Introduction for Carolee Schneemann

Bowery Poetry Club

October 2, 2004

What is this thing, this body?

What are we doing here, as bodies, and as a social body?

Whence this crazy sensorium, these pleasures, this pain, this ever-bewildering mortality?

What’s sex? What’s love? What’s aggression? What’s war?

More than any artist I can think of, with the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci, CS (whom I have elsewhere referred to as a “renaissance being”) has always explored these most fundamental questions.

There is a unique sortilege in her art’s expanding dimensionality. It goes far beyond, say, the charming instance of Max Fleischer animating Koko the Clown right out of his inkwell, or the misogynist Pygmalion kissing his sexy statue into life.

She has, with her sorcery, taken even the brilliantly meta Courbet one step further. In his immense painting of 1855, “The Artist’s Studio,” a nude model stands behind the painter at work. Half-draped by a sheet, but still revealing most of her luscious form, she cocks her head, seeming to admire the grand landscape he is rendering. Or is she? Perhaps she is trying to see the painting from a different perspective, and meditating on how she might do it better.

In my version, that model is Carolee Schneemann. (who in fact did work as a model when she first came to NYC). In a neat “Purple Rose of Cairo” maneuver, she steps right out of that painting, and proceeds to turn art UPSIDE DOWN. In one of the myriad ways that she examines the relationship between, and sometimes separates, figure and ground, she practically invents performance art. She works in most media: painting, film, installation, video, and text. She becomes world renowned. It’s not that she has her finger on the pulse of the moment, but rather, she is the pulse of the moment. Touché, Courbet!

Among her great achievements is having set into motion the reproduction of a socially galvanizing meme of gylanic energy that may be our greatest hope in beginning to topple the bellicose androcentrics who now dominate the planet. My co-Americans, it is with unbridled jubilation that I welcome to this stage a luminous revolutionary, Carolee Schneemann…