Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast 1963

Carolee Schneemann

2007, 9:02 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from Christmas to his incomplete opera The Sunken Bell. The hand-painted film stock heightens the impressionistic vitality of this snapshot of the 84-year-old composer.

Catscan

Carolee Schneemann

1988, 12:46 min, color, sound

Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann's previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of...

Fuses

Carolee Schneemann

1964-67, 29:37 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on HD video

Schneemann's self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. "The notorious masterpiece... a silent celebration in colour of heterosexual love making. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of abstract impressions...

Mysteries of the Pussies

Carolee Schneemann

1998-2010, 7:43 min, color, sound

For this performative/lecture, Schneemann invited Teija Lammi, museum librarian at the Porin Taidemuseo in Pori, Finland, to be an improvisatory participant. Together Schneemann and Lammi physically respond to images of the artist's cats. Schneemann relates her own research into historic obscenities connecting the various implications of "pussy". Lammi translates Schneemann's shocking words into Finnish. The performance was recorded in June 1998 and re-edited in 2010.

Plumb Line

Carolee Schneemann

1968-71, 14:27 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video

The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames,...