The night after Meat Joy joy inundated the American Center [in Paris]—but totally at the climax, crawling, slithering, twisting, in a lake of paint, battered chickens and fish, ropes, mountains of paper—drenched with buckets of red, white, and yellow, eight bodies almost naked—the men drenching us, the women struggling (joyfully) yelling, crying, howling, shouting, laughing… And the thing built like a monument—rhythmically: materials, movements, sound, lights…
The impossible French audience I’d come to know and fear so well, hypnotized into a silence which no one ever had experienced before!…
Beautiful to be in it—I didn’t see it the way I “didn’t see” Chromelodeon, but I was in it and alive in the center of this radiant, fierce organism and a pleasure to me unprecedented in my theatre/dance pieces. You and me in it… to make this possible our love, our life like a buried nervous system, a blood stream. — Carolee Schneemann*
Her landmark performance work—solo and group—her films and kinetic assemblages, her paintings and multimedia installations. In a series of gallery exhibitions and public programs, screenings, and events, CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN—BODY POLITICS brings it all together at the Barbican, her first major survey in Great Britain.
See link below for details.
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN — BODY POLITICS
Through January 8
Barbican Centre—Art Gallery
Silk Street, London
*Carolee Schneemann to James Tenney, May 30, 1964, in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, edited by Kristine Stiles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 83–85.
Carolee Schneemann, Body Politics, Barbican Art Gallery, September 8, 2022–January 8, 2023, from top: Interior Scroll, August 29, 1975, Women Here and Now, East Hampton, New York, photograph by Anthony McCall, © the photographer; Chromelodeon (4th Concretion), June 23 and 25, 1963, Judson Dance Theater, Judson Memorial Church, New York City, photograph by Al Giese, © the photographer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London, 2022; Round House, July 29, 1967, Dialectics of Liberation International Congress, Institute of Phenomenological Studies, The Roundhouse, London, photograph by John Haynes, © the photographer; Body Politics installation views (3), © Marcus J. Leith; Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1966, wooden box, lightbulbs, slides, oil paint, clock, ampule, metallic objects, paper and mirrors, private collection, London, photograph by JSP Art Photography; Water Light / Water Needle, May 29, 1966, Havemeyer Estate, Mahwah, New Jersey, photograph by CharlotteVictoria; Personae: J.T. and Three Kitchs, 1957, oil on canvas; Fuses,1964–1967, two film strips, 16 mm film transferred to HD video, color, silent, original film burned with fire and acid, painted and collaged, image courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York; Carolee Schneemann with Venus Vectors, 1987, photograph by Victoria Vesna; Meat Joy, November 16–18, 1964, Judson Dance Theater, Judson Memorial Church, photograph by Robert McElroy, © 2022 Estate of Robert R. McElroy, licensed by VAGA at ARS; Body Politics installation view, © Marcus J. Leith; Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963, gelatin silver print, printed 2005, photograph by Erró [Guðmundur Guðmundsson], © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2022; Body Politics installation view, © Marcus J. Leith; Carolee Schneemann and Kitch in Schneemann’s studio on West 29th Street, New York, 1962, photograph by Leo Choplin, reproduced by permission of Neil T. Choplin, MD. Images courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P.P.O.W, New York, © Carolee Schneemann Foundation, ARS, New York, and DACS, London, 2022.
