Structuring Strategies: Carolee Schneemann
7:00 PM, April 22, 2008
New and Recent Videos by Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann will present a selection of recently released videos, including: Duo (2008), which incorporates extracts from her earlier Infinity Kisses and completes her exploration of human and feline sensual communication; Interior Scroll--The Cave (1995), a performance in a vast underground cave in which 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; Vesper's Stampede to My Holy Mouth (1992), in which Victoria Vesna and Schneemann explore suppressed feminist issues of female subjugation, the unconscious, the paranormal and goddess religions; Devour (2003-04), a montage that Schneemann describes as contrasting "evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments... political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace"; Mop-Mop--Improvisation for Job at New York University (2007), which captures an interview for a teaching position that Schneemann spontaneously transformed into a performance; the newly reedited version of Americana I Ching Apple Pie (2007), which documents the artist in front of a packed lecture hall as she demonstrates, with hilarious and deadpan delivery, how to make the quintessential American dessert--apple pie; Body Collage (1967), in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and then rolls through a floor covered in shredded paper, transforming herself into a constantly changing, moving collage. (This film was preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the NFPF.); Meat Joy (1964), an erotic rite, a celebration of flesh as material that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.