Artist known for taboo-breaking work
painter, performance artist b October 12, 1939 d March 6, 2019
Carolee Schneemann, who has died aged 79, was a painter and performance artist whose taboobursting works explored gender, sexuality and the body politic, often by using her own nude figure as a canvas.
Schneemann described herself primarily as a painter, but in a sixdecade career, she leaped between photography, collage, assemblage, film, dance, multimedia installations and ecstatic works of performance art.
Among her most indelible was a piece called Interior Scroll (1975), in which she stood on a table and slowly pulled – and read – a feminist screed from her vagina.
Her goal, she once wrote, was ‘‘to eroticise my guilt-ridden culture and further to confound this culture’s sexual rigidities’’. ‘‘The life of the body,’’ she added, ‘‘is more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit.’’
Schneemann was largely shunned by the art establishment until the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria held a massive retrospective of her work in 2015. Two years later, the show travelled to MoMA PS1 in Manhattan, and Schneemann received a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Biennale.
‘‘She was pushing against some very powerful barriers – not just against women artists, but against women artists who were deploying their bodies as a kind of political gesture,’’ said her friend Dan Cameron, who curated a 1996 retrospective of her work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan.
Schneemann and artists who followed in her footsteps, including Cindy Sherman and Marina Abramovic, ‘‘were essentially saying we have been made into objects by men, and the very thing that has caused men to objectify us, we’ll take ownership of’’, Cameron added.
Originally grouped among the abstract expressionists, Schneemann had begun to take a more experimental approach by the early 1960s, when she became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater.
Building on the improvisatory, chance-based philosophies of composer John Cage and performance artist Allan Kaprow, the group performed works such as Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), in which eight underwear-clad dancers writhed and rolled across the floor, playing with raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, plastic, rope, brushes and paper.
Schneemann described the piece as ‘‘a celebration of flesh as material’’, and Lady Gaga seemed to nod at the work when she wore a dress made of meat in 2010.
While the concept endured, its execution sometimes proved challenging; Schneemann recalled a London performance in which her leading man was drunk and, according to the Guardian, ‘‘one of her chickens got stuck in a sink, causing a flood of bloody water’’.
In the 1960s, she devised a series known as Eye Body, in which the Icelandic artist Erro took pictures of Schneemann posing with feathers, shards of broken glass and snakes.
More controversial was her film Fuses (1964-67), which showed Schneemann and her partner at the time, composer James Tenney, having sex. Their coupling was abstracted and obstructed through the use of collage, superimposed images and scratches on the celluloid.
In 2016, Schneemann told The New York Times she had been vilified by feminist critics who accused her of ‘‘playing into male fantasies’’. Others ‘‘called it narcissism’’, artist Marilyn Minter told ‘‘Today it would be called slut-shaming. I wish I had had the language to defend her, but it registered that this is someone who’s really making a giant move.’’
‘‘I never thought I was shocking,’’ Schneemann told the Guardian in 2014. ‘‘I say this all the time, and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘this is something they need. My culture is going to recognise it’s missing something.’ ’’
Schneemann was born in Philadelphia in 1939. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a travelling doctor whom Schneemann accompanied on visits to treat patients, where she was exposed to blood, gore and bodily maladies from a young age. ‘‘No fantasy of the sanitised body in this household,’’ she once said.
When she announced she wanted to become an artist, her father refused to send her to college, telling her she would be sent to typing school.
She received a full scholarship to Bard College in New York, where she was kicked out of school for one year for what she described as ‘‘moral turpitude’’, after painting a self-portrait that showed her with her legs open, but received a bachelor’s degree in 1960.
Her marriages to Tenney and Anthony McCall, a British-born artist known for his installations of ‘‘solid light’’, both ended in divorce. She has no immediate survivors.
She turned repeatedly to war and tragedy as themes in her art, and also incorporated her cats into many of her pieces.
But she remained closely identified with her provocative early work, which seemed increasingly relevant for its political message. A Times review of her recent MoMA PS1 exhibit noted that Schneemann began one performance of Interior Scroll with a reading that featured a warning to female artists, or perhaps to women everywhere:
BE PREPARED: to have your brain picked to have the pickings misunderstood to be mistreated whether your success increases or decreases if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed) they will almost never believe you really did it
(what you did do) they will patronize you humor you try to sleep with you want you to transform them with your energy.
– Washington Post