Carolee Schneemann at Pierre Menard Gallery
Seminal performance artist stuns in Harvard Square
By: Shawn Hill - Nov 04, 2007
A selection of recent and early work
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow St.
Harvard Square, Cambridge
October 12th - November 25th
http://www.pierremenardgallery.com
http://www.caroleeschneemann.com
There's a fitting simpatico between Pierre Menard's sprawling space and the rough-hewn, powerful works of Carolee Schneeman. Subtlety really isn't her strong suit, and there's a nostalgic vibe in her work of an earlier era's goal of "letting it all hang out." The works in this carefully curated show encompass fifty years of art-making, always of an avant-garde nature. Some of Schneemann's works seem derivative of the styles of the fifties and sixties in American art; others have become classics still taught in college campuses.
There is a kind of shambolic unity to this show, whether the medium is photography, film, video, painting or sculpture. And that loose, gestural cohesion is basic to Schneemann's primary aesthetic: Abstract Expressionism. The earliest works here are paintings in a de Kooning mode, and they are respectable, serviceable, figurative abstractions. To adopt this style in 1955, even if she didn't invent it, reveals a clear taste and sensibility for the avant-garde. Schneemann was hardly the only American artist to be swayed by the Abstract Expressionists in her formative years. What's particularly interesting is that she was one of the artists who took the aesthetic beyond the painterly canvas without losing sight of its paramount concerns.
Several assemblage works use gestural paint to unite their accumulations of forms: boxes of broken glass, shards that signify past activity mired in glistening oil paint, make up her "Darker Companion" (1962). In "Maximus at Gloucester" (1963), we have an epic sea shanty in the form of trash art. Lobster traps, nets, glass and collage combine on a piece of driftwood to evoke a feeling of the New England coast.
Evoking feelings seems to always be the goal. "Body Collage" leaps off the canvas to find Schneeman in her principal role of the sixties and seventies, as the object as well as the subject of her work. In this short film Schneeman, nude as an artist's model, rolls herself in roomful of paper maché. The sticky paper adheres to her body, briefly, and must be reapplied. She keeps busy creating a variety of forms in motion, throwing herself to the floor repeatedly in a three-dimensional mode of "action painting."
Sexuality is a liberating and complex component of Schneemann's presentation. "Fuses" (1964-67) is a half hour film of lovemaking, intimate and frank moments of passion between the artist and a male partner, edited roughly with colored and painted film, splice together with a free wheeling abandon that befits the cyclical, repetitive nature of desire. We see body parts and faces, his tumescent penis, her breasts, brief smiles, his hands, her hips Â… all flowing over and through each other in short rough cuts. Tableaux flow recall the impressionists, Raphael, and the odalisques of art history. Schneemann gives equal time to the male and female nude body and genitalia. Brief respites of windows, a picnic blanket, fields of wildflowers, and (humorously) a disinterested housecat are intercut, to immerse the moments of passion in a full world of sensory and personal, even domestic experience. Was it shocking at the time to watch Schneeman fellate her partner? Or was it more shocking that she made it all seem natural and uncomplicated, free love at its most easygoing?
Genitalia remained a focus in Schneemann's work, as in her definitive "Interior Scroll" (1975; available on the gallery website) where she pulled a "snake-like" scroll from her vagina, reading from aloud as she did the words of a negative review from a male critic. It might be easy to dismiss Schneemann's work as merely sexually provocative. Certainly her own attractiveness added to the popularity and renown of her nude performances. But it's also hard to argue with a work like "Vulva's Morphia" (1995) wherein the artist struggles to find a visual language to let the female sex organ (so often on view but silenced in art, overwhelmed and over defined in psychology as only the counterpart of lack to the phallic presence, desired but never understood on its own terms) finally speak its piece.
Here in a grid of forty panels (each the size of a sheet of paper), she collages an assortment of vaginas, leaving them colored and glued and messy, deriving them through photocopy from works of art, medical texts and ancient figurines. The panels are hung on offset screws so that they flutter and shift on the gallery walls. Strategic fans have been placed to instigate the motion, a way of allowing them to speak, or at least occupy a active visual presence that is other than just as passive receptors of the sexual gaze.
More recent works link to disturbing world events. "Devour" (2003-4) is a video loop that presents paired screens of diverse scenes that range from a kitten clawing at a floor to fragments that look like the aftermaths of terrorist bombings and grievous injuries. The scale is large, and video effects recreate a digitized version of abstract color fields as the images shift from one side to the other. Bombings are juxtaposed with a baby suckling at its mother's nipple. While figurative work was problematic for the leading critic of the era of the Abstract Expressionists, Clement Greenberg, who dismissed de Kooning's "Women," it was an undeniable requisite in her work. Schneeman created a montage of found footage of figures in various predicaments.
Even more disturbing is "Dark Pond" (2001-05), where the artist paints freely over digital prints depicting victims who leapt from the World Trade Center on 9/11. These doomed bodies seem to eternally fall, but the paint and crayon and other marks that obscure the black and white prints seem almost like futile gestures of comfort, prayers made through art for some other outcome on that terrible day. The colorful paint obscures, but can't obliterate, images of horror.