Erwartung: Expectancy, 1995/2001

[close-up of projection]

Carolee Schneemann

CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN ON DARA BIRNBAUMS ERWARTUNG: EXPECTANCY

As an MTV child, I guess it’s not surprising that I’m really into video art. While its 40 years in art history is only a blip on the proverbial charts, video art’s impressive ability to address social, cultural and political issues remains unsurpassed by other mediums. So when art world superstar Carolee Schneemann agreed to let me record her critique of video artist Dara Birnbaum’s recent video art exhibition Erwartung: Expectancy, 1995/2001, at Marion Goodman Gallery, I was ecstatic.

Most of us know Ms. Schneemann primarily as a performance artist, but she’s also widely recognized as one of the first to experiment with video techniques back in the 1960s. With Fuses, 1965, Schneemann made an 18-minute time-lapse silent film of collaged and painted sequences of herself and her then partner James Tenney making love, as observed by her cat Kitch (see Fuses at www.caroleeshneemann.com).
“I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking,” she says looking back at the project. “And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense – as one feels during lovemaking. It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen – that’s why people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization of the woman.”

No stranger to the video medium, she’s uniquely qualified to comment on another artist’s video work, having led the way for artists like Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Tracy Emins — even Dara Birnbaum, who today like a pop music icon is a well-established video presence. Birnbaum comes to video art from a background in architecture and has had previous commissions to design video installations for publicly accessible venues like Grand Central Station’s waiting area and also for MTV. She creates provocative work that’s plugged into innovative technology, enlisting active viewer participation and implicating us as creative consumers in the spaces she defines.

With Erwartung: Expectancy, Birnbaum appropriates images, text and music from Arnold Schonberg, turn of the century painter and composer. Schonberg’s Erwartung, was highly innovative for 1909. The music, portrait and accompanying libretto text of this early atonal piece represents the interior monologue of a woman lost in the forest where she’s seeking her lover. The music — complex and fragmentary, accents the overall feeling of dislocation, longing and betrayal. Schonberg overturned the conventions of Romanticism by introducing a female figure who was at once solitary and yet at the same time desiring — he was ahead of his time.
 
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