Carolee Schneemann

COURAGE. From the ‘Gift Science Archive’ guiding lights.

“That’s what I was recognizing when he was my student. He was all about spillage and seepage and everyone was trying to get him back in the quadrant and I thought that it was just perfect. Let him spill and seep and envelop and overcome space.” (Schneemann on Sands’ practice in the ‘Double Trouble’ catalog, 2001)

Carolee Schneemann’s work and her ways of being, ways of seeing and ways of understanding what “art” or “life” might be are imprinted into the DNA of Sands’ practice and of the ‘Gift Science Archive’. It would be impossible really to map that, so let’s start with a date and a title:

6 March. ‘Gift Science Archive’.

On 7 March 2019 Frédérique Bergholtz, Director of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution met with Sands to invite him to do a commission with If I Can’t Dance in the frame of their Edition VIII – ‘Ritual and Display’ biennial program. When she arrived at his home studio, she brought with her flowers. 7 March was the day that the death of Carolee Schneemann on 6 March 2019 became public knowledge. 6 March has in the three years of the ‘Gift Science Archive’ been a day of remembering to cherish the good company we are in, with our living ancestors and those passed beyond. Each year, on 6 March, in honor of Schneemann, the ‘Gift Science Archive’ has attempted what Aimar Arriola so beautifully articulated in ‘Process Event #2’: “to rhyme an end with a new beginning.”

When Frédérique approached Sands, he happily accepted and proposed to “take stock” of his 25-year studio practice; he proposed to take up the process of archiving as a performance; and he proposed to call this performance ‘Gift Science Archive’ after Schneemann’s 1965 ‘Gift Science’, an assemblage work bringing together objects gifted to her by other artists. The majority of objects constituting Schneemann’s (social) sculpture were gifts from men. The art world then (and still now) is dominated by men. BELONGING is complicated and contingent. With ‘Gift Science Archive’, Sands and the ‘Gift Science Archive’ team (all woman-identified) have playfully taken up Schneemann’s proposition of ‘gift science’ as a starting point to fuck with the scientific basis of an archiving system. No one on the team is trained in the library sciences, and none of us particularly care for sanitized, or “systematic” ways of thinking that push out the messy relationality—the spillage and the seepage—of the gift and the understandings of “value” and “economy”, which it engenders and enacts. Where is the space for non-systemic systems? It is Schneemann who opened up this space, first for Sands to have the courage and RESILIENCE to keep developing a practice as complicatedly conceptual and excessively emotional as his, even when, for decades, no one seemed to be looking; and second, for the ‘Gift Science Archive’ to come into being as a functioning archive of relations and their objects, as a collective of people and their positions, and as a fierce feminist demand to center feelings and thoughts and SHARING in our performances of history-making.

… I wonder, is this map enough to understand Carolee’s place in all of this? – MH. More

Carolee Schneemann’s work and her ways of being, ways of seeing and ways of understanding what “art” or “life” might be are imprinted into the DNA of Sands’ practice and of the ‘Gift Science Archive’. It would be impossible really to map that, so let’s start with a date and a title:

6 March. ‘Gift Science Archive’.

On 7 March 2019 Frédérique Bergholtz, Director of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution met with Sands to invite him to do a commission with If I Can’t Dance in the frame of their Edition VIII – ‘Ritual and Display’ biennial program. When she arrived at his home studio, she brought with her flowers. 7 March was the day that the death of Carolee Schneemann on 6 March 2019 became public knowledge. 6 March has in the three years of the ‘Gift Science Archive’ been a day of remembering to cherish the good company we are in, with our living ancestors and those passed beyond. Each year, on 6 March, in honor of Schneemann, the ‘Gift Science Archive’ has attempted what Aimar Arriola so beautifully articulated in ‘Process Event #2’: “to rhyme an end with a new beginning.”

When Frédérique approached Sands, he happily accepted and proposed to “take stock” of his 25-year studio practice; he proposed to take up the process of archiving as a performance; and he proposed to call this performance ‘Gift Science Archive’ after Schneemann’s 1965 ‘Gift Science’, an assemblage work bringing together objects gifted to her by other artists. The majority of objects constituting Schneemann’s (social) sculpture were gifts from men. The art world then (and still now) is dominated by men. BELONGING is complicated and contingent. With ‘Gift Science Archive’, Sands and the ‘Gift Science Archive’ team (all woman-identified) have playfully taken up Schneemann’s proposition of ‘gift science’ as a starting point to fuck with the scientific basis of an archiving system. No one on the team is trained in the library sciences, and none of us particularly care for sanitized, or “systematic” ways of thinking that push out the messy relationality—the spillage and the seepage—of the gift and the understandings of “value” and “economy”, which it engenders and enacts. Where is the space for non-systemic systems? It is Schneemann who opened up this space, first for Sands to have the courage and RESILIENCE to keep developing a practice as complicatedly conceptual and excessively emotional as his, even when, for decades, no one seemed to be looking; and second, for the ‘Gift Science Archive’ to come into being as a functioning archive of relations and their objects, as a collective of people and their positions, and as a fierce feminist demand to center feelings and thoughts and SHARING in our performances of history-making.

… I wonder, is this map enough to understand Carolee’s place in all of this? – MH.

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