Seething Under the Snow: Film and Video by Carolee Schneemann
With Additional Works by Ellen Cantor, Cheryl Donegan, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Joan Jonas, Andrew Lampert, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, and Hannah Wilke
The Carolee Schneemann Foundation and EAI are pleased to offer three programs of film and video available for free screening online from December 15, 2023–January 30, 2024.
Carolee Schneemann’s films—including Fuses (1964–67), Viet-Flakes (1965), Plumb Line (1971)—are heralded as classics of the postwar avant-garde film movement in their radical deconstruction of the role of the performer, their presentation of the female body, and their blurring of the distinctions between documentary and fiction. They subvert and transcend the tropes of conventional cinema and defy expectations of the avant-garde film through their presentation of the personal, the ecstatic, and pressing social issues. When she shifted from celluloid to video in the late 1970s, Schneemann continued to push against the expectations of the medium with single-channel video works and more elaborate video installations, from Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) to Devour (2003–04), that explore themes of gender and sexuality, identity and subjectivity, and war.
CSF and EAI have invited the Estate of Ellen Cantor, Cheryl Donegan, the Estate of Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Joan Jonas, Andrew Lampert, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, and the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive to present work in dialogue with three strands of Schneemann’s moving-image work: antiwar films and videos, sex and images of the body, and winter celebrations. These strands overlap freely, as Kenneth White explores in his essay “Hello, Darkness,” also published on this website.
The presentation complements Schneemann’s exhibition Of Course You Can / Don’t You Dare at PPOW (392 Broadway) through January 20, 2024.
Image: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964-67. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation.
Image: Barbara Hammer, Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, 2001. Courtesy of the Estate of Barbara Hammer.
“The grotesque fulfillment of the Western split between matter and spirit, mind and body, individualized ‘man’ against cosmic natural unities. Destruction so vast as to become randomized, constant as weather.” (Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 1979)
“I need to combine what is most ecstatic and what is most disturbing when I’m working with a source of social political conflict. There’s always an ambiguity that I want to really tear you apart. I want you to feel and hear this ecstatic moment that is then blown apart and shredded and chopped up and disturbed.” (Carolee Schneemann, interviewed in 2018, published in From Then and Beyond, 2022)
Carolee Schneemann: Viet-Flakes (1962–67), Snows (1969/2009), Souvenir of Lebanon (1983/2006), Devour (2003–04)
Martha Rosler: If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION (1985)
Barbara Hammer: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (2001)
Walid Raad, Souheil Bachar: Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) (2001) (Courtesy of Video Data Bank)
Ken Jacobs: America at War (2011)
Program 2: Fuses, Refuses: On Sex and Images
Image: Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964-67. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation.
“Art can be an area where we dismantle taboos, constraints of perception, materials, structure. … These films personally and determinedly manifest aspects of our own sexual vision apart from, and in resistance to, those values inherited from masculine sexual visions. We are not Muse, whore, sexual object, or an ideality. We take the forbidden camera into our own hands. We are not actresses extending or sustaining anyone's image of what is ‘female.’ Each of these films demonstrates concrete experience, the lived-life, not an invented, fantasized sexuality.” (Carolee Schneemann, introducing Fuses at Telluride Film Festival, September 4, 1977)
Carolee Schneemann: Fuses (1964–67), Interior Scroll—The Cave (1995), Infinity Kisses—The Movie (2008)
Barbara Hammer: Dyketactics (1974)
Hannah Wilke: Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass (1976)
Ellen Cantor: Madame Bovary’s Revenge (The Lovers) (1995)
Cheryl Donegan: Refuses (2006)
Program 3: Winter Celebrations
Image: Carolee Schneemann, Pinea Silva: Lost Meanings of the Christmas Tree, 2012. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation.
December 20, 1959
SNOW, best so far
wake to white which J. promised! Finish tree
moving thru tinsel. Hare leaping in snow
J. reads Stein “First Reader” and others
so nice under tree
(Carolee Schneemann, diary entry, 1959)
Carolee Schneemann: Carl Ruggles’ Christmas Breakfast (1963), Americana I Ching Apple Pie (2007), Pinea Silva: Lost Meanings of the Christmas Tree (2012)
Joan Jonas: Wind (1968)
Andrew Lampert: Some December (2011)
Image: Carolee Schneemann, Americana I Ching Apple Pie, 2007. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation.
Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. She holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art. Her work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her six-decade career, including Body Politics, at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2022–23), and Kinetic Painting, presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2015–16, the Museum für modern Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2017, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2017–18. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among others. Film and video retrospectives have been held internationally, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Film Theatre, London; and Whitney Museum, New York. Recent publications include Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015), Uncollected Texts (Primary Information, 2018), and From Then and Beyond (VFMK, 2022). In 2017, Schneemann was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.
The Carolee Schneemann Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the legacy of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019). Established by the artist in 2013, the Foundation advances the understanding of Schneemann’s work through scholarship, exhibitions, and publications. Over the next few years, the Foundation will establish a residency program at Schneemann’s home in upstate New York in order to support artists whose work shares Schneemann’s commitment to new methods of aesthetic experimentation.