Carolee Schneemann Research Articles

Review: The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television, by Erica Levin

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television, by Erica Levin The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television, by Erica Levin Lisa Wells Jacobson Lisa Wells Jacobson LISA WELLS JACOBSON is a scholar of contemporary serial television. She received her PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Erica Levin, The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. $32.50 paper. 240 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 111–112. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.111 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lisa Wells Jacobson; Review: The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television, by Erica Levin. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 111–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.111 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Erica Levin, The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. $32.50 paper. 240 pages. Even before Gil Scott-Heron recorded his famous “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” questions about the relationship between radical political movements of the 1960s and television news media were circulating among artists, activists, journalists, and everyday people living through that particularly tumultuous moment in US history. To what extent would the revolution be televised? How, by whom, and for whom? Erica Levin’s The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television focuses on responses from artists of that era—specifically, those whose work engaged with the imagery and apparatus of television. The work she discusses ranges in form and exhibition context: gallery installations by Bruce Conner and Carolee Schneemann’s multimedia theatrical performances in the book’s first half, and the radical collective Newsreel’s takeover of a... You do not currently have access to this content.

Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s ed. by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner

Reviewed by: Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s ed. by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner Elsa De Smet (bio) Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s Edited by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. 329. Hybrid Practices, which presents findings from a 2015 international colloquium, calls on scholars and artists to demonstrate the role of hybrid practices between art, science, and technology. It challenges arts and sciences issues by opening up new perspectives on a very symptomatic historical period. This work examines hybrid practices at the time of great 1960s and 1970s technological and scientific advances, namely the early Cold War, when the Western world advocated a certain idea of democracy and promises for the future were based on a positivist vision of scientific and technological progress. It is also the time when avant-garde visual artists in [End Page 264] the United States and Western Europe were challenging pictorial formalism, claiming that art should function as a counterpower or provide an alternative interpretation of the contemporary world. The editors have divided Hybrid Practices into three sections, with eleven essays by art, science, and design historians who thoughtfully explore projects at both the forefront and at the neglected margins of this unprecedented collaboration between the arts and newly emerging scientific and technological fields. The strengths of this collective work are that it is based on concrete case studies yet also suggests compelling conceptual notions. It begins with contributions explaining the historical and contextual relevance of collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientific institutions orchestrated by initiatives such as Experiments in Art and Technology, the Artist Placement Group, and the Arts and Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The book also showcases specific examples: Claes Oldenburg's collaboration with Disney, visual artist Carolee Schneemann's shows, Hans Haacke's photoelectric viewers, Stanley Milgram's psycho-cognitive laboratory using simulated shock generators, John Latham's land-art monuments, and John Cage's experiments. This book attempts to overcome the dichotomy between art and science/technology, using Michel Serres's idea that "all learning consists of a crossbreeding." The authors show that even though artists remained artists and scientists remained scientists, their collaborations produced real moments of cognitive grace. Some of the most interesting sections are about collaborations, for example between artist Robert Irwin and scientist Ed Wortz or engineer Billy Klüver with artist Fujiko Nakaya, who turned to meteorologist Thomas R. Mee to design Expo '70 in Osaka, where millions of people could "appreciate the natural beauty of fog" through artificial and artistic staging. Another good example is physicist Elsa M. Garmine, who invested a great deal in the Experiments in Art and Technology initiative, attempting to use technology "in a non logical, artistic way." These cases show how interdisciplinarity allowed each community to reflect and find its place in a changing world. It might have been relevant to point out the frustrations from less fruitful collaborations, even though these are understandably more difficult to source. While most of the contributions opt for an art history or art sociology perspective, historian W. Patrick McCray highlights the case of Frank Malina, an engineer and artist (the only one wearing both hats) who filed technical patents for aerospace and then for his artworks. This essay relies on the historiography of science and technology, demonstrating that when art, science, and technology intersect, the result should be examined in terms of fallout or spin-off. The book is well edited and allows a relevant understanding of all the case studies. The promise to connect these historical cases with contemporary [End Page 265] hybrid practices does not seem to have been entirely fulfilled, however. Negotiations between the arts, sciences, and technology's objectives therefore need further exploration. Elsa De Smet Elsa De Smet (Ph.D. in art history at La Sorbonne) is an associate researcher at Centre Alexandre Koyré, History of Sciences, Technology, and Knowledge (CNRS, France). She is the author of Voir l'Espace: Astronomie et science Populaire (1840–1969) (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2018) and the forthcoming Esth...

Contributors

Contributors

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Judson Memorial Church and the intersections between happening and dancing

The article examines a short excerpt from the New York scene, namely the period around 1959–1963 in the context of the environment, happening, dance pieces and draws attention to the leading influences of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. We are focusing on the gravitating artists’ circles around the Judson Memorial Church and some of their distinct practices and centers. Among the many, we consider the Reuben Gallery, Judson Gallery, Judson Dance Theater, and artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Simon Forti, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg. The text does not aim to provide a complete overview of Judson Dance Theater or the artists` practices, but rather to consider some of their common influences in their period of formation. We will bring the environment and the happening under their contradictions and variability and will consider the first generation of dance reformers at Judson Dance Theater as an influential force for involving visual artists in intermediate zones.

Thoughts on Making Films with Barbara Hammer

Abstract This personal essay articulates filmmaker Lynne Sachs's experiences working with experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs conveys the journey of her relationship with Hammer when they were both artists living in San Francisco in the late 1980s and 1990s and then later in New York City. Sachs initially discusses her experiences making Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (US, 2018), which includes Hammer, the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann, and the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. She then discusses her 2019 film, A Month of Single Frames, which uses material from Hammer's 1998 artist residency in a Cape Cod shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Hammer began her process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Sachs explores Hammer's experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a way to be in dialogue with both Hammer and her audience. This essay provides context for the intentions and challenges that grew out of both of these film collaborations.

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019): Portfolio

Abstract A portfolio of select photographs featuring significant works by Carolee Schneemann, photographs of Schneemann at work, and candid photographs of Schneemann with friends and colleagues. The portfolio complements the preceding essays and illustrations collected in the In Practice dossier dedicated to Schneemann. Several photographs in the portfolio have never before been published.

Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann

Abstract This essay attends to the force of aggression in Carolee Schneemann's work, emphasizing the conflicts in the artist's representation of enjoyment, knowledge, and truth in her own body, with a focus on Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and the underexplored text “Anti-Demeter: The More I Give the More You Steal” (1994). Addressing how the latter presents an origin myth for the artist, the essay underscores Schneemann's struggle over questions of genealogy, alliance, influence, and debt. On the question of debt, particular attention is given to its quality of ambivalence on terms of sexual difference, especially for father figures perceived as models of artistic expressivity, and the mothering body as a body of prohibition, labor, illness, and death. Examining the negation of the body, the role of aggression and violence, and the critique of the bind of “male fantasies” in Schneemann's work, the essay proposes a shift in feminist art historiography and its projections on Schneemann the artist. The essay asserts Schneemann's tale as a cautionary and self-reflexive one for those who come after, the would-be-daughters, who would negate the body, the struggle, the art yet again for the myth, in a time ripe for myth, in the wake of the artist's passing.

Carolee Schneemann's Sonic Shadow

Abstract This commemorative essay considers Carolee Schneemann's voice as expressed through performative utterances and written words, with particular focus on Interior Scroll (1975). The essay argues that the performance's documentation in photographs, the primary means of experiencing the work, has come at the expense of attention to Schneemann's voice. The essay reflects on the work of evoking Schneemann's voice through limited records in relation to the process of grief following the artist's death. Schneemann's “sonic shadow,” the essay argues, emerges through affirmative mourning. The essay was composed originally for the memorial service for Schneemann at Judson Memorial Church, New York, on 3 May 2019.

Breaking at the Edges: Carolee Schneemann's Desires for Dance

Abstract During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Carolee Schneemann primarily identified as a painter. But she was a keen and cutting observer of dance. This article considers Schneemann's audacious performance work for the Judson Dance Theater and reflects on its ongoing importance both at the time of her death and in a world forced apart by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

House Body House

Abstract The essay describes Carolee Schneemann's residence, a stone house constructed in 1750 by Huguenot settlers on land of the Munsee Lenape people, and its central role in her life and work from the early 1960s until her death in 2019. The essay gives particular attention to Schneemann's text “Parts of a Body House” (1957–67), a series of paragraphs composed over a decade that describe a network of biomorphic structures and multimedia environments. The essay argues that “Parts of a Body House” is a “nerve codex” by which to read the artist's life and work. The essay is derived in part from remarks the author delivered at the memorial service for Schneemann at Judson Memorial Church, New York, on 3 May 2019.

Schneemann Sounding: Embodied Sonic Systems

Abstract This essay examines the central position the medium of sound played in the work of the artist Carolee Schneemann (US, 1939–2019). By exploring a few key early works such as Glass Environment for Sound and Motion (1962), Chromelodeon (1963), and Noise Bodies (1965), it traces how her exposure to emergent forms in experimental music informed important translations she made of complex sonic structures into expanded, layered, constantly evolving visual systems. The essay argues that Schneemann transformed the body into a soft recording system that broadcast sonic testimonies of everyday encounters with the excesses of conspicuous consumption, the inequalities of gendered relations, and the disturbing encounters with state-mandated violence against other cultures, in particular the US invasion of Vietnam.

American as Apple Pie

Abstract This brief tribute to Carolee Schneemann examines her self-conception as an American artist, considering how it intersects with the disruptive performance of gender norms in Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1972). The work was originally staged for the camera in Schneemann's London kitchen in 1972, during a period in which the artist was living in voluntary exile. She published a performance score for the piece in her artist's book Parts of a Body House (1972) and reprinted it in Cezanne She Was a Great Painter (1974–75). This essay reads Americana I Ching Apple Pie as an unruly reenactment of the highly gendered role that the filmmaker Stan Brakhage cast Schneemann to play in his short experimental film Cat's Cradle (1959). It considers the way she understood home and homeland as two interlocking fronts in the ongoing battle over how gender is encoded and enacted. It concludes by briefly considering the reception of Schneemann's work by a younger generation of artists, including Sondra Perry, who staged an homage to Americana I Ching Apple Pie in 2015.

On Carolee

Abstract The essay celebrates Carolee Schneemann, the author's friend and colleague since their first meeting in the early 1960s at Judson Memorial Church, New York. The essay describes the author's and Schneemann's participation in the dance workshops at Judson. The essay cites select works produced by Schneemann at Judson, including Lateral Splay (1962) and Meat Joy (1964). The essay reflects on the relation between the dance workshops and Schneemann's work in painting. It gives particular focus to Schneemann's canonic “solo” Interior Scroll (1975) and the author's experience of the artist's retrospective exhibition Kinetic Painting at MoMA PS1 in 2018. The author presented this essay in the memorial service for Schneemann at Judson Memorial Church on 3 May 2019.

Introduction: Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019)

Abstract This is an introduction to a dossier on the work and life of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019). Schneemann was celebrated in a memorial service at Judson Memorial Church in New York. The service included Malcolm Goldstein's improvisational performance on violin titled Soundings for Carolee. The seven essays in this dossier, derived in part from remarks delivered at the service, comprise a range of critical “soundings” of Schneemann's work and life.

Flowing Bodies: Autoethnographies of Desire in "Christmas on Earth", "Fuses" and "Je, tu, il, elle"

This article explores how three women filmmakers express their ways of understanding and experiencing pleasure, based on a comparative study of Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963), Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964–67) and Je, tu, il, elle (Chantal Akerman, 1974). By filming the subculture to which they belong or presenting themselves in the sexual act in a way that emulates ritual, these filmmakers recognize their own sexuality in opposition to the model that relegates the woman to the role of muse. Drawing on Artaud’s concept of ritual and his “Body without Organs,” this analysis posits the possibility of the concept of “flowing bodies,” referring to bodies in motion that affirm their own pleasure, andproposes to describe the three films explored here as “autoethnographies of desire.”

Note on Hallucinatory Film

Comparisons between hallucinatory films of the 1960s and 2000s show a conversion of the earlier utopian signifiers from benign fields of intoxicating color that celebrate and induce psychic bliss, into high-definition alarm bells for a world imploding from accelerated hyperconsumption. Paranoid, conspiracy-driven 70s commercial cinema, which appropriates editing techniques from earlier experimental films, marks a threshold of disenchantment. The entropic model of 60s hallucinatory works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, and others, where film material and abstract imagery are modified analagous to the intensification of bodily pleasures, is digitally exacerbated in high-definition videos of Heather Phillipson, Ed Atkins, and Benedict Drew as if collapsing under environmental and psychic degradation. This later work maximizes hallucinatory HD properties through relentlessly overlaying imagery of interpenetrating, deflating, and exploding bodies that are avatars of overindulgence, the nightmarish uncanny descendants of 60s utopian intoxications. (MH)

Feminist Art and Female Subjectivity: a Monstrous Approach

The article shows the relationship between philosophical thought and feminist art in terms of searching for subjectivity in women’s creations. This is a review of the theories proposed by Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, which, as this article proves, manifest themselves in the art that defines itself as feminist. Monstrosity is an important prospect here. The author presents écriture féminine and women’s literature, namely Charlotte Roche’s Wet Places and Izabela Filipiak’s Total Amnesia. Moreover, visual arts by Cindy Sherman, Chili Kumari Burman, Jo Spece, as well as a performance by Carolee Schneemann and ORLAN are discussed.

A Creative Process between Painting and Body Arts: Carolee Schneemann and Aby Warburg,

ABSTRACT This article discusses the issue of the pictorial gesture potency in Carolee Schneemann’s creating process and how her use of herself body allowed her to question whether she could, in addition to an image be also an image maker: a poetic and theoretical juxtaposition at the same time, which causes specific displacements in her performative work. This study aims to correlate operatory concepts around the nymph as a theoretical object, with special attention to its accessories in movement, in the Warburgian sense, from the examination of iconological paths and theoretical approaches inaugurated by Aby Warburg, having as focus the crossings between painting and the body arts.

Digital Historical Practices

Digital Historical Practices Michelle Moravec (bio) Ten years into the twenty-first century, the historical profession is coming to terms with the ways in which the internet is irrevocably changing what we do and how we do it.1 With these remarks, Rachel Leow introduced the Journal of Women's History readership to a roundtable of historical bloggers. A decade later, we are still debating the implications of the "digital" for our profession. Rather than revisiting the various positions, I want to offer insights from my practice as a digital historian. I view digital history as a question-driven research process rather than the production of a particular end product. Becoming a digital historian, a mid-career shift, has not changed my core praxis. I rely, as I always have, on robust research questions anchored in archives. How I go about answering them is where the differences arise. Over the past decade, I have experimented with many approaches to answering historical questions using digital history approaches. In response to a suffrage historian's query, I evaluated gendered rhetoric in the sixvolume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922).2 A digital history approach allowed me to highlight how men and women adopted different rhetorical strategies to fight for women's rights. For example, male authors continually engaged in a rhetoric of separate spheres, while female authors instead emphasized aspects of women's nature that justified expanding their rights. In another case, my inquiry began with the quest for an original copy of a historical document, "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo" (1965), often credited with launching the second wave of feminism. I finally located one, via Google, when a finding aid for a recently processed collection went online. Software called Juxta pinpointed the changes between the published version that historians had relied on for decades, and the original, mailed to just thirty-two women. Juxta creates a side-by-side visualization that colors the text where differences occur between versions. That visualization appears in the essay to document changes made in the published version, which have led to an interpretation of "Sex and Caste" as an attack on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by white women who wanted more power for themselves or who sought to organize women separately.3 The original Memo's list of recipients, omitted from the published version, indicates that the authors sent the document to a small group of SNCC insiders. [End Page 163] A closing section, also omitted from the published version, illuminates the authors' limited intent to promote discussion among women within the freedom movement. Finally, text added to the published document by an unknown individual creates the impression that the authors emphasized women's oppression in society and their subordination inside the movement to a greater extent than appeared in the original. I began theorizing about digital archives when I stumbled upon online copies of digitized audiotapes from a significant feminist conference, The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later (1979). Using my training as an oral historian, I transcribed the audiotapes of Audre Lorde's remarks that became her famed essay "The Master's Tools." I became curious about the grassroots Black feminists who participated in this event. This investigation led to a nonlinear web essay about using online search engines to research marginalized historical subjects.4 In turn, writing that piece led me to draft guidelines for ethical research practices in digital archives.5 I offer these examples of my work to emphasize that digital history is impossible to pin down to one particular approach or outcome. What my projects have in common is a reliance on a core research process. I begin with a historical question that seems to have a potential digital history answer. Each question requires careful consideration of the most suitable approach and the most appropriate archives.For instance, in my analysis of the correspondence of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist performance artist, I initially worked from an edited collection of her letters. I soon realized the volume contained insufficient evidence to provide insights into her connections to other feminist activists, which led me back to the archive to locate more female correspondents.6 What happened next is...