Carolee Schneemann’s innovative and controversial artistic practice flowed for over fifty years, until her death in March. The performative elements of her big, bold oeuvre—kinetic theater—usually garner the lion’s share of critical attention: Meat Joy (1964) utilized minimally garbed women and men, red paint, and chicken carcasses.  Interior Scroll (1974) adhered to the title’s literal meaning, in which Schneemann—in front of an audience–retrieved a piece of paper from her vagina and then read it out loud. It was certainly easy to distort Carolee Schneemann’s intent. The public and critics both did their share of distorting. Doing so glosses over—perhaps intentionally–an intense, lifelong political commitment that inflected most of her art. There is also—not insubstantially–her insightful, articulate writing.

So much of her work was prophetic, in terms of gender issues, female sexuality, power imbalances, the brutality of the American political structure (“deformed hyper-masculinity”).  Viet-Flakes, her film that focused on American brutality in Vietnam, was undertaken in 1965, at the very dawn of the antiwar movement. That is extraordinary. Being prophetic, though, is a decidedly mixed blessing.

Her emergence as an art student in the 1960s coincided with the zeitgeist of protest and social change, undergirded by the “huge surround” of racial injustice. “de Beauvoir was a huge influence. And then reading Wilhelm Reich. And then all the radical, forbidden literature that was beginning to emerge around the Vietnam War—which we don’t have anymore; alternative journals, critics…”

Her work encompassed a broad spectrum of media: performance, film, photography, but Schneemann was—first, foremost, and always—a painter. “When I was really little—four and five years old—kids are always drawing, but I was drawing obsessively with the sense that this is what life meant. I had to make these images.” Her understanding of kinetic theater was that it was “an extension of Abstract Expressionism. It relates to painters going into real time and actual space, preceded by Oldenburg and Robert Whitman and Jim Dine and Red Grooms; those were the influences ahead of me, confirmed and solidified by Pollock.” For Schneemann, it was “extending the physicality into my own body of the painting.  Kinetic theater is this intensification of visual dynamics.”

This interview with Carolee Schneemann was undertaken at her home in New Paltz, New York in 2010. My collaborator, painter and photographer Lily Prince, was on hand to take photos. There were some moments of levity: Carolee’s confession, for example, that Everyone Loves Raymond was a secret vice. Her cat—as cats tend to do–constantly interrupted the proceedings.

She was born in 1939 into a thoroughly non-artistic household. The options for women in the 1950s were, to say the least, constrained. “I was supposed to conform to the conventions. I could go to typing school, get married, and have children. From early on, I was completely against that.” Virginia Woolf was one of the first hints that there existed an alternative universe of nonconformity. “Woolf was so important to me because I found her book in the back of a library van when I was at Putney [school]; I was probably fourteen. And I don’t know why I picked that book. I liked the cover and the double-O and Woolf looked interesting. And it was The Waves and I took it into the barn, started to read it, and I just wept for the next bunch of hours. Because I recognized this was a kind of fragmentation and reconnection and associative, metaphoric richness. And I knew I wanted this. I didn’t know how I could possibly do it. But as a painter I wanted it.”

The testosterone-driven art world, to say the least, did not offer much support either. “I identified the absence of what we call ‘models’ or ‘precedent’ as something that I had to vigorously try to counter.”

Her photographic Eye Body (1963) was the first time she inserted her body into her work, leading to a lifetime of critical distortion. “They mistook my body for the body of work,” effectively erasing the political import of her art. “I’m always astonished when the message is blurred or reaches a level of ambiguity that’s inappropriate. Or when the work is censored. The censorship is often implicit. Eye Body was censored because no one in the art world knew what to make of it. They thought it was narcissistic. Exhibitionism. And I thought it was a transformation of the traditional nude into a collage configuration in which I was both the image and the image-maker. I felt that that should have a political power that would deflect particularly the…mechanization of the female nude all through the sixties, where the body is turned into a form of machinery…. It’s kind of dead, it’s mechanical and it’s perfect as a surface would be for an automobile or a coffee maker. It’s so divested of a lived viscerality. I was very conscious of that and I was very conscious of the painterly traditions in which the nude was completely absorbed and contextualized into the history of male viewing.”

Fuses, a short film also made during the same period as Viet-Flakes, upped the ante.  Utilizing the techniques of collage and painting, the film chronicles Schneemann and then-partner Jim Tenney’s lovemaking. “There was no example or precedent for heterosexual pleasure that I had ever seen, and I wondered if I could discover aspects of it by filming my partner and myself. There was only pornography and woman as a kind of anomalous sexual problem. The transformation’s so incredible. You couldn’t say lubricity, orgasm, vagina, come, suck, cock unless you were doing pornography. So all the lived experience was deflected. And Fuses entered a contrary cultural moment where people weren’t sure whether it was pornography or transformative, ecstatic depiction and it was the men critics and the men historians who most valued it. Women were scared. They didn’t write about it. Still.

“Initially, in the sixties, [my work] was considered proto-pornography. Then it was essentialism. Then it did not conform to feminist principles… it evaded semiotics. It was not Marxist. Every couple years there was something new that was problematic.”

And the state of the union, 2010? “It’s complicated. Politically it feels as sinister as it could possibly be”—and with the advent of Donald Trump six years later, these words were sadly prescient–“with powers and structures embedded that are maintaining invisibility. It’s a masquerade. But in the meantime, feminist principles and sexual explicitness has so changed popular culture that it’s thrilling, it’s amazing. Gay culture, issues of the body—they’re really in discussion. And to some extent they’ve been vitiated by younger people, because they don’t feel that there is any resistance or still a battle surrounding their own aspects of self-definition and freedom.

“The degree of control and systemization… it’s quite terrifying. And it’s also because culture is mass—everything is mass. There’s no sense of a sustainable community. As soon as there is one, it’s invaded by investors or real estate… so some self-determination is endangered.”

The interview ended on—if not an overtly optimistic note—at least a hopeful one. She displayed a level of personal equanimity that belied her decades-long struggle to overcome the cascade of opprobrium that seemed to emanate from every faction. “Art definitely changes the world. Absolutely. You just consider John Lennon and the song ‘Imagine’ and the power that that has.

“And in the way aesthetics can influence or bewilder or provoke.” And there was no greater example of this than the legacy of Carolee Schneemann. She no doubt bewildered. She certainly provoked. And—to say the least—she influenced.

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Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave., New York, NY 10003

At first there’s something ominous about the commentary of Marielle Nitoslawska, director and cinematographer of this fulsome, doting portrait of Carolee Schneemann, intoning rhetorical questions at her subject in her mildly lugubrious Polish-accented voice, repeating Schneemann’s words back to her as she reads from diaries and historic statements.  It smacks of self-indulgent intrusion into what is an already dense and layered oeuvre.  But just when you are ready to call out “enough already” several scenes into this approximately 100 minute movie, the director seems actually to hear you because suddenly she pretty much hands over the mike to Schneemann.  And then you realize why Nitoslawska had to be heard from early on, and identified as the hand behind the insistently hand-held camera: the film is so much about one woman claiming for all women their voice and their place within art HIS-story that conferring authorship on the film as a distinct artifact is an ethical imperative.

Schneemann occupies a unique position in the art of the last half century in part because she is nestled between a late 1950s Happenings sensibility, which was as much a last gasp of abstract expressionism as it was the harbinger of something new, and the process, performance and conceptual art of the 1960s of which Schneemann herself was a pioneer.  Schneemann touchingly recounts her first visit, alone, to the Philadelphia Museum at age 11 (she grew up in rural Pennsylvania the daughter of a country doctor) in which she strays into an art class in the basement and is set up with her own easel.  She hears the word “gestalt” from the teacher, the second big important German word to enter her life after her family name, she says.

A painterly touch underscores everything she does quite regardless of medium even as her art turns upon feminist, ecological, political and diaristic axes.  We get a sense of working and reworking, of finding shapes and teasing boundaries in her photo-based work, her installations, her experimental film work, her moving tribute and act of solidarity in “Hand/Heart for Ana Mendiata” (1986) as she goes out into the snow to paint in blood, and of course in her legendary performances such as the orgiastic “Meat Joy” (1964) and the ritualistic “Interior Scroll” (1974).  While there is little doubt of the scholarly and linguistic depth of Schneemann’s researches she comes across as almost a mystic of feminism, her art a kind of witches brew.

Nitoslawska deserves special credit for the way her film is about more than the artist’s oeuvre and impact without resorting to mawkish biography.  The film manages to be, in a very liberated way, romantic.  It is, in fact, a matrix of free-love stories – there is her love for her first companion, the late composer James Tenney, whose music almost forms a second subject, exquisitely energizing the narrative arc of Schneemann’s career; her interactions with subsequent overlapping lovers Anthony McCall and Bruce McPherson, their triangulation being the subject of “ABC – We Print Anything – In the Cards” (1977); her devotion to her cats, from whom she learns so much; and ultimately, and especially, for her house in the Hudson Valley, a failed farm given her by relatives, whose almost haunted decay provides Nitoslawska’s lustrous cinematography its intriguing, sumptuous opening shots.

Still, the film’s occasional excess of “artiness” can feel like a tactical error, as the art it frames is already so visceral and expressive.  It is not that one would want a Ken Burns deal for Carolee Schneemann, but the job of placing her where she belongs in the canon is so much a work in progress that the documentary convention of titles and dates with vintage footing would have served the subject well.  Again, however, its somewhat a-chronological organization is of a piece with the career it chronicles, with its revisiting of earlier efforts, its collaging of old works.  The most painterly of new media artists, Carolee Schneemann constantly dips her brush, so to speak, into her own archive.

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Carolee Schneemann: Within and Beyond the Premises at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, January 27 to April 1, 2012

In 1961, Carolee Schneemann moved to New York City after completing her MFA at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It’s well known that she was a part of the experimental avant garde in the city: creating performances at Judson Dance Theater, participating at Andy Warhol’s Factory and Claes Oldenburg’s Store, and collaborating with Robert Morris and others on works that expanded her painting practice within and beyond its materiality. But rural Illinois where she studied painting—and the small town where she grew up, and New Paltz, NY where she settled in 1965 — couldn’t be further from that reality. Landscape exists in these places; is these places.

Champaign is in the middle of nowhere. It seems flat forever with nothing to look at but horizon and sky, except for, these days, some eccentric University architecture—charming old round barns, a fascist-looking football stadium, a basketball arena that touched down from outer space in the 1970s. This quiet University town was, to me, the perfect frame for Schneemann’s retrospective, allowing reflection on what was already alive in the artist before New York and contemporary misunderstandings about her. Under an endless, quiet sky it feels natural to contemplate body as activated presence; nature as the essential connection to self; and emotions, even rage, as spacious, possible, fruitful.

The retrospective, which closes at the Krannert Art Museum on April 1, originated at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. The current iteration was created in partnership with the Henry Art Gallery of Washington, and will hopefully travel throughout the country. Unfortunately however, according to Kathleen Harleman, Director at the Krannert, they are having trouble getting the show to certain locations due to the nature of the work. That seems incredible. Even though the internet exists, somehow a formal masterpiece like Fuses (1964-67)—which is a painted film, or a filmic-painting, exploring materiality and abstraction in both mediums, and including sexual sensation and fluid, female emotion as its content—can still frighten and offend. As Schneemann read during her performance of Interior Scroll in 1975, “there are certain films/we cannot look at/the personal clutter/the persistence of feelings/the hand-touch sensibility/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess/the dense gestalt/the primitive techniques.”

The Krannert version of the show includes the addition of the charming photo collage Schneemann, Tenney and Kitch: The Illinois Years (1959-60), which is a visual diary of the start of Schneemann’s domestic life with the composer James Tenney, her partner for 13 years, and Kitch their cat.  Another difference with the Dorsky’s presentation of the show is the greater emphasis placed on the artist’s film works. Instead of showing these on small monitors, Fuses, Meat Joy (1964-2010), and Precarious (2009) were projected on big screens in room-sized viewing enclaves. Precarious was actually projected around viewers onto four walls in a room, with a fifth smaller moving-image projection traveling slowly, overlapping in diagonal across the back wall. I’d seen pieces of Fuses on Youtube years ago, and Meat Joy on a monitor at P.P.O.W. in Chelsea during Schneemann’s last New York solo show, but the difference in seeing these pieces projected in their entirety on a big screen is enormous.

Fuses, a 35 mm, silent, color film is 29 minutes and 51 seconds long; flickers of light, Schneemann’s figure silhouetted against an ocean shoreline, her cat’s gaze, and scenes of Tenney driving in the country are cut in with shots of the couple making love. Some frames are upside down. All are painted, scratched, baked, cut and put back together to create a textured flow that looks at times the way an orgasm might feel. It’s impossible to say the work is not explicit, as it certainly shows everything, but Fuses is far from a narrative depiction of sex, and the images are tender and natural — a different creature entirely than the abusive images that dominate in the not-so-underground pornography industry. I actually believe that it should be distressing to women that people are or could be (especially people in positions of power to show this work) offended by Fuses. What that says to me is that because of fear and politics, a woman’s ownership of her own image, and her own joy — emotion, life, and formal filmmaking technique are inseparable here — is still unacceptable to many. This work should be much more widely known, shown, and studied.

Before she was making films, Schneemann was a painter who was already trying to find ways off of the canvas, as early as 1960 calling painting her “beloved corpse.” Some of my favorite of her works are the Rauschenberg-like combines that she made by attaching wire, broken glass, plaster and found photos to her canvases. In the front room is a series of paintings and etchings, including semi-abstract landscapes, still lifes, and life drawings that vary from each other only slightly, as well as the larger, built-out combine Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1961). This work includes a found photo of a nude woman seen from behind, broken glass and wood, and a small, weathered map of Illinois. There is a sense of expansion inward and also of pushing away energetically from the traditional means of expression. It looks as if the objects originated from the canvas themselves and just had to get out. Schneemann carried her impulse away from traditional painting farther, and more expertly than most, and yet she was somehow capable of aesthetic continuity between her own body, disparate objects, and paint.

Perhaps this is because of the artist’s attention to her own subconscious, to her dreams and desires, and to the places these natural impulses lead her. The film Meat Joy, which documents a performance of the fabulously disgusting event at Judson Church in 1964 (it was also performed in Paris and London to predictably different responses from audiences), attempts to reach heights of ecstatic sensuality. The soundtrack of the film is made up of sounds, mostly French conversations, from the streets of Paris, but it also includes Schneemann’s voice repeating a sentence in English to someone at least three times during the 10 minute, 34 second film: “I want to show the space between desire and experience,” she says.

In this case, her expression of desire in a pure form took the embodied shape of young men and women wearing very little, eventually covered with raw fish, chickens, and sausages. Participants rolled around together on the church floor, dismembering the carcasses, rubbing guts into each other’s flesh, acting out, and it seems experiencing, ecstatic states. On film, the scene can’t help but look a bit absurd after all these years, which is partially due to the nature of performance documentation versus a film created for its own sake like Fuses, or the photos that make up Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), which was performed specifically and only for the camera.  But it’s also because there’s not much room in today’s adult experience for unabashed ecstasy, so being a witness to it becomes unfamiliar and embarrassing. I can’t help thinking that Meat Joy, as mystical rite and energetic force, was necessarily experiential; on film it lives as a purely visual, yet nonetheless powerful icon.

Iconic works abound in this retrospective, including Up to and Including Her Limits (1973-76), which explores the mark as remnant of trancelike, painterly action, and photos from Interior Scroll, the performance during which a nude Schneemann removed a folded piece of paper from her vagina and then read aloud the letter she had printed upon it. Also present, however, are later pieces that continue to respond to themes from earlier years. Positioned next to each other are Terminal Velocity (2001) and Snows (1967), both of which express a different kind of desire: to somehow respond to unfathomable current events, and to visually express the depths of pain and rage stemming from inhumane political acts.

Terminal Velocity is an elegy to the men and women who fell from windows of the World Trace Center on 9/11. Schneemann took images of these people, mid-fall, that she found in newspapers, and successively zoomed in to enlarge each image. Across the top of a grid, each figure is featured in his or her smallest size; each picture is then enlarged progressively in photos that line up, smallest to largest, from the top to the bottom of each column of the grid. The effect is haunting; it looks as if each subject is in motion, still falling, as his or her image stays captured forever in horrific limbo. Snows is a response to the atrocities of the Vietnam war: the video shows a performance in which the film Viet-Flakes, made up of re-filmed photos of Vietnam, cycled behind slowly moving performers with white make-up on their faces. Schneemann culled the images from foreign sources, as they were suppressed in U.S. media outlets. Audience movement affected the speed of the image and sound transitions in Viet-Flakes, a complex technology (though now common, used then for the first time), creating non-optional participation. Experimental acuity and the ability to combine organic with technical media played a part in the balance of the piece, which is somehow both pure political action and pure formal mastery—which is pure Schneemann.

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February 10 to March 17, 2012
534 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 421-3292

The beauty of performance—or its weakness, if your perspective is financial— is that, in its most pure form, it is as an artwork in time, divorced from objects, fleeting. There is sometimes, in special instances, a greater sense of recognizable aliveness, or beingness imbued in participation or presence. Historical accounts of performances, in this case Happenings, are exciting as stories themselves, as art world mythologies. But recreation is not art; I say this despite recent pushes to have works live forever. To me, the majority of straight re-performances (as if performance art were repertory theater!) recall Cindy Sherman’s intentionally plastic-looking face, in fairly recent work, mimicking surgical attempts to recreate youth. Try as some might to slow down the inevitable, humans just don’t live forever. Neither do performances.

Paintings and sculptures, however, last. So do photographs and films. “Happenings: New York, 1958-1963”, now at The Pace Gallery, is effective and interesting in its multi-room layout because it is first a photo and art object show, and second, through these objects mostly, an historical accounting of the live visual art scene in Provincetown and New York in that period. Five photographers – chiefly Robert R. McElroy, but also Fred McDarrah, Martha Holmes, John Cohen and I.C. (Chuck) Rappaport – captured events by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. The “Happenings” artists were also working in tangible media alongside and in conjunction with performance. Viewed together, the photographs, art objects, multimedia and ephemera develop a convincing storyline in this show about the time of the first Happenings as new, free, special, raw, and developed, without agenda, for the existential sake of its participants.

Schneemann’s Quarry Transposed (1960), a mixed media assemblage —painted wood, a broken red glass goblet dangling from wire, a photograph of a woman, and messily hammered in nails—creates more atmosphere than photographs and wall text ever could alone. Specifically, this piece is arranged in the gallery to animate the artist’s Newspaper Event at Judson Church in 1962, though one could argue that the memory of the event and the object actually enliven each other. Glued to the wall behind the assemblage and photographs is a series of New York Times pages from 2012, there as if to remind us of the tactile quality of newsprint. The affect is aesthetically successful from far, but stories about current events are distracting in this context, and they make the installation feel more superficial than it should.

Certain nitpicky design details aside, “Happenings” is a good example of the ever-increasing ability of private interests to mount successful museum-style shows. It is to curator Mildred L. Glimcher’s credit that the show does not rely too heavily on video, which is sparingly installed no more than one monitor per room, some of which are silent.  The show also successfully avoids the question of re-performance all together, and doesn’t attempt to sincerely recreate original spaces. We might have walked into slick versions of Kaprow’s Words (1962) or Oldenburg’s Sports (1962), for example. Instead, visitors glimpse the originals through signed photographic prints by Robert McElroy. In the photograph of Sports, Pat Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and the artist roll around on the gallery floor in sweat suits and with painted faces amid a mess of what looks like packing material, linens, and plastic bags. Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain and Richard Bellamy stand aside and look on, in suits, from the audience.

From major pieces like Grooms’s Painting from ‘A Play Called Fire’ (1958), which is on loan from the Greenville County Museum of Art, to ephemera like Kaprow’s Poster for ‘Apple Shrine’ (1960), there is a surprisingly lot to admire in work that was ostensibly done at the service of an ephemeral event. Handmade, lasting, and beautiful, the work makes one wonder if it weren’t actually the other way around. Whitman’s Inside Out (1963), also helps to elicit this sentiment. The artist filmed a meeting of his friends talking and smoking around a table; the grainy black and white images are projected on four walls and a ceiling in a private room, with a sound loop the artist added in 2009.  Surely the meeting was interesting for the participants at the time, but is there any reality that doesn’t look better in retrospect, captured through the keen eye of an artist? Pace is correct to celebrate not just the history of performance events, but the things and images that were left behind.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same title, by Mildred L. Glimcher, published by Monacelli Press at $65. 320pp, many reproductions, ISBN: 978-1-58093-307-0

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elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne

May 27, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris, +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

France has a long history of women artists and of organizations supporting their work.  Partly as a result of that tradition, the National Museum of Modern Art owns works by more than 800 mostly European women artists.  Approximately twenty-five percent of these are represented in elles@centrepompidou, an exhibition that runs through February of next year with occasional substitutions of additional works.  Occupying the extensive fourth floor of the Pompidou Center, elles is divided into nine categories: “Pioneering Women,” “Fire at Will,” “The Body Slogan,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Words at Work,” “Immaterials,” “elles@design,” and “Architecture and Feminism?”  This thematic approach enabled curator Camille Moreau to organize some 500 works in provocative groupings.  Her purpose was “to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art.  The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  But she goes on to say, “Proving it is another matter.”

“Pioneering Women” encompasses the late 19th to the mid-20th century period.  Often described as pre-feminist, these women nevertheless engaged the male-dominated art world with wit and determination.  Lack of representation of these artists in galleries and museum collections was one of the issues prompting demonstrations and other actions by feminists during the 1960s and 1970s.  Because of their longevity, several pioneering women were still working during those decades, notably Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning.  In general, however, they did not identity themselves as feminists or participate in exhibitions open only to women artists.

Confrontational and deconstructionist approaches produced the dynamic pieces in “Fire at Will,” which includes print and video documentation of performance art by Valerie Export (exposed crotch and machine gun), Sigalit Landau (barded-wire hula hoop), and Charlotte Moorman (cello and camouflage uniform), along with Wendy Jacob’s eerie installation of inflated, animated blankets.  In materials as well as subject matter, artists in this section attacked assumptions pertaining to art production. The violence of war, viewed as a male domain, prompted this theme. From Zineb Sedira’s nostalgic photograph of an Algerian ruin to Annette Messager’s skewered protest, these artists dealt with war-scarred landscapes and psyches.  The female body as both canvas and subject in “The Body Slogan” addresses concepts of gender and identity, creating the most unified section of the exhibition. Jana Sterbak’s flesh dress of thinly sliced raw beef (completely dried by the time I saw it in June of 2010) resonates with the bloody visions of a nude Ana Mendieta holding a flapping, decapitated chicken.  Marina Abramovic, Sonia Khurana, and Carolee Schneemann dance to their different drummers, while Tania Brugera, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman consider the self-portrait as an exploratory genre.

“Eccentric Abstraction,” with its unmistakable reference to the 1966 New York gallery exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard using the same title, functions as the lynchpin of elles.  If we consider that the final two sections of the show focus more on design than art per se, then “Eccentric Abstraction” can be seen as positioned near the center of the exhibition.  Our opinion of everything that we see before these pieces and after them becomes enhanced or reduced by the “craft” materials and offbeat treatment of shape and space in this section.  Besides the classically deviant sculpture of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse, works here emphasize the power of repetition, both inside and outside the grid.  The rhythm of marking, stacking, and stitching is claimed and perpetuated as essentially female within the context of this exhibition.

In “Immaterials,” eccentric abstraction morphs into post-minimalist dialectics, with light and white as recurring motifs. “A Room of One’s Own” strays from the rigorous curatorial focus in the rest of the show, with several works seemingly shoehorned into this category.  While Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation, for example, may look like a wall unit for storage and display, its title Reflections of a Waterfall I suggests that the artist’s thoughts were elsewhere.  Although Mona Hatoum’s circular structure resembles a tiny room, the video seen on the floor invades and exposes the universal physicality of the human body.  The most ironic “room” is experienced in the 1975 video of Martha Rosler’s kitchen. “Words at Work,” while conflating text and visual narrative, nevertheless emphasizes the crucial component of language and storytelling within feminist art.  From the literal messages of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to Eleanor Antin’s liberated black boots, we are reminded not only that women have stories to tell, but also that women tell them best.

On seeing an exhibition of this magnitude focusing exclusively on women’s art, it is very hard to imagine how its curator could suggest that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  Moreau’s show underscores the fact that museums have only just begun to demonstrate the advances in post-1960 women’s art, let alone to explore work  by early women modernists that explores their differences from male pioneers.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 20, 2006.

If you missed “the body” as the de rigeur theme of artists at the “transgressive” cutting edge of avant garde art between, say, 1985 and 2000 then clearly your mind was on better things.  But don’t despair: There is a recap of everything you will soon realise you were glad to miss at PS1 in Queens.

“Into Me / Out of Me” is a sprawling 132-artist, encylopedic survey of work whose subject—and frequently its material, too—involves two-way traffic of the human body, as often as not the artist’s own.  For once, four letter words that spring to a critic’s mind aren’t crude putdowns but literal descriptions.

It is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, the PS1 Chief Curator who is also a curator of film and media at MoMA, of which PS1 is an affiliate. Like Winston Churchill, Mr. Biesenbach’s show offers “blood, sweat, toil and tears”.  There are rooms devoted to everything or anything that can go into or out of or swill around in the body, from any of its entries or exits (designated by nature or not).  The installation is strictly anatomical: one room deals with the bowel, another the bladder, another the uterus, and so on.

It is claimed that the show arose from conversations with the late Susan Sontag, although how much credit or blame she deserves for the results is left unclear.

What is ironic is that an exhibition so concerned with expulsions of bodily fluids should be so anal retentive in its organization. The experience, in fact, of this bizzarely methodical exhibition recalls the Musée d’Anatomie in Montpellier, with its graphic waxwork displays of the different stages of diseases.  Established by the Directory in 1794, the museum is now a period piece of logical positivism at its most kinky. Although based on material that was prevalent in the 1980s, therefore, “Into Me / Out of Me” is old news by more than a mere decade.

The Viennese “Actionists” are a starting point for Mr. Biesenbach.  These were the Wagnerian performance artists of the 1960s like Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Otmar Bauer, and Rudolph Schwarzkogler who would dismember sacraficial animals and fling their entrails about, or lacerate themselves or each other.  “By cutting the body, dousing it with blood and excrement, and arranging it in compositions suggesting surgery, the Actionists treated these primal fears in the most unabashed manner” a wall text explains. “Into Me / Out of Me” opened the same day as the Pride rally: You have Pride, said PS1, but we have Abjection.

Few of the artists in this show match the trippy, hippy primitivism of the Actionists.  More usual is the hospital aesthetic that comes across in Damien Hirst’s “Each Day as it Comes” (2005), a vitrine filled neatly with pharmaceuticals.  A natural for the show, of  course, is Matthew Barney, who has both an installation and an excerpt from “Cremaster 3” (2002) in which Freemasons in the top of the Chrysler Building perform elaborate surgery to induce glandular excretions from a strapped in Mr. Barney—a fusion of Actionism and Mr. Hirst, of weird, gooey biology and hard-edged, heraldic minimalism.

Laceration, self-mutilation, and puncture has a couple of gallery of its own (or should that be ward?)  Chris Burden is acknowledged as a father figure in the tradition of the art of self-injury: There is documentation of the Californian having himself crucified on a VW Beatle, and a DVD of his being shot.  These keep company with Marina Abramovic’s “Rest Energy,” a 1980 video of a performance in which her partner suspends a taut crossbow at her breast. Both these artists are represented by grainy old films which are mere souvenirs of performances where the true drama occurred: There are plenty of exhibits elsewhere, however, which give you blood and guts in technicolor.  Mat Collishaw’s “Bullet Hole” (1988-93) blows up a wound to a multipanel, 7 by 10 foot photograph. Sigalit Landau performs on DVD a hoola hoop dance with a barbed wire ring.

There are rooms for each substance the body expels.  Semen, for instance, is represented by documentation of Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” in which the artist masterbated under the raised floorboards of a gallery, his panting voice amplified for the visitor, along with a tasteful, blow up photograph by Andres Serrano of the trajectory of an ejaculation.  (He could also, of course, have sent his notorious “Piss Christ” though Mr. Biesenbach would have agonized as to whether to hang that as a Crufixion or a urine sample.)  Urine is represented by Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation” (1978) and several other works.  There is a vomitarium presided over by Sue Williams’s self-portrait cast from her own puke, “Vomithead” (1990). Mike Parr’s “The Emetics [Primary Vomit] I am Sick of Art [Red, Yellow and Blue] (1977) documents the artist throwing up primary color dyes in a pristine white cube art gallery.  And there is extensive representation of faeces. Walter de Maria’s “Rome Eats Shit” (1970) is a placard containing these words; Tom Friedman’s “Untitled” (1992) is a turd on a pedestal; Piero Manzoni’s “Merda Artista” (1961) is a labelled can ostensibly of the artist’s own excrement. Welcome to Pooh Corner.

What comes out must go in, so there are rooms devoted to eating.  Rather than showing any contemporary representation of one of the most timeless theme in art, the pleasures of the table, however, Mr. Biesenbach prefers that we contemplate Mona Hatoum’s “Deep Throat” (1996) a sculpture in which the plate contains a TV monitor relays an endoscope of the artist’s digestive system.

There are sections dealing with pregnancy, crying, breathing, screaming, putting things into and pulling them out of one’s body (the vagina being a favorite egress: pace Carolee Schneeman ‘s”Interior Scroll,” 1975), and bleeding. All of these, however, are solitary pursuits.  Intrusions and extrusions which involve two or more people (sex, in other words) are consigned by Chief Curator/Medical Examiner Biesenbach to an old boiler room in the bowels of the building.  Here the emphasis is on anal penetration, with highly graphic portfolios of gay sex by photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.  Other works in this dimly lit, packed display include Alex McQuilkin’s breakthrough 2000 DVD “Fucked,” a headshot in which she heroically attempts to apply lipstick while, off camera, being entered from behind.

The sex gallery is ostensibly devoted to voyeurism—that’s to say, visual penetration.  It is ironic, however, that in such a hot, sticky exhibition (literally, as PS1 is severally challenged in climate control, making the show a dubious summer destination) the cummulative effect of looking at so much biology is ultimately so unvisceral.  This has to do with the fact that so many works are dreary black and white photographs and texts.  There is barely any painting in the show, and what there is is limp illustration.

The thought I had, on leaving this exhausting, puerile display, is that a single painting by Francis Bacon would metaphorically fuse every sensation laid out so literally by the photographers, performers and video makers in this show, and penetrate the viewer where virtually nothing in this show does—the solar plexus.  But metaphor, depictive relish and the catharsis of painting are obviously too trangressive for some.

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