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CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN 18 January – 10 February 2001 A site specific multi-channel video installation. The installation activates the entire gallery space with 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. These elements are composed in relation to the beams, conduits and pipes which define the distinctive architectural aspects of the White Box gallery space. This work also responds to current trends of costly fabrication and refined presentation. A wall of recent Iris prints further integrates sources of more wrong things. “Schneemann is a miner of the hidden, the unseen, the stolen and misappropriated.” —Bruce McPherson (from the introduction to More Than Meat Joy) Formally trained as a painter and emerging in the early 1960s world of experimental film, music, Judson Dance Theatre and happenings, Carolee Schneemann has transformed the very definition of art, especially with regard to discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. Schneemann addresses archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the dynamic relationship between her body and the social body. The range of her work has been substantial and broadly influential: from painting and assemblage to films and installations, from solo improvisations to large group ensemble pieces, from starkly bare stagings to multi-media and multi-sensory extravaganzas. PRESS Show: Carolee Schneemann –
More Wrong Things Having started as a painter in the early ‘60s, Schneemann’s work has continued to influence greatly, particularly for the attention she has drawn to issues of gender and sexuality. Moving easily from film and performance to painting and music, and with a body of work that ranges from the surprisingly simple to the extravagantly complex, Schneemann has always managed to preserve a sense of immediacy. She is an artist who thinks out loud. Yet her message remains intently directed at the viewers. Her current piece—a site specific, multi-channel video installation—is no exception. The artist has installed a variety of TV monitors throughout the gallery space hung on the walls or lying on the floor—each surrounded by piles of cables and wiring. The videos and some large slide projections depict scenes of violence, killings, disasters, and sex. The images span from the historical—a news broadcast of a killing in Kosovo or Vietnam—to extremely intimate images of naked bodies and explicit sex scenes. In keeping with her way of creating and displaying images, Scheneemann has no inhibitions about making us face our innermost taboos—namely, our uneasy relationships with sexuality, violence, and death—and society’s general tendency to consider these factors only as they apply to us as private individuals, which prevents us from understanding and accepting them as fundamental elements of our collective conscious. By combining sex, violence, and animal imagery, Schneemann sends a clear message to the viewer: what we consider morally wrong is nothing other than an essential part of our basic animal instinct—something inherent to human nature. The cables that invade the space suggest a jungle. Perhaps this is the jungle of contemporary society where, under the delusion of evolution and, more recently, technological revolution, we fool ourselves into thinking that we have overcome the darkest aspects of human nature.
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