It was with great honour and joy that Sequences VII presented Carolee Schneemann as the honorary artist. Her work was exhibited in artist run Kling&Bang galleri. The exhibition consisted of a central piece, an installation of More Wrong Things – one of Schneemann´s newer works dating from 2001, Eye Body, a series of photographs and Up to and Including her Limits, a video of a performance.
On a special occasion a new biopic documentary, Breaking the Frame with Carolee Schneemann was screened in a nearby independent cinema, Bió Paradís, followed by a screening of Fuses in Kling&Bang and artist talk via Skype moderated by Ragnar Kjartansson.
In a text written by this years artistic director, Alfredo Cramerotti he describes her work as ones “… that have a lot to say on notions of bodies, organs and communication conduits. Her show brings together works that challenge the viewer not only to face ‘logic shortcuts’ but also the individual position in relation to those shortcuts i.e. media representation and the singular agency in societal matters.”
Works presented for Sequences VII:
Up to and Including her Limits (video) extends the principles of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Schneemann is suspended from a rope harness, naked and drawing; her moving body becomes a measure of concentration, the sustained and variable movements of her extended drawing hand creates a dense web of strokes and marking. This video captures the concentration and raw intensity of Schneemann’s presence and use of her own body.
More Wrong Things (video installation)
Fourteen video monitors suspended from the ceiling within an extended tangle of wires, cables and cords. Video loops seen on the monitors present a compendium of “Wrong Things”; juxtaposing Schneemann’s visual archives of personal and public disasters.
Eye Body (photographs of performance by Erró)
Schneemann’s “Action for Camera” in which she merged her own body with the environment of her painting/constructions… “I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material– a further dimension of the construction… I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will.”
Interview: Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carolee Schneemann (video). With thanks to Hans Ulrich Obrist and Mark Rowan-Hull.
Fuses (video)
A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch. “…I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt– the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense– as one feels during lovemaking… It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen– that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman.”
Breaking the Frame (biopic documentary)
Breaking The Frame (2012, 100 minutes) is a feature–length documentary portrait of Carolee Schneemann by Canadian filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska. Ultimately, Breaking The Frame presents the artist’s recollections and meditations on life/work in order to pose the questions what is space, where is form, and how do we look? The insistently roving camera breaks open the frame(work) of art, revealing the magnificent mess of interiority and the interconnected holism of the creative process. By eschewing standard chronologies, Nitoslawska explores the way filmic strategies complicate the traditional understanding of memory as an act of narration and investigates the complexities of the use of visual images as a form of historical testimony.
