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\"long_desc\": \"<em>Catscan<\/em> is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann's previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of intimacy and physicality, the erotic and the obscene, the incubation of dream enactment. <em>Catscan<\/em> centers on the death of a beloved cat as a means to ritualize more universal mourning and to bring forward ghosts of the past. As a ritual consecration, Schneemann, blindfolded, dances out of 20 yards of red fabric wound around her body.\r\n\r\nThe performance, which had a duration of approximately 90 minutes and variously featured 5 to 8 performers, included a slide projection system, 15 video monitors, ladders, furniture, suitcases, and debris.\",
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\"short_bio\": \"Carolee Schneemann, a groundbreaking performance and multidisciplinary artist, has used film and video since the 1960s. Shattering taboos and redefining the notion of the erotic, she confronts sexuality, gender, and the social construction of the female body. Her seminal performances of the 1970s were as transgressive as they were influential. Schneemann continues to provoke, as she explores female sexuality in relation to art-making, ritual, and culture.\",
\"long_bio\": \"Carolee Schneemann's pioneering work ranges across disciplines, encompassing painting, performance, film and video. Her early and prescient investigations into themes of gender and sexuality, identity and subjectivity, as well as the cultural biases of art history, laid the groundwork for much work of the 1980s and '90s. Her bold challenges to taboo and tradition can be seen as inspiring and influencing artists as varied as Paul McCarthy, VALIE EXPORT, the Guerrilla Girls, Tracy Emin and Karen Finley. \r\n\r\nWhile she is often described as a performance artist, Schneemann first studied painting, and that training informed the course of all her subsequent work. It can be seen in her continuing identification as a painter and a formalist, in her attention to art-historical figures such as C\u00e9zanne, and in the hand-coloring and mark-making to which she subjected the surface of some of her films. However, the effect of her early experience with painting was also reactive and negative; she recognized, as a woman in the early 1960s working in a male-dominated medium, that \\"the brush belonged to abstract expressionist male endeavor. The brush was phallic.\\" This realization coincided with an explosion of new artistic forms, and while Schneemann would never give up painting, she turned her attention to the downtown New York avant-garde's locus of film, dance, theater, and performance. \r\n\r\nHer involvement with this scene, including work with the Judson Dance Theater and time spent at Warhol's Factory, as well as participation in events such as Robert Morris's <i>Site<\/i> (1964), in which she appeared onstage as Manet's <I>Olympia<\/I>, proved crucial to her own concept of what she would call \\"kinetic theater.\\" Although she had experimented with performance as early as 1960, her work in this vein went public with the notorious 1964 action and film <i>Meat Joy<\/i>. This \\"celebration of flesh as material,\\" replete with naked bodies, raw fish, chickens, and sausages, was contemporaneous with the sensationalist Viennese Aktionist group, and, at least superficially, shared some of the concerns of those artists, who referred to her as their \\"crazy sister.\\" However, rather than pursuing their interests in the scatological and the morbid, Schneemann presented <i>Meat Joy<\/i> as an \\"erotic rite,\\" foregrounding human sexuality and Dionysian ecstasy with a powerful and subversively affirmative spirit. This spirit asserted itself even more explicitly a year later, in her \\"anti-porn,\\" collage-film <i>Fuses<\/i>, conceived of as a response to work by her friend, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The film challenged dominant modes of interpretation, and was also a provocation to both the avant-garde film establishment and the feminist movement. \r\n\r\nThis go-it-alone criticality is one of the major strands of Schneemann's work. When critiqued for her interest in sexuality and use of her body as medium, she has always offered an unapologetic defense, pointing out, for example, \\"If I am a token, I'll be a token to be reckoned with.\\" Her insistence on integrating the form and content of her art can be seen as quite radical, in that it collapses work and life, thought and flesh, nature and culture — forms charged by repression and the strategic deployment of those forms. For Schneemann, the focus on the \\"experiential erotic body\\" is a method of empowerment, and an antidote to what she sees as a tendency of feminist art historians to discuss female sexuality exclusively as a male construction. Schneeman's project, then, is in some ways concerned with reclaiming those signifiers, actions, and ideas that have historically been denied women, and, to a lesser degree, artists in general. Her work should not solely be viewed as feminist, although she is certainly a pioneer in that area. Rather, her focus has also been on countering traditional art historical accounts, and in mapping what she calls \\"Istory,\\" in an attempt to see \\"where the taboos and censorious conventions are embedded aesthetically.\\" This tendency to identify what has been deemed sacred and what has been declared obscene can be seen in works like <i>Art is Reactionary<\/i> (1987), and in her research into historic artifacts as far-flung as Victorian art-books and Neolithic cave drawings.\r\n\r\nThrough the 1980s and 1990s, and up to the present, Schneemann has continued making work in diverse media, including writings and installations. Looking back on her groundbreaking work of the 1960s and '70s, it is important to recognize that, to a certain degree, she was inventing modes of resistance as she went along. Whether it was the notion of what feminism looked like and how it picked its battles, or the notion that art history was clearly written from a position of power, her work has always employed a criticality that was ahead of its time. \r\n\r\nBorn in 1939 in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, Schneemann received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, and holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited throughout the world, at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda, Madrid; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Film Theatre, London; Tate Liverpool, UK, and PPOW Gallery, New York. In 1997, a retrospective of Schneemann's work entitled <i>Carolee Schneemann - Up To And Including Her Limits<\/i> was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. A retrospective of over forty of her works was exhibited in 2010 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, and traveled to The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Krannert Art Museum, Champagn, Illinois. \r\n\r\nSchneemann has received an Art Pace International Artist Residency, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association, an Anonymous Was A Woman award, the Ono Lennon Courage Award, and a USA Rockefeller grant, among others. Her published books include <i>Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter<\/i> (1976); <i>Early and Recent Work<\/i> (1983); <i>More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings<\/i> (1979), and <i>Imaging Her Erotics - Essays, Interviews, Projects<\/i> (2002). She has taught at many institutions, including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. \r\n\r\nIn 2017, Carolee was awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.\r\n\r\nCarolee Schneemann lived in New Paltz, New York until her death in 2019.\",
\"bibliography\": \"<u>Carolee Schneemann: Early and Recent Work.<\/u> Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1983. Text by Julia Ballerini, Ted Castle, Carolee Schneemann. <br><br>\r\n<u>Carolee Schneemann: Up To and Including Her Limits.<\/u> New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. Text by Dan Cameron, Kristine Stiles, David Levi-Strauss.<br><br>\r\nJones, Amelia. <u>Body Art: Performing the Subject.<\/u> Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.<br><br>\r\nNewman, Amy. \\"An Innovator Who Was the Eros of Her Own Art.\\" <u>New York Times<\/u> 3 Feb. 2002. <br><br>\r\nSchneemann, Carolee. <u>Imaging Her Erotics- Essays, Interviews, Projects.<\/u> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.\",
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\"url\": \"<a href=\\"http:\/\/www.caroleeschneemann.com\\" target=\\"_new\\"><b>http:\/\/www.caroleeschneemann.com<\/b><\/a>\",
\"notes\": \"As of July 2nd, the Schneemann Foundation board is settling and establishing roles. Our current contacts with them for any screening\/ exhibition inquiries are:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOld notes:\r\n\r\nCarolee trusts our judgement and is OK with Archival tape sales. Her last name is frequently misspelled, watch out for the missing 2nd 'N' in Schneemann. -nl\",
\"royalty_notes\": \"Per a phone conversation with LZ on June 13, 2019 - royalties should be held until the Schneemann Estate is fully settled. Steven Johnson is the Executive Director of the Estate. His contact information is listed in the contact notes under the Contact\/Artist tab.\r\n\r\nPer CS's assistant Allora McCullough and her Trustee, Emily Caigan, in an e-mail to LZ on September 26, 2014: Payments should be made to The Vesper Revocable Living Trust.\",
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\"internal_supporting_notes\": \"Additional information supplied by Carolee: \r\n\r\nPerformances:\r\n\r\nBeyond Baroque, Venice CA (1987)\r\nPerforming Language, State University of New York Binghamton (1988)\r\nMedicine Show Theatre, New York (1988)\r\nEdge 88, performance festival London (1988)\",
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\"long_desc\": \"Press release for Carolee Schneemann event at Anthology Film Archives, Sunday, February 2, 2014.\",
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\"html\": \"Anthology and EAI join together to present a program featuring some of our favorite film and video works by Carolee Schneemann. These pieces center on Schneemann's physical approach to filmmaking as well as her feline fixations. The program screens in tandem with <em\/>Breaking the Frame<\/em>, Marielle Nitoslawska's engrossing and insightful portrait of Schneemann's multimedia work and uncharacterizable life.\r\n<br><br>\r\nFounded in 1971, EAI is a nonprofit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of media art. For more info, visit www.eai.org.\r\n<br><br>\r\nCARL RUGGLES CHRISTMAS BREAKFAST (1963\/2007, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital video)<br>\r\nIn her earliest film Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music.\r\n<br><br>\r\nFUSES (1965-67, 30 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center.)<br>\r\n\\"[A] notorious masterpiece, a silent celebration in color of heterosexual love making, the film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, super-imposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself... FUSES succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body's mind.' \\" THE GUARDIAN\r\n<br><br>\r\nPLUMB LINE (1968-71, 15 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm)<br>\r\nThe dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve, until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.\r\n<br><br>\r\nMYSTERIES OF THE PUSSIES (1998-2010, 5.5 min, digital video)<br>\r\nIn this performance lecture, Schneemann and Teija Lammi, museum librarian at the Porin Taidemuseo in Pori, Finland, physically respond to projected images of the artist's cats. As Schneemann interprets into poetry her own research on gender and feline abuse, Lammi translates Schneemann's words into Finnish.\r\n<br><br>\r\nCATSCAN (1988, 13 min, digital video)<br>\r\nA group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief, and spirits of the dead.\r\n<br><br>\r\nTotal running time: ca. 80 min.\",
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Press Release
Press release for Carolee Schneemann event at Anthology Film Archives, Sunday, February 2, 2014.
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