Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneemann was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.
Schneemann taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, Rutgers University, and SUNY New Paltz. She also published widely, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976) and More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979). Her works have been associated with a variety of art classifications, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, the Beat Generation, and happenings.
Early life and education Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman and raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania.Judith Olch Richards, 'Oral History Interview with Carolee Schneemann', 1 March 2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessible here: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-carolee-schneemann-15672#transcript; and 'Selected Chronology', Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, ed. Kenneth White (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), p. 308. As a child, her friends described her in retrospect as "a mad pantheist", due to her relationship with, and respect for, nature.Montano, pg. 132. As a young adult, Schneemann often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she cited her earliest connections between art and sexuality to her drawings from ages four and five, which she drew on her father's prescription tablets. Her family was generally supportive of her naturalness and freeness with her body. Schneemann attributed her father's support to the fact that he was a rural physician who had to often deal with the body in various states of health.
Schneemann was awarded a full scholarship to New York's Bard College. She was the first woman from her family to attend college, but her father discouraged her from an art education. While at Bard, Schneemann began to realize the differences between male and female perceptions of each other's bodies while serving as a nude model for her boyfriend's portraits and while painting nude self-portraits.Montano, pp. 132-33. While on leave from Bard and on a separate scholarship to Columbia University, she met musician James Tenney, who was attending The Juilliard School.
Her first experience with experimental film was through Stan Brakhage, Schneemann's and Tenney's mutual friend. After graduating from Bard in 1962, Schneemann attended the University of Illinois for her graduate degree.
Schneemann's image is included in the iconic 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.
Early work 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".ND, p. 114. 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.ND, p. 116. She was also highly interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such as Willem de Kooning.ND, pg. 117. 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.ND, p. 118.
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 these images is a frontal nude featuring two garden snakes crawling on Schneemann's torso. This image drew particular attention both for its "archaic eroticism" and her visible clitoris. Schneemann said that at the time she did not know about the symbolism of the serpent in ancient cultures in figures such as the Minoan Snake Goddess and, in fact, learned of it years later.ND, p. 121. Upon its presentation to the public in 1963, art critics found the piece lewd and pornographic. Artist Valie Export cites Eye Body for the way in which Schneemann portrays "how random fragments of her memory and personal elements of her environment are superimposed on her perception."
Film The 1964 piece, Meat Joy,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)Notes on Fuseology Carolee Schneemann Remembers James Tenney 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."An Interview with Carolee Schneemann," Wide Angle, 20(1) (1998), p20-49 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.ND, p. 125. Fuses became the first film in Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy. Though her works of the 1960s shared many of the ideas of the concurrent Fluxus artists, she remained independent of any specific movement. They formed the groundwork for the feminist art movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.