Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Her work in a range of media-painting, film, video, dance and performance, constructions and installations, the written word, and assemblage-presents an unparalleled catalogue of radical aesthetic experimentation. Meat Joy, 1964, Fuses, 1964-66, Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-1976, and Interior Scroll, 1975, are now considered canonical projects, required entries in any meaningful account of contemporary art, belying their once notoriety as feminist challenges of the very concept of the art historical canon.Throughout the last fifty years, Schneemann has participated in the most significant formulations of the avant-garde, having made crucial contributions in Fluxus, happenings, expanded cinema, and performance cultures, while complicating generic definitions that might cohere to her work. Schneemann has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her career, and her work is in the collections of Tate Modern, Commune di Milano, Centre Georges Pompidou, Muzeum Wspoczesne Wroclaw, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable is the most thorough visual overview of Schneemann's work to date. Organized by five interrelated categories-Interviews and Correspondence, Painting, Cinema, Sites, and Technological Processes-this volume brings together previously published essays and interviews by authorities on the artist's work. The texts, many scarce or out of print, examine the significance of Schneemann's work in its historical context, and its vital urgency for our present.Contributors: Stephane Aquin, Emily Caigan, R Bruce Elder, Ron Hanson, Juan Carlos Kase, Brett Kashmere, Anette Kubitza, Erica Levin, Scott MacDonald, Thomas McEvilley, Ara Osterweil, Melissa Ragona, Maura Reilly, Kristine Stiles and Kenneth White.

Creator of such acclaimed works as the performance Meat Joy and the film Fuses, for decades the artist Carolee Schneemann has saved the letters she has written and received. Much of this correspondence is published here for the first time, providing an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to the international avant-garde of happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art. Schneemann corresponded for more than forty years with such figures as 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 emphasis from the private creation of unique objects to direct engagement with the public in ephemeral performances and in expanded, nontraditional forms of music, film, dance, theater, 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, joy and sorrow, and charged personal and artistic struggles. It sheds light on the internecine aesthetic politics and 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.