Artspace And Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki Present A Lecture By Carolee Schneemann Legendary Feminist Performance
Artist
Auckland Art Gallery auditorium / Thursday 16 November at 6pm
Emerging in the early 1960s world of experimental film, music, poetry, dance and happenings, Carolee Schneemann has
transformed art with her groundbreaking works on the body, sexuality and gender. The American artist's work addresses
archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the dynamic relationship between her body and
the social body. Her influential work ranges from solo improvisations to large group ensemble pieces, from starkly bare
stagings to multi-media and multi-sensory extravaganzas. A pioneer of body art, she is best known for her watershed 1964
performance Meat Joy, a orgiastic group performance involving nakedness, sausages, fish and chicken (image attached).
Marcia Tucker writes: "By the mid 1960s, performance played a major role in the New York art world, yet women were a
conspicuous minority on the scene. It was only after 1968, when the first wave of the Women's Movement hit New York that
pieces by Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, Rachael Rosenthal, Yvonne Rainer, Hannah Wilke, Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Moorman,
Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, and others began to take on the accumulated force of a shift in collective thinking
about art... Schneemann's work was difficult to pin down, but it became controversial and ultimately marginalised
because of the way she used her own body; her style was direct, sexual, autobiographical, and confrontational. Her work
couldn't be called "conceptual" because it was too raw, too emotive, too immediate. Nor did people perceive its
connection to 'action' painting, which was firmly rooted in the heroic, male tradition... In the context of early
feminist art activities, Schneemann's work was viewed by many at the time as liberating; nonetheless, it ran counter to
prevailing feminist politics because it didn't seem to constitute a critique of patriarchy. It had a little too much
pleasure, a little too much (hetero)sexuality, and an uncompromising refusal on the part of the artist to justify
herself to anyone."
Schneemann's performances - direct extensions of her work as a painter and filmmaker - have been presented throughout
Europe and the United States. Schneemann's video, film, painting, photography, performance art and installation works
have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of
Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in Up To And Including Her Limits, a
retrospective at New York's New Museum which the International Association of Art Critics judged "best show originating
in a New York museum" at their annual awards.
Schneemann is visiting New Zealand to participate in the Colloquium conference at Christchurch's Robert McDougall Art
Gallery. Come hear he speak for one night only at Auckland Art Gallery. Schneemann's lecture is presented with support
from Museums Aotearoa.
For further information or to book interviews with Schneemann, please call Sonya Korohina or Robert Leonard at Artspace
(9) 3034965.
NOVEMBER AT ARTSPACE
KARIN SANDER 15 November - 9 December; with the support of the Goethe Institut
German artist Karin Sander's latest works are small human figures. These Lilliputian figures are not made by hand, and
they reveal nothing of her touch or subjectivity. Instead she draws on advanced 3-D scanning technology, outputing the
digitised image layer-by-layer in acrylic at 1:10 scale in a process called "fused deposition modeling". Finally the
figures are airbrushed. So the results are really a hybrid of sculpture, photography, painting and computer art. Sander
has so far invited friends, associates, and virtual strangers to be scanned, and the results are intensely and eerily
human, right down to the nuances of expressions, creases in clothes, postures, eye color and hairdos. It's not like
looking at miniature sculptures, but at miniaturised people. All the big and tiny details of the body are there, but so
too are pronounced traces of the high tech process, the ridges of the acrylic layers from which the figures are
comprised suggesting video scan lines.