On art, money and impermanence

The performance art of Carolee Schneemann, Amanda Coogan, Ana Mendieta

On art, money and imperanmance

Late last night, after driving home from a Hagstone event and crawling onto the couch, I discovered that it was Carolee Schneemann’s birthday. The Schneemann Foundation revealed that Stanford University has made six decades of the artist’s diaries available online. What a gift. When there’s time, I look forward to picking my way through them.

Earlier at the event, I discussed, as I regularly do, one of its central narrative themes in the book: precarity. Nell is an artist who makes performance and durational art, using her body as medium, as tool, as interrogative object. She also uses the island itself as a canvas, carving spirals and loops on the sand, and once made a sound installation in the forest, encountering problems at every turn.

Because this kind of work is not the kind of physical, tangible art we are used to seeing in galleries, it can be difficult to sell; unless a reproduction is made, like this image of Amanda Coogan’s extraordinary six-hour…