My introduction to the work of Carolee Schneemann was an ironic rehash of her iconic 1975 work “Interior Scroll.” It came in a Ms. Lower East Side contest in the early nineties, an era in which I was immersed in Judson Church performance culture, as Carolee had been thirty years prior, when she marshalled “raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, plastic, rope and paper scrap” and a host of orgiastic naked bodies around the Judson Church stage in her 1964 work “Meat Joy.” I think that this Ms. Lower East Side contest took place at Fez, in the basement of the Time Café, on Lafayette Street. I can remember clearly the enjoyably stocky, naked body of a young white dyke who announced that she was going to redo “Interior Scroll” for the talent portion of the evening. When the time came, she stood under the stage lights with her legs spread and attempted to pull the folded-up scroll from her pussy. But she had a hard time—the integrity of the paper’s pulp was challenged, and she struggled to read the text, eventually giving up. “I’m sorry,” she told the crowd, laughing. “It’s too smeary to read. I guess this is a lot harder than I thought.” Indeed.
Two decades later, Carolee picked me up from a Trailways bus station in New Paltz, in her old purple-blue Subaru. She was having a hard time walking since breaking a hip in October, 2014, on her way to the podium during an event at N.Y.U. (She didn’t go to the hospital until the event had finished.) But she was still driving on the upstate roads, which she had driven for more than fifty years, like a demon. En route to her home, a stone house built by Huguenots, in 1750, and featured in much of her work, including the films “Fuses” (1965) and “Kitch’s Last Meal” (1973-76), we stopped at a Stewart’s. Carolee handed me a fifty dollar bill and said we were there to feed her addiction. Diet Coke? I guessed. The New York Times, she countered. At her beautiful, dark home, I noticed articles cut from the Times everywhere: a review of an Animal Planet show devoted to rescuing cats from trees, another of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.” She said she liked reading the weddings section, seeing all the different combinations of people.
For some time, Carolee hadn’t been able to access the upstairs of her house, which is where one of her home studios was located. But she encouraged me to go up by myself and look around. The landing was dark and dominated by several bookcases. One contained an enviably well-organized wall of publications in which Carolee’s work was featured or mentioned, with dividers that began with the year 1962 and moved up to the present. Another was filled with fiction and nonfiction classics loosely divided into categories: true crime/violence, feminist theory, “masculinity studies,” and so on. Farther back sat a large Mac desktop computer humming loudly, as if finishing a forty-year download. On one wall were about a dozen or so ziplock baggies tacked up with fat silver thumbtacks, each with a decaying carcass of some kind inside. One was discernibly a grasshopper—another, a mouse. One was labelled “Lilly Grey, September 2014.” (Miss Lilly Grey was one of Carolee’s beloved cats, who, in contrast to others she’d had over the years, was “not psychic at all.”) One mouse carcass, which looked like a piece of fried black seaweed, was tacked directly to the wall.
The display brought to mind Carolee’s work “More Wrong Things,” from 2001, which featured, among other things, vivid, closeup photos of her cat Treasure after he was hit and killed by a car. Carolee chose an image of Treasure titled “Photograph of Treasure after death, 2001” for a postcard announcing her show. In the photo, Treasure lies on his side, one eye open and normal-ish save for a distended pupil. His other eye is squashed out and so engorged that it seems to belong to a much larger animal. Blood smutches up Treasure’s dainty nose and mouth, streaks his expelled eyeball. The image bears a relation to the bulging, injured eye at the start of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), the notorious act of slitting announcing both the Surrealists’ love of the startling image and their dedication to the mutilation or fragmentation of women’s bodies in order to achieve it. But Carolee wasn’t performing or pretending to perform an act of violence. She was recording something that happened—something sad and wrong that happened to something she loved. Were it another artist, I might attribute the image of Treasure to some unconscious sadism. But Carolee seems not to house an iota of such a thing. When she showed a slide with a photograph of Treasure at a 2015 talk, she told the discomfited audience, “You all can close your eyes, but I can’t.” The ghost of her father, a country doctor, was in the house.
Also upstairs was a scrapbook I’d heard tell of, a binder with the label “Influence/ Plagerism/I Forgot.” I’d heard that Carolee kept a scrapbook full of clippings of work by artists she thought derived images, ideas, or impulses from her. When I poked around in it, however, it immediately became clear that this was no litany of woes. Quite the opposite—it was an expansive elaboration of a morphological correspondence theory that drove Carolee for so long: This looks like this. This stems from this. As Carolee asked at a talk in 2011, at Portland Community College, What does this building under construction in Liverpool with rebar sticking out of it remind me of? Of course—my childhood drawing of a cat emerging from a mystery clutch of wires! Carolee’s unapologetic fascination with her childhood drawings makes me think of Jill Johnston’s line about Agnes Martin, that “a great woman may be a woman more interested in herself than in anything else.” As with Martin, Carolee’s wager was to put herself at the center and to insist that her experience, as a female human being, mattered just as much as that of Emerson’s self-reliant man.
Still, the conversation around her often turns on her under-recognized influence on more commercially successful artists. In a 1997 interview, the artist Odili Donald Odita asked Carolee about Matthew Barney’s borrowing from Carolee in his series “Drawing Restraint.” Carolee didn’t take the bait. (Whenever I would mention to Carolee someone or something she didn’t like, she would just say, “Meow.”) Instead, she turned the question around, to wonder (rhetorically? honestly?) whether there’s something about her or her work that intrinsically repels art-world “promotion machines,” whether she was less a maker of commodities and more a “part of nature that just keeps pouring and pouring.” Elsewhere, she speculated, “Is it because my body of work explores a self-contained, self-defined, pleasured, female-identified erotic integration? Is that what the culture can’t stand? It is interested. It gets tremendous courage, vitality, and feeds itself off this material I provide. But it will not come back and help me. It’s almost as if it’s saying, ‘If you’ve got all that, go feed yourself!’ ”
The narrative of the under-recognized, underrated female artist is a difficult one to separate from Carolee, in part because pointing out gendered inequity and injustice in the art world and beyond was one of the most vital services she performed for more than six decades. In 1999, she wrote a blunt letter to Daniel Socolow, who was the director of MacArthur Foundation at the time, in response to his request that she nominate a candidate for the MacArthur “genius” grant, which awards recipients hundreds of thousands of dollars. “I do not have health insurance, life insurance, storage, or insurance for art works; I do not have savings, retirement funds, medical plan, investments, bonds, etc.,” Carolee wrote. “In 1995, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and Breast Cancer. I am alive because a Pollock-Krasner Grant enabled me to undertake alternative therapy in Mexico. . . . People find it unbelievable that in thirty years I have sold only two works to museums in the U.S.A. I am not the only woman artist with a distinguished history who has no way to sustain her work, nor provide for her future.” She concluded, “Perhaps you will understand that being in dire straits while enduring a fantasy of success and achievement makes it impossible to fulfill your request.”
As delighted (and troubled) as this response makes me feel, I also can’t help feeling that to consistently deem someone an underrated living legend is also to practice a certain repetitive distortion, whereby all praise or estimation begins to register more as corrective than insight. Similarly complicated, when it comes to Carolee’s work, is the question of suppression and censorship. A man once attempted to strangle Carolee during her 1964 Paris performance of “Meat Joy.” French men ripped up the seats of a movie theater with razor blades in response to “Fuses,” at Cannes, in 1968. During a 1985 screening of that film in El Paso, Texas, the police arrested the projectionist and seized the print. Although such demonization may grow one’s status as a taboo-buster or outlaw, it also tends to come at great cost, both to the artist, personally, and to the work. As Cynthia Carr wrote in her biography of David Wojnarowicz, who battled heavily with right-wing censors in his final years before dying from AIDS, Wojnarowicz “would say many times over the next two months, his work had been turned into ‘banal pornography,’ stripped of its artistic and political content.”
Carolee’s desire to be known primarily as a painter and a formalist always clashed with the limitations of a world that treated and continues to treat certain image-makers as non-neutral presences in the images they create (as in the artist Glenn Ligon’s repurposing of Zore Neale Hurston’s line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”). Carolee came up in the moment of Abstract Expressionism, but, like most restless, ambitious artists, she wanted, needed, to ask the next big questions about painting. The question she came up with—“Could a nude woman artist be both image and image-maker?”—was simultaneously formal, art historical, metaphysical, and revolutionary. When Carolee took off her clothes and put her body into her painting (starting with “Eye Body,” in 1963), she thought “it would be seen as an integrated, powerful event,” she told the Guardian. It wasn’t. “They said, ‘If you want to paint, put your clothes back on.’ It’s always been like that.” In the same interview, Carolee said, “I never thought I was shocking. I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘This is something they need. My culture is going to recognize it’s missing something.’ ” I don’t think this sounds disingenuous at all. It sounds to me like sane amazement.
While these conditions are, without a doubt, deplorable, the dogged, surprising, and shifting ways in which artists such as Schneemann navigate them can also constitute the propulsive force of their careers. It’s also what keeps the import of their work shape-shifting over time, as the background behind it continues to change. Carolee could have gone the way, for example, of Elaine de Kooning, born twenty years prior, who had this to say in response to Linda Nochlin’s famous essay, from 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”: “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified. We’re artists who happen to be women or men among other things we happen to be—tall, short, blonde, dark, mesomorph, ectomorph, black, Spanish, German, Irish . . . There are no obstacles in the way of a woman becoming a painter or sculptor other than the usual obstacles that any artist has to face.” I don’t know many people who enjoy being put into categories, but it still seems to me that de Kooning’s attitude reflects an impoverished and impoverishing fantasy, one that Carolee never tired of revealing, exploring, and dissolving.
I would be very pleased if this essay were to serve as the final resting place for all the tired critiques of Carolee and other female performance artists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—that they were just using their naked bodies in their art because they had beautiful bodies, and, no matter their intent as artists, the voyeurism and vanity associated with the naked female body will always override any experiment with it, and you’re a naïve fool if you think otherwise. Time has shown us how the impulse to use the body in fearless ways, among artists such as Carolee, Hannah Wilke, and Annie Sprinkle, has persisted beyond their youth and into all kinds of physical adventures, including illness, aging, and death. Time has given us Wilke’s harrowing “Intra-Venus” photos, taken throughout her time being afflicted with fatal cancer. (“People give me this bullshit of, What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous? What difference does it make? Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.’ Everybody dies,” Wilke said.) It has given us Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s “Breast Cancer Ballet Collages,” which depict Annie’s very famous double-D’s being subjected to all sorts of oncological interventions. And it has given us Carolee’s very great, very strange “Infinity Kisses” (1981-88), which shows Carolee “deep kissing” with her cats each morning over a number of years. The photos reveal a stunning lack of vanity on Carolee’s part: the colors are washed out, greenish and bluish; the camera P.O.V. is extremely close to Carolee’s face, which at times seems to bear contusions. Her eyes are nearly always closed, her mouth open. The work is yet another reflection of Carolee’s lifelong “desperate desire to capture the passionate things of life,” even when those things disturb, like her account of an abortion, performed in Cuba, in 1959, preserved in a letter to a friend: “Silvery clamps and pinchers, the sensation of being meat or wood held for chopping. And the ‘inside’ pain for which I find no correlatives.”
Back at Carolee’s house, sitting on her porch and attempting to amuse her cats with feather toys, I asked her whether it’s true that her former partner the composer James Tenney felt hurt by her publishing accounts of abortions that she had while they were together. She said, “I think he was a lot more upset that I made them public at the time by having a party after each one! I just had to celebrate getting that thing out of me.” Carolee always spoke about pregnancy in this way—as a life-sucking, invasive force deadly to the ambitions of a female artist, “a social usurpation of the private products and processes of [her] body—even the ecstatic fucking.” In a written piece entitled “Anti-Demeter (The More I Give the More You Steal/The More You Give the More I Need),” she wrote, “You are not invited into my body. I did not invite an alien being, a ‘child,’ into my future. I had a mountainside to climb, my back pushing against a heavy rucksack filled with paints, turpentine, oils, brushes, the roll of canvas.”
The formula that holds being a mother as fundamentally incompatible with being an artist strikes me, at times, as a sensical (if execrable) holdover from an earlier era, and, at others, as a conviction idiosyncratic to Carolee and her particular body. Though I’ve personally spent time and trouble trying to unravel this formula, I’m not bothered by Carolee’s pronouncements on the subject. They seem, as per usual, to speak for Carolee alone, or mostly for her alone, and also to provide a bold, needed example for other women repulsed by the prospect of an “alien being” taking up residence inside their bodies. Carolee’s defiant rejection can feel especially fresh and urgent in a political climate in which “reproductive freedom” often swirls dankly around the holy trinity of “rape, incest, or life of the mother” as the only plausible reasons why a woman shouldn’t be forced to bear a child she does not want to bear.
Eventually, we headed out to Carolee’s studio, stopping along the way to break down some cardboard boxes by the recycling cans. I noticed the boxes were full of mouse droppings, which reminded me of a comment Carolee once made about her 1996-97 retrospective at the New Museum. She said that it was an important show for her but “led to no sales, no commissions. Everything came back home here to the shed, to the waiting raccoons. And, if you really want to know how to dissolve epoxy resin, have a mouse pee on it. It’s magic.” I asked her about a line she often proffered, about having a body that is “not conflicted about its pleasures.” (Yvonne Rainer used to tell her, “You make sexuality too easy,” to which Carolee would respond, “You make it too hard.”) “Yes, that is true,” Carolee said, but clarified that, whenever she says that now, she is careful to add that she has never been abused, which allowed her positive relationship with her sexual body to flourish. As she put it in her interview with Odita, “The transposition of the body as a source of knowledge and ecstatic pleasure—this is not a useful example for everybody because if your pleasure and your experience of the body has been damaged, or interfered with, or hurt, then you’re not going to be able to assume the position that I assume.” When Odita responded, “Right. But one has to learn how to get to that liberation,” Carolee said, “Maybe, but maybe not.” One might realize, she added, “that you have to put pins all over your body because that’s the only correlative to the violence that was done to you when you were four years old.”
This “maybe, maybe not” in the face of “one musts” or “we all shoulds” brings us into the heart of Carolee’s unusually generous and unbossy approach to the aesthetics of liberation. It also corresponds to the way that she often seemed willing to restate, with unfailing articulation, the same feminist and aesthetic principles she’d been called upon to defend or embody for decades, while at the same time evidencing a penchant for thinking anew on the spot—imagining scenarios, as per the traumatized four-year-old later coming to pins, which would complicate, contradict, or otherwise expand her fierce proclamations. Indeed, after reiterating to me the line that her untroubled ecstatic relation to her body was made possible by her not having been abused, she paused and said, “You know, I’ve been saying that for years, but actually I was raped. I remember thinking afterward, Well, at least that’s over with now, my first time.”
We arrived at her studio, which was lovely and busy and hot. On the far wall was “Flange 6rpm” (2011-13), a series of hand-molded aluminum shapes revolving on motors, with a video of the fire that forged the shapes playing behind them. I couldn’t help but think of the extravagant, awe-inducing forge scene in Matthew Barney’s “River of Fundament” (2014), because I’d just watched the film, and how the scale and feeling here were almost the opposite—Carolee’s felt handmade, a kind of anti-apocalypse. Carolee apologized that one couldn’t really get the full effect of the flames projected on the wall during daylight hours, but I liked the look of the pale orange flickering in the midday heat, the weird flanges creaking in the foreground. On a long table sat an ensemble that she had recently unearthed from “Noise Bodies” (1965), a piece that would soon be travelling to a retrospective of her work. The ensemble was akin to a bicycle wheel strung with pots and pans, designed for a performer to wear and shake. Carolee told me me to put it on and move around. I felt silly doing so, but, so instructed, I submitted—I shook.
As we sat and watched the projected flames, Carolee repeated to me the line that so many straight women have spoken before her: “I wish I could just be gay; it would be so much easier.” From others, this faux-lament can be irksome; from Carolee, I took it as true musing. “I just love cock too much,” she sighed. I said something to the effect of, You might be surprised at the possibilities for cock in so-called lesbian relationships; she narrowed her eyes in a cheery way and said, “Maggie, I’m literal-minded.” She told me that her most recent relationship, with a local guy who assisted her with motorized elements of some of the pieces in her studio, ended not long ago. “That guy,” she said, pointing to a photograph of a cock entering a cunt on the wall. I asked her what it was like not to have that source of inspiration at present, after having made so much art in explicit, generative relationship to sex over the years. “It’s melancholy,” she said. She said it felt like such a waste, because she still felt tremendously horny. “I’m still tight and wet!” she marvelled.
Aging may not have been Carolee’s favorite subject, but she was quite brilliant on it. For example, in her response to the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s suggestion that Carolee restage “Meat Joy” using the original cast, Carolee wrote, “Somehow, it is never made very clear that by the time you’re in your sixties or seventies, people have lost flexibility, mobility, and the sort of ecstatic sensuality that is best communicated by young bodies. . . . Women’s breasts have moved down toward their waists and are wrinkled; men’s breasts usually acquire a layer of fat, as does their stomach. . . . If women in their sixties and seventies remain genitally viable—desiring, lubricating, and muscular—the Venus mound has nevertheless put on a layer of fat . . . Mette, do not try to re-create Meat Joy!” Why go in for faux optimism, Carolee suggests, when one could instead face down the real “physical adventure” of aging? “You all can close your eyes, but I can’t,” she told us, in so many ways.
Carolee also had a lot to tell us about heterosexuality. As far as I can tell, most of what she had to say hasn’t seeped very far into heterosexual culture. Carolee called “Fuses” a “heterosexual classic.” Who else would refer to her art that way? Not that the world isn’t teeming with work that might fit under that rubric, but, most often, its creators aren’t self-aware enough to describe it as such. Carolee may have been given a hard time by dykes back in the day—she often told a story about her literally crawling out of a New York screening of “Plumb Line” (1968-71) to avoid being booed by a “lesbian contingent”—but, by classifying “Fuses” in this way, she denaturalized heterosexuality even while focussing on “the fuck,” which she called “the core of heterosexual connection.” One of Carolee’s credos was “touch tenderly, fuck fiercely.” She knew how to access the ferocity of the fuck without insisting, à la Camille Paglia or Leo Bersani or so many others, that there is an inherent destructiveness in that ferocity—or, more to the point, that there is an inherent self-destructiveness in that ferocity for the female or feminized subject. Rejecting the revisionist, or at least myopic, history that would cast “free love” as a good time solely for men preying on LSD-addled hippie chicks, Carolee testified, “We were young women taking tremendous freedoms, maintaining self-definition and an erotic confidence in choosing partners spontaneously in the firm expectation of great times to be won together.” Carolee insisted on female heterosexual self-knowledge, in a world that continues to treat self-knowledgeable heterosexual women as a kind of oxymoron, as if there’s always something self-compromising or self-denigrating about female heterosexual desire.
A lot of artists, including many male artists, have used art to deconstruct masculinity or reveal its pathetic nature, most often using tropes of abjection or self-destruction. Carolee, in contrast, was interested in equity. She didn’t find anything degrading about heterosexuality because she remained—as she was out of the gate, incredibly, back in the fifties—devoted to “the firm expectation of great times to be won together.” Her formative relationship with James Tenney seemed to have laid the groundwork for this expectation. She suspected—as do I—that her 1957 portrait of Tenney, “Personae,” caused a stir at Bard not because of its obscenity but rather because she was able to get a guy to be vulnerable enough to pose nude for her, and to support his girlfriend, the artist, in her desire to publicly exhibit the result. As Carolee put it, Tenney “was my model, and that was considered really outrageous, because to include and depict the genitals of a male student who everybody knew was to deny him his authority and his proper respect.” Eight years later, she filmed Tenney’s penis aglisten with her menstrual blood in “Fuses.” Indeed, while watching “Fuses,” I’m filled with respect for Carolee, but also for Tenney. One of the work’s less heralded but utterly moving, innovative achievements is its invention of a new subject position and manner of respect for a heterosexual male subject—a new, and still underexplored, possibility.
Carolee’s belief in the constant possibility (and sometimes lived reality) of equity never led her to deny the difficulty of finding or sustaining it, however. As she told Andrea Juno in the iconic anthology “Angry Women,” from 1991, “In my experience men would rather tear a relationship apart than adjust, adapt and change what needs to be changed in their psyche . . . It’s difficult to find a really intelligent man who shares a commitment to feminist issues and practice, who reads the same material I read . . . someone who knows what’s happening with this reinvestigation of ‘inherited culture.’ ” Difficult, maybe, but the search went on. In her work, in her life, and in her letters, Carolee repeatedly showed herself to be the kind of radical feminist who never shied away from difficult conversations with men.
Among Carolee’s letters to male interlocutors in her collected correspondence, for instance, is a 1975 exchange between her and the poet Clayton Eshleman. Eshleman wrote, “I haven’t answered because there seemed not much to say in a letter to your letter: you do not write directly to ME, but to me AS A MAN; since I am constantly in the process of removing myself from that ‘wall of huge men’ it is frustrating to be put back into it when addressed.” To which Carolee replied:
Reading these inflamed exchanges (with Eshleman, Stan Brakhage, and others), I am repeatedly astonished by the doggedness, indeed, the courage—often of both parties—in sticking with conversations that would have likely sent me straight to the nearest exit. After each rough letter, I think, Well, there goes that friendship. And then there’s another. Eshleman replied, “Your reaction is so simplistic I can barely deal with it. . . . Such is the death of response, and, ultimately, of relationship.” But then Carolee writes back again. And so on and so on. Her fundamental optimism lay in her unceasing drive to make others understand while also attempting to learn from their “antagonisms and prejudices.” When I asked Carolee about the collection of true-crime books on her bookshelf, for example, she said that she always found it comforting and illuminating to read about Ted Bundy after meetings with male gallerists who had crappy things to say about her work. After describing my own experience researching and writing about the gruesome murder of my aunt Jane, I asked Carolee if she ever grew tired of the question “Why do men hate women?” Without the slightest pause, Carolee said, “Never. I will never grow tired of that question.”
Carolee also never tired of the question of liberation. She identified to the end as a Reichian, sharing Wilhelm Reich’s belief that “complete and repeated genital gratification” was critical to our individual and social health. She could never bring herself to agree with the characterization of the “dream of sexual and material liberation” as “long ago dashed,” as Wayne Koestenbaum, a friend of Carolee’s, once put it. Indeed, spending time with Carolee made me wonder how much I really know about this dream and how and why I—along with so many others—feel able to dismiss it so glibly.
Driving to her house earlier that day, Carolee and I had passed by a local movie theater, which was playing “Love & Mercy,” the biopic about the Beach Boy Brian Wilson. Carolee was excited—she had seen the movie before and loved it. She told me that she’d see it again, if I wanted to. “Most movies are mind pollution,” she said, “but this one was good.” It seemed interesting, as a prospect—to spend my final hours with Carolee at a movie about a tortured, synesthetic male genius. But, as the show time neared, she said, “You know, I think I’d just like to go somewhere lovely and have some oysters instead.” And so we did.
At the restaurant, Carolee and the young, clean-cut waiter greeted each other warmly by name. “The birds are chirping in the back, Carolee,” he told her; she was delighted. It was empty in the back. The tables weren’t set for dinner yet; it was just empty tables overlooking a lovely stretch of lawn and giant trees. Carolee ordered the drink special, a Tiki thing. “It has an umbrella!” she enthused when it arrived and offered me a sip. I sincerely wished that I still drank so that I could partake. Instead, I agreed to an oyster, also not on my usual roster. I told her that I’ve always wanted to like oysters more than I actually do. “People have different relationships to viscera,” she said, diplomatically.
In one of my favorite books of recent years, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study” (2013), the authors emphasize the importance of asking ourselves two questions derived from the curriculum of the Mississippi Freedom Schools: “What do we not have that we need?” (a question of struggle, aspiration, demand) and “What do we have that we want to keep?” (a question of self-knowledge, appreciation, preservation). The first question may contain more urgency, even of the life-or-death variety, but the second question is more primary, Moten and Harney explain, because it presumes that we are, at least at times, already living and loving and thinking and fucking and caring and studying and making in ways worth continuing, enjoying, deepening, and defending. Moreover, our self-knowledge on this account need not be delusional, rigid, nor friable—it may be a real, if mercurial, source of wisdom, a “part of nature that just keeps pouring and pouring.”
Carolee’s long-standing devotion to pleasure and atrocity, ecstasy and rage, protest and preservation has provided and will continue to provide a lavish example of what it might mean to meditate on these two crucial questions in the course of a life. Faced with “the long ago dashed dreams” of sexual and material liberation, Carolee offered other convictions, other possibilities. As she wrote in a letter to a friend when she was all of eighteen years old, about going back to the country, “Then when the city exhausts me I will be, may be, reënchanted by here. That is all, (all?!) I want—reënchantment. It is something I must do myself.” So she did, and so she invited us to do for ourselves.
This piece was drawn from “Carolee's,” which was published in 2016 by the Artist's Institute and Koenig Books, Ltd.
