Carolee Schneemann’s Art and Legacy: New Perspectives (Memorial Session)
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Women in the ArtsCarolee Schneemann’s death last March marked the annals of American art history with the loss of an artist and thinker whose diverse and revolutionizing multimedia practices have left an indelible imprint on contemporary art. It also marked the loss of a feminist artist whose radical sexual politics helped initiate an influential discourse for women-identified artists that both critiqued and resisted the suppression of the feminine in Western culture. The challenges that the aesthetics and body politics of her work presented to art criticism and patriarchy, but also to feminism, are evidenced in the contradictions of her reception since the 1960s. Only in the last few years before her death, Schneemann saw an intensification of her work’s scholarly and curatorial appreciation, and witnessed her overdue embrace by the art establishment with a solo retrospective at MoMA (alas through Salzburg and PS1) and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion Award in 2017. The Committee on Women in the Arts honors Schneemann’s pioneering contribution to postwar avant-garde with a session that focuses on different aspects of her multifaceted and polysemous oeuvre. With her wish for rigorous research and scholarship underpinning its memorial contours, we seek papers that advance new perspectives on the art, writing, politics, legacy, and reception of Carolee Schneemann, within and beyond the poetics of her radical voice. In doing so, this session carries forward her protest of the easy slippage of female production into invisibility and reductive posthumous acknowledgement, which she herself sought to defy with writings that have shaped her work’s understanding.
Field of Study:
Chairs:
Kalliopi Minioudaki,Independent Scholar and Curator - minioudaki@aol.com
and
Rachel Middleman,California State University, Chico - rmiddleman@csuchico.edu
Discussant:
Amelia G. Jones,University of Southern California - ameliaj@usc.edu
