By Victoria Stapley-Brown
You might be surprised that Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting at MoMA PS1 (until 11 March 2018) is the first comprehensive US retrospective on the artist, a major figure in the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s-70. The two-floor show delves into six decades of Schneemann’s work, starting with her early paintings in the 1950s (she trained in the medium) and also includes documentation of performances, drawings, mixed-media works, assemblages and artist’s books. The themes she explores feel as relevant as ever, such as feminism and the body, in works like the performance Scroll (1975/77), in which she pulled a scroll, printed with a manifesto which she recited, out of her vagina, or war and violence in works like the multi-media installation War Mop (1983), a mop that hits a monitor flipping between videos from the Beirut tourist bureau and images following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon...
