Carolee Schneemann Research Articles

Being a thing: the work of performing in the museum

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes on contributorAbigail Levine is a dance and performance artist from New York. She has performed recently with Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, Clarinda Mac Low, and Mark Dendy. She has presented her own performance works in the US, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil and Taiwan. Abigail holds a Masters from NYU in Dance and Performance Studies.

Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle. Edited by Kristine Stiles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; 513 pp.; illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper

<i>Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle.</i> Edited by Kristine Stiles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; 513 pp.; illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper

Who Is Ana Mendieta?

Who is Ana Mendieta? Redfern, C. & Caron, C. (201 1 ). Who is Ana Mendieta? New York, NY: The Feminist Press. 84 pages. $18.95 hardcover.Who is Ana Mendieta? is clearly a labor of love for creators Christine Redfern and Caro Caron. It is a hybrid graphic text that includes essays, a thought-provoking comic, and an annotated bibliography that looks more like a zine. Caron's drawings are masterful and emotive. The narrative, which combines Mendieta's voice with the voices of other artists, critics, collectors, and historians, feels almost like a poem. At times, the text is disconnected, like pieces of ephemera collected from decades past and patched together to tell a story. The juxtaposed images and texts elegantly recount how early feminist artists struggled mightily under the oppressive shadow of patriarchy to make a space in the art world for women.The book begins with an essential introduction by Lucy R. Lippard. The introduction is especially helpful for readers who may not be familiar with the struggle of women artists in the past 50 years or the life and work of Ana Mendieta. Lippard, a wellrespected critic and scholar, not only writes about Mendieta and the struggle of women artists, but also notes the ways that comics have been catalysts and/or byproducts of political insurrections.Lippard, Redfern, and Caron frame Mendieta's story as part of a larger picture that depicts the ways women have suffered both physical and psychological violence at the hands of men, and our culture as a whole. They argue that such suffering continues to persist to ensure that patriarchy remains the status quo. Using the story of Valerie Solanas, they illustrate how women who have used violence against men are depicted by historians and the media as mentally unstable. Male artists who have been privileged by fame, class, and race are seen as eccentric artistic geniuses. This is the backdrop of the stage on which the story begins.Ana Mendieta, born in 1948, was sent away from her Cuban homeland in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, to escape the turbulence and violence of Castro. The privilege she enjoyed in Cuba was erased as she and her sister became lost children in the Catholic social service system of Iowa. She found a home of sorts in the art department at the University of Iowa where she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Mendieta was deeply influenced by the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the American landscape was full of turbulence and revolution. All of this is illustrated skillfully in the book in a series of drawn montages of various artists, art figures, and Mendieta herself. Redfern and Caron have cleverly contextualized Mendieta's influences and the ways they affected her. They also make visible that which notorious art historians like Horst Waldemar Janson have purposely made invisible - women in the visual arts. The book is filled with mini-tributes to well-known feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke.The reader can easily see how Mendieta is deeply influenced by the work and rebellion of these women who dared to bare their bodies, create incredibly complex and controversial performance pieces, and raise their fists against the good old boys of the art world.Caron and Redfern use images to effectively tell how Mendieta developed asan artist. Within the story, the reader sees Mendieta, a small figure marked by a masked face, move through time. In one spread she slips into a door left ajar; it looks like a prison door with a meshed window and industrial handle. The reader follows her like Alice down the rabbit hole only to turn the page and witness Mendieta's famous Rape Scene from 1973.Her performance/installation was inspired by the reaction of the press and others to a very violent rape/murder that took place in March 1973. She invited people over to her apartment as though she were hosting an art event or a dinner party. …

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Reviewed by: Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde Tara Rodman Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 244. Cutting Performances demonstrates that feminist performances can, and should, play a crucial role in our understanding of the American avant-garde. James Harding's aims here are twofold. First, to the extent that he endeavors to rescue the feminist artists in his case studies from historical disregard, he does so not merely to reinsert their works into the canon, but to prove that there is, in fact, a lineage of feminist avant-garde performance of which more recent female artists remain ignorant. And second, and perhaps more important, is the prescriptive aspect of the book: Harding proposes a feminist historiography of the avant-garde, in which the avant-garde itself is redefined in relation to feminist performances. [End Page 672] Harding's project focuses primarily on collage. Seen as an aesthetic, rather than strictly a graphic-art medium, collage is a juxtaposition of texts, bodies, voices, and objects that asserts a multiplicity of meaning. For Harding, these juxtapositions call "attention to that which remains unaccounted for in conventional representation and logic" (25), and thus offer a model for feminist historiography, where feminist performance neither replaces male innovation nor constitutes a separate artistic sphere, but is instead inherent to a history of the avant-garde that this book aims to tell. Harding's five case studies feature artists from throughout the twentieth century whose iconoclasm resisted the patriarchal assumptions of the mainstream and went further than their supposedly more challenging male peers. One of the strengths of the book is the way in which Harding not only positions these performances as historically important, but grounds his feminist historiography in concrete details that show that these women were explicitly responding to both the work and the behavior of the male artists surrounding them, in addition to broader patriarchal social institutions. In the first chapter, Harding analyzes Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's skin-baring costumes of detritus as a rejoinder to the timid gender blurring of her contemporaries, such as Marcel Duchamp's female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. While Duchamp dressed up within the safety of Man Ray's studio (and, Harding speculates, only from the waist up), the baroness paraded through New York City streets, inviting and enduring repeated instances of police repression. Harding argues for von Freytag-Loringhoven's status as the "mother" of American Dada, as both her body and apartment—two "female" realms—became canvasses for a living collage of sexual and artistic transgression. The second chapter, which lays out much of Harding's theory of collage, examines Gertrude Stein's 1946 The Mother of Us All as an example of how performance undermines the authority of texts. According to Harding, the opera's layering of history and fiction destabilizes both forms of narrative, thereby escaping constrictive, unified meaning in favor of nonlinear, heterogeneous representations of experience. Harding next analyzes Yoko Ono's Cut Piece as a violent "unmaking of collage" that challenged the rhetoric of immediacy and authenticity of contemporaneous happenings artists like Allan Kaprow and Claus Oldenburg. Cut Piece (performed five times between 1964 and 1966) makes clear that such immediacy was still governed by patriarchal practices, because the activities audience members chose to carry out reiterated norms of sexual and racial dominance. Further, Harding's analysis of Cut Piece highlights the fact that collage is part of an artistic tradition that is implicated in the institutions of patriarchy, but it also foregrounds the historicity of collage, opening up the possibility for its recovery as a feminist aesthetic. In his fourth chapter, Harding again takes up performance's challenge to textual authority through Carolee Schneemann's participation in the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London. Her physical performance of "found behaviors" and fragments read aloud from the keynote addresses, paired with a screening of her erotic film Fuses, contested the conference organizers' plan for decorous academic papers on the topic of liberation. Harding argues that, while the emerging academic practice of...

A One-Work-Artist? Carolee Schneemann and the Reception of her Work

A One-Work-Artist? Carolee Schneemann and the Reception of her Work

RE/Searching Angry Women

RE/Search’s issue on Angry Women brought together a range of critics, theorists, performance artists and lesbian activists including Kathy Acker, Valie Export, bell hooks, Lydia Lunch, Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle. Published in 1991, the issue proposed a ‘revolutionary feminism’, finding its forms and manifestations in ‘wild sex, humor, beauty, spirituality plus radical politics’. Despite the radical content of this issue and the significance of its contributors for feminism, the publication has received little academic attention. Analyses that address this publication treat it in isolation from the wider context of RE/Search and its theoretical perspectives. This article focuses on Angry Women by setting it into these contexts. It argues that RE/Search’s theoretical positions can be understood through Bataillean notions of base materialism. The article explores a range of influences and relations, including that of Bataille on RE/Search and the significance of the relation of Angry Women to the wider RE/Search project once read through the lens of Bataillean theories. It will also demonstrate that the deliberate selection of contributors by Juno and Vale reveals a distinct Bataillean strain within feminist projects in the 1990s.

The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann

The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann Maura Reilly I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas. —Schneemann, 1993 Carolee Schneemann's paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s have been a significantly overlooked aspect of her oeuvre. Eclipsed by her signature works in performance and film, the paintings have often been considered early or immature work rather than an artistic foundation fundamental to understanding the entirety of Schneemann's practice. This essay traces Schneemann's works from 1957 to the present, highlighting the transfor mation from traditional paintings on canvas in the lineage of abstract expressionism to painting constructions and kinetic sculptures to group and solo performances, installations, and films. Taking this historical trajectory through Schneemann's work demonstrates how her explora tions within other mediums derive from "extending visual principles off the canvas." It helps to appreciate her paintings and drawings as impor tant corollaries to the kinetic theater, Judson Dance Theater performances, and films that she was producing simultaneously. The essay's intention is to reconsider Schneemann as a painter who has never ceased conceptual izing her work as always related to the painterly gesture, to prying open "the frame," and to conceiving of the body itself as tactile material. Her most significant works, treasured by many, misunderstood by some, can be reenvisioned, then, as what Schneemann herself has called, "exploded FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 621 opposite Quarry Transposed (Central Park in the Dark) (I960) 622 Maura Reilly canvasses"1 or as performative paintings, filmic paintings, kinetic paint ings—always with the pictorial concerns of painting remaining as the grounding mechanism and unifying field. Schneemann's formal training as an artist began in landscape paint ing and with endless hours of life drawing, as is evident in her early works on canvas—such as Summer I (Honey Suckle) (1959)—that reveal her signature luscious brushwork and all-over compositions. These late 1950s pre-New York works also reflect a love of paint's tactility, its materiality, its object hood—an important concept that assisted Schneemann in moving the gesture farther off the canvas. Schneemann moved to New York City in 1961 after finishing her master of fine arts in painting at the University of Illinois. Almost immediately, she Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963) Action for camera. Photo: Erro. opposite Body Collage 0968) Performance, New York City. Photo: Michael Benedikt. 624 Maura Reilly became situated squarely within what in the 1960s was called the "experi mental avant-garde," a place also occupied by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and other second-generation abstract expressionist artists. Indeed, like them, Schneemann was interested in exploring the new aesthetic options made available in the wake of Action Painting. How could Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning's spatial frac ture be expanded beyond the canvas and into space and time? Schnee mann's intermedia works from the late 1950s through the 1970s demon strate her continuous investigation of this question. Schneemann's painting constructions—like Richard Stankiewicz's junk sculptures, Rauschenberg's "combines," Oldenburg's painted corrugated cardboard reliefs, or John Chamberlain's crushed auto assemblages—cull together non-art materials from life, ones that retain biographical refer ences and which, in their rawness, call to mind the appearance and spirit of spatial analysis in painting. Schneemann's Quarry Transposed (i960), Sphinx (1961), Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1961), Fur Wheel (1962), and Notes to Lou Andre Salome (1965) are large painting constructions that exemplify her interest in assemblage and departure from the flat canvas. In each, paint becomes one of many materials from life that can be applied to or cut into surfaces, along with photographs, wood, fabric, audiotape, glass, cellophane, under pants, and so forth. Each demonstrates the artist's continued desire to push painting through the canvas, out of the frame, and into the specta tor's space, while at the same time structuring the "real" with the visual composition of a painter's eye. Fur Wheel adds the element of movement, signaling Schneemann's entry into kinetic sculpture...

Thoughts on Re-Performance, Experience, and Archivism

��� he term “re-performance” has a catchy refrain, a resonance with an implicit political if not seductive undercurrent, specifically in relation to art politics. To perform on some level is everyone’s dream. Yet to re-perform—what is that? Could it be that re-performance implies a fundamental need for artists to sustain the importance of their work as “live art” through some form of documentation? Hypothetically, this should include performances of some merit—whether by Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Ann Hamilton, or Carolee Schneemann—that are reproduced synthetically ad infinitum over a period time in places other than from where they originated. It is a virtual idea to place performance art in an institution—a modern art museum, for example—where various works may be represented both as archival software and as ephemeral artifacts, documents, or notices of one kind or another. Meanwhile, research coming from various institutions appears bent on mining the same sources while alternative publications and Websites from less predictable sources are being ignored. On one level, the topic of re-performance appears to hold the attention of some observers in denial of more pressing issues, such as the impact of global economy on the future of a deeply faulted art market, now involving “live art”—a topic that deserves serious attention. Instead of going this route, it would appear that the topic at hand has become typically self-indulgent as increasing numbers of mostly younger performance artists—and museum curators who support them—are scrambling for appointments with destiny, hoping their work will be placed on virtual call in the future. One might say that to contemplate the exigencies of performing a work of body art by an artist from another time at another youthful moment, based on extant documentation, archived to the teeth, is like transferring a four-by-five-inch photographic negative into a digital image or copying a reel-to-reel Portapak tape into a DVD format. As Philip Auslander correctly, though reticently suggests in his superlative essay published in PAJ 84 (September 2006), there is the question as to whether performances produced on the basis of archival documentation might lose some of the vitality of the performance, assuming the vitality was there in the first place. 1 Assuming it was there, the question might arise as to what future artist would want to do it. Would he or she appear like a performance clone functioning

Preposterous Histories

This article explores maternal desire, loss, and control by reading Carolee Schneemann's performance Interior Scroll (1975) through Tracey Emin's photographic print I've Got It All (2000). More specifically, I consider Schneemann's work on the energy of female sexuality and maternal desire through Emin's recurrent visualizations of sexuality and maternal loss. The artists' refusal to disengage with the commodified (dis)pleasures of femininity leads me to consider the differently contextualized handling of these issues in each artwork. I explore the mediation of the body of each artist by positioning Emin's work as a “source” for my reading of Schneemann's performance. Invoking the notion of “preposterous history” (Bal 1999), I argue that the concepts of the “live” and the “mediated” are differently intensified by operating outside of the constraints of chronology. Hence the inter-generational dialogue between these particular female artists, whose work has been produced at different historical moments, is itself generative of thoughts and ideas that are irreducible to the individual works.

Pummeling through the Frames

For over a dozen years, Caroline Koebel has explored the poeties and polities of the body in pain and pleasure, scattering lines of flight from coast to coast in American experimental film culture. Programmer and critic, filmmaker and organizer, book publisher and digital director, Koebel's energy springs from an unwavering commitment to women in avant-garde film history and she extends her gaze into contemporary digital manifestations of creative social critique. The diversity of her pursuits frustrate any attempt at containment--bursting genres, formats, and job descriptions. Koebel has videotaped more than three-hundred participants conceiving fantasy offspring in Want to Have your Baby (2003 05) and has co-authored Schablone Berlin (2005), an illustrated book about stencil and graffiti art on the streets of Berlin. She has also organized a weekly forum on torture, written catalog essays on the films of Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer and drawn from the vaults at the Film-Makers' Cooperative and Canyon Cinema to program experimental 16mm shorts by women, while managing to pursue her own distinctive style of film and video. Although Want to Have Your Baby, about which she wrote a statement for the Millennium Film Journal (Issue 51. Spring/Summer 2009), harnesses the power of a collective imaginary both political and erotic, her essay on Jasmila Zbanic's film Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2005) in the online journal Jump Cut 'Issue 51, Spring 2009), expresses a deep and unwavering identification with the lived experiences of women survivors of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, Koebel's films and videos constitute a particular expression of her acute awareness of the extent 10 which an individual aesthetic depends upon social circumstance. This conversation took place via email in April and May of 2009. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BERNIE RODDY: During your April 2009 screening at the University of Oklahoma, I was struck by the use of time and pacing in the works, which seemed to indulge the sense of wonder that early cinema was designed to provoke. One video, Berlin Warszawa Express [2009], consists primarily of arriving and departing trains, and anticipated the smooth passage of digitally stratified pages that cross the screen in the more recent Flicker On Off series. Whether trains or grids, there is a gradual speeding up between cuts, a sense of pacing in the rattling of gangster guns, and the pummeling of boxers' gloves in the series. You seem to take great pleasure in exploring different sound effects for these fragmented pieces of violence. For me, the extended duration of the firing and pummeling offered time to reflect on the varieties of immersion in cinema today and the implications for oppositional media politics. In the final installment of the Flicker On Off series, we are reminded of that portion of video art's history in which video was an activist tool. In this part, All the House (Haditha Massacre) [2008]. you interject flashes of televised imagery from the aftermath of the Haditha massacre in November 2005 in which United States Marines killed twenty-four unarmed Iraqi civilians. How would you position your work with respect to this history of media critique? CAROLINE KOEBEL: One work I would love to see All the House (Haditha Massacre) screen with is Viet-Flakes, the 1965 anti-war film by Carolee Schneemann. A couple of years ago, I wrote about it for the catalog Carolee Sehneemann: Split Decision: To pay attention to Viet Flakes is to be overcome by sorrow. Images and sounds disappear before the mind has lime to fully process what is seen and heard; continuous interruption and substitution compounds the hauntedness of the film's mailer. (1) All the House (Haditha Massacre) comes out of my fascination with the modes of transmission by which torture and human rights abuses are conveyed, especially in the American imagination. It, like Schneemann's film, asks for critical reflection on the role jingoism plays in blinding many to the damning reality of U. …

Flux-proof or “sometimes no one can read labels in the dark”: Carolee Schneemann and the Fluxus paradox

Carolee Schneemann's relationship to Fluxus has notoriously been described as controversial. Anette Kubitza's essay is questioning the continued, arbitrary and possibly personally motivated exclusion of Schneemann's art from publications and exhibitions of Fluxus art in the US. It intends to renew a discussion of Flux-ness in part of Schneemann's oeuvre, taking a close look at early performances such as Glass Environment for Sound and Motion (1962) and Looseleaf (1964), as well as at her later environment Electronic Activation Room (1970–1), realized in Cologne with John Lifton, and works created in connection with the British Fluxshoe group in the 1970s. While Kubitza's essay is not an attempt to finally establish Schnemann as a Fluxus artist, Schneemann's early connection with Fluxus can be considered not only an important step to the artist's innovative, more radical body and performance pieces that placed her at the forefront of these new genres and later of feminist art. It also acknowledges her pivotal role in helping shape the avant-garde of the 1960s and beyond, including Fluxus.

Whose Performance Is It Anyway? Performed Criticism as Feminist Strategy

By the 1990s, the feminist contention that gender norms inform the production and reception of art had become widely accepted in academia. Many theatre journalists, however, continued to insist on the possibility of writing about performance from an apolitical, gender-neutral position. This article examines the gendered history of this insistence from the early 1700s to the present, its effects on the production and reception of plays by women, and its implications for theatre scholarship. Focusing on Carolee Schneemann's critique of a masculine bias in art criticism in her performance Interior Scroll and the Guerrilla Girls' actions against gender discrimination in the art world, this article examines strategies adopted by female and feminist journalists in Britain and the US to counter women's inequitable status in art journalism and playwriting. By engaging with the gendered binaries mind–body and text–performance, Schneemann and the Guerrilla Girls help clarify how reviewing practices have informed critical thinking about femininity and performance. In doing so, these artists anticipate poststructuralist feminist critiques of visibility and the performing body. Stefka Mihaylova holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on performance theory, especially gender and racial aspects of spectatorship in contemporary American and British feminist and radical theatre and performance art.

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

A Mentor Worth Watching

Throughout the twentieth century, artists have tried to question and redraw the boundaries of what society considers both sacred and profane. Many of them have used bodily fluids to do so: Marcel Duchamp literally inseminated his painting Paysage Fautif (1946), Mario Merz put shit in a can, and Andres Serrano infamously immersed Christ in a vial of piss. Yet the bodily discharge that is perhaps most naturally aesthetic, most painterly in its consistency and richly varied in its hue, menstrual blood. remains one of the last artistic taboos. The bold Blood Work (1972) proto-feminist artist Carolee Schneemann or Menstruation Bathroom (1979) by Judy Chicago notwithstanding, period as it is called on various Web sites, tends to elicit a cry of repulsive! from the public and a critique of essentialist! from the academy. No matter how progressive society believes itself to be, the issue of menstruation is still one that provokes the most knee-jerk of reactions and the most stereotypical of responses, Giovanna Chesler is to be commended, then, for courageously beginning her documentary film, Period: The End of Menstruation? (2006), with elegantly crafted paintings made with this organic, if still suspect, media. As the camera intimately lingers over the crimson curlicues and calligraphic feathers made by artist Vanessa Tiegs, one is reminded that the gaze can be retrained. Beauty is first in the eye of the filmmaker and then in the eye of the beholder. By enticing us to follow her lead through the sweeping and glossy arabesques of blood, Chesler's introduction is a brilliant visual metaphor for the subject and pacing of the film itself, and illustrates her power to make the viewer reconsider what they once believed to be a given. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During her youth on Long Island in the 1980s, Chesler regularly frequented the art cinema in her small town, and while watching such innovative feminist directors as Jane Campion quickly began to comprehend the power of illuminated images screened in darkened, intimate space, Although she intuitively recognized that the constant cinematic mistreatment of women was an injustice she wanted to see righted, at that point she was not aware that she wanted to make films. It was only later, as a senior finishing her BA in anthropology and women's studies at the University of Virginia, that filmmaking arose as a possible vocation. Chesler was quite literally turning in her final exam in a film history class when the professor asked about her post-graduation plans. He opined that she should be a filmmaker, and Chesler abandoned her original plan to study archaeology at Berkeley. She still moved to San Francisco, but began taking classes at the Film Arts Foundation, and was ultimately accepted into the MFA program in Cinema at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Her rapid development and obvious skill as a filmmaker are evident in her multi-award-winning student films from her years SFSU, namely BeauteouS: The Trilogy (2000-02), and hand-some (2004), which she completed while working as an assistant professor in Communication at the University of California, San Diego. It is clear that Chesler's early academic studies were a formidable influence upon her filmmaking practice, and continue to be so. As such, it would not be a misnomer to term her a filmic ethnographer. (To underscore her indebtedness to women and her allegiance to matrilineal genealogies, Chesler chose to name her production company G6 Pictures, as she is the sixth Giovanna Marie in her family.) Throughout her body of work, one can sense her sincere need to tell the stories of women who have no other means to voice them and she cites Emily Martin, a feminist anthropologist and author of The Woman in the Body (1987), as her biggest influence. Martin's groundbreaking examination of how powerfully cultural myth and supposition determine what is perceived to be natural about the female body, and thus effect how women then envision themselves, persuaded Chesler to re-imagine how women could be presented in the filmic medium. …

A Challenging Grittiness: Spirituality in Jewish Women's Art

There are many parallels between spiritual work and creative process. Hailing from a wide spectrum of artistic backgrounds and religious practice, each artist discussed here addresses spiritual themes that assume the existence of a divine presence accessible to human consciousness. For each, struggle with faith and desire for revelation intersect or collide with the challenges and enlightenment of creative work. Be cautioned: The challenging grittiness of many of these images is far from the soothing, faux-greeting-card holiness that one might expect of "religious art." The spiritual component inherent in certain types of creative enterprise is often generated by (or embedded in) the tension between the restraint of religious law and the freedom of creative expression. This is particularly evident in the work of Nechama Golan, an Israeli artist who was raised in a secular home and educated in theater, dance, and visual art. In the 1980s, she became religiously observant and moved with her husband and two daughters to the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community of Bnei Brak. Like numerous feminist performance artists (Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta come immediately to mind), Golan incorporates her own body into her installations and documents them photographically. Thus, she acts out her dialogue directly with Jewish texts. The resulting untitled images (the titles affixed here are my own) betray profound ambivalence and offer a sly suggestion of elegantly crafted violence.1 "Breathing" is a troubling image of the artist's face breathing (as in suffocating) in a text from Maimonides' Mishneh Torah: Sefer Nashim—"Hilkhot Ishut" (a codification of the laws governing sexual relations between spouses). Her face is pressed against the transparent page, once from the inside, showing the text reversed, and again with her face behind the readable text. [End Page 170] Click for larger view Figure 1 Nechama Golan, "Glass Letters" In "Red Thread," Golan wears a starched white dress and white stockings. This detail of the full-figure photograph reveals a frail red thread "leaking" from under the hem of her skirt. As if simulating the common but disturbing dream of a menstrual accident, the image, seen from both front and back, references a protective red bendle ("ribbon" in Yiddish)2 while also suggesting the more obvious association of shameful blood. Although her work appears to criticize the status of women in the Orthodox society in which she lives, Golan says she intends it to express the self that has chosen to be a part of "that world, that order." [End Page 171] Click for larger view Figure 2 Nechama Golan, Untitled photograph In "Glass Letters," transparent globes hang from a thread and cast a shadow. The black Hebrew characters suspended in the clear resin seem to embody the artist's fascination with and deep reverence for the letter of the Law. [End Page 172] Perhaps the most widely reproduced of Golan's works is an image of a high-heeled shoe, onto which she has glued the opening words of Mishnah Kiddushin 1:1—"The woman is acquired . . ."—along with a verse from "Eshet Hayil," the final chapter of the Book of Proverbs, sung as a paean to the "virtuous woman" in traditional Jewish homes on the eve of the Sabbath. Golan says, My work deals with the plight of women—not necessarily religious women. In the West, shoes for women are designed by men, who view women as sex objects. These shoes are terribly uncomfortable, but women just sit there and accept their fate. The text I've stuck on is a page from the Talmud on laws of conjugality—written by men, of course. The tension existing in the gap between the sacred texts and a low-level image, "the touch of a dirty foot," creates more than a single interpretation. A text from halakhah3 embodied in footwear is saying: Halakhah should be comfortable to walk in. Walking and... collapse You are not currently authenticated. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE Authenticate

Appropriate Ending: Ben d'Armagnac's Last Performance

In a few moments the Theater aan de Rijn in Arnhem would be full of people who had come to attend the next session of the Behavior Workshop, a five-day event that included performances and talks by Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Carolee Schneemann, and a series of related workshops, dialogues, and political debates (Thursday, September 28 through Wednesday, October 3, 1978). Now, just before noon on Saturday, the room was empty except for Beuys, his friend the Dutch artist and writer Louwrien Wijers, and the ghost of Bernard (Ben) d’Armagnac. Two days before, on Thursday evening, September 28, d’Armagnac had fallen and hit his head on the side of his houseboat, been knocked unconscious, and had drowned in the water at the corner of the canals Herengracht and Brouwersgracht. A convex mirror, attached to the wall so that boat pilots can see oncoming vessels coming around the corner, today serves as a kind of makeshift memorial marking the site of his death. Wijers recalled that Friday morning his wife Johanna noticed “many people looking over the railing of the bridge. She looked in the water, and Ben’s body was lying there, as if in a performance, you know, but this time he had drowned during the night, stepping on his . . . going into the boat he stepped on . . . and he just . . . he fell, you know, and then he came with his head on the iron side of the boat, fell into the water, probably unconscious, and later in the morning when they started to move the water, the body came up.”

Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance

Robert Morris's danceSite(Fig. 1) premiered in February 1964 at the Surplus Dance Theater in New York City. Choreographed and performed by Morris,Sitealso featured the visual artist Carolee Schneemann and several sheets of four-by-eight foot plywood. Although it may seem odd to include these wooden panels among the performers, they assumed an active role in the choreography. Ironically, it was Schneemann who provided the background scenery. Nude and covered in white paint, she sat motionless throughout the performance, recreating the pose and persona of Edouard Manet's famous 1863 painting ofOlympiawhile Morris manipulated the large wooden boards. In a graceful duet with inanimate partners, Morris spun the rectangular planes from a point on the ground, maneuvered them around his body, lifted them over his head, caressed their even form as he slowly moved his hand across one edge, and balanced the panels on his back as he moved across the stage. Not only did Morris never dance with Schneemann, he did not even seem to notice her.In a career spanning over forty years, Robert Morris has produced theoretical articles, paintings, videos, installations, and environmental art in addition to his work in dance; nevertheless, the American artist remains best known for his Minimalist sculptures of the 1960s (Figs. 2 and 3). Like the works of his colleagues Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris's spare, geometrical objects of that period were three-dimensional and called attention to issues of site and artistic context. They also resisted past artistic conventions based in subjective methods of composition, expressivity, and metaphor. Morris, however, distinguished himself among this group of visual artists by the emphasis he placed on the viewer's bodily relationship with the art object, a distinction that derives directly from his unique involvement in avant-garde dance.

Marina Abramovic on the Ledge

F or many years, Marina Abramovic has been a prominent practitioner of site-specific action and performance art, and like some of the other pioneer women in body art (Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, Lygia Clark), she had used her body deliberately-to expose it to certain pressures, dangers, and contingencies, or to present it, make it present, as subject and object in specific relationships to the world. During the 1970s and 1980s, when she performed together with her partner Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), these actions were both intensely relational and durational. Nightsea Crossing she sat motionless and silent for seven hours at one end of a long table, facing Ulay. Relation in Space, performed at the Venice Biennale in 1976, their naked bodies crashed into each other repeatedly for one hour. The catalog described the action bluntly as a task: In a large, empty space, repeatedly two bodies touch each other frontally at high speed. 1988, Abramovic parted from Ulay; their final performance was a crossing of the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and walking towards each other.

The garden in the machine: a field guide to independent films about place

Introduction 1. The Garden in the Machine Larry Gottheim's Fog Line, Thomas Cole's The Oxbow, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign, Panoramas 2. Voyages of Life Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life, Larry Gottheim's Horizons 3. Avant-Gardens Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'artifice, Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden, Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, Stan Brakhage's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Marjorie Keller's The Answering Furrow, Anne Charlotte Robertson's Melon Patches, Or Reasons to Go on Living, Rose Lowder's Ecological Cinema 4. Re-envisioning the American West Babette Mangolte's The Sky on Location, James Benning's North on Evers, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home 5. From the Sublime to the Vernacular Jan DeBont's Twister and George Kuchar's Weather Diaries 6. The City as Motion Picture The New York City Symphony: Rudy Burckhardt's New York Films, Weegee's Weegee's New York, Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y., Marie Menken's Go! Go! Go! Hilary Harris's Organism, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Panorama, the San Francisco City Film: Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito and Notes on the Port of St. Francis, Bruce Baillie's Castro Street, Michael Rudnick's Panorama, Ernie Gehr's Eureka and Side/Walk/Shuttle Coda--Deconstruction/Reconstruction: Pat O'Neill's Water and Power and Eugene Martin's Invisible Cities 7. The Country in the City Central Park, Jonas Mekas's Walden, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One 8. Rural (and Urban) Hours Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, Robert Huot's One Year and Rolls 1971, Nathaniel Dorsky's Hours for Jerome, Peter Hutton's Landscape (for Manon) and New York Portrait, Part I 9. Expulsion from the Garden Thomas Cole's The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Carl Franklin's One False Move, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Print Generation and Horicon 10. Satan's National Park Bruce Conner's Crossroads, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, James Benning's Deseret and Four Corners 11. Benedictions/New Frontiers Chick Strand's Kristallnacht, Stan Brakhage's Commingled Containers, Andrew Noren's Imaginary Light, Leighton Pierce's 50 Feet of String, David Gatten's What the Water Said, nos. 1-3 Appendix: Distribution Sources for Films and Videos Notes Index

Performing Memory in Moon in a Tree: Carolee Schneemann Recollects Joseph Cornell

IntroductionIn 1959, three years after Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) met Joseph Cornell (1902–72), she wrote a letter to him, posing a question that remained unanswered in Cornell's lifetime: “Time remembering disclosures of quince tree hours; and so must I only discover you in myself, could you enliven this treasured light with a few words of now?”2 Some two decades later, Schneemann represented this question in Moon in a Tree, a 1976 performance during which she recreated the “***qumce tree hours” that the two friends shared in Cornell's garden on Utopia Parkway, his suburban home in Flushing, New York.