Fuses

Fuses (1964-1967) by Carolee Schneemann, a cross between home movie and art film, combines artistic practices with erotic activities. The film forms a cinematographic manifestation of the American artist’s feminist viewpoints and her reflections on female sexuality.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) is a performing and plastic artist, film maker and pioneer in the fields of performance and body art. A trained artist, the American performer has close ties with Neo-Dada and Fluxus, and shook up the underground film scene in New York in the mid-60s. Her films were among the most radical of the era and question how women’s bodies are perceived. The artist’s body becomes one with her work and is used to register and state her claim of going beyond the archetypes of the model’s traditional representation. A cross between home movies and art films, her works reflect her own feminist viewpoints and reflections on female sexuality. Fuses (1964-1967) reveals the romantic intimacy between the artist and her partner, American composer James Tenney, and their cat Kitch, combining artistic practice and erotic activity. Created in response to Cat’s Cradle (1959) and Loving (1957) by American film maker Stan Brakhage (two erotic studies already featuring Schneemann and Tenney),  this cinematographic manifestation emancipates itself from the aesthetic detachment characteristic of experimental cinema and, instead, embraces the reality of body and sexuality without a filter. In Fuses, Schneemann establishes her own view on heterosexual eroticism, touching on what she considers to be the repression of the female principle. Using a neutral, non-judgemental narrative viewpoint, the artist liberates the representation of the, mainly female, body from the taboos of her era. The silent and formally heterogeneous film forms an explicitly pornographic collage, alternating hand-coloured scenes with burnt ones, soaked in acid or even layered. This iconic project in a previously unheard of form, with its sensual/tactile imagery, reveals the relationship between film and body in a radical way.