Carolee Schneemann gets dirty, and makes you feel dirty

Now through December 30 is your chance to see Carolee Shneemann’s exhibition Within and Beyond the Premises in Seattle at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery (15th Ave NE & 41st St
, Seattle). The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday for a suggested donation of $10.00.

The work on display makes a good case for Shneemann’s inclusion at the top of the modern art canon. There are few artists with work this diverse. The exhibition contains works from the 1950’s until today, and makes use of video, photography, performance, sculpture, painting, collage and more. Yet, there are also few artists whose body of work is so thematically cohesive. That is not to say that what Within and Beyond explores is by any means easy to articulate, or even comprehend. It is overly simplistic to label Shneemann a feminist artist. In fact, she breaks with almost every artistic and political tradition except for that of the iconoclast.

The most overt consistency throughout her work is the centrality of the body. She returns again and again to her human body, her female form, and uses it as the basis for her expression. Every piece begins with the artists’ body; the brush, the canvas, the projector, are all secondary to the body, and exist as mere extensions of it.

With her body, Schneemann cleaves the female away from the sexual - or perhaps - abstracts the sexual from the erotic. In one of her most provocative pieces, Inner Scroll (1975), Schneemann stood on stage, painted herself with mud, and then pulled a long paper scroll out of her own vagina, reading the printed words. (Within and Beyond features both a series of photographs documenting the performance, and the scroll itself.) Similarly, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963)  (see photo below) consists of six black and white close-up photos of the nude artist in which she “merged her own body with the environment of her painting/constructions,” according to a statement on the artist’s website. She contrasts the eroticism of her form and her postures with the chaotic paint strokes on her skin, and snakes crawling across her belly. As in Inner Scroll, Schneemann reclaims the images of sex from a masculine obsession with eroticism, and turns them into something gruesome, and powerful.

Obviously, Within and Beyond is not simply an advertisement for feminism. Advertisement is the business of complacency. Schneemann is not interested in establishing a discourse of gender and sexuality as she is in shattering the current one. The artist constantly questions, and ultimately subverts, the boundaries of our society. She creates her own limits, not conveniently definable by the popular idioms of art or politics. It is not enough to say that Schneemann is a visual artist, because her work is in equal measure conception. Literally, the art exists “within and beyond the premises.” It exists in the “premise” as a visual manifestation of the concept beyond. Furthermore, the artist works both within established axioms of art, and beyond those “premises.”

By paring the erotic with the fearsome, Schneemann evokes the constant tension that exists within desire between creation and destruction. And that is the job of the artist: to disrupt through creation. Art is itself a task of transformation, and within that transformation is a higher dialectic of creation and destruction. Carol Schneemann powerfully harnesses the destruction of creation, and it is accessible for the rest of the month at the Henry Art Gallery, in Seattle. 

Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963) (note: image from artist's website)

More info:

www.caroleeschneemann.com
www.henryart.org