Carolee Schneemann
Water Light / Water Needle I, 1966 / 2014
Hand-colored giclee prints on Hahnemuhle paper
27 15/16 x 40 15/16 inches (71 x 104 cm)
Framed: 34 1/2 x 47 1/2 inches (87.5 x 120.5 cm)
(GP2195)
Following the success of her performance, Meat Joy (1964), Carolee Schneemann received a ticket to attend the 1964 Venice Biennale. ⠀
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Venice's floating city environment inspired the artist: “This mirroring of water and sky introduced my visual concept of bodies moving within an anti-gravitational frame... If Venice’s water is ‘ground,’ duplicating, reflecting the repeated upright rhythms – whatever is above the horizon line is also below the horizon line mirrored in water," Schneemann wrote.⠀
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Between 1964-1965, Schneemann worked on preparatory drawings and notes, envisioning an aerial work comprised of ropes and pulleys rigged across the canal at San Marco in Venice (Italy). Water Light/Water Needle was eventually realized for the first time between March 17th-20th 1966 in St. Mark’s Church, New York, and performed once again in the same year on the Havemayer Estate in New Jersey. Men and women performers skilfully moved within the ropes with a series of rules: when they encountered one another they had to combine intentions to adjust their positions together. In doing so, the body becomes the surface on which discourse of the “body as subject” and “body as object” takes place.