Carolee Schneemann
P.P.O.W/Galerie Lelong
What does an enduring commitment to feminist antiwar resistance look like? For more than five decades, Carolee Schneemann has underwritten her art with a desire to understand and observe. From Viet-Flakes, 1965, and Snows, 1967, which protested the Vietnam War, to the “Lebanon Series,” 1983–91, on the destruction of Beirut, and Terminal Velocity, 2001–2005, wherein she took on 9/11, she has long borne witness to cruelty and empathy, though discussions of her oeuvre sideline this theme in favor of other, related issues of gender and sexuality. Hot on the heels of her retrospective at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria, Schneemann’s two-part exhibition this past fall offered lesser-known yet no-less-poignant examples of her ongoing mode of defiance.
“Further Evidence: Exhibit A” at P.P.O.W gathered works that focus on metaphors of illness—namely the militaristic sort used in medicine (i.e., “the war on cancer”). Known/Unknown: Plague Column, 1995–96, is a sickly, shrine-like multipart installation that evokes Schneemann’s own history with breast cancer. The title makes reference to a baroque Viennese monument from 1693 that features an angel beating a ragged witch personifying disease, erected to trumpet thankfulness for the end of the bubonic plague. Schneemann’s work offers no such gratitude, however: Collaged elements combine images of cancer cells with medical reports; syringes pierce oranges (a nod to how some patients learn to inject themselves); and four video monitors show fragmented diaristic images. Around the corner from this piece, several works on paper belonging to Schneemann’s “Diario” series, created while she received alternative treatments in Tijuana in 1995 and 2007, stood as brooding testaments to her resolve to never stop working. Together, both works resist the idea of the ill body as a battlefield to be conquered with traditional regimens.
At Galerie Lelong, “Further Evidence: Exhibit B” addressed death and war more overtly—via Precarious, 2009, a commission by Tate Liverpool here making its US debut, and the multichannel video installation Devour, 2003–2004, the lone piece in either show included in her Austrian retrospective. Precarious merges video clips of dancing humans and animals—prisoners in the Philippines, a bear from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Strike, a cockatoo—captured by someone or some state as well as the frame. Two of three projectors employed in this work feature motorized mirror systems that sit in front of their lenses, refracting and throwing the projection to the left and the right. The images move back and forth and bleed onto each another, claustrophobically filling three walls. Meanwhile, the ominous Devour displays footage of a student killed by a sniper in Sarajevo as well as, cacophonously, snippets of a mouth gulping up noodles, a baby nursing, and Schneemann being licked by a cat. It is, in the end, an object lesson in the artist’s career-long embrace of themes of violence and sensation, collapsing the irrational brutality of combat with the deeds of sustenance and affection that get us through the day.
The two shows celebrated Schneemann’s appropriation of grim, difficult imagery—her commitment to witnessing, though perhaps not to understanding. It comes as no surprise that she’s been recently collecting images of deaths in Syria. I am sure the resulting works will be challenging to see, but I’m thankful to Schneemann for never holding back. As is so often the case with her work, there’s always an uncovering, an urgent disclosure. Thank goddess the Salzburg retrospective is coming to MoMA PS1 at the end of the year.