Carolee Schneemann

Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. Her painting began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork. These constructs share the heavily textural characteristics in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. She described the atmosphere in the art community at this time as misogynistic and said that female artists of the time were not aware of their bodies. These works integrated the influence of artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists. Schneemann focused on expressiveness rather than accessibility or stylishness. But she still called herself a formalist, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance themselves from male-oriented art history. She is considered a "first-generation feminist artist", a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago. They were part of the feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s that developed feminist writing and art. Schneemann became involved with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to "crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, walk, go through mud". Soon thereafter she met Allan Kaprow, the primary figure of happenings, in addition to artists Red Grooms and Jim Dine. Influenced by figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Reich, and Kaprow, Schneemann found herself drawn away from painting. In 1962, Schneemann moved with Tenney from their residence in Illinois to New York City, when Tenney obtained a job with Bell Laboratories as an experimental composer. Through one of Tenney's colleagues at Bell, Billy Klüver, Schneemann met figures such as Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved with the Judson Memorial Church's art program. There, she participated in works such as Oldenburg's Store Days (1962), and Robert Morris's Site (1964), where she played a living version of Édouard Manet's Olympia. She contributed to Oldenburg's happening, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek in upstate New York, Birth of the American Flag (1965). Around this time she began to self-represent her nude body in works, feeling that it needed to be reclaimed from the status of a cultural possession. Schneemann got to personally know many New York musicians and composers in the 1960s, including George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. She was also highly interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such as Willem de Kooning. But despite her numerous connections in the art world, New York galleries and museums were not interested in Schneemann's painting-constructions. Oldenburg suggested that there would have been more interest in Europe. The first support for Schneemann's work came from poets such as Robert Kelly, David Antin, and Paul Blackburn, who published some of her writings. Production on Schneemann's work Eye Body began in 1963. Schneemann created a "loft environment" filled with broken mirrors, motorized umbrellas, and rhythmic color units. To become part of the art herself, she covered herself in various materials, including grease, chalk, and plastic. She created 36 "transformative-actions"—photographs of herself in her constructed environment by Icelandic artist Erró. Among thes

The 1964 piece, Meat Joy, revolved around eight partially nude figures dancing and playing with various objects and substances including wet paint, sausage, raw fish, scraps of paper, and raw chickens. It was first performed at the Festival de la Libre Expression in Paris and later filmed and photographed as performed by her Kinetic Theater group at Judson Memorial Church. She described the piece as an "erotic rite" and an indulgent Dionysian "celebration of flesh as material." Meat Joy is like a happening in that they both use improvisation and focus on conception rather than execution. Though her work of the 1960s was more performance-based, she continued to build assemblages such as the Joseph Cornell-influenced Native Beauties (1962–64), Music Box Music (1964), and Pharaoh's Daughter (1966). Her Letter to Lou Andreas Salome (1965) expressed Schneemann's philosophical interests by combining scrawlings of Nietzsche and Tolstoy with a Rauschenberg-like form. Schneeman later said of the piece: “Sensuality was always confused with pornography. The old patriarchal morality of proper behaviour and improper behaviour had no threshold for the pleasures of physical contact that were not explicitly about sex.” In 1964, Schneemann began production of her 30-minute film Fuses, finishing it in 1967. Fuses portrayed her and her then-boyfriend James Tenney (who also created the sound collages for Schneemann's Viet Flakes, 1965, and Snows, 1970) having sex as recorded by a 16 mm Bolex camera, as her cat, Kitch, observed nearby. Schneemann then altered the film by staining, burning, and directly drawing on the celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage. The segments were edited together at varying speeds and superimposed with photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney's bodies and sexual actions. Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire to know whether a woman's depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art as well as a reaction to Stan Brakhage's Loving (1957), Cat's Cradle (1959) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959). Schneemann herself appeared in some Brakhage films, including Cat's Cradle, in which she wore an apron at Brakhage's insistence. Despite her friendship with Brakhage, she later called the experience of being in Cat's Cradle "frightening," remarking that "whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend's film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance—a terrifying experience—experiences of true dissolution." She showed Fuses to her contemporaries as she worked on it in 1965 and 1966, receiving mostly positive feedback. But many critics described it as self-indulgent, "narcissistic exhibitionism". There were especially strong reactions to the film's cunnilingus scene. While Fuses is viewed as a "proto-feminist" film, Schneemann felt that feminist film historians largely neglected it. The film lacked the fetishism and objectification of the female body seen in much male-oriented pornography. Two years after its completion, it won a Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Selection prize. Pop artist Andy Warhol, with whom Schneemann was acquainted, having spent time at The Factory, drolly remarked that Schneemann should have taken the film to Hollywood. Fuses became the first film in Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy. Though her works of the 1960s shared many of the ideas o

Schneemann said that in the 1980s her work was sometimes considered by various feminist groups to be an insufficient response to many feminist issues of the time. Her 1994 piece Mortal Coils commemorated 15 friends and colleagues who had died over two years, including Hannah Wilke, John Cage, and Charlotte Moorman. The piece consisted of rotating mechanisms from which hung coiled ropes while slides of the commemorated artists were shown on the walls. From 1981 to 1988, Schneemann's piece Infinity Kisses was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The wall installation, consisting of 140 self-shot images, depicted Schneemann kissing her cat at various angles. In December 2001, she unveiled Terminal Velocity, which consisted of a group of photographs of people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. In this and another of Schneemann's works that used the same images, Dark Pond, Schneemann sought to "personalize" the attacks' victims by digitally enhancing and enlarging the figures in the images, isolating them from their surroundings. Schneemann continued to produce art later in life, including the 2007 installation Devour, which featured videos of recent wars contrasted with everyday images of United States daily life on dual screens. She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution.

In 2020, Schneemann's work was included in a major group show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. My Body, My Rules investigated the artistic practices of 23 female-identified artists in the 21st century, including Louise Bourgeois, Ida Applebroog, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Ana Mendieta, Wanguechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Francesca Woodman.

While living in London briefly in 1973, Schneemann met light artist Anthony McCall. When she moved back to New York, he followed her there. Carolee Schneemann was born in 1939 in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia to a rural physician and a homemaker. The first woman in her family to attend college, she studied at Bard College but was briefly suspended for "moral turpitude" after painting a nude self-portrait; she subsequently transferred to Columbia University and later earned an MFA from the University of Illinois. In 1955, she met experimental composer James Tenney, with whom she maintained a long-term relationship and marriage that lasted until 1968. Their domestic and sexual life became the subject of her pioneering autobiographical film Fuses (1967), which also featured her beloved cat, Kitch. Schneemann later lived with artist Anthony McCall in New York City during the 1970s and had a subsequent relationship with Bruce McPherson. Throughout her life, she was deeply devoted to her cats—including Kitch, Vesper, and La Niña—viewing them as essential muses and "co-creators" who informed her understanding of space and intimacy. From 1964 until her death in 2019, she resided and worked in an 18th-century stone farmhouse in New Paltz, New York, a property she considered a primary collaborator in her artistic practice.

One of Schneemann's work's primary focuses was the separation between eroticism and the politics of gender. Her cat Kitch, which was featured in works such as Fuses (1967) and Kitch's Last Meal (1978), was a major figure in her work for almost 20 years. Schneemann used Kitch as an "objective" observer to her and James Tenney's sexual activities, saying that she was unaffected by human mores. One of her later cats, Vesper, was featured in the photographic series Infinity Kisses (1986). In a wall-size collection of 140 photos, Schneemann documented her daily kisses with Vesper and "the artist at life." With numerous works foregrounding the centrality of feline companions in Schneemann's life, scholars now locate her work as significant for new accounts of human-animal relations. Schneemann listed as an aesthetic influence on herself and James Tenney the poet Charles Olson, especially the collage Maximus at Gloucester but also in general, "in relationship to his concern for deep imagery, sustained metaphor, and also that he had been researching Tenney’s ancestors", despite his occasional sexist comments.

Schneemann considered her photographic and body pieces based in painting despite appearing otherwise on the surface. She called herself a "painter who has left the canvas to activate actual space and lived time." She cited her studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an event in time" and to think of her performers as "colors in three dimensions." Schneemann took the ideas in her figurative abstract paintings of the 1950s, where she cut and destroyed layers of paint from their surfaces, and transferred them to her photographic work Eye Body. Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire oeuvre is devoted to exploring the concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the use of cats and trees). Stiles says that the issues of sex and politics in Schneemann's work merely dictate how the art is shaped, rather than the formal concepts found behind it. For example, Schneemann relates the colors and movement featured in Fuses to brush strokes in painting. Her 1976 piece Up to and Including Her Limits, too, invokes the gestural brush strokes of the abstract expressionists with Schneemann swinging from ropes and scribbling with crayons onto a variety of surfaces.

Schneemann acknowledged that she was often called a feminist icon and that she is an influential figure to female artists, but noted that she reached out to male artists as well. Though she was noted for being a feminist figure, her works explore issues in art and rely heavily on her broad knowledge of art history. Works such as Eye Body were meant to explore the processes of painting and assemblage, rather than address feminist topics, though they still possess a strong female presence. In Schneemann's earlier work, she is seen as addressing issues of patriarchal hierarchies in the 1950s American gallery space. She addressed these issues through various performance pieces that sought to create agency for the female body as both sensual and sexual, while simultaneously breaking gallery space taboos against nude performance. Unlike much other feminist art, Schneemann's revolves around sexual expression and liberation, rather than referring to victimization or repression of women. According to artist and lecturer Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's work resists the "political correctness" of some branches of feminism as well as ideologies that some feminists claim are misogynist, such as psychoanalysis. He also asserts that Schneemann's work is difficult to classify and analyze because it combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body and energy. In her 1976 book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter, Schneemann wrote that she used nudity to break taboos associated with the kinetic human body and to show that "the life of the body is more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit." She also wrote, "In some sense I made a gift of my body to other women; giving our bodies back to ourselves." According to Kristine Stiles, Schneemann read several books exploring the body's relationship with "sexuality, culture, and freedom", such as The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich. These may have influenced her belief that women must represent themselves through writing about their experiences if they wish to gain equality. She preferred her term "art istorical" (without the h), so as to reject the "his" in history.

Much of Schneemann's work was performance-based, so photographs, video documentation, sketches, and artist's notes are often used to examine her work. It was not until the 1990s that her work began to be recognized as a central part of the contemporary feminist art canon. The first prominent exhibition of her work was the modest 1996 retrospective Up To and Including Her Limits, named for her 1973 work of the same title. It was held at New York City's New Museum of Contemporary Art and organized by senior curator Dan Cameron. Previously, these works were dismissed as narcissism or otherwise overly sexualized forms of expression. Critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, "Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire." Critics have also noted that the reaction to Schneemann's work has changed since its original performance. Nancy Princenthal notes that modern viewers of Meat Joy are still squeamish about it; however, now the reaction is also due to the biting of raw chicken or to the men hauling women over their shoulders. Schneemann's work from the late 1950s continues to influence artists such as Matthew Barney and others, especially women artists. Carolee's Magazine, printed by the Artist's Institute in New York City, highlights Schneemann's visual legacy through side-by-side comparisons with newer artists. Schneemann's work on the one side is juxtaposed with a work bearing signs of her visual style on the other. In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked Interior Scroll the 15th-best work of performance art in history, writing, "Schneemann is argued to have realigned the gender balance of conceptual and minimal art with her 1975 piece". Schneeman was an inspiration for the character Maude Lebowski (portrayed by Julianne Moore) in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski.

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6, 2019, after suffering from breast cancer for two decades.

1993 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship 2003: Eyebeam Residency 2011: United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow for Visual Arts 2011: The Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award 2012: One of that year's Courage Awards for the Arts from Yoko Ono 2017: Venice Biennale's Golden Lion Award For Lifetime Achievement 2018: Maria Anto & Elsa von Freytag-Lorignhoven Art Prize, Warsaw (Nagroda im. Marii Anto i Elsy von Freytag-Loringhoven), created by artist Zuzanny Janin and awarded by Fundacja Miejsce Sztuki / Place of Art Foundation on 15.12.2018 at Zachęta National Gallery Warsaw.

1962–63: Four ~Fur Cutting Boards 1963: Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions 1964: Meat Joy 1965: Viet Flakes Autobiographical Trilogy 1964-67: Fuses 1968-71: Plumb Line 1973-78: Kitch's Last Meal 1972: Blood Work Diary 1973-76: Up to and Including Her Limits 1975: Interior Scroll 1981: Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology 1981-88: Infinity Kisses 1983-2006: Souvenir of Lebanon 1986: Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta 1986-88: Venus Vectors 1987-88: Vesper's Pool 1990: Cycladic Imprints 1991: Ask the Goddess 1994: Mortal Coils 1995: Vulva's Morphia 2001: More Wrong Things 2001: Terminal Velocity 2007: Devour 2013: Flange 6rpm