What do you think?
Rate this book
Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects
Carolee Schneemann is one of the pioneers of performance, installation, and video art. Although other visual artists, such as Salvador Dali and Yves Klein, had used live self-portraiture and performance as a vehicle for public provocation, Schneemann was among the first to use her body to animate the relationship between the world of lived experience and the imagination, as well as issues of the erotic, the sacred, and the taboo. In the 1960s, her work prefigured the feminist movement's sexual self-assertion for women, and by the mid-1970s, her work anticipated the field of women's studies and its critique of patriarchal institutions. In the 1980s, she was one of the first to experiment with virtual environments.
Imaging Her Erotics integrates images from Schneemann's works in painting, collage, drawing, and video sculptures with written material drawn from the artist's journals, dream diaries, essays, and lectures. Encompassing four decades of her work, it demonstrates her profound influence on artists in all media. An opening essay by Kristine Stiles presents Schneemann's major themes and places her work in a historical context. Among other topics, the book covers Schneemann's response to the widespread use by artists of the ideas of theoreticians such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan; her relationship to male artists such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg; and reminiscences about her friends Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman, and Hannah Wilke. The book also contains essays by Jay Murphy and David Levi-Strauss and interviews with the artist by Kate Haug, Linda Montano, and Aviva Rahmani.
Imaging Her Erotics integrates images from Schneemann's works in painting, collage, drawing, and video sculptures with written material drawn from the artist's journals, dream diaries, essays, and lectures. Encompassing four decades of her work, it demonstrates her profound influence on artists in all media. An opening essay by Kristine Stiles presents Schneemann's major themes and places her work in a historical context. Among other topics, the book covers Schneemann's response to the widespread use by artists of the ideas of theoreticians such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan; her relationship to male artists such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg; and reminiscences about her friends Ana Mendieta, Charlotte Moorman, and Hannah Wilke. The book also contains essays by Jay Murphy and David Levi-Strauss and interviews with the artist by Kate Haug, Linda Montano, and Aviva Rahmani.
357 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 31, 2025
Only took me seven months but I finished! Can’t say that I totally get the art, but Carolee Schneeman was a badass and so ahead of her time.
After reading “Anita de Monte Laughs Lasts” and wanting to read more about women artists in that era (or abouts), I came across this retrospective. Good art for centuries was dictated by the opinions and tastes of rich and/or religious white men. When they use the female form as a model it’s considered beautiful or evocative, but when women artists take agency of their bodies and make them the subject, it’s crass or pornographic. Carolee Schneeman spent her career bucking that narrative, forcing all people to reevaluate often hypocritical thinking about women in and as art. Don’t get me wrong, her work was complete wild, but her defense of it and ability to make people understand the significance of it is powerful.
Glad I got to read this. Thank you to everyone who came to my house and saw a book of “erotics” on my end table and didn’t say anything about it.
P.S. There was also a passage/work of art that Schneeman did about Ana Mendieta after her death that was featured in the book so it came full circle to Anita de Monte.
After reading “Anita de Monte Laughs Lasts” and wanting to read more about women artists in that era (or abouts), I came across this retrospective. Good art for centuries was dictated by the opinions and tastes of rich and/or religious white men. When they use the female form as a model it’s considered beautiful or evocative, but when women artists take agency of their bodies and make them the subject, it’s crass or pornographic. Carolee Schneeman spent her career bucking that narrative, forcing all people to reevaluate often hypocritical thinking about women in and as art. Don’t get me wrong, her work was complete wild, but her defense of it and ability to make people understand the significance of it is powerful.
Glad I got to read this. Thank you to everyone who came to my house and saw a book of “erotics” on my end table and didn’t say anything about it.
P.S. There was also a passage/work of art that Schneeman did about Ana Mendieta after her death that was featured in the book so it came full circle to Anita de Monte.
Displaying 1 of 1 review