“My life experience would be defined as double knowledge. Yes, you can. Don’t you dare. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Carolee Schneemann 'Fuses' (1964-7)
Throughout her trailblazing 50 year career, Schneemann insisted on a return to the body as a source of knowledge, experience and awareness (something she perceived in the rites and beliefs of ancient cultures). She says of it: “this source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh ... the source of conceptualising, of interacting with materials, of imagining the world and composing its images.”
Across an oeuvre spanning painting, sculpture, film, and performance, Schneemann revealed the body as the source of creative and imaginative energy as well as the site and subject of the work and the lens through which our broader understanding of the world and oneself is framed.
From 1964 to 1967, Schneemann filmed herself having sex with her partner James Tenney, with her cat Kitch often close by, observing. ‘Fuses’ is the result of Schneemann’s transmogrification of the 16mm film negatives; singeing them with fire and acid, scratching and staining the celluloid to produce a painterly overlay of visceral materiality and individualism.
In ‘Fuses’ as well as in many of her later performances, Schneemann affirmed the body as inherently sexual. Her refusal to divorce sexual experience from art making was intended as a return to this site of ‘interior knowledge’.
