Infinity Kisses II

1990-1998

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.