Correspondence Course

Creator of such acclaimed works as the performanceMeat Joyand the filmFuses, the artist Carolee Schneemann has saved the letters she has written and received for decades. Much of this correspondence is published here for the first time, providing an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to international avant-garde happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art. Schneemann corresponded for more than forty years with individuals including the composer James Tenney, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the artist Dick Higgins, the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the poet Clayton Eshleman, and the psychiatrist Joseph Berke. Her "tribe," as she called it, altered the conditions under which art is made and the form in which it is presented, shifting art away from private acts and the creation of unique objects to art engaged directly with the public in ephemeral performances and in expanded, non-traditional forms of music, film, dance, theatre, and literature. Kristine Stiles selected, edited, annotated, and wrote the introduction to the letters, assembling them so that readers can follow the development of Schneemann's art, thought, and private and public relationships. The correspondence chronicles a history of energy and invention, as well as of charged personal and artistic struggles, arguments, and displays of ego. It sheds light on internecine aesthetic politics and the mundane activities that constitute the exasperating vicissitudes of making art, building an artistic reputation, and negotiating an industry as unpredictable and demanding as the art world in the mid-to-late twentieth century. For her part, Schneemann discusses financial dilemmas, grapples with her career, shares her success, joy, and love, and contends with loneliness, aging, and disappointment. Her correspondence reveals her to be a writer of considerable literary talent, as well as one whose letters are consummately visual, both in communicating images of sensate and corporeal experience and as material objects, as shown in the volume's many images.