Carolee Schneemann

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

 

Parts of a Body House Book was originally published in 1972 by Beau Geste Press and includes the first publishing of an excerpt from Schneemann’s Sexual Parameters Chart, Americana I Ching Apple Pie, film positives from two of Carolee’s films, notes and sketches on Kinetic Painting, a very special menstrual- blood-blotted paper work, and more. This reprinting, in production at the time of her death in 2019, is a facsimile of Carolee’s personal copy from the first edition; all hand interventions including corrections, stamping, staining, and highlighting were recreated to the artist’s exact wishes. Each copy is signed by Carolee’s beloved feline, La Niña, using a pigment mixed from beet juice and dirt gathered from the grounds of Carolee’s eighteenth century farmhouse in New Paltz, NY.

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) was one of the most influential artists of the second part of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, installations, and the written word—is characterized by radical formal experimentation and critical investigations of subjectivity, the erotic and taboo, and the social construction of the female body. Schneemann was the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her six-decade career, including the retrospective Kinetic Painting, presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2015–
2016 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2017–2018. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Film and video retrospectives have been held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Film Theatre, London; and Whitney Museum, New York, among others. Recent publications include the monograph Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015) and a book of her early writings, Uncollected Texts (PrimaryInformation, 2018). In 2017, Schneemann was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.