CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: MORE WRONG THINGS CURATED BY JUAN PUNTES JANUARY 18 – FEBRUARY 10, 2001
A site specific multi-channel video installation. The installation activates the entire gallery space with fourteen video monitors suspended from the ceiling within an extended tangle of wires, cables and cords. Video loops seen on the monitors present a compendium of “Wrong Things”, juxtaposing Schneemann’s visual archives of personal and public disasters. These elements are composed in relation to the beams, conduits and pipes which define the distinctive architectural aspects of the White Box gallery space. This work also responds to current trends of costly fabrication and refined presentation. A wall of recent Iris prints further integrates sources of more wrong things.
“Schneemann is a miner of the hidden, the unseen, the stolen and misappropriated.” —Bruce McPherson (from the introduction to More Than Meat Joy)
Formally trained as a painter and emerging in the early 1960s world of experimental film, music, Judson Dance Theatre and happenings, Carolee Schneemann has transformed the very definition of art, especially with regard to discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. Schneemann addresses archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the dynamic relationship between her body and the social body. The range of her work has been substantial and broadly influential: from painting and assemblage to films and installations, from solo improvisations to large group ensemble pieces, from starkly bare stagings to multi-media and multi-sensory extravaganzas.
