Arleen Schloss

Arleen Schloss (left) in Martin Kippenberger`s SO 36, Berlin Jan 1980

Arleen Schloss (born December 12, 1943 in Brooklyn, NY) is a noted "North American performance art pioneer, video/film artist, sound poet, director and curator" [1] who is an influential figure in the Downtown New York art, video, performance art and music scenes. Schloss began her influence through A’s – an interdisciplinary loft space that became a hub for music, exhibitions, performance art, films and videos.[1] A hotbed of experimentation, A’s featured works from Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Richard Hambleton, Liquid Liquid, Carolee Schneemann, The Coachmen, Kim Gordon, Phoebe Legere, Mania D, Thurston Moore, Shirin Neshat, Lee Ranaldo, Sur Rodney Sur, Alan Vega and Ai Weiwei [2] In the 1990s A's became A's Wave where website works and other forms of digital media were shown.

Concurrently with A’s, Schloss established herself as a curator, co-organizing shows at Danceteria and The Storefront of Art and Architecture, now a well-known architectural venue in New York.[3]

Schloss gained attention as a critically acclaimed performance artist in the 1970s.[4] The New York Times stated that her performances were "superior to much performance art." [5] and the SoHo Weekly News noted that her voice was "musical the way Patti Smith or Yoko Ono are musical."[6]

Life and Work

Schloss studied at The Bank Street College of Education, The Art Students League, Parsons School of Design and graduated from New York University. Schloss started her career in the galleries of SoHo and the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a painter and performance artist who performed and showed her work in the U.S., Europe and Asia at venues such as the prestigious Franklin Furnace, Betty Parsons Gallery, Bykert Gallery, Construction Company, Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo, Lenbachhaus Galeria in Munich, La Nuit Parcourt La Ceil in Belgium, Cafe Einstein in Berlin, The Kitchen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In subsequent years she performed her media opera "A.E.BLA BLA BLA" at Ars Electronica in Austria and was a featured guest on Willoughby Sharp's Downtown ’86, a Cable ACE Award-winning program, which showcased the top talent of 1980s performers, artists and musicians.

Additionally, during the 1980s, she began to get noticed for her sound poetry work, most notably for the audio piece "How She Sees It By Her." Schloss' sound work is included in two seminal publications and anthologies, "Just Another Asshole," a short-lived no wave art/music/sound art magazine publication published by Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess [7] and "Text-Sound Texts" Edited by Richard Kostelanetz.

Schloss was one of the first national artists to be awarded an 8mm camera from Canon to experiment with 8mm video.[8] With the camera, she created the travelogue video Sun Daze Away, which showed at Central Park’s Summerstage and at various venues in Europe and Asia. In 1990 Schloss directed and produced the video documentary "FromKepler2Cyberspace", with Hi8 equipment loans from Sony. This document featured the pioneers of virtual reality, including Dr. Marvin Minsky, John Perry Barlow, Timothy Leary, William Gibson and Jaron Lanier. During the same period of time, Schloss filmed a series of interviews with John Cage and included those interviews in a series entitled "Windows of Chance/Change." Nickelodeon, impressed with her video work and art in dealing with the alphabet and children, hired Schloss in 1989 to direct and produce 15 live video excerpts for the animated TV series Eureeka's Castle, which won a Cable ACE Award.

In the 1990s Schloss continued her work with new forms of art and media. She exhibited her electronic work "Marbelize" at the international digital and technology show at ISEA, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and showed multimedia work on one of the first digital art, radio and Internet programs called ArtNetWeb. Art Dirt In-Port Performance 3/25/1997

Schloss received grants, awards and residencies from The Experimental Television Center, Creative Artists Public Service Grant, New York Foundation of the Arts, Harvestworks, Allied Productions and the Ford Foundation. She is on the board of Art & Sciences Collaborations Inc, and her work is in the collections of the Fales Library, AT&T, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Donnell Library. The Newyork Undergroundmuseum documents her entire work.[9] A documentary about Arleen's life, called Wednesdays at A's, is currently in post production. Schloss lives in New York City.

Exhibitions, Screenings and Performances

Collections

Awards

Further reading

Goodbye 20th Century: Die Geschichte von Sonic Youth, Arleen Schloss S. 514 ff, Verlag: Kiepenheuer & Witsch; Auflage: 1., Auflage (24. August 2009) ISBN 3-462-04162-2

References

Notes
  1. 1 2 Sonic Youth: Sensational Fix, p. 514 Publisher: Walther Konig; Har/Com edition (March 1, 2009)
  2. ↑ http://www.nypress.com/article-17040-q-a-arlene-schloss.html
  3. ↑ http://www.newmuseum.org/events/273
  4. ↑ Kay Larsen Village Voice p. 119 November 6, 1978
  5. ↑ New York Times, "Music (?): Kitchen Sink," Robert Palmer, October 13, 1977
  6. ↑ SoHo Weekly News, "Schloss/Smead", January 30, 1975
  7. ↑ Carlo McCormick, "The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984", Princeton University Press, 2006
  8. ↑ Captured: A Lower East Side Film & Video History, By Clayton Patterson, 2005
  9. ↑ http://www.nyundergroundmuseum.org/ARLEENSCHLOSS.htm

External links

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