More than Meat Joy. Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings - SIGNED TO VAL TELBERG AND LEILA KATAYEN

New Paltz: Documentext. 1979. First. 281,(7)p., numerous photographs and illustrations, orig. boards w. dustwrapper, oblong 4to.  One of 2000 printed, this copy inscribed and signed on the ffe "Val - for my dear friend and co-consipirator of the visual depth charge, loving admiration, to you + Leila / Carolee / June '86."  In fine condition, with the lightest toning to the upper board edges, a few small tears and marks to the dj.

A fine signed copy of the Catalogue raisonne by the American performance/ body artist known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender, containing a performance chronology and bibliography.  The recipients of the inscription are the Russian surrealist photographer, filmmaker, and sculptor Val Telberg (1910-1995) and his wife, dancer and choreographer Leila Katayen. 

As Oliver Basciano writes for the Guardian, Schneemann’s career is perhaps best encapsulated by the 1964 piece “Meat Joy.” An hour-long, bacchanalian celebration of the flesh, the performance found men and women cavorting around in various stages of undress while slathering each other in paint and exchanging slimy handfuls of raw fish, chicken and sausage. “I thought of 'Meat Joy' as an erotic ritual for my starved culture,” Schneemann reflected in a retrospective held by Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. The work as a concept emerged out of a frustration that sensuality had become synonymous with pornography; she added: “The old patriarchal morality of proper behavior and improper behavior had no threshold for the pleasures of physical contact that were not explicitly about sex but related to something more ancient—the worship of nature, worship of the body, a pleasure in sensuousness.”  “Meat Joy” even managed to shock Marcel Duchamp, who declared it the “messiest” work of art France had ever seen. At one Paris performance, an audience member reportedly grew so riled up that he flung himself into the melee and attempted to strangle Schneemann. But for fans, “Meat Joy” was a high-octane thrill of messy, joyous, violent, comical, erotic and off-putting entanglements. It also typified, as Anna Cafolla of Dazed writes, “what is now a universal feminist ideal—celebrating our bodies and our sex.”

The Surrealist-influenced photomontagist Val Telberg had his first major show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948 and in the mid-1950's he famously collaborated with Anais Nin, creating images for the 1958 edition of her book "The House of Incest."  Works by Telberg, who also made paintings, sculptures and films, are part of many public collections, including those in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1983 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective of his photomontages. (18254)

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