Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 6
Carolee Schneemann
THE
FLESH
AND
BLOOD
SHOW
Violence, feminism and
personal trauma all coexist
in the provocative and
challenging art of the late
Carolee Schneemann.
Salvation explores her legacy
arol Schneemann was
an
American
performance artist, filmmaker
and painter whose work
championed her unique
takes on feminism in ways that were
both provocative and challenging to
her, her friends, and the viewer. She
saw her work as part of a transformative and ever-evolving process
which would, over time, involve her
lovers, her private life, including
her sex life, and bizarrely her pet
cat, Kitch. Born in 1939 in rural
Pennsylvania and raised by a doctor father and homemaker mother
and her farmer grandparents, she
became accustomed to the sight of
blood and butchered meat; something that would stand her in good
stead later when she would employ
dead chickens, fish, raw meat and
sausages in her performances.
Schneemann, studying at the
University of Illinois, started off
in Abstract Expressionism, a style
C
4/Salvation
of painting that evolved among a
coterie of New York artists that
began in the late forties and came
to prominence in the 1950s with
the emergence of artists like Jack
son Pollack and William de Kooning (see Ninth Street Women in the
reviews section). However, alienated by the male dominance and
misogyny of that scene she moved
to performance art. Despite this she
stated dramatically that she was
first and foremost a painter, “I’m a
painter. I’m still a painter and I will
die a painter”.
his was the very early 60s
and the Abstract Expressionist movement was already fading and being
usurped by new emerging
art forms like Pop Art, experimental
film and the general excitement and
creativity being generated around
music. Around this, she met and
started a relationship with musician
James Tenney and moved with him
T
to New York. It was 1962 and she
was in what was, at that time, the
centre of the artistic universe.
Early interest in Schneemann’s
work came from radical poets like
Robert Kelly and Paul Blackburn,
but in 1963 she met up with the Paris-based Icelandic photographer,
Erró, who was spending time in
New York and agreed to photograph
Schneeman who was in the process of
creating 36 “transformative actions”
for her first solo performance. Called
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, it would transform
the Pollockian impulse to register the
‘presence’ of the artist in the traces of
gestural marks on the canvas and Pollock’s desire to be ‘in the painting’ into
a feminist desire to ‘have the painting
be on her body’. To enhance her body
as part of the artwork Schneemann
created an environment of large panels, coloured units, broken mirrors,
glass, lights, moving umbrellas and
motorised parts.
The end result was a series of
extraordinary images of a naked
woman smeared in paint, grease
and, in what would become the
performance’s most controversial
image, live snakes crawling across
her torso. Described as ‘archaic
eroticism’ art critics at the time attacked the works as ‘lewd and pornographic; conversely by one of the
leading feminists of the day, Simone
de Beauvoir, ’Schneemann thrusts
the ‘immanent’ female subject into
the domain of the ‘transcendent’,
active male’. Essentially the female
nude was looking back.
ndaunted and inspired,
Schneemann staged an
equally challenging performance the following
year, titled Meat Joy it
revolved around eight partially nude
figures, four men and four women, including Schneemann, who were covered in paint and paper and crawled
and writhed together while play-
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