Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-1978) by Carolee Schneemann
Sunday, November 11, 1984, 8:00 pm
Kitch’s Last Meal by Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann in person
Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-78), double super-8mm projection, 60 min. (approx.), Fuses (1964-67), 22 min., Plumb Line (1968-72), 18 min., all by Carolee Schneemann.
Carolee Schneemann has long been regarded as one of the pivotal avant-garde artists of the last twenty years. Her work spans many mediums (painting, collage, performance art, and film) and is known for its diaristic honesty and aggressive sexuality. In Kitch’s Last Meal, she “spans four years with Anthony McCall and my companion for 19 years, the cat Kitch. The visual premise of the film was twofold: to shoot one meal a week of the cat eating, so long as she lived, and to film what I saw the cat observing in the course of our ordinary life. The structure… is based on that continuous texture of shared daily life and its unknown direction and outcome… The ordinariness of the activities of the couple, in association with sound, builds towards a disconcerting combustion.” Of the earlier Fuses, B. Ruby Rich has said: “Schneemann’s film… is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit, its meanings as an activity for herself and quite accurately, women in general.”