Who Was Carolee Schneemann? 8 Facts About the Legendary Performance Artist

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was a performance artist who created multimedia artworks with a focus on body image, gender, and sexuality. She is considered a pioneer of feminist performance art and occupied a special position in the art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. From her background in painting to her groundbreaking and daring performance art pieces, below are eight fascinating facts about Carolee Schneeman.

Most people know Carolee Schneemann as a performance artist and a pioneer of feminist art, but what many don’t know is that Schneemann completed a classical study of painting and understood herself as a painter all her life. Born in 1939 in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, the visually experimental artist held a B.A. degree from Bard College, an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois, and honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the California Institute of Art and the Maine College of Art.

In an interview with Scott McDonald in 1980, she declared: “I’m a painter, working with my body and ways of thinking about movement and environment that come out of the discipline of having painted for six or eight hours a day for years. That’s got to be the root of my language in any medium. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m not a photographer. I’m a painter.” Painting, as this quote from the artist makes clear, can be seen as the basis for her work. It is the starting point for all understanding of Schneemann’s art.

2. Her Early Work Was Influenced by Paul Cézanne and Jackson Pollock

A look at the early paintings of Carolee Schneemann shows the American artist was influenced by partly very contradictory art movements. In the research on Carolee Schneemann’s painting, there is evidence of inspiration from Paul Cézanne‘s Impressionism as well as a strong influence by contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and the action painting of Jackson Pollock. However, more than simply using or adopting the techniques and style of these artists in her paintings, Schneemann reflected them in her art, sometimes even satirizing them. Like her contemporary Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann understood painting as a “male-dominated medium” and the brush as “phallic”. Even more than Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning at that time, Schneemann questioned painting in its two-dimensionality and wanted to expand painting into space and time. This reflection ended in segmental images and assemblages and can be seen in large format paintings like Quarry Transposed (1960), Sphinx (1961) or Fur Wheel (1962).

Author Maura Reilly writes in her essay The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann (2011) that “Each [painting] demonstrates the artist’s continued desire to push painting through the canvas, out of the frame, and into the spectator’s space, while at the same time structuring the ‘real’ with the visual composition of a painter’s eye.” An examination of Jackson Pollock’s action painting is also found in Schneemann’s performance entitled Up To and Including Her Limits (1976). Trapped in a harness and naked, the artist paints in front of an audience, thereby exaggerating Pollock’s form of painting. In this performance, criticism of the concentration on the male body and its sexualization in Pollock’s art can be seen.

After moving from Illinois to New York with her partner James Tenney in 1961, Schneemann quickly became part of the so-called “experimental avant-garde” and associated herself with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and other second-generation abstract expressionist artists. Through a colleague of Tenney’s at Bell Laboratories, Billy Klüver, Schneemann met Oldenburg and Rauschenberg, along with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who integrated her into the activities of the art program of the Judson Dance Theater at Judson Memorial Church.

At this point, she participated in works such as Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1962). In Robert Morris Site (1964), she played a living version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Conscious of liberating her body from the status of cultural possession and re-appropriating it for herself, she used it naked in works of art. Schneemann was interested in the art of the Abstract Expressionists of her time, but Schneemann’s pictorial constructions, despite their connections in the art scene, were met with little interest from New York art dealers. Consequently, Carolee Schneemann devoted herself more to her cinematic performances and experimental films.

4. Her Performances and Installations Were Criticised by Feminists

In her artworks, Carolee Schneemann negotiated the themes of physicality, sexuality, and gender roles. Perhaps Schneemann’s most famous performance to date is her first one: Meat Joy (1964). In Schneemann’s so-called kinetic theater performance, half-naked male and female bodies rolled across the floor in front of an audience in color and a mixture of raw meat, fish, and sausages. With performances like this Schneemann shocked her audience in the 1960s. Criticism came from both conservative and feminist sides. Unlike many of her colleagues, Carolee Schneemann was less concerned with the presentation of harassment or oppression in her works and more with body appropriation, sexual expression, and emancipation.

At first, feminists strongly criticized the fact that the artist primarily used naked bodies for expression. It was not until the 1990s that Schneemann’s image as an icon of feminist art was born. With her works, she influenced other artists such as Valie Export, the Guerilla Girls, Tracy Min, and Karen Finley. Carolee Schneemann was much more than “just” a feminist artist, but feminist themes determined her oeuvre. Recurring themes included physicality, sexuality, and gender roles.

To this day, the film Fuses (1965) is one of the most famous works by Carolee Schneemann is considered a controversial classic of recent art history. The film is a self-righteous piece showing Carolee Schneemann and her partner having sexual intercourse. The images are overlaid and distorted with cinematic effects so that the view is limited to the nakedness of the bodies and the whole thing appears like a dream.

The Guardian newspaper wrote about this film by the artist: “The notorious masterpiece… a silent celebration in color of heterosexual lovemaking. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition, and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself… Fuses succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body’s mind.“

Fuses is not only a provocative piece of film, but the artistic work is also a good example of how Schneemann’s films were influenced by her painting. Thus, the edited shot and the video stills shown in this article seem like many abstract expressionist paintings with many different layers that overlap and allow the artist’s action in creating this work to be openly recognized.

6. She Thought of Her Vagina as a Sculptural Form

Carolee Schneemann’s nudity and her female body were often dominant elements in the artist’s performances. She used both her body and her genitals for her artistic expression. The artist herself understood her vagina as a kind of sculpture. In the text of her performance Meat Joy, she explained: “I thought of the vagina in many ways – physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers. This source of ‘interior knowledge’ would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh … the source of conceptualizing, of interacting with materials, of imagining the world and composing its images.”

The significance of the vagina as a sculptural body and meaningful physical space is also the theme of Snowman’s famous performance Interior Scroll (1975). In front of an audience – mainly women artists – Schneemann in this performance undressed in front of her viewers. She then read naked from her book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter (published in 1967). After that, she put paint onto her body and after a while removed slowly a narrow scroll of paper from her vagina reading out loud from it.

Carolee Schneemann was a feminist and performance artist, she was a painter – and she was obviously political. Her political commitment was evident in films she directed against the Vietnam War. One of them is Viet Flakes (1965). The 7-minute 16 mm film consists of a collection of images of atrocities in Vietnam, compiled over five years from foreign magazines and newspapers. Broken visual rhythms in the film are complemented by music by Carolee Schneemann’s partner James Tenney, which includes Vietnamese songs as well as fragments of classical and pop music. This film makes the suffering of the people in Vietnam during the war particularly clear.

8. She Was Awarded at the Venice Biennale

In 2017, Carolee Schneeman was presented with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice. When the committee announced their selection, the curator of the exhibition said of Schneeman, “She has used her own body as the prevalent material of her art. In so doing, she situates women as both the creator and an active part of the creation itself.”

Carolee Schneemann died in 2019. Although she was criticized from many sides during her lifetime, the artist is remembered today for being explicit, provocative, and diverse in her work and political stance. She is rightly considered a trailblazer for feminist performance art, and her catalog continues to inspire feminist artwork and artists.

Originally published: August 30, 2020. Last update: August 23, 2024, by Elizabeth Berry.