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.

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema's lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film's provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media's materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author's previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

Since the late 1950s Stan Brakhage has been in the forefront of independent filmmaking. His body of work -- some seventy hours -- is one of the largest of any filmmaker in the history of cinema, and one of the most diverse. Probably the most widely quoted experimental filmmaker in history, his films typify the independent cinema.

Until now, despite well-deserved acclaim, there has been no comprehensive study of Brakhage's oeuvre. "The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition" fills this void. R. Bruce Elder delineates the aesthetic parallels between Brakhage's films and a broad spectrum of American art from the 1920s through the 1960s.

This book is certain to stir the passions of those interested in artistic critique and interpretation in its broadest terms.

What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmmakers have given us, tell us about ourselves, about the way we think and about the culture in which we live? In his new book A Body of Vision , R. Bruce Elder situates contemporary poetic and cinematic body images in their cultural context. Elder examines how recent artists have tried to recognize and to convey primordial forms of experiences. He proposes the daring thesis that in their efforts to do so, artists have resorted to gnostic models of consciousness. He argues that the attempt to convey these primordial modes of awareness demands a different conception of artistic meaning from any of those that currently dominate contemporary critical discussion. By reworking theories and speech in highly original ways, Elder formulates this new conception. The works of Brakhage, Artaud, Schneeman, Cohen and others lie naked under Elder's razor-sharp dissecting knife and he exposes the essence of their work, cutting deeply into the themes and theses from which the works are derived. His remarks on the gaps in contemporary critical practices will likely become the focus of much debate.