For Part Two of The Artist’s Institute season with Carolee Schneemann, the Artist’s Institute presents a new three slide-projector installation of Schneemann’s ABC—We Print Anything—In The Cards (1976–77). The work is made up of 156 index cards, each with an accompanying image card, that document the emotional chaos of two tangled relationships: Schneemann’s breakup with Anthony McCall and a new relationship with Bruce McPherson. The cards are color-coded to organize advice from friends, dialog amongst the partners, and excerpts from Schneemann’s diary and dreams. Shuffled by the slide projectors, the cards present a non-linear narrative whose complexity and contradictions mirror the shifting, inter-connected relationships that are their subject. ABC revisits Schneemann’s enduring interest in reflexivity, autobiography, and inter-media installations.
The artwork’s attention to how we communicate, disrupt, and adapt to one another gives shape to what happens around it: a music concert written as correspondence by composer James Tenney, a lecture on the difficulty of interpreting Schneemann’s art by Branden W. Joseph, an intercollegiate symposium, a night of stand-up comedy, and a print from a fictional feminist secession by Mai-Thu Perret.
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