Media Studies Workshop with Nina Peterson
The artist swinging in a harness. A live then dead cat. A dual Super8 film projector. Two jokes. Three to six video monitors. Those are the components of artist Carolee Schneemann’s contraption Up to and Including Her Limits, an artwork she performed nine times 1973–76 in New York City, London, Berlin, and Berkeley, California. Art historians have examined Schneemann’s use of her own naked body in relation to essentialism and constructionism in feminist debates during the late twentieth century. But the roles of mechanical and film technologies as well as the feline participant remain untheorized in relation to the artwork’s potential for intervening in masculinist visual economies and patriarchal structures of relationality. Drawing on film, humor, performance, and animal studies, this project looks closely at the operation of the components in Schneemann’s multimedia performance alongside materials from the artist’s archive. I identify the following physical and conceptual mechanisms at work in Schneemann’s performance: filmic confusion, failed flight, inside and hegemonic jokes, and animal puppetry. I then map these mechanisms onto news and advertising media discourses surrounding developments in the women’s liberation movement during the 1970s in the United States. In so doing, this project raises questions about agency in artist-audience-technology configurations and in interspecies relationships as well as the uses of humor for critiquing gender hierarchy in art and political institutions.
Nina Peterson is a Ph.D. candidate in art history and a 2024-25 Harold Leonard Memorial Fellow in Film Study at the University of Minnesota. She recently co-edited with Katherine Guinness a special issue of Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (“The Aesthetics of Perplexity,” March 2025). From 2022–2024, she was the editorial assistant for the academic journal Public Art Dialogue, and she held a 2022–23 Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship at UMN’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her areas of interdisciplinary interest include humor studies, animal studies, and feminisms, and she researches modern and contemporary performance, film, and photography.
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For more information on upcoming sessions, consult the spring semester schedule.
Zoom link: https://umn.zoom.us/j/96914755650