Carolee Schneemann. Of Course You Can / Don’t You Dare

About

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Of Course You Can/Don’t You Dare, an exhibition of historic mid-twentieth century works by Carolee Schneemann. This presentation marks the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, and the first major display of her work in New York since her death in 2019. The paintings, drawings, assemblages, and film on view highlight Schneemann’s visual investigation into gesture, movement, and materiality from 1957 through the mid-1960s, while simultaneously pointing to the artist’s contemporaries, whose work and advice Schneemann strategically saw as both inspiration and “anti-influence,” a coinage Schneemann applied to her utilization of the often-contradicting guidance offered at the start of her artistic career.

Opening the exhibition is a series of rarely seen drawings depicting Schneemann’s then partner, experimental composer James Tenney, and their cat Kitch. The couple’s creative investigations developed in parallel through their collaboration of over ten years, as exhibited here in works Personae: JT and Three Kitch’s (1957) and J. & C. (1962), and culminated in the film Fuses (1963-65), an ode to feminine pleasure, heterosexual eroticism, and love. These early paintings and works on paper concurrently correspond to Schneemann’s experience teaching in Bennington, Vermont, and pursuing her Master of Fine Art at the University of Illinois, Urbana, from 1957 to 1961. During this period, Schneemann navigated the contradicting critiques given by her professors who exclaimed “Of course you can/Don’t you dare,” declaring the young artist’s depiction and activation of her own nude body—as seen in the Untitled (Self-portrait with Kitch) (1957)—as narcissistic, a criticism never levied on her male counterparts. Schneemann later proclaimed in her written statement about Fuses: “There were no aspects of love-making which I would avoid; as a painter I had never accepted the visual and tactile taboos concerning specific parts of the body.”