women Artists elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris Video installation titled Precarious commissioned for the first Abandon Normal Devices Festival (AND), Tate Liverpool Unmistakable line of thought and language Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle is published. (K. Stilles, ed., Duke UP) From Schneemann’s letter (1988) to writer Tomas McEvilley, about the cats of Infinity Kisses, Cluny and Vesper: “If the cat represents an extension of the human lover it is as tenderness cherishing trust devotion wordless communion there is no power play the wild is tamed by love and the taming love welcomes admits the wild poignant like Beauty and the Beast the Prince is trapped in a small animal body he can only come back to his beloved as a cat! A domestic cat this hero who died for her so long ago her brother lover her son (Dionysus’ panther to

2012 Breaking the Frame: Carolee Schneemann, a feature film created by Marielle Nitoslawska premieres at New York Film Festival. Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award For The Arts Honored one of the greatest American artists Stanford University purchases the Carolee Schneemann archives The Museum of Modern Art purchases Up To and Including Her Limits 2013 New work Flange 6rpm, motorized sculptural installation debuts at P.P.O.W gallery, NY “[As an artist,] you have to make images or you are going to die, basically. That is the most interesting, satisfying, compelling, necessary function—like love and sex and breathing.” 66

Starting 2015 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pinea Silva: The Lost Meanings of the Christmas Tree,â&#x20AC;? Schneemann provides gravitas and feminist content at the new Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The Merchant House Exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses January 22-April 12, 2015 Infinity Kisses II–Photogrid 1990-1998 /2004 Infinity Kisses–The Movie 2008

Infinity Kisses II, 1990-98 Photogrid 30 self-shot 35 mm Ilfachrome prints, 2004 19” x 22”; 48 x 56 cm (each)

Infinity Kissesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;The Movie, 2008 Incorporating Infinity Kisses self-shot 35â&#x20AC;&#x2030;mm photogrid With the cats Cluny, 1981-1988, and Vesper, 1990-1998 Edited by Carolee Schneemann, Trevor Shimizu, and Rick Silva Sound by Rick Silva and Carolee Schneemann

Beyond Her Own Body or Carolee Schneemannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Transgressions in Love, Sorrow, and Research Thoughts on Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses

by Kalliopi Minioudaki, PhD 65

[My work] has to do with a desperate desire to capture the passionate things of life. Those could be very small things, very big. It can be war, it can be love, a cat whisker—but … it’s kind of convoluted the way I need to work: dream, research, hands into materials, the invocation of motive, necessity—what I must see… — Carolee Schneemann, 1977 1 In using the actual lived life, that’s the only chance for me to see: Is there a sensory and conceptual correspondence between what I live and what can be viewed and seen? — Carolee Schneemann, 1989 2 A principle of my work is to give permission to see, to bring what is likely to be suppressed forward. I'm interested in investigations that have something forbidden about them. — Carolee Schneemann, 2002 3 Schneemann … is a diagnost of our malaises & a deft spokeswoman of the priority of personal meaning above all. — Robert Kelly, 1977 4 66

A pioneer of body and performance art, feminist art, expanded cinema, and intermedia art, Carolee Schneemann is one of the most significant artists to have emerged from the various avant-garde art circles of early 1960s New York—not only movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus, Happenings, and the Judson Dance Theater, but also experimental filmmaking, music, and poetry. A gestural painter who broke free of the painting’s frame to include space, motion, and the body—challenged by the lessons of Cézanne, Artaud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Wilhelm Reich while challenging the conventions of her era’s art and culture—Schneemann has made valuable contributions to the postwar avant-garde and the course of contemporary art. She has indeed radically transformed all the media she has explored and combined, from painting, sculpture, collage, drawing, and printmaking to “kinetic theater,” film, video, photography, installation art, writing, and lecturing. Effectively drawing “the eye back to the body that sees,”5 Schneemann has used the lived body and life to critically expose and revolutionize the deleterious effects of the split of matter and spirit that underpins modern art and Western patriarchal culture. While continuing to apply her painterly and collagist sensibility to her multimedia work, as well as to “conceptualize” its relation to the painterly gesture,6 she has remained an exceptionally tireless guardian of the avant-garde aesthetic and the political premises of her oeuvre, most prominent being her unruly impure formalism, her poetic politicization of the personal and the body, her critical deciphering of various kinds of cultural and historical malaises, and the feminism that underlies all the above. Paving the way for the work of diverse artists such as Marina Abramovic´ and Matthew Barney, Schneemann has been internationally influential and respected by many in the art world from the beginning of her trajectory in the arts. She, however, remained sidelined for several decades, in effect denied her radical proclamation, for herself and all women, of the right to be both an artist and a woman, a creator and a sexual being, an embodied subject rather than a fetishized object, an “image maker”7 rather than an image, as first manifested in Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963. Although best known today for her taboo-breaking and path-paving enactment of the “explicit”8 body in performance, it is the use of her own nude body that, deemed obscene as well as essentialist and narcissistic, has largely effected her prolonged marginalization and controversial position in postwar art and its discourses—including feminist art history. While she has finally come to be better recognized as an eminent force of American postwar art and an uncompromising feminist, the complexities of her work and its body politics have also been unfairly overshadowed by the 67

proto/feminist enactment of her nude body in celebrated classics of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Meat Joy, 1964; Fuses, 1964–67; Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973–77; and Interior Scroll, 1975–77.9 The experiential body—not only her own, as this exhibition argues—is indeed paramount in Carolee Schneemann’s revolutionary pleasure politics and idiosyncratic poetics. It is by using her own body that Schneemann instantiated her embodied subjectivity as a female artist in a male-dominated field, shattering the phallocentric taboos of the representation of female sexuality and exposing the masculinist underpinnings of artistic creation and art history. But it is along with the bodies of her human and nonhuman companions in life and art—her lovers, the performers of her group kinetic theater, her audience, her cats—that Schneemann tried to radically undo the split of mind and body that shaped art, life, and the understanding of subjectivity in Western patriarchal culture through a remedial multisensorial, “visual-kinesthetic” awakening of the body to new thresholds of awareness, through intersubjective relationality and the conscious and intuitive retrieval of the repressed feminine and bodily knowledge. Moreover, it is with the evocation of the lived body, enacted or enfolded in representation, that Schneemann laments, protests, and comments on the historic symptoms of the suppression of the “sacred” feminine and erotic in contemporary Western culture, and the body’s demise under the reign of the image. Focusing on the photographic set (2004) and the video (2008) Infinity Kisses that sensually portray the morning kisses given to the artist by her beloved cats Cluny and Vesper, this exhibition shifts attention away from Schneemann’s own naked body. By foregrounding the centrality of the cat in her work—as life companion, radically subjectivized other, and a symbol of what patriarchal culture represses and dismisses, especially female sexuality—it instead illuminates the expanded radical premises of the substitution of the human by the feline body that underpins Schneemann’s late erotic imagery and embrace of difference. With the exhibition’s site-specific installation, her legendary yet controversial interspecies “kisses” return to a “house” that variously evokes her own home, highlighting the domesticity that characterizes the poetics of intimacy inherent in a great part of her work and harkens back to her early figurative paintings as well as to her famous filmic autobiographical trilogy (Fuses, 1964–67; Plumb Line, 1968–71; and Kitch’s Last Meal, 1973–76).10 Additional works on paper, that range from antiwar prints to the photogrid Unexpectedly Research, 1992, sample aspects of the gestural and collagist sensibility that characterize her work across media, and shed further light on the disparate role 68

that the body, including her own, plays in her multifaceted work and its politics—especially Schneemann’s ecstatic defiance and sorrowful diagnosis of the malaises of modernity and patriarchy. They also summon the diverse research and “double knowledge”11 that drive Schneemann’s socio-politically concerned and deconstructively critical, yet always visually nuanced, attention “to the multifarious conditions of the world”12 and, above all, her conceptual and bodily, feminist search for the lost feminine. In Love I cannot paint “we.” I paint for him, I live by him, but when I am, like now, in a dry work time and “we” are charged and charging and with joy if there is not good work the I and the we lead separate meanings… — Carolee Schneemann, 195713 When I said LOVE I meant EROTIC love; deep transforming bounty one imparts to another reciprocally; it assumes … all! To celebrate, illuminate respect, tenderness, trust, passion and regard … to joyfully put all we are into one another’s hands … all contact, touch, expression possible, desired. — Carolee Schneemann, 196314 A forbidden erotic kiss from a lost time/Demarcations of acceptable expression between species shattered as the mouth of a kitten is pressed to the mouth of his human female/ Sexual sacredness, expressivity constrained by our culture in a brew of morality and fetishized romanticism/The projected violence in heroics of male attraction and repulsion/ While here, in my arms, is a tiny amorous kitten/Extending paws, tongue, purring/His entire ardent body pressed, to touch, lick, knead, fold fearlessly into this huge responsive human…. Consider the thousands of years of taboos/Prohibition and authoritarian androcentric control exercised over the female body/A politics of control prevailing history publicly and privately…. In this sexually distorted universe/ Posit the inexplicable embrace of a tiny kitten/Whose gentle lips produce an unexpected female orgasm. — Carolee Schneemann, 199215 Love has been an important, and yet-to-be scrutinized theme as well as motive of Schneemann’s creative imaginary and feminist politics. In her writings she contemplates as much about sexual satisfaction, as requisite for her creativity, as about love in creative partnership, its limits and enabling potential. And her oeuvre is replete with poetic, ecstatic, mournful, and humorous documen69

tations of love’s experience and its loss, whether involving her human or nonhuman partners—her cats.16 Cats are for Schneemann life companions, rather than pets, whose love and creative partnership has outlived those of her human loves and their own life.17 Cats were always central in Schneemann’s life and automythology, which almost starts with a childhood drawing of the “exuberant cat” and is replete with paranormal posthumous communication with her cats.18 Kitch, Cluny, and Vesper, so far the most important ones, have repeatedly appeared in her work as ciphers of sexuality, domesticity, and love. Their death has been mourned with individual works, such as the vanguard diaristic filmic contemplation on life and death, Kitch’s Last Meal, 1973–6; individual memorials to Cluny, such as Cluny-Ladder and Cluny-Corpse, 1981–83; and the multimedia installation Vesper’s Pool, 1999–2000. But they have also been credited as creative partners, and attributed works of their own. Kitch’s movement has inspired Schneemann’s first “event,” the landscape activation Labyrinths, 1960, as well as the exercises with which she shaped the movements of the performers of her group kinetic theater events in the 1960s. Credited in Fuses, Kitch is, above all, the dispassionate observer of Schneemann’s and James Tenney’s lovemaking—a metaphor for the camera’s eye, in often playful symbolic displacement of the repeatedly caressed and orgasmically portrayed “pussy,” that in and of itself resists the normative masculine penetration of the camera and the pornographic objectification effected by the projective male gaze. Communicating through the psychic elsewhere, Cluny and Vesper’s instructions have inspired several works, including the group performance Cat Scan, 1988 and Vesper’s Pool. Schneemann has saved a painting with shoe polish by Kitch and a photographic portrait of her by Vesper. Only Cluny, who woke Schneemann every morning “with deep kisses,” and Vesper, considered a reincarnation of Cluny after kissing her on their first encounter, have been systematically co-portrayed with the artist as initiators of physical expressions of love, with their initiative never being “coerced.” It is by portraying them as subjects, rather than objects, of love, that Schneemann problematizes the philosophical distinction of human and nonhuman animals.19 But the substitution of the male with the feline body in Schneemann’s loving rituals, further radicalizes the politics of her remedial activation of Eros, by complementing both her defense of women’s right to sexual pleasure and the rather polymorphous sexuality of Fuses, not only with a further embrace of the multiplicity of sexuality20 but a suggestion of love for all kinds of others. Both the photographic set and the video in this exhibition derive from the sources of the photogrid Infinity 70

Kisses I, 1981–87 and the laser prints Infinity Kisses II, 1990–98 that document the kisses of Cluny and Vesper respectively.21 With a handheld camera ready by her bed, Schneemann documented daily their kissing throughout their multiyear cohabitation, allowing chance to shape focus, angle, light, and framing, and the predominantly domestic envelope of their daily ritual to backdrop them. Much as with the film Fuses, itself a self-shot autobiographic documentation of the erotic body in pleasure and love, Schneemann sought to “see.” She sought to visualize sensual lived experience, effecting some of the most lyric visual emulations and affective portrayals of kissing, in meaningful contrast to the fake Hollywood and television kisses or those staged in the Factory by Warhol in the early 1960s. “How do you describe what a kiss feels like?” she wonders, admitting that she had to collect hundreds of them in order to satisfy her own sense of such feeling’s appropriate representation.22 But in addition to its diaristic accumulation, it is with rigorous formal means that the artist, who early on determined the importance of form in her work by defining it as emotion,23 manages to enhance the visualization of sensual experience. By mirror-printing the slides into pairs of flipped images, in Infinity Kisses I Schneemann allowed formal beats—“concavity and convexity”—to rhythmically orchestrate the kisses, eroticizing the shapes surrounding the human and animal mouths.24 This is why pairing remains the curatorial principle guiding the arrangement of the photographic set Infinity Kisses II in this exhibition, in enhancement of formal rhythms and visual correspondences, as well as of the polysemous and nonhierarchic mirroring of self and other in their infinite kissing.25 In Infinity Kisses-The Movie, which can be seen as a postscript to Fuses, pleasure is visualized with formal means previously tested in film, especially in that early hymn to love. A painterly collage (like the highly tactile film Fuses) yet of photographs (like the film Viet-Flakes, 1965), the “movie” is comprised of a sequence of photographs from Infinity Kisses, rhythmically structured by the visual refrain of the handheld camera that metaphorizes Schneemann’s artistic effort to see as well as her understanding of vision as an “aggregate of sensations” rather than a fact.26 Whether seen as split or paired, each Infinity Kisses photograph focused on in each sequence of the movie is featured along with an enlarged detail derived from the same photograph. Physical pleasure, including its memory, is here energized not only by flipping, but by the flickering of the images and their superimposition as they tremulously succeed one another coming in and out of focus or light, as quite painterly and abstract signifiers of pleasure. Sensation is heightened also by color and the soundtrack’s 71

cat purr, as well as the way in which the enlarged details confound vision or invite associations, like the labial configuration of a blurry close up of Schneemann’s lips. It is by dissolving the image into whiteness that, as in Fuses, Schneemann emulates orgasm, a pleasure that only the body can see.27 Moreover, in its site-specific installation, the intimacy of Infinity Kisses-The Movie, becomes further visually moving and effective as the internal motion of the images is accentuated by the literal moving, layering, and sensuous abstraction of the video through Schneemann’s signature rotating-mirror projection device.28 Yet Infinity Kisses also shows the forbidden, the repressed, and thus the essentially obscene. In the movie, this is tellingly intimated by the soundtrack’s coupling of the erotic cat-purring with the uncanny tune of breaking glass, resonating as in the hallowed chambers of the personal and collective unconscious that house such interspecies kissing.29 Ironically, while Infinity Kisses I was the first work by Schneemann to be purchased by an American museum and included in a feminist exhibition that, shifting the feminist discourse, determined the broader acknowledgment of the feminism of her sexual politics, the series has been largely overlooked, dismissed as late style obscenity or abhorred as advocating bestiality.30 Unsurprised but disappointed, Schneemann, who sees the cat as “a sacred being, profoundly devoted to communicating love,” attributed the series’ negative reception to the familiar ongoing “erotic dislocation and cultural deception”31 that motivated much of her work, while also making it susceptible to various kinds of censorship. As she astutely puts it, tenderness, sensitivity, yielding, wetness, and permeability are all taboo aspects, isolated as “female.” Yet she was not unprepared. In the video Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth, 1992, by Victoria Vesna, Schneemann unmasks the repressive cultural premises that underpin related taboos that surround cats and female genitals, sexuality and power, in light of her synchronic and diachronic research of global culture. Critically preempting the negative reception of interspecies communication and affection, she collages readings from various studies, relating the torture and maiming of cats—itself a popular amusement of early modernity with appalling contemporary manifestations — with historic and contemporary witch-hunting, female genital mutilation, and wartime destruction of Palestinian sites of the Great Goddess as forms of historic and continuing patriarchal containment of female sexuality and power. For, if in the puritanical and misogynist 1960s what was “forbidden” was sex, especially as experienced and shown by a woman, twenty years later and on, under the conservative backlash of society and the commodification of sexuality, it is nonfetishized and 72

non-objectified female sexuality—that is, non-phallocentrically defined, autonomous, female sexuality—that has remained forbidden, both in its daily consummation and sacral apparition. Only the latter had grown even more important for the critical revisionism and deconstructive unmasking that have been underlying Schneemann’s feminist project since the 1970s, variously distinguishing it from comparable feminist explorations of the Great Mother/ Earth Goddess, that it not only presaged and paralleled, but also often outlasted in the era of their postfeminist demise. After all, the anomalous grid of Infinity Kisses I was juxtaposed with another of Schneemann’s research finds: a diptych featuring the flipped image of an Egyptian relief depicting a lion kissing a young girl, whether a priestess or a goddess, rather than a witch. By evoking the positive, empowering affiliation of the animal with deities of matriarchal cultures and mythology, Schneemann interweaves the personal and cultural signification of Cluny and Vesper’s affection. Exposing both the pretensions of a pet-loving yet belligerent and misogynist civilization as well as the theoretical feminist rigidities of the time, which embraced the abjectness of the body while abjecting the visualization of its joys, with Infinity Kisses Schneemann restores the domestic affection and the erotic jouissance of a lived interspecies relation to speak of the detrimental loss of the sacredness of the feminine. While effectively critiquing the failure of human communication in the era of mass communication, she, however, also renews her devotion to the lived ecstatic body and her belief in its revolutionary potential. Only the displacement of the human by the nonhuman body betrays, perhaps, a hint of Schneemann’s melancholic realization of the utopianism of her remedial sensate intervention in a repressed and repressive culture gone irreversibly wrong. In Sorrow My life is sweet but my skin is crawling. — Carolee Schneemann, 196632 [In the sixties] we were being moved, we were being affected by images bringing information that was startling and taboo and terrible and made you convinced that you had to do something. To enter the image itself! — Carolee Schneemann, 197733 Subtle movements: crawly-pushy and backwards spatial challenge inversions. Up and around, clambers, squeezes between my knees and legs, licks my hand…. I pull covers up over our heads as a tent. In the halflight he stares into my eyes, prolonged, an envision73

ing. I blink. Minos blinks. We close our eyes. We sleep! "Families scramble in the dust to find their dead. Aid workers and human rights monitors have started to call this ground zero. Rubble of Palestinian Refugee Camp," New York Times headline, November 2002 — Carolee Schneemann, 200234 The lion’s kiss of the goddess promises “restoration of peace” according to Egyptian symbology.35 Yet peace has been the stuff of myth, symptomatic of the suppression of the feminine divine and bodily knowledge, at least according to Schneemann’s convictions. War and violence, serving the American “home” and penetrating the intimacy of her own, her body, making “her skin crawl,” remain the stuff of history that the artist has observed, critiqued, and often attempted to exorcize with the interference of the body. From her anti-Vietnam War work of the 1960s, which began with the filming of press images of Vietnamese people in Viet-Flakes, to the mourning of the leaping victims of 9/11 in Terminal Velocity, 2001, Schneemann’s utopian evocation, remedial activation, and personal experience of the ecstatic body, is indeed coupled by her protesting, angry, and essentially sorrowful witnessing of the body’s demise— whether by natural death, historic atrocities such as war, or the violence of contemporary media and image culture. In her antiwar work of the 1960s, such as the groundbreaking interactive Snows, 1967, where the combination of film screening and live performance allowed the body’s “entering” of the horror image, the performing body, framed in group configurations and often dissonantly erotic, was put forward to problematize the apathetic consumption of news images of violence, its physical sensitization staged as a means of resistance to the “genocidal” effect of an “icy cool” technocratic capitalism.36 Yet historical circumstances, the state itself of a belligerent and media-colonized capitalist society, with the ensuing commodification and simulation of the body, made it difficult for her to sustain her polemic promulgation of pleasure through the activation and enactment of the ecstatic body. In effect, Schneemann gradually retrieved the body from her performative agenda to enfold its affect in representation.37 Nevertheless she has never stopped speaking about the misfortunes of this culture through human and other bodies.38 Some of the latter are exemplified in this exhibition by a series of prints that span the last fifteen years of her career. Whether digital collages, such as the series Caged Cats, 2005, or laser prints of actual collages, such as Global Menace, 2002 and Hallucinating III, 2002, these works juxtapose news images of global or localized violence that threatens both human and nonhuman beings 74

(such as the war in Iraq, the 9/11 attack, the “mad cow” massacres, or cat killings serving the food industry in China). Featuring gruesomely violated feline bodies, most of them point to the darker role that the body, whether nonhuman or human, plays in Schneemann’s sorrowful diagnosis of the malaises of modernity and patriarchy, of Western civilization in general or the current stage of the society of spectacle. Resonating with the incongruous juxtapositions of domestic joys and global atrocities with which Schneemann continues to comment on history and the violence of mediated imagery in multiscreen video installations, such as Devour, 2003–04, and Precarious, 2009, many of these prints relate to her painting collages of the 1980s multimedia series on the Lebanese war. Their collage aesthetic, however, is the product of different modes of interlacing found and made imagery. While some are evocative of the explosive gesturality of her paintings and collages, including the “Lebanon series” painting collages, others recall her radically irreverent “messing up” of the modernist grid with feelings, bodies, and “personal clutter.”39 Moreover, the juxtaposition of excerpts of domestic peace from the Infinity Kisses series with news pieces on the war in Kosovo in Paths of Oil and Five Vespers, 1999, captures the visceral encroachment of violence that threatens the jouissance that Schneemann has uttered as antidote to civilization’s discontents. The framing of Vesper’s kisses by news clippings indeed evokes the menacing invasion of her ecstatic body, her skin or Bachelardian home, by global tragedies—like the Vietnam War hallucinations that invaded her house fueling her anti-Vietnam War protest work or the dreams that bodily “activated” her conceptual work on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.40 While recalling Martha Rosler’s exposure of the consumerist bliss of the American home as complicit in global violence in her anti-Vietnam War series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72, Schneemann’s Paths of Oil and Five Vespers surfaces the interweaving of the personal and the social, the unwavering devotion to the personal that underlies her socially engaged work. The suturing of global news images and texts in these collages also makes manifest the research that sustains Schneemann’s incessant scavenging of the “wrong things” that plague humanity worldwide and informs her recent works. Such works not only protest against violence and war, but expose and sabotage the apathetic consumption of their mediated face. Yet Schneemann is not simply collecting and combining the symptoms of global violence and its mediatization. Her visual juxtapositions of mainstream and underground media horror imagery is supported by her textual intermeshing of the forbidden finds of her study of history and culture, with which she unmasks 75

the masculinist ideological foundations of violence and war, polemically “reinventing” history,41 or rather revealing its misogynist doctoring from a radical feminist point of view. After all, the destruction of “hedonistic, optimistic, excruciatingly beautiful, and constantly improvising itself” Beirut “was gratuitous,” as she has argued, suggesting another metaphor of the demonized feminine “beaten to shreds, without boundaries,” like all the cultures that have been victimized by the US or its agencies as nonindustrial or non-Western cultures, such as Vietnam, to paraphrase her.42 And it is in light of this systematic unmasking of the “destructive, psychotic mechanistic male convictions”43 that the victimized feline bodies in the prints of this exhibition protest also against gendered violence, against the victimization of the women in war or peace, while revealing all violence and war as masculinist and symptomatic of the systemic and continuous suppression of the feminine. “The real declivity is within the men,“ as Schneemann daringly claims, with sorrowful and informed acknowledgment of the ideological obfuscation of the feminine in patriarchal culture, rather than sexist naivety.44 In Research [In the early sixties] There were many reasons for my use of the naked body in my Kinetic Theater works: to break into the taboos against the vitality of the naked body in movement, to eroticise my guilt-ridden culture and further to confound this culture’s sexual rigidities—that the life of the body was more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit…. Alienation from our physical joys, constrictions in the scope of our own physical natures, meant endless disasters, acts against our own deepest needs. In some sense I made a gift of my body to other women…. The haunting images of the Cretan bull dancers—joyful, free, bare-breasted, skilled women leaping precisely from danger to ascendancy, guided my imagination. — Carolee Schneemann, 197445 Vulva goes to school and discovers she doesn’t exist… Vulva goes to church and discovers she is obscene… Vulva studies Freud and realizes she will have to transfer clitoral orgasm to her vagina… Vulva decodes feminist constructivist semiotics and realizes she has no authentic feelings at all; even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions, and conditioning… — Carolee Schneemann46 76

Resonating with the focus of this exhibition on the animal body is Unexpectedly Research, 1992, which prompts a retrospective association of the bodily expressivity of human and lion partners in lovemaking (as in a still from Fuses and an illustration from National Geographic). But Unexpectedly Research is also an extraordinary example of Schneemann’s conceptual feminist poetics that mingles a didactic deconstruction of linguistic and visual projections of phallocentric ideology onto the female body with embodied, often intuitive and quasi-shamanistic, evocations of the discoveries of her diachronic scrutiny of global iconography, or the “mysteries of iconographies,” as she titles one of her performative lectures. Bringing together highlights of Schneemann’s early work in a photogrid combining laser print images with text, it foregrounds the multifaceted conscious and unconscious research that drives Schneemann’s feminist critique, while unavoidably paying homage to her subversive use of her own naked body. In Unexpectedly Research Schneemann indeed pairs iconic finds of her research into primary gynocratic cultures with their unprogrammatic bodily enactment in works that predate their historic discovery.47 Her snakecovered body in Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, for instance, is juxtaposed with the snake holding figurine of a Minoan priestess. Twice appearing, her glueand paper-covered body of the private performance Body Collage, 1967, during which Schneemann tried to emulate the Vietnamese victims of napalm bombing,48 is juxtaposed with a New Guinea Owl Goddess and a Minoan bull jumper, whose pose is echoed by hers. A still from Fuses is paired with the figurine of a lovemaking couple from Zaire. And a Nigerian Vulva Goddess is tellingly paired with a photograph of Interior Scroll, featuring Schneemann pulling out of her vagina the scroll of paper from which she read a critique of the art world’s misogynism in light of the reception of her work, while, for the first time, giving voice to “interior knowledge,” the vulva’s sacred knowledge. Although first combined in 1991 as an illustration accompanying a manifesto of her body politics and critique of censorship—“The Obscene Body/Politic”—published in a mainstream scholarly art history publication, the Art Journal, Unexpectedly Research is the outcome of a subversive comparative iconography, which Schneemann first devised in the 1970s by performatively teaching, questioning, and revising world art history, or better yet “art istory,” in order to decode the eclipse of the feminine and female creativity from Western culture; to reclaim and decolonize the signs of female sexuality, power, and pleasure, and to rewrite the feminine back into history without projections and prejudices. The Owl Goddess, for instance, first appears as a recurrent slide projection in her Brooklyn 77

Museum performance HOMERUNMUSE, 1977, itself a radical intervention in the institutional shaping of art history that premiered her lasting practice of associative layering of images and symbols from the continuum of visual culture, whether seen as strategically repurposed or better yet stripped of their underpinning masculinist myths.49 It is not coincidental that the formation of Unexpectedly Research in the 1990s coincides with the incubation of another feminist, yet kinetic, iconographic photogrid (with text), Vulva’s Morphia, 1992–97. Consisting of an assortment of erotically pulsing, found and made images of vaginas, including Schneemann’s, derived from various strata of world visual culture, Vulva’s Morphia is, like Unexpectedly Research, another feminist subversion of the Warburgian Atlas,50 though a rather humorous one.51 Unexpectedly Research, however, does not only map morphological affinities between positive visual encodings or embodiments of female sexuality across cultures and time. Above all it highlights the coincidences, the “striking precedents” and unplanned “equivalences,” that relate Schneemann’s “lived actions” and the finds of her research, the archeological testaments of the repressed feminine divine and sacred erotic. As such it justifies Schneemann’s “occupation of her own body.”52 Evincing the cultural repression of female sexuality and power, including the primary knowledge ensuing from the unity of spirit and flesh, with Unexpectedly Research Schneemann promulgates the remedial retrieval of the sacred erotic and repressed feminine that underlies most of her work, while importantly legitimizing the unconscious channeling that accompanies their bodily—whether lived or polemic—enactment in her life and art. Unexpectedly Research thus illuminates the “double knowledge” that drives both the deconstructive premises of Schneemann’s feminist project, as well as the “radical metaphysics”53 that go along with it. As Lucy Lippard has put it, Schneemann “threatens mythological revolution.”54 It is a revolution that, as Lippard observes, has been neither economically feasible nor socially acceptable, while it has often been misunderstood or undermined as narcissistic and essentialist. But it is a revolution, I would argue, that has been in its principles and goals as radical as that of Joseph Beuys, as well as radically feminist.

The Merchant House Exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Infinity Kisses January 22-April 12, 2015 Caged Cats and Other Worksâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;1992-2005

Unexpectedly Research, 1992 Laser prints and text on board (8 panels) 83” x 47”; 211 x 119 cm  (overall)

Vulva Reads, 1999 Iris print  24” x 80”; 24 x 203 cm AP 1 of 5

Paths of Oil and Five Vespers, 1999 Iris print  46 3⁄4” x 35”; 119 x 89 cm AP 3 of 4

Global Menace, 2002 Iris print 30” x 101⁄2”; 30 x 26.7 cm Unique

Hallucinating I, 2002 Iris print 46 1⁄2” x 35”; 118 x 89 cm AP 1 of 5

Hallucinating II, 2002 Iris print 46 1⁄2” x 35”; 118 x 89 cm AP 4 of 5

Caged Cats I, 2005 Iris print 44” x 64”; 112 x 163 cm AP 3 of 6

Study for Caged Cats I, 2005 Iris print  441⁄2” x 12”; 113 x 31 cm Unique

Study for Caged Cats II, 2005 Iris print 441⁄2” x 12”; 113 x 30.5 cm Unique

Caged Cats II, 2005 Iris print 44” x 66”; 112 x 168 cm AP 3 of 6

Four Kisses + Detail, 1999 Iris print 46” x 34 1⁄2”;  117 x 88 cm AP 3 of 4

Editorial 1 Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 28(Schneemann). 2 Ibid., p. 34. 3 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Fontana City Press, 1988, p. 460. 4 Schneemann, p. 264. Art Life Timeline 1 Carolee Schneemann, Studio Visit broadcast, Resonance 104.4 FM. 2 Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2002, p.145 (Schneemann). 3 “Carolee Schneemann: A Life Drawing,” TDR (1988-), Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), p. 12 (Life Drawing). 4 “To Behold in Wonder: Theory, Theater, and Collaboration of James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann,” by Eric Smigel, unpublished, p. 3 (To Behold). 5 Schneemann, p. 28. 6 Life Drawing, p. 10. 7 Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, K. Stiles, ed., Duke UP, 2009, p. 385 (Letters). 8 Life Drawing, p. 23. 9 Schneemann, p. 28. 10 Letters, p. 3. 11 Life Drawing, p. 51. 12 To Behold, pp. 2-3. 13 Letters, p. xliv. 14 Life Drawing, p. 29. 15 Life Drawing, p. 29. 16 Schneemann, p. 28. 17 Life Drawing, pp. 26-27. 18 Schneemann, p. 29. 19 Ibid., p. 48. 20 Ibid., p. 45. 21 “Depth of Place: An Interview with Carolee Schneemann,” by Emily Caigan, held on 11/11/09, Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, 2010, p. 53 (Depth of Place). 22 “An interview with Carolee Schneemann,” by Kate Haug, Ohio University School of Film, Wide Angle, 20.1, 1998, p. 45 (Wide Angle). 23 Schneemann, p. 45. 24 Depth of Place, p. 53. 25 Letters, p. 409. 26 “Introduction,” by Brian Wallace, Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises, p. 12.

27 Schneemann, p. 75. 28 Ibid., p. 45. 29 Ibid., p. 45. 30 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, McPherson & Co., Kingston, NY, 1979, p. 194. 31 Ibid., p. 155. 32 Schneemann, p. 125. 33 Ibid., p. 45. 34 “Carolee Schneemann talks about Judson Dance Theater,” by Gia Kourlas, Time Out, New York, Sept. 17, 2012. 35 Letters, p. 142. 36 Schneemann, p. 5. 37 Ibid., p. 153. 38 Ibid., p. 134. 39 Ibid., p. 215. 40 Ibid., p. 229. 41 “Carolee Schneemann” Remains to be seen: New and Restored Films and Videos, by Time Out Editors, Time Out, New York, Oct 25, 2007. 42 Letters, pp. 385-86. 43 Schneemann, p. 317. 44 Ibid., p. 241. 45 Ibid., p. 187. 46 Ibid., p. 322. 47 Ibid., p. 203. 48 Ibid., p. 187. 49 Ibid., p. 276. 50 Letters, p. 384. 51 Schneemann, p. 205. 52 Ibid., p. 264. 53 Ibid., p. 273-74. 54 Ibid., p. 21. 55 Ibid., p. 229. 56 Ibid., p. 37. 57 Ibid., p. 299. 58 Ibid., p. 264. 59 Wide Angle, p. 48. 60 Schneemann, p. 309. 61 Wide Angle, p. 36. 62 Carolee Schneemann Wikipedia, ft. 32. 63 www.brooklynrail.org/2005/ 04/art/carolee-schneemannwith-praxis-delia-baj. 64 Remains, p. 41. 65 Letters, p. 389. 66 Schneemann, p. 29. Beyond Her Own Body 1 Carolee Schneemann, “Interview with Kate Haug,” in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 37; first published in Wide Angle 20, 1977, pp. 20-49. 2 Schneemann,“Interview with Aviva Rahmani,” in Imaging Her Erotics, p. 215; first published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, 1989, pp. 3-7.

3 Schneemann, in Amy Newman, “An Innovator Who Was the Eros of Her Own Art,” The New York Times, February 3, 2002, p. 35. 4 Robert Kelly, “American Direction,” May 2, 1977, in Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed., Bruce R. McPherson, Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1979, p. 264. 5 While I am here referring to a memorable distillation of Schneemann’s contribution to painting and art history, the “aesthetic of the transitive eye” by Kristine Stiles, one of the most astute and prolific analysts of Schneemann’s work (“The Painter as Instrument of Real Time,” Imaging Her Erotics, p. 11), it is Schneemann who has repeatedly and eloquently similarly argued for the contingency of body and vision in her writings before and after Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963. 6 As put by Maura Reilly, in Carolee Schneemann: Painting, What it Became, New York, P.P.O.W. Gallery, 2009. 7 “Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic, I establish my body as visual territory. Not only am I an image-maker, but I explore the image values of flesh as material I choose to work with. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, and yet still be votive—marked and written over in text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will,” Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 55. 8 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge, 1997. 9 It must be said however that recent exhibitions, such as Then and Now Carolee Schneemann: Oeuvres d’Histoire, Rochechouart, Musée départmental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, 2014, her upcoming retrospective in Salzburg (2015, curated by Sabine Breitwieser) and recent writings of new and old devotees, such as Stéphane Aquin, Emily Caigan, Bruce Elder, Anette Kubitza, Erica Levin, Ara Osterweil, Kathleen Wentrack, and Kenneth White, to mention only a few, that offer fresh and detailed historicized accounts of diverse aspects of Schneemann’s work, promise to drastically shift her critical reception. 10 The frame of the house, and a decisively childless one, is perhaps one of the few frames that Schneemann never broke with her art (“The house remains the frame,” she says in “Depth of Place: An interview with Carolee Schneemann by Emily Caigan,” in

Carolee Schneemann:Within and Beyond the Premises, New Paltz, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2010, p. 59). Although Schneemann maintained a studio in Manhattan for several decades, since the mid-1960s she lives and works in a historic, mid-eighteenth-century Huguenot house in Springtown, NY, whose original wood and stone structures were discovered, according to the artist, after dreams that instructed her to smash the cement of its façade, remove the linoleum floors etc. As “a modern version” of a traditional, Amsterdam canal house, known for its often hybrid function as residence and business, the Merchant House art space variously echoes aspects of Schneemann’s historic home in Springtown, while the window panes of the “ceiling room” where Infinity KissesThe Movie is installed, echo in particular the window frames of her home as featured in Fuses or Kitch’s Last Meal as well as her home’s immersion in nature, another major yet also permeable and transformative frame of Schneemann’s art practice. In the same interview she continues: “The way the house is constructed, almost each window is opposite. The western window has an eastern compliment. It’s very spiritual . . . everything is open to inside/outside. And since I began as a landscape painter, that sense of the imminent transformation, the daily transformations of what nature is doing is very important. I don’t like to go away and miss a leaf change or sleet storm. I want to be where the weather is, that constancy again.” 11 Schneemann, “Interview with Carl Heyward,” in Imaging Her Erotics, p. 200; first published in Art Papers 17, January February 1993, pp. 9-16. 12 Stiles, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 10. 13 Schneemann, Letter to Marvin Hayes, April 4, 1957 (referring to her partner James Tenney); repetition of passage previously written to Stan Brakhage. See Kristine Stiles, ed., Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, Duke UP, 2010, pp.10-11. 14 Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, p. 57. 15 Excerpt [my transcription] from Schneemann’s “Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth,” as recited by the artist in the video by Victoria Vesna, “Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth,” 1992. 16 Schneemann’s first love was the composer James Tenney, whom she married in 1956, against her wish not to comply

with women’s prescribed social roles, in order to facilitate a scholarship, and with whom she shared a transformative and rarely egalitarian creative partnership for over a decade. Along with Anthony McCall and Bruce McPherson—among several lovers—these are the protagonists in her visual contemplations on love. 17 Although due to the scope of this exhibition my focus is on cats, dogs are also important in Schneemann’s art and life, activating different aspects of “psyche, devotion and protection” as put by the artist in one of our conversations. 18 The “exuberant cat” resurfaces also in Schneemann’s performative lecture “Mysteries of the Iconographies.” Schneemann has had numerous cats since childhood. Her childhood cats were all named Tommy, despite gender, as proven by their enumeration on a children’s book according to Carla Benzan, “The Lives and Deaths of Carolee’s Cats: Intimate Encounters, Gentle Transgressions and Incalculable Ethics,” C Magazine, Autumn 2010, p. 8. In her diaries she always documents their lives. 19 See the insightful discussion of the role of cat in the work of Schneemann, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Hélène Cixous by Lynn Turner, in “When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence between Animots,” HUMaNIMALIA, 2:1; see also Benzan, The Lives and Deaths of Carolee’s Cats, p. 107. 20 Although Fuses has been justly celebrated by feminist critics for its nonpornographic and nonhierarchical visualization of heterosexual erotic pleasure, or as a form of feminist pornography for its particular celebration of female sexual pleasure and orgasm, there are scholars, such as Jonathan Katz who has also rightly argued that Fuses promotes a nongenital polymorphous, rather Marcusean, view of Eros (instead of offering an heterosexist view of heterosexuality, as castigated by various feminists). Rebecca Schneider, in Explicit Body in Performance, although analyzing the erotic intimacy of Vesper and Schneemann in Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth as a form of art bestiality, argues that it obviates gender distinction, radically evoking the multiplication of sexualities. 21 Infinity Kisses I, 1981-87, San Francisco Museum collection, is a photogrid (84 x 72 in) comprising 140 xerachrome prints on linen, derived from self-shot 35 mm photographs; Infinity Kisses II,1990-8

consists of 24 self-shot 35 mm color photographs printed as larger laser images (total of 96 x 120 inches). 22 Schneemann, Interview by Jarrett Earnest, “Rigorous Ecstasy: Language and Performance, Part I,” Art Practical, September 17, 2014, at http://www.artpractical.com/column/women-in-performance-rigorous-ecstasy-languageperformance-part-i/ 23 “Form is Emotion,” Schneemann says in “From the Notebooks,” 1960-2, More Than Meat Joy, p. 13, giving examples of the early ways with which she honed the capacity of form to activate emotion, something she continues to variously pursue. 24 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 264. 25 Itself a radical feminist proclamation of the love of the same and the other, in line with Luce Irigaray’s theorization of love, whose “sensible transcendental” is also echoed by Schneemann’s corrective and reformative quest for the sacred feminine or the feminine divine. 26 Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, p. 58. 27 Whose “seeing” Schneemann has further associated with the feel of the animal body in her discussion of the fur she was wearing in the snowstorm that fades into orgasmic whiteness in Fuses. 28 Introducing further motion (itself a definitive element of Schneemann’s work—that harks back to the inside out movement of Labyrinths, the use of motors in her early kinetic paintingconstructions and environments, as well as the very use of the body in environments or performances and her early performances’ focus on “kinematics”— and continues to find many expressions in Schneemann’s work) as well as image layering and collision (that originates from her pioneering projection of films on performing bodies in her group “kinetic” theater in the 1960s, starting with Ghost Rev, 1965) the rotatingmirror device has become central in the often aggressive “dance” of images and the effects of their movement in space that characterize her more recent immersive multiscreen video installations, such as Precarious, 2009. For the “geometry of motion” or “kinematics” in Schneemann’s work, see Kenneth White, “Carolee Schneemann: Terminal Velocities,” San Francisco Arts Quarterly, 2013. 29 Broken glass, including its sound, has been important in Schneemann’s early painting constructions and events. So is

music, whether as soundtrack of her work or structural principle of its collage aesthetic. 30 Amelia Jones, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, 1996. 31 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 215. 32 Schneemann, “Notes on and around Snows,” More than Meat Joy, p. 121. 33 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 37. 34 Schneemann, Excerpt from “Thanksgiving Diary, 2002,” in Carolee Schneemann: Split Decision, Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Art and Buffalo, New York, CEPA Gallery, 2007, p. 82. 35 According to Robert Riley, “Infinity Kisses,” Imaging Her Erotics, p. 263. See also Caroline Koebel, “Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann,” Brooklyn Rail, July 1, 2002. Although this interpretation serves the arguments of this section, it is not meant to overshadow the ambiguity of the original relief (titled “breath of life” in the hieroglyphics of the frieze from which it derives and featuring a young girl whose identity remains ambiguous) or, by extension, the carnality of the interspecies exchange in Infinity Kisses. 36 Schneemann, 1966, in More Than Meat Joy, p. 59. 37 “Inundated as we are with Abu Ghraib and those torture images, am I ever going to create a pile of pleasured naked bodies again?” Schneemann asks in "Carolee Schneemann with Praxis" (Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey), Brooklyn Rail, April 1, 2005, at http://www.brooklynrail. org/2005/04/art/carolee-schneemannwith-praxis-delia-baj. 38 For early examples see the painting Animal Carnage, 1960 and tapes of crying cats used in antiwar environment Divisions and Rubble, October 19, 1969, New York, Judson Gallery. 39 Stereotypical gendered charges that Schneemann herself has decoded in a “feminist” text first heard in Kitch’s Last Meal, read also from the scroll pulled out of her vagina in Interior Scroll. For her subversion of the modernist grid see Stéphane Aquin's excellent analysis “Carolee Schneemann: Terminal Velocity,” in Then and Now, pp. 93-100. 40 Schneemann, “The Lebanon Series,” in Imaging Her Erotics, p. 187. 41 Ibid., p. 191. 42 Ibid., p. 190. 43 Ibid., p. 193.

44 Ibid. 45 Schneemann, “Istory of a Girl Pornographer,” 1974, in Imaging Her Erotics, p.137. 46 Schneemann, from the text of the photogrid Vulva’s Morphia, 1965, see Imaging Her Erotics, p. 299. 47 It is in the 1970s that most of these correspondences were discovered, when Schneemann—whose interest in iconography and symbology had nevertheless already manifested during her study years (as in her graduate paper on the “Transmigration of the Serpent,” see Imaging Her Erotics, p.153)—precipitated her study of “primary” cultures perhaps under the effect of feminism and its own effect on archeology and cultural studies. 48 The pose assumed in Body Collage was also recycled in her kinetic theater performance Illinois Central, 1968 and its publicity material. 49 It is in the same performance that Schneemann first interlaced images of her performative actions and Minoan or Etruscan sculptures to illustrate their iconographic affinities, while she also premiered the associative juxtapositions of symbols and artistic evidence of the feminine across time and cultures as a feminist intervention in the history of art and visual culture and her confrontation with institutions, such as the museum or art history, that have contributed to its marginalization. See Imaging Her Erotics, p. 181. 50 See the insightful analysis of Schneemann’s feminism and its reception by Emilie Bouvard, “Carolee Schneemann: Feminism and History,” Then and Now, p. 67-93 who first makes this parallelism. 51 Even though Vulva's Morphia also seriously reclaims and celebrates female sexuality by allowing us to “see” its signs and indexical images, while eloquently deconstructing the patriarchal, as well as feminist myths that obscure it with its textual component, see note no. 46. The print Vulva Reads in this exhibition belongs to the above series. 52 Quotes derive from the text embedded in the photogrid of Unexpectedly Research. 53 David Levi Strauss, “Love Rides Aristotle Through the Audience: Body, Image, and Idea in the Work of Carolee Schneemann,” Imaging Her Erotics, p. 317. 54 Lucy Lippard, cited in ibid., p. 317.

The installation of Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses II–Photogrid, 2004 is presented with the participation of Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, Canada