Carolee Schneemann’s solo exhibition at Lisson – Whitehot Magazine
3 June 2025
Carolee Schneemann’s solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery is a gift to Los Angeles. Her work, vision and fierce poetic intellect are not as well known here as they are in New York. Schneemann (1939–2019) is a profoundly important artist whose imagination encompassed a reinterpretation of art history through the lens of what she termed vulvic space. Through a feminine embrace of sexual power and the ecstasy of the flesh, she used her body as a vehicle and a metaphor to shape Dionysian works in performance, video, installation and sculpture. Her art expressed the belief that joy is a birthright, and from this vantage point she created works that are a profound search for freedom and a critique of the powers that seek to rob us of our freedom. Her full embrace of sensuality and sexual pleasure as feminine power informs her mythology and imbues her art with an ethos that resonates in the work of many contemporary female artists.
Schneemann was an early pioneering feminist artist whose orgiastic performance piece “Meat Joy” (1964) established her as an important artist, using her body to communicate mythic ideas and reshape art history. Fuses (1967), the experimental film that she made of herself and her partner, composer James Tenney, was a groundbreaking work. She wrote about the piece, “I began an erotic film, Fuses, in 1965, because no one else had dealt with the image of lovemaking as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement.” Her iconic piece “Interior Scroll,” in which she stood naked and read from a scroll of paper slowly drawn from her vagina and spoken aloud to an unsuspecting audience is one of her best-known works.
I first met Schneemann in an unusually fated way. During the grand opening of the new SFMOMA in 1995, I stepped outside to escape the crowd and get some fresh air. I noticed a woman in the group standing outside who seemed to be having a problem. She began to faint, and I ran over and caught her in my arms. It was Carolee. We became intimate friends, and several months later, at a party in her loft on West 29th Street in New York, I met my future wife, the artist Aline Mare. Coincidentally, the major installation piece in the Lisson exhibition, “Video Rocks” (1987), was installed in her loft at that party long ago. She was still thinking about changes she might make to it for an upcoming show.
Continue reading Gary Brewer's review in Whitehot Magazine here.
