Carolee Schneemann

Exhibit A and Exhibit B 

PPOW Gallery & Galerie Lelong

Oct 21- December 3, 2016

A pioneer in body art movement in the United States, Carolee Schneeman is considered a major influence for artists working with body, gender and identity issues today. Her Meat Joy performance, still appropriated in art as well as popular culture, is a landmark for performance art and body politics. Her Interior Scroll performance, in which she withdrew a roll of paper from her genitalia to read an excerpt from a Super-8-film she previously made about an artist couple, claimed one of the most iconic imageries in art history. 

While art history is excessively accustomed to female nude, it is regrettably uncommon that the artist herself is female and nude. “I’m interested in sensuous pleasure and the power of the naked body as an active image rather than the same old, pacified, immobilized, historicized body,” underlines Schneemann in an interview with BOMB, when asked about appearing regularly nude in her performances. 

These joint exhibitions occupying two influential Chelsea galleries focus on the decades after the artist claimed wide success in 1960s with her revolutionary and controversial Fluxus happenings. Although the following years were spent with modest body of work compared her prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s, this dual project plans to prove the otherwise. Supported by ephemera documenting her groundbreaking body of work, the exhibitions not only provide an approach to Schneeman’s persuasive body of work through a contemporary lens, but also serves as a historic narrative to study.