Xiao Xiong
On May 13, 2017, Carolee Schneemann(American, b.1939) was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale - “VIVA ARTE VIVA”. For more than sixty years, Schneemann has made the groundbreaking innovations in the field of photography, performance, film, video, mixed media, and installations, she has constantly broken the boundaries and challenged the limits of contemporary art. As one of the most influential multimedia artists of the later half of the 20th century, Schneemann is perhaps best known for her provocative work Interior Scroll(1975), a bold performance representing what the artist called “The movement of interior thought to exterior signification”, …show more content…
Kinetic Painting covers Schneemann’s whole prolific career across the first and second floors. The second floor galleries present her pioneering films and performances along with a broad selection of her paintings, assemblages, drawings, and artist books, which together chart her evolutionary breakthrough of her expanded concept of painting. The first floor galleries put together a collection of the artist’s later works, which explore the intimacy, violence and mourning. Right beside the entrance at the first floor, in a small hidden corner room you may easily ignore, a 10x8 feet large screen project the landmark self-shot erotic films Fuses(1965), a controversial silent movie of Schneemann’s heterosexual love making with the composer James Tenney, celebrating their primitive human desire in garden of Eden, with her dear cat watching all the time. In fact she loves her cat so much that her photograph serial Infinity Kiss 1981-87 showing her deep kiss with her cat everyday is on also on view at MOMA PS1, which some people may feel very disturbing. Back into Fuses, this was at a time when movies couldn't show pubic hair or even say the word "vagina". Schneemann had to get the footage developed in a secret lab usually used for pornographic films. “She painted, bleached...and put so many collaged layers that the filmstrips were too thick to run through the printer!” according to the film