Carolee Schneemann is a painter. She studied painting in college. She painted a male nude that got her in trouble with her male teachers. She has pretty much stayed in trouble ever since. She has a gift for getting men upset with her art.
Soon afterward she was teaching drawing at the University of Illinois campus at Navy Pier and hanging out at Second City. “They helped me think about using the self for performance.”
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Moving on to New York City, she was uninspired by the painting scene. “I just had the sense that the canvas had already been completely vitalized and explored by Pollock and de Kooning. All I could really do with my need to activate that surface was to slice through it and come out the other side.” Now, she says, this reminds her of the Godard film where men watching a nudie movie lunge for the stripper on the screen.
Schneemann soon turned from the outdated canvas–turf she termed the “Art Stud Club”–to the underground cinema.
“So I made a deal with the film spirit. I’m going to work with a subject until it dies. There’s going to be a very clear time frame around it. The subject was a 17-year-old cat. The promise was I would film what the cat saw, and intercut that with details of the lives of people I would see the cat paying attention to, and then intercut that with my feeding the cat until the cat died.”
“My work is about the ecstatic. For me it’s like an entrancement where I invite very uncertain, very unconscious energies to come through me. It’s a matter of psychic life and death to get the suppressed female energies out, now that I know that’s what I’m really working on.”
Schneemann’s installation Cycladic Imprints opens tonight, November 6, at Randolph Street Gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee, with a free reception from 6 to 8. It will remain on view through December 23. Saturday the gallery will screen her Kitch’s Last Meal, Plumb Line, and Fuses beginning at 8. Admission is $7, $5 for students and RSG members. Schneemann will be present at both events; call 666-7737 for more.
