A Modest Encomium to Carolee Schneeman
BE PREPARED
to have your brain picked to have the pickings misunderstood to be mistreated whether your success increases or decreases if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed) they will almost never believe you really did it (what you did do) they will patronize you humor you try to sleep with you want you to transform them with your energy… —Carolee Schneeman |
As an officially “elder” artist, I’ve come to realize that my sense of agency and self-awareness as young artist rested upon three foundational moments. The first occurred when I was ten, the last at age sixteen.
The first was listening to WNYC’s live broadcast of the artist-intended “self-destruction” of Jean Tinguely’s metal and mixed media kinetic sculpture Homage to New York in the MoMA garden in 1960.
The third came in 1966 on the heels of a lecture by Larry Rivers, whose painting I greatly admired. The take-away was that a first-rate painter can be an idiot savant.
Between these two pivot points came an encounter with the work of Carolee Schneeman. In November, 1964, a hipper and more precocious high school classmate Shanghai’d me into accompanying him to a performance of Meat Joy* at the Judson Memorial Church. I was 14.
To distill its effect a quintessence, the combined force of Schneeman’s commanding presence, the full sensual engagement of the performance itself and the manifest intentionality of its realization – formality of design ever on the edge of anarchy – effectively demolished my internal fourth wall. It has never been rebuilt.
Schneeman’s death, on March 6th of this year, prompted a question I ask when circumstances bring me to consider the extended family of cultural figures whose work has directly informed my own:
What do we owe our teachers?
To this question, my only available answer is: To recognize them within our lineage, even as we carry on.
In the contuation of our work, the spirit of our teachers mingles with our own, and thus becomes ever available for transmission to our contemporaries, and those who follow us.
* A version of Meat Joy premiered at the 3’ Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris in May, 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneeman
The first was listening to WNYC’s live broadcast of the artist-intended “self-destruction” of Jean Tinguely’s metal and mixed media kinetic sculpture Homage to New York in the MoMA garden in 1960.
The third came in 1966 on the heels of a lecture by Larry Rivers, whose painting I greatly admired. The take-away was that a first-rate painter can be an idiot savant.
Between these two pivot points came an encounter with the work of Carolee Schneeman. In November, 1964, a hipper and more precocious high school classmate Shanghai’d me into accompanying him to a performance of Meat Joy* at the Judson Memorial Church. I was 14.
To distill its effect a quintessence, the combined force of Schneeman’s commanding presence, the full sensual engagement of the performance itself and the manifest intentionality of its realization – formality of design ever on the edge of anarchy – effectively demolished my internal fourth wall. It has never been rebuilt.
Schneeman’s death, on March 6th of this year, prompted a question I ask when circumstances bring me to consider the extended family of cultural figures whose work has directly informed my own:
What do we owe our teachers?
To this question, my only available answer is: To recognize them within our lineage, even as we carry on.
In the contuation of our work, the spirit of our teachers mingles with our own, and thus becomes ever available for transmission to our contemporaries, and those who follow us.
* A version of Meat Joy premiered at the 3’ Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris in May, 1964.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneeman