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Carolee Schneemann’s Body of Work

The works of the legendary feminist performance artist have been collected and curated into a retrospective monograph

by
Rachel Shukert
March 23, 2016
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The work of Carolee Schneemann—the legendary performance artist whose brand of visual experimentation and expression wowed audiences during Fluxus-dominated New York scene of ’60s and ’70s—is featured in a new monograph released this week. Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting is the first complete retrospective of the Schneemann’s artistic career. The 320-page book features her paintings and other visual works, alongside depictions of her various groundbreaking performances, including Meat Joy, in which the Schneemann and several others cavorted in an enormous pile of sausages, raw fish, and raw chicken in a choreographed ecstatic ritual in 1964, and Interior Scroll, a 1975 piece in which a naked Schneemann unfurled a long roll of paper from inside her vagina while narrating an imaginary conversation with an dismissive and chauvinistic male filmmaker.

Schneemann has never been a particularly fashionable artist. In the early ‘60’s, when she began to show her work, the art world was in the throes of pop art and minimalism—a chilly, cerebral, and de-sexualized visual language that explored the mechanization and impersonality of the modern world. Schneemann, meanwhile, explored questions of power, shame, gender, and sex—in all their inherent messiness—through the female body: often naked, often smeared in some kind of organic viscera, and with the use of materials that have been around since the dawn of time.

Decades later, some of Schneemann’s performances might seem like perfect examples of the clichés of “bad” art. To some people, they’re the type of thing that might be cited were some idiot Congressman to make a barely literate call to deny all federal funding to the NEA (and, perhaps, to eradicate the existence of women as a class of people entitled to their own thoughts, feelings, and bodies.) But this is only the kind of thing that proves what might be rightly considered the thesis of Schneemann’s work: that a woman—her body covered or uncovered, clean or messy, voluptuous or rigorously devoid of extra flesh—should get to choose the terms of what she does with it, and how to display it.

In my experience, this idea still utterly unhinges lots of people: the female body as a medium of expression seems to elicit anger and disgust, or it may be met by a studiedly blasé or dismissive attitude. (Nonetheless, there is always some reaction.) It’s something we’ve seen again and again—from Eve in the Garden of Eden to Lady Godiva to Lena Dunham on Girls. The female body is never neutral ground; it’s not even, to an alarming degree, considered to belong to the woman herself. (See, for example, the latest on reproduction rights coming out of the frothing and outraged mouths of the Republican presidential candidates, who all want to want to, or have already, defunded Planned Parenthhood. Or read about a lawmaker in Texas had last year proposed that women be forced to carry even a dead or nonviable fetus to term.) Carolee Schneemann was far from the first woman to realize the unique power—and weakness —her physical being confers on her. But she was one of the first to literally embody it in her art. She’s not a cliché; she’s a pioneer.

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.