Carolee Schneemann

The pioneering artist Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) embraced a wide range of mediums: from painting to performance, film and video to mixed media and installations, famously applying the gestural physicality of action painting to kinetic environments and performances centered on the body—more often than not, her own. Many of the artist’s works have entered the canon of contemporary art, such as Eye Body (1963), Fuses (1964), Meat Joy (1964), Up To and Including Her Limits (1974) and Interior Scroll (1975).
From Then and Beyond consists of interviews with Schneemann conducted by art historian Oliver Kielmayer (Kunsthalle Winterthur) and curator Lara Pan at her home in New Paltz, New York. The transcript of these interviews, edited into 27 monologues and dialogues, is the last substantial testimony by the artist and is complemented by illustrations of her works and photographs of her house.

Edited by art historian Branden W. Joseph, the texts span diverse formats: included are journal entries, criticism, poems, essays and performance notes culled primarily from short-run magazines such as Caterpillar, Film Culture, The Fox, Manipulations and Matter, as well as academic journals such as Performing Arts Journal and Art Journal and mainstream media outlets including the New York Times and the Village Voice.

The book serves as a companion to Schneemann’s two earliest books—Parts of a Body House Book and Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter—offering new perspectives on the artist’s life, work and ideas through many writings that have never been reproduced in their original form. It features Schneemann’s reflections on her own works, including “Meat Joy,” “Divisions and Rubble,” and “Kitch’s Last Meal.”

Published with Artist's Institute.

Carolee's is the second issue of The Magazine of the Artist's Institute, the publication which takes each season of the Artist's Institute as a point of departure for new criticism, journalism, fiction, interviews and artist projects, developed around the work of a single artist. Dedicated to Carolee Schneemann (born 1939), this issue features a previously unpublished archive of images from Schneemann's studio that documents half a century of morphological connections between her work and other visual material, including art, advertising and popular culture. Published following the Artist's Institute's season of exhibitions and programming examining Schneemann's expanded conception of the body as material, Carolee's includes a new long-form profile of Schneemann by writer Maggie Nelson that considers the artist's relationship to the history of her reception and Schneemann's significant influence on subsequent generations of feminists.