Matsu Fusako | Performance Art: A Film Festival on Body and Space | Carolee Schneemann's "Breaking the Frame"
A review of Carolee Schneemann's documentary "Breaking the Frame," screened at a film festival on body and space in Shibuya.Summary
This article reviews Carolee Schneemann's documentary "Breaking the Frame" (2012), screened at the "Performance Art: A Film Festival on Body and Space" held at Eurospace in Shibuya. Schneemann is known for performances using her body as material, such as "Up To and Including Her Limits," "Meat Joy," and "Interior Scroll." The film shows that these works are only part of her diverse oeuvre, which includes painting, video, and sculpture, and that they emerged as responses to misogyny she faced as a woman trying to be a painter. Shot over about six years from around 2005, the documentary centers on Schneemann's narration from childhood to the present, featuring her partner, cat, diaries, letters, and final home, illustrating how her creativity was inseparable from life, thought, and the times. It covers her life with former partner James Tenney, their friend Stan Brakhage and conflicts with the sexist Brakhage, her exchange with Ana Mendieta, and the exhibition "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" (2007, MoMA PS1). Director Marielle Nitoslawska, who also featured Schneemann in her previous film "Bad Girl" (2001), maintains a close distance that reveals Schneemann's trust, culminating in a final scene of Schneemann setting up a solo exhibition, moving a painting as tall as herself in a gray space, ending with a sigh. Schneemann received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2017 Venice Biennale, held a retrospective at MoMA PS1, died in 2019, and was honored with a 2022 exhibition at London's Barbican Centre. Archives by MoMA and the Carolee Schneemann Foundation are also available online.
(Source：artscape)