Meat Joy. 1964. USA. Directed by Carolee Schneemann. 5 min. Digital
Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann. 1993. USA. Directed by Maria Beatty. 5 min. Digital
Nymphomania. 1994. Great Britain. Directed by Tessa Hughes Freeland. 9 min. Digital
Exposed. 2013. USA. Directed by Beth B. 78 min. DCP
With Exposed, Beth B takes us into the 21st-century underground and reveals a secret world where cutting-edge performers are taking hold of a taboo art form, burlesque, and driving it to extremes that most people have never seen. Operating on the far edge of burlesque, these performers combine politics and physical comedy to question the very concept of “normal.” Through them, we get to examine our own inhibitions as a liberation of the body...and the mind. Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, edited from footage of three 1964 performances in London, Paris, and New York City, depicts the erotic rite of excessive indulgence, shifting between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon, comedy, joy, and repulsion. The result of a yearlong collaboration with her subject, Marie Beatty’s Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann is a feminist take on the traditional “portrait of an artist” and a provocative exploration of feminist art, particularly the body as a site of identity and political struggle. Author Jack Sargeant describes Nymphomania as “a parody of myths of an ‘ancient/pagan’ essential plentitude and…thus a blackly comedic critique of attitudes toward the dialectic of male/female sexuality.”