Barbara Leon, May 21, 2001

She has effectively explored, fractured, and finally, united the perceived chasm between personal pain and global suffering. She gives the viewer an opportunity to experience the processing of tragedy from multiple, simultaneous vantage points.

Upon entering the exhibit one walks into a network of dangling video monitors suspended from the ceiling. They have an array of images of civil mayhem, environmental disaster, and political anarchy looping in each screen, out of sync with one another. As one passes from monitor to monitor the constant assault of the graphic images, at first shocking and disturbing, starts to fade into a distant backdrop of psychic disturbance.

After several minutes, their very repetition puts the mind into a state of dissociated viewing. The media-fication of the brutality creates an all too familiar split between the viewer and the image viewed. It's not that the event videotaped lose their graphic quality, but the ability to hold onto one's own emotional response starts to ebb. After walking around and through the various monitors and a maze of jumbled wires, one feels lost in the techno-visual overload and the mind just shuts down.

It wasn't until I walked away from the labyrinth of monitors that I was confronted by the huge, wall-sized projections of the artist and her cat. One quickly grasps the narrative of what has happened: the beloved cat, reflections of its life, the crushing blow of death, the hovering grief.

The images appear and disappear as though seen through a partially shrouded window. At first the viewer is only a witness, an innocent bystander caught rubbernecking the scene of a crime. But with the rhythmic repetition of the images, slowly the graphic horror is transmuted into a background of palpable grief. But in contrast to the background of suffering seen on the monitors, now the despair and suffering seem to magnify.

Whether this amplifying effect is wrought by the sheer size of the image (vs the small-screen monitor), or by the abject grief seen in the eye's of the artist, is hard to decipher. It may be as simple as the triggering is one's own buried memories of loss. But, whatever the mechanism, there is a boundary crossed where her pain becomes our pain. The inescapability of grief fills the room.

Of course, this crossing of the boundary of empathy can, at first glance, appear to be manipulative or heavy-handed. Afterall, it is not our cat, not our life that has been disrupted. Why should we have to drink from this cup of despair? We just wanted to see some art. And therein lies the brilliance of this exhibit. For somewhere between the global "more wrong things" and the personal "more wrong things", we discover the links in our humanity. There is a chord of despair that resonates deep within the soul. And far from being forced or manipulated by the artist, there is only the invitation to view grief from the inside. What we make of it is a completely hidden personal event. And no doubt some may view this show and leave feeling cut off and alienated. Perhaps even a bit embarrassed but the artist's unwavering stand to look into the heart of a terrible truth.

But, the invitation is there nonetheless. Its presence is a moment of courage that serves to inspire each person to delve into the heart of their own greatest fear. How deep can one go? How open and vulnerable does one dare to be?

These are not questions or challenges that one expects from an art installation. But in so many ways it is a concise summation of our daily life experience. We are inundated with tragic news events mediafied through images and sounds played over and over again. The deluge of images overwhelms the senses until finally out of emotional fatigue we are forced to retreat from the front lines of our own empathy. It isn't until some personal tragedy strikes that the reality of pain and suffering storms back into consciousness.

What Carolee Schneemann has done here is to create a bridge from the "other" into the "I". She has revealed the domain where suffering exists beyond the boundaries of ownership. Pain is neither pushed away nor clung to, it just IS. And far from making one feel isolated and helpless, there is a sense of shared grief that somehow lightens the burden. Afterall, isn't it the ultimate embrace, to have the sense that one's tears are falling not only from one's own eyes but from the eyes of all the world?