Carolee Schneemann

This film consists entirely of close ups of famous persons' bottoms. Ono meant it to encourage a dialogue for world peace.

Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search, he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women.

Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.

Maya Deren's Sink, a 30 minute experimental film, is an evocative tribute to the mother of avantgarde American film. The film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Teiji Ito's family, Carolee Schneemann and Judith Malvina, float through the homes recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren's architectural and personal interior space. Clips from Maya Deren's films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed appearing on the floorboard, furniture, and in the bowl of her former sink. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know as film with its imaginary nature evokes a former time and space.

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

An experimental short in which a couple engaged in lovemaking is superimposed over ocean and beach scenes.

A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.

The tradition of modernism and neo-avant-garde are faced in the project, in which Radziszewski is confronting both – Polish and Western – narratives of art history. Starting from the subversive work of Natalia LL, Radziszewski raises a series of questions on issues such as gender, feminist art, conceptual art, queer and East-West relations and their impact on the art world in the context of the Iron Curtain. America Is Not Ready For This is an open archive in search of parallels between the artistic experiences of Natalia LL and Radziszewski, as well as an attempt to examine the rules of the positioning of artists in the art world, both at that time and today.

Unable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.

A comprehensive documentation of new art movements from 1945 to the present day. Beginning with the "Internationale Situationniste," "Cobra," "Spur," and "Wiener Gruppe" groups in Europe, and moving on to the international Happening and Fluxus movements, including the Viennese Actionists, and from 1970 onward to international Body and Performance Art, which also encompassed media art—film and video—the documentary presents film and photographic material from these art movements.

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann.

Images of two women, two men, and a gray cat form a montage of rapid bits of movement. A woman is in a bedroom, another wears an apron: they work with their hands, occasionally looking up. A man enters a room, a woman smiles. He sits, another man sits and smokes. The cat stretches. There are close-ups of each. The light is dim; a filter accentuates red. A bare foot stands on a satin sheet. A woman disrobes. She pets the cat. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

About the relationship between a man and a woman.

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of animal attributes. Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions; she channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling wolf or crawling across the projection area, squealing like a pig.

Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a documentary about gender construction.

The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance. Sound: Carolee Schneemann. -- EAI

Writes Schneemann: "The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May '77, as a cooking event for the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking 'material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, 'traditionally you need an apron, but it doesn't matter where you put it.'

Video documentation of performance of the work hosted by De Appel, Amsterdam, in 1977 and filmed by Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas. In ABC - We print anything - In the cards (1977) Schneemann documented dreams, advice and conversations relating to her shifting relationships. She collated 315 numbered cards, containing both text and photographic imagery, which she photographed from her domestic life. Schneemann (the ‘C’ in ABC) analyses her complex set of experiences separating from ‘A’ (artist Anthony McCall) while drawing closer to ‘B’ (publisher Bruce McPherson). The cards capture the dynamic, paradoxical, humorous and contrary aspects of relationships, forming an intimate yet measured set of information.

This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.

Viet Flakes was composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images, compiled over five years, from foreign magazines and newspapers. Schneemann uses the 8mm camera to “travel” within the photographs, producing a volatile animation.

An experimental short in which a couple engaged in lovemaking is superimposed over ocean and beach scenes.

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann's previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of intimacy and physicality, the erotic and the obscene, the incubation of dream enactment. Catscan centers on the death of a beloved cat as a means to ritualize more universal mourning and to bring forward ghosts of the past. As a ritual consecration, Schneemann, blindfolded, dances out of 20 yards of red fabric wound around her body. The performance, which had a duration of approximately 90 minutes and variously featured 5 to 8 performers, included a slide projection system, 15 video monitors, ladders, furniture, suitcases, and debris.

Vulvic puns, jokes and ruminations on the meanings of menstrual blood activate a range of taboos surrounding cultural notions of the feminine as a metaphoric battle ground of the body and of language itself. Schneemann, naked and in red pajamas, merged her physical movements within a continuous slide projection. The projected images weave into archeology of unconscious forms, pulled to the surface of conscious recognition. This videotape is a compilation of several performances, edited by Schneemann.

Body Collage is a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage. "My intention was not simply to collage my body (as an object), but to enact movement so that the collage image would be active, found, not predetermined or posed," writes Schneemann.

RED NEWS (1962-67) considers the interplay between media, entertainment, and violence. "I also had Red News simultaneously, that magical little film that I also found mystically by closing my eyes and putting my hands up in front of a whole wall of 16mm films and I just pulled it and it was this perfectly remarkable compendium of disasters, a little feature that they showed at contemporary movies, Movietone or something, and it was just one disaster after another. A boat blows up, motorcycle racers blow up. It was very satisfying, one explosion after another, and then it cut to Santa Claus appearing for the American Legion."

Schneemann's classic 1966 aerial "Kinetic Theatre" work was first staged at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, with eight performers moving to a score of randomized encounter on layers of rigged ropes and pulleys. One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version is enacted outdoors in trees and across the surface of a lake, in sequences directed by Schneemann.

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of animal attributes. Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions; she channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling wolf or crawling across the projection area, squealing like a pig.

This is a newly restored version of documentation of the 1967 group performance Snows, which was built out of Schneemann's outrage and sorrows over the atrocities of the Vietnam War. An ethereal stage environment combining colored light panels, film projection, torn collage, hanging sacks of colored water, "snow," crusted branches, rope, foil and foam was the set and setting in which an audience-activated electronic switching system controlled elements of the performance/installation. Images from film, slide and live action propel silent, ghostly performers to become aggressor and victim, torturer and tortured, lover and beloved, as well as simply themselves in this breakthrough mixed-media film performance. (The film Viet-Flakes is a central element).

Pinea Silva: Lost Meanings of the Christmas Tree, a performance-lecture by Carolee Schneemann, was first presented on December 15, 2011 as part of the 40th Anniversary Benefit at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). The live recording, which was edited by Schneemann at EAI, represents an audio-visual collage in which the images used in the artist's lecture intervene in the recording of the lecture itself.

Schneemann’s cat, Kitch, who was featured in works such as Fuses, was a major figure in Schneemann’s work for almost twenty years. The moving conclusion to her Autobiographical Trilogy documents the routines of daily life whilst time passes, a relationship winds down and death closes in: filming and recording stopped when the elderly cat died.

The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance. Sound: Carolee Schneemann. -- EAI

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from Christmas to his incomplete opera The Sunken Bell. The hand-painted film stock heightens the impressionistic vitality of this snapshot of the 84-year-old composer, who is heard paraphrasing Freud: "Everything that you do is a matter of sex. That is the great passion of life."

Devour is a dual-channel version of the artist's multi-channel video projection installation of the same name. Schneemann notes that this work brings together "a range of images which contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments... political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace." In this dense montage, the title stands for the voraciously synthetic, head-on rush of contemporary media, and the corresponding, near-addictive impulse of its consumers.

Writes Schneemann: "The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May '77, as a cooking event for the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking 'material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, 'traditionally you need an apron, but it doesn't matter where you put it.'

Video documentation of performance of the work hosted by De Appel, Amsterdam, in 1977 and filmed by Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas. In ABC - We print anything - In the cards (1977) Schneemann documented dreams, advice and conversations relating to her shifting relationships. She collated 315 numbered cards, containing both text and photographic imagery, which she photographed from her domestic life. Schneemann (the ‘C’ in ABC) analyses her complex set of experiences separating from ‘A’ (artist Anthony McCall) while drawing closer to ‘B’ (publisher Bruce McPherson). The cards capture the dynamic, paradoxical, humorous and contrary aspects of relationships, forming an intimate yet measured set of information.

A performance in which Schneemann personifies an irrepressible vulva, which engages two animal hand puppets in a clamorous deconstruction of sexual bias in French semiotics, Marxism, patriarchal religions and physical taboos.

Up To and Including Her Limits extends the principles of Jackson Pollock's action painting. Schneemann is suspended from a rope harness, naked and drawing; her moving body becomes a measure of concentration, the sustained and variable movements of her extended drawing hand creates a dense web of strokes and marking. This video captures the concentration and raw intensity of Schneemann's presence and use of her own body. The piece was edited by Schneemann in 1984 from video footage of six performances: the Berkeley Museum, 1974; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, 1974; Artists Space, NY, 1974; Anthology Film Archives, NY, 1974; The Kitchen, NY, 1976; and the Studio Galerie, Berlin, 1976.

A compilation of Schneemann's anti-Vietnam War group performances, this work merges film projection, sound and slide systems, light beams, audience and performer action in a sensory collage linking the exposed Illinois landscape to the devastation in Vietnam. Writes Schneemann: "I think of this work as an exploded canvas, units of rapidly changing clusters. A flow of energy which makes an active audience inevitable and necessary — not to mimic the performance, but to absorb relations within the space and between one another — to be correspondent to the materials and imagery, grasping a conscious and realizable wish to replace the performers with themselves."

In a vast underground cave, Schneemann and seven nude women perform the ritualized actions of Interior Scroll reading the text as each woman slowly extracts a scroll from her vagina. The scroll embodies the primacy of an extended visual line shaped as both concept and action. The extracted text merges critical theory with the body as a source of knowledge. Beatty's camera moves from the naked group actions into close-ups of the unraveling text.

For this performative/lecture, Schneemann invited Teija Lammi, museum librarian at the Porin Taidemuseo in Pori, Finland, to be an improvisatory participant. Together Schneemann and Lammi physically respond to images of the artist's cats. Schneemann relates her own research into historic obscenities connecting the various implications of "pussy". Lammi translates Schneemann's shocking words into Finnish.

Eight performers, suspended from ropes, move to a score of randomized encounter. Schneemann writes that this "kinetic theatre" work was "conceived as an aerial event with ropes rigged across the canal at San Marco... finally realized at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, then later rigged in a grove of trees. The illuminated aqueous planes of Venice motivated the performers on layers of ropes which enclosed and surrounded the audience seated below." One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version features original film footage by Elaine Summers.

Infinity Kisses - The Movie completes Schneemann's exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses - The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.