Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann

Taking the innovative and influential work of the late American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939­–2019) as a point of departure, this exhibition shined light on how it resonates in the works of subsequent generations of artists. About sixty works by thirteen artists and collectives examined whether certain boundaries with respect to media and content are still relevant in contemporary art. Organized in a parcours on four floors of the museum, as well as in the museum restaurant, the works on display were put in dialog with ten seminal works by Schneemann. While her exhibited works date back to the 1950s, those by the following generations span the 1980s to the present day. Mirroring Schneemann’s multidisciplinary approach, the artistic media in the exhibition ranged from painting, assemblage and sculpture over photography, film, and video to performance art, some of which were staged live at the opening or over the course of the exhibition.

While Carolee Schneemann radically expanded her use of artistic media and worked across disciplines throughout her career, she always understood herself as a painter. In her early paintings and assemblages, she looked for female role models but soon began creating new forms of art that emerged as paintings literally set in motion. Eventually, she incorporated her own body into her work, developing expansive choreographies and installations in various media, for which she coined the term “kinetic theater.” Her goal was to extend the visual principles of painting beyond the canvas and into life. At the same time, when asking herself if she could be “both image and image-maker,” she started creating experimental photographs and films in which she was featured. While women in art have been primarily represented from a male perspective and frequently nude, Schneemann became famous for introducing sex and lust from a woman’s perspective, including critical reflections upon her role in society and struggle for recognition as a woman artist.

After the groundbreaking societal changes of the 1960s and 1970s, with Schneemann as a pioneer among feminist artists, we asked ourselves how artists of subsequent generations have explored issues related to the development of artistic media and the emancipated body. What changes did the representation and notion of the body undergo? What kinds of questions and topics are addressed anew when artists of the current generation use the body in their works or frame it in various sociopolitical contexts? How and in which forms did the expansive and innovative use of artistic media, including the artist’s body and new methods, develop further in the works of the generation “after Carolee Schneemann”?

Ahead of its time, Schneemann’s work was considered highly experimental, even provocative, and caused numerous controversies. This exhibition provided the opportunity to examine how we approach new artistic forms and content, and how we engage with images of nudity and sexuality, particularly those of the female body, at a time when such images are omnipresent in our current media environment.