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The Museum of Modern Art
Unit 1: Lesson 6
Artist interviews- Andrés Jaque: COSMO | Young Architects Program 2015
- Gilbert & George: The Early Years
- Cai Guo-Qiang | Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows
- Richard Serra | Equal
- "Weaving the Courtyard" by Escobedo Soliz | Young Architects Program 2016
- Artists Experiment 2014 | MoMA
- THIS IS ISA GENZKEN | MoMA
- Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves | MoMA
- James Rosenquist, "F-111," 1964-65
- Lee Quinones on graffiti
- Studio Tour: Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
- Richard Serra, "Intersection II"
- Richard Serra, "Torqued Ellipse IV"
- Richard Serra, "Band," 2006
- Wolfgang Laib, "Pollen from Hazelnut"
- Gabriel Byrne revisiting "The Quiet Man"
- Carolee Schneemann, "Up to and Including Her Limits"
- Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself
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Carolee Schneemann, "Up to and Including Her Limits"
Carolee Schneeman describes her piece Up to and Including Her Limits as being in discussion with Jackson Pollock. To learn more about what artists have to say, take our online course, Modern and Contemporary Art, 1945-1989. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.
Want to join the conversation?
- Did she do this nude? Is that why they aren't showing the video?
If so, why? What was the benefit to her to do this "work" in the nude?(6 votes)- My best guess is wrt2:27
"To vitalize the whole body as stroke and gesture in this dimensional space"
It makes some sense to me that an artist who wishes to turn their full body into 'their brush' would prefer to be nude for the work. To some extent, it is her body's actions that are 'the work of art', not just the 'work' produced - the soul of performance art, I suppose.(3 votes)
- i don't really understand what this is?any one can draw like that.(1 vote)
- I don't think it's WHAT she is drawing here that is innovative. It is the act of HOW. I think much like how Jackson Pollock's drips and splashes, you can try to trace the movements of the artist as she was swinging to create all of the marks on the wall.
If you think about the artist, nude, swinging in a rope harness, different people can imagine different feelings. Freedom vs. Confinement. Order vs. Chaos.
I personally think it's a little silly, but I can appreciate it for what the artist was trying to convey, which was more than just 3-year-oldish scribbles on the wall.(8 votes)
Video transcript
Carolee: I'm Carolee Schneemann, and
I'm here at MOMA for an interview while I'm installing a
large diptych drawing, Up To and Including Her Limits was
originally inpsired by a neighbor who came to prune my apple tree. I had been working with 3/4-inch
manila rope in creating an
aerial suspended kinetic work and then the tree trimmer went
away to have lunch and I just took off my clothes and crawled into the
harness to see what it felt like. The work demands a release, a
submission to the sense of float that I have being suspended. And then the physical extensivity
of the arm with the crayons
that are going to keep, as I move, hitting the adjacent walls
that are situated so that they're within the reach of the hand with the
crayon as well as the floor. It's a work that developed over
the course of six or seven years. I kept adapting the rope and the
harness and the time duration to various spaces that I would live
in and sleep in and sometimes even have my cat living with me in the museum. It's usually four to six monitors and
the various action sequences come from seven or eight different performances. Part of my fondness for Up To and
Including Her Limits is that it relates to the fact that I'm a painter. I have never described myself
as a performance artist. When I started extending materials
into realtime and literal space it was coming out of the happenings. I was influenced by Claes Oldenburg,
by Jim Dine by Robert Whitman and it had nothing to do
with self confession or self
exposure or personal narrative. It really had to do with painterly
sense of environment as a collage arena. Up To and Including Her Limits really
is a discussion with Jackson Pollock to vitalize the whole body as stroke
and gesture in this dimensional space. (acoustic guitar music)