[-empyre-] Carolee Schneeman and Barbara Hammer

Mon Apr 22 11:44:00 AEST 2019

Hello one and all,

Renate Ferro and Constanza Salazar asked us to reflect on these questions:

What is a body? What can a body do? How is a body rendered an object? And,
how does this “object” have agency? How do we place/position these
wonderful female artists we are celebrating these weeks within these
notions and as female artists in an art history that still celebrates male
artists?

I believe these questions are at the root of a female guided exploration of
art making.  As a young filmmaker and student in the late 1980s, I remember
reading Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" (1975), in which she proposes that “sexual inequality is a
controlling social force in the cinematic representations of the sexes; and
that the male gaze is a social construct derived from the ideologies of
patriarchy.” (Wikipedia)  When I held my camera and framed my world, I
worked extremely hard to keep her words in mind, knowing that holding my
own Bolex 16mm camera did not necessarily mean that I would produce images
that came from my own experience as a woman.  I needed to find a personal,
somatic cinema that embraced a new physical relationship to this apparatus.
It wasn’t just that I wanted to produce images that spoke to women’s lives,
liberation, love, struggle, awareness or consciousness.  Watching “Fuses”
(1965) by Carolee Schneemann (https://vimeo.com/12606342) or “Optic Nerve”
(1985) by Barbara Hammer (https://vimeo.com/49508330 excerpt) catapulted my
camerawork into an expanded, self-aware, performative mode of working.
Their radical, improvisational and totally physical cinematography pushed
me and other young women artists to dive deeply and fully into our bodies
and ourselves. My earliest film responses to their work were "Drawn and
Quartered" (1987, https://vimeo.com/158996334) and "The House of Science"
(1991, https://vimeo.com/158998705), both films that I shot and performed
in myself nude.

As I mentioned in my earlier empyre post this week, I became very close to
both Carolee and Barbara over the last thirty years and made my film
"Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor" (https://vimeo.com/245243561) last year.
They were dear friends, fellow artists, and mentors. In 1998, Barbara had a
one-month artist residency in a shack in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack
had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with
her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a
journal.  In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her
personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing
to me and invited me to make a film with the material.

Two weeks ago, I completed the film at the  Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio
program. The film is called “A Month of Single Frames” (14 min.) If anyone
would like to see the film, please write to me directly and I will send you
a link with a password. I would be honored to share it.

Lynne Sachs

On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 10:15 AM Constanza Salazar <cs2293 at cornell.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you, Renate for your reply.
>
> In my research I constantly find myself returning not only to the body but
> also to feminist artists and their works. My research primarily deals with
> tactical media since 2001 in the US, after 911. I am mostly concerned with
> how artists are thinking beyond the visual and considering the senses,
> affect, camouflage, and embodiment through technology/new media as a means
> of resistance against power and control from major tech corporations and
> even the government. Many of the artists working in these areas, I believe
> owe a lot to the works by these pioneering feminist artists who used their
> bodies through performance, video, and as an object in itself against the
> usual or traditional methods of visual representation on canvas. Artists
> like Schneeman, and others like Jill Magid, for instance, use their bodies
> as modes of political dissent, and these are some ways, through which we
> can think about embodiment rather than disembodiment--which is the usual
> traditional way of thinking about technologies--as a source of power and
> transformation. I think that it's necessary, especially for contemporary
> art scholars to always look back at precedents, especially in the case of
> new technology, of how the same issues we are dealing with today,
> surveillance, visual capture, the marginalization of bodies, and the
> compartmentalization (categorization) of bodies, have their roots early on.
> Moreover, the roots of resistance begin with feminist artists. It is in the
> way that the body transforms, metamorphosizes, and can move fluidly that I
> base my research on and why Schneeman was so influential for me in thinking
> about "contemporary issues."
>
> Thanks.
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 9:46 PM Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Constanza wrote:
>> <snip>
>> But for me, it was in the role that the
>> body played within the works by feminist artists that made an impact on
>> me. It was the return to the body, as an object, a material thing, a
>> corporeal and phenomenological thing in the world that inspired a true
>> awakening in thinking intellectually about the role of women throughout art
>> history.
>> <snip>
>>
>> Thanks Constanza for your thoughts about Carolee Scheemann.  A quick
>> anecdote about Carolee.  Tim and I attended a feminist conference at the
>> University of Montreal in 2002 or 2003.  Carolee was an invited guest
>> lecturer.  A bit later in the afternoon on Saturday, the second day of the
>> conference, she suggested the three of us escape the stuffiness of the day
>> and grab a drink at a local bar.  We spent a wonderfully interesting time
>> listening to her ideas most particularly about politics as it was shortly
>> after 911. She was adamant about moving to Canada to escape as she felt
>> vulnerable as an artist as the US Government was tracking citizens and
>> infiltrating rights with illegal wiretaps and other means. As an artist,
>> she felt particularly vulnerable.  I believe she ended up moving to Canada
>> for a short time after our conversation but for that afternoon we ended up
>> taking a walk in the beautiful sunlit grass, Carolee in bare feet.
>>
>> The recording of all histories is a precarious one. What is it that gets
>> recorded?  What privileges certain information over others?   I was also
>> frustrated as a young artist sitting in art history and art studios where
>> the artists presented to us were that of a western male canon.  For me art
>> history was documented in Janson’s Art History and Gardner’s Book of Art
>> History where historical art was presented according to time periods and
>> classical categories:  Cave Era, Egyptian Art, Greek Art, Roman and Gothic
>> periods and so on.
>>
>> Early feminist artists such as Scheemann along with Judy Chicago, Hanne
>> Darbovan, Eva Hesse, and others are featured in a well-crafted recent film
>> by artist Lynn Hershman. !Women Art and Revolution.
>>   http://www.womenartrevolution.com/
>> Hershman’s film tells of the feminist movement born from politics and
>> free speech through direct interviews and artefacts of video and film. It
>> is through the film that Hershman corrects the telling of art history
>> through original documents.
>>
>> The feminist turn to the body was indeed a turning point and one that
>> helped to raise the consciousness of women. Thanks Constanza.  Looking
>> forward to hearing more.
>>
>> Renate
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Renate Ferro
>> Visiting Associate Professor
>> Director of Undergraduate Studies
>> Department of Art
>> Tjaden Hall 306
>> rferro at cornell.edu
>>
>>
>>
>> On 4/16/19, 4:27 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on
>> behalf of Constanza Salazar" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> on behalf of cs2293 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> --
>
> *Constanza Salazar*
>
> Ph.D. Student
>
> Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies
>
> GM08 Goldwin Smith Hall
>
> Cornell University
>
> Ithaca, NY 14853
>
> cs2293 at cornell.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-- 
Lynne Sachs
www.lynnesachs.com
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