NYAB Event - Carolee Schneemann “Flange 6rpm”

Carolee Schneemann “Flange 6rpm”

P.P.O.W.

This event has ended.

Originally a painter, Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer of extended media, from her explorations of ‘geometry of motion’ in Lateral Splay, 1963, the provocative group performance Meat Joy, 1964, her self-shot erotic film Fuses, 1965, and the meditation of solitary movements in Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-76.

Upon entering the gallery the viewer is immersed in the projected foundry fires of Schneemann’s latest multi-sensory installation, Flange 6rpm. Seven motorized sculptural units; containing hand-sculpted components are, uniquely, cast in aluminum from a lost wax process. The aluminum sculptures are not polished, but maintain a rough texture sill marked from the fire of the foundry. The sculptural units are each mounted on a motorized base which moves them at six revolutions per minute – slowly, side to side, as well as forward and back – in a continuous motion so that the sculptural elements are almost touching, creating a sense of tension and unpredictability.

Schneemann notes ‘The fundamental life of any material I use is concentrated in that material’s gesture — gesticulation, gestation, source of compression (measure of tension and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action. Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.’ This statement reigns true to the materials of the four Dust Paintings, 1983-86, that occupy the walls of the second gallery. Degraded materials, ashes, soot, layers of dust, spilled paint, circuit boards, posit a visual correlative to the endless bombardments of Lebanese and Palestinian villages.

Saw Over Want, 1980-82 and Vulva’s Morphia, 1995 are composed from photographic grids separated by strips of text that accentuate and destabilize their associated images. The text in Saw Over Want, is taken from Schneemann’s childhood alphabet exercises. The words “saw,” “want,” and “over” have been repeatedly practiced. Strips of text underline images of ordinary objects and self-shot erotic body details. This contrast produces an aesthetic seepage. Vulva’s Morphia consists of thirty-six images which address normative taboos within an undulating grid of Paleolithic vulvas inscribed on rocks as well as sacred, obscene, scientific, and self-photographed vulvic images. Each sectional grid is underlined with a taboo reflection. For instance, “Vulva reads biology and understands she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires….”