Carolee Schneemann

"Interior Scroll, (1975/77)"



     I think Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll" piece has got to be the most darnest piece of art I've ever came across. It was disturbingly intriguing. In this piece, Carolee uses her own body to symbolize gender politics and empowerment and in her own words, calls "the movement" of interior thought to exterior signification," where this piece of art gave visual forms to her notion of vulvic space. For this artwork, she is on a table, naked and she has painted her face and body with mud and like this, is she slowly taking out this scroll from her vagina while reading out the manifesto printed on it. I personally believe her performance with her reciting the manifesto was very symbolic in terms that she perceived her vagina as not only a birth passage, but the source of knowledge. Schneemann's interest was so high in the vulvic space because she thought of is as this passageway  "from the visible to invisble"; a handful of mysteries to be discovered with characteristics of both female and male.


"Three Figures After Pontormo, (1957)"

     When I first saw this painting from afar, I knew there was some type of motion going on. I saw a lot of curves and accents with the dark colors to portray this muscular type of body, which I soon  found up about. This oil on canvas piece of work incorporated and showed art historical references and what I mean by this is that Carolee Schnneeman referrerd back to one of the most known Ancient Greek styles done by the artist Jacopo Pontormo, "figura serpentinata." Figura serpentinata was this style in painting and sculpturing, intended to make the piece of art more dynamic and show this spiral pose. In this painting, Carolee incorporates the spiral and serpent, which were ancient symbols of goddess imagery and creative life force, but going deeper into this painting, we obviously see no perfect form of a serpent or a perfect shape of a human. Carolee deliberately scratches away and cuts the surface attempting  to scrape away the depiction of the three figures. She does this in order to physically reach behind the surface of Pontormo's work. It's like as if she's trying to understand the meaning of "figura serpentinata" by doing this action and I think the result of her painting turned out to be very expressive.

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