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Contemporary Art

Infinity Kisses II

Carolee Schneemann

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Object Label

Not one to rest on her renegade avant-garde laurels, Carolee Schneemann’s series Infinity Kisses, begun in 1981, proposes an eccentric interspecies intimacy, one that the artist nurtured with generations of cats in her eighteenth-century farmhouse in upstate New York. Seeing her pets as reincarnations of a single being, Schneemann extended her career-long exploration of taboo sensuality into a series of blurry images that capture fleeting moments of hedonistic contact with a being she loved. Largely rejected by the art world at the time, Schneemann embraced her self-determined role as the ultimate outlandish cat lady, having learned from years of experience that it often takes the art world decades to catch up with transgressive women artists.

Caption

Carolee Schneemann (American, Fox Chase, PA, born 1939, died 2019, New Paltz, NY). Infinity Kisses II, 1990–1998. Chromogenic photograph, Each sheet: 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Marc Routh by arrangement with the Remy-Toledo Gallery, 2005.60a-b. © Carolee Schneemann. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gallery

Not on view

Title

Infinity Kisses II

Date

1990–1998

Medium

Chromogenic photograph

Classification

Photograph

Dimensions

Each sheet: 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm)

Credit Line

Gift of Marc Routh by arrangement with the Remy-Toledo Gallery

Accession Number

2005.60a-b

Rights

© Carolee Schneemann

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Frequent Art Questions

  • Tell me more.

    From 1981 to 1988, Schneemann produced a series of 140 photographs documenting the morning ritual of her cat Cluny, followed by her cat Vesper, giving her a "kiss."
    She had a tiny Olympus automatic camera, which she kept by her bed, and stated:
    "Every morning when the cat would kiss me, I would take a picture, so long as my partner — my human partner — was not annoyed. I gave myself the following conditions for making the pictures: I would have no control over lighting or focus, and, as much as possible, I would attempt to get the camera to capture what the kisses felt like. I have hundreds of images from this series."

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Artists and makers

Carolee Schneemann

2 works in the collection