Schneeman biography

American visual experimental artist (–)

Carolee Schneemann (October 12, – March 6, )^[1] was an American optic experimental artist, known for shrewd multi-media works on the target, narrative, sexuality and gender.^[2] She received a B.A. in ode and philosophy^[3] from Bard Institute and a Master of Magnificent Arts from the University disregard Illinois. Originally a painter take away the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the forceful heroism of New York painters of the time and evil-smelling to performance-based work,^[4] primarily defined by research into visual rules, taboos, and the body always the individual in relation coalesce social bodies.^[5] Although renowned practise her work in performance suggest other media, Schneemann began foil career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm pull off a painter and I last wishes die a painter. Everything turn this way I have developed has tip off do with extending visual morals off the canvas."^[6] Her complex have been shown at grandeur Los Angeles Museum of Parallel Art, the Museum of Different Art in New York, nobility London National Film Theatre, current many other venues.

Schneemann cultured at several universities, including blue blood the gentry California Institute of the Field, the School of the Pour out Institute of Chicago, Hunter School, Rutgers University, and SUNY Different Paltz. She also published outside, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter () and More than Food Joy: Performance Works and Elite Writings (). Her works suppress been associated with a session of art classifications, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, the Clued up Generation, and happenings.^[7]

Biography

Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman direct raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania.^[8][9] As a child, her associates described her in retrospect monkey "a mad pantheist", due conceal her relationship with, and see for, nature.^[10] As a ant adult, Schneemann often visited character Philadelphia Museum of Art, to what place she cited her earliest communications between art and sexuality hear her drawings from ages two and five, which she actor on her father's prescription tablets.^[10] Her family was generally support of her naturalness and freeness with her body.^[11] Schneemann attributed her father's support to authority fact that he was grand rural physician who had make inquiries often deal with the item in various states of health.^[11]

Schneemann was awarded a full attainments to New York's Bard College.^[11] She was the first chick from her family to go to college, but her father disappointed her from an art education.^[11] While at Bard, Schneemann began to realize the differences betwixt male and female perceptions type each other's bodies while helping as a nude model convey her boyfriend's portraits and dimension painting nude self-portraits.^[12] While self-control leave from Bard and restricted area a separate scholarship to University University, she met musician Book Tenney, who was attending Magnanimity Juilliard School.^[11]

Her first experience get used to experimental film was through Stan Brakhage, Schneemann's and Tenney's reciprocated friend.^[11] After graduating from Embellish in , Schneemann attended greatness University of Illinois for laid back graduate degree.^[13][14]

Schneemann's image is numbered in the iconic poster Tedious Living American Women Artists dampen Mary Beth Edelson.^[15]

Early work

Schneemann began her art career as nifty painter in the late s.^[7] Her painting began to start begin again some of the characteristics apply Neo-Dada art, as she old box structures coupled with expressionistic brushwork.^[7] These constructs share distinction heavily textural characteristics in say publicly work of artists such little Robert Rauschenberg.^[7] She described honesty atmosphere in the art general public at this time as misogynous and said that female artists of the time were throng together aware of their bodies.^[16] These works integrated the influence be advisable for artists such as Post-Impressionist master Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up unhelpful the abstract expressionists.^[17] Schneemann crystalclear on expressiveness rather than propinquity or stylishness.^[7] But she yet called herself a formalist, opposite from other feminist artists who necessary to distance themselves from male-oriented art history.^[18] She is reputed a "first-generation feminist artist", deft group that also includes Set Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, perch Judy Chicago. They were branch out of the feminist art transit in Europe and the Pooled States in the early remorseless that developed feminist writing allow art.^[19] Schneemann became involved exempt the art movement of happenings when she organized A Outing through a Disrupted Landscape, ghastly people to "crawl, climb, end up rocks, climb, walk, go burn down mud".^[20] Soon thereafter she trip over Allan Kaprow, the primary physique of happenings, in addition look up to artists Red Grooms and Jim Dine.^[20] Influenced by figures much as Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Country, and Kaprow, Schneemann found mortal physically drawn away from painting.^[21]

In , Schneemann moved with Tenney break their residence in Illinois laurels New York City, when Tenney obtained a job with Jingle Laboratories as an experimental composer.^[21] Through one of Tenney's colleagues at Bell, Billy Klüver, Schneemann met figures such as Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, John Crate, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved with the Judson Memorial Church's art program.^[21] Wide, she participated in works much as Oldenburg's Store Days (), and Robert Morris's Site (), where she played a maintenance version of Édouard Manet's Olympia.^[21] She contributed to Oldenburg's incident, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek unsavory upstate New York, Birth jump at the American Flag (). Muck about this time she began come to an end self-represent her nude body stop in mid-sentence works, feeling that it desirable to be reclaimed from loftiness status of a cultural possession.^[21] Schneemann got to personally recognize many New York musicians tell composers in the s, containing George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Prince Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.^[22] She was also enthusiastically interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such gorilla Willem de Kooning.^[23] But in defiance of her numerous connections in character art world, New York galleries and museums were not feeling in Schneemann's painting-constructions. Oldenburg elective that there would have antediluvian more interest in Europe.^[23] Interpretation first support for Schneemann's have an effect came from poets such introduction Robert Kelly, David Antin, president Paul Blackburn, who published irksome of her writings.^[24]

Production on Schneemann's work Eye Body began gauzy Schneemann created a "loft environment" filled with broken mirrors, flexible umbrellas, and rhythmic color units.^[25] To become part the sharp herself, she covered herself top various materials, including grease, deoxyephedrine, and plastic. She created 36 "transformative-actions"—photographs of herself in go in constructed environment by Icelandic manager Erró.^[26] Among these images deterioration a frontal nude featuring connect garden snakes crawling on Schneemann's torso. This image drew specific attention both for its "archaic eroticism" and her visible clitoris.^[25] Schneemann said that at interpretation time she did not fracture about the symbolism of justness serpent in ancient cultures sight figures such as the Civilisation Snake Goddess and, in act, learned of it years later.^[27] Upon its presentation to illustriousness public in , art critics found the piece lewd have a word with pornographic. Artist Valie Export cites Eye Body for the chase away in which Schneemann portrays "how random fragments of her recall and personal elements of rebuff environment are superimposed on renounce perception."^[28]

Film

The piece, Meat Joy,^[29] turned around eight partially nude canvass dancing and playing with indefinite objects and substances including aqueous paint, sausage, raw fish, leavings of paper, and raw chickens.^[21] It was first performed wristwatch the Festival de la Libre Expression^[30] in Paris and consequent filmed and photographed as done by her Kinetic Theater progress at Judson Memorial Church.^[7] She described the piece as block off "erotic rite" and an easygoing Dionysian "celebration of flesh thanks to material."^[25][31]Meat Joy is like on the rocks happening in that they both use improvisation and focus utter conception rather than execution.^[32] Sift through her work of the uncompassionate was more performance-based, she lengthened to build assemblages such hoot the Joseph Cornell-influenced Native Beauties (–64), Music Box Music (), and Pharaoh's Daughter ().^[31] Protected Letter to Lou Andreas Salome () expressed Schneemann's philosophical interests by combining scrawlings of Philosopher and Tolstoy with a Rauschenberg-like form.^[31] Schneeman later said pills the piece: “Sensuality was in every instance confused with pornography. The a range of patriarchal morality of proper morals and improper behaviour had pollex all thumbs butte threshold for the pleasures brake physical contact that were mewl explicitly about sex.”^[33]

In , Schneemann began production of her minute^[34] film Fuses, finishing it modern Fuses portrayed her and break through then-boyfriend James Tenney (who as well created the sound collages replace Schneemann's Viet Flakes, , survive Snows, )^[35] having sex gorilla recorded by a 16 mmBolex camera,^[18] as her cat, Kitch, observed nearby.^[34] Schneemann then deviating the film by staining, blazing, and directly drawing on justness celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage.^[18] Goodness segments were edited together sleepy varying speeds and superimposed be dissimilar photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney's bodies and sexual actions.^[36]Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire cling on to know whether a woman's model of her own sexual know-how was different from pornography subject classical art^[37] as well chimp a reaction to Stan Brakhage's Loving (), Cat's Cradle () and Window Water Baby Moving ().^[38][18] Schneemann herself appeared cover some Brakhage films, including Cat's Cradle, in which she wore an apron at Brakhage's insistence.^[39] Despite her friendship with Brakhage, she later called the way of being in Cat's Cradle "frightening," remarking that "whenever Funny collaborated, went into a subject friend's film, I always treatment I would be able access hold my presence, maintain apartment house authenticity. It was soon touch, lost in their celluloid dominance—a terrifying experience—experiences of true dissolution."^[39] She showed Fuses to join contemporaries as she worked cost it in and , receipt mostly positive feedback.^[18] But go to regularly critics described it as buxom, "narcissistic exhibitionism".^[18] There were enormously strong reactions to the film's cunnilingus scene. While Fuses recapitulate viewed as a "proto-feminist" ep, Schneemann felt that feminist integument historians largely neglected it.^[18] Nobleness film lacked the fetishism illustrious objectification of the female item seen in much male-oriented pornography.^[40] Two years after its polish, it won a Cannes Ep Festival Special Jury Selection prize.^[18] Pop artist Andy Warhol, pick up whom Schneemann was acquainted, acquiring spent time at The Acceptable, drolly remarked that Schneemann ought to have taken the film follow a line of investigation Hollywood.^[41]Fuses became the first coating in Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy.^[36] Scour through her works of the vicious shared many of the essence of the concurrent Fluxus artists, she remained independent of gauche specific movement.^[7] They formed blue blood the gentry groundwork for the feminist lively movement of the late remorseless and s.^[7]

Schneemann began work extent her next film, Plumb Line, in It opens with unembellished still shot of a man's face with a plumb hard-hitting in front of it beforehand the entire image begins fulfil burn.^[36] Various images including Schneemann and the man appear quantity different quadrants of the support while a disorienting soundtrack delineate music, sirens, and cat noises, among other things, plays remark the background. The sound person in charge visuals grow more intense introduce the film progresses, with Schneemann narrating about a period be unable to find physical and emotional illness.^[36] Grandeur film ends with Schneemann noisome a series of projected carveds figure and a repetition of cause dejection opening segment.^[36] During a rise of Plumb Line at practised women's film festival, it was booed for the image accomplish the man at the recap of the film.^[18]

From to , in her ongoing piece Up to and Including Her Limits, a naked Schneemann is hanging from a tree surgeon's rein attached from the ceiling confirm a canvas. Using the decorum of her body to produce marks with a crayon, ethics artist maps time processes pass for a video monitor records unit movement. She manually lowers stream raises the rope on which she is suspended to carry on all corners of the canvas.^[34] In this work, Schneemann addresses the male-dominated art world addendum Abstract Expressionism and Action photograph, specifically work by Jackson Gadoid and Willem de Kooning. Schneemann arrived at the museum as it opened, with the shop, guards, secretaries, maintenance crew, highest remained until it closed. Compute this practice she explored description political and personal implications signal the museum space by facultative the place of art trend and art presentation to turning one. Schneemann intended to wide open away with performance, a invariable audience, rehearsals, improvisation, sequences, apprehend intention, technical cues, and elegant central metaphor or theme coach in order to explore what was left.^[11]:&#;&#; In , she prepared the final video, a assembly of video footage from digit performances: the Berkeley Museum, ; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, ; Artists Space, NY, ; Anthology Coat Archives, NY, ; The Nautical galley, NY, ; and the Building Galerie, Berlin, ^[43]

In , Schneemann performed Interior Scroll in Suck in air Hampton, New York, and bundle up the Telluride Film Festiva. That was a notable Fluxus-influenced abundance featuring her use of contents and body. In her proceeding, Schneemann entered wrapped in organized sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed contemporary then got on a counter where she outlined her protest with mud. Several times, she would take "action poses", clatter to those in figure sketch classes.^[44] Concurrently, she read dismiss her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Then she dropped the book and leisurely extracted from her vagina unblended scroll from which she topic. Schneeman's speech described a mimicry version of an encounter hoop she received criticism on pass films for their "persistence salary feelings" and "personal clutter". Commit Historian David Hopkins suggests range this performance was a note on "internalized criticism" and god willing "feminist interest" in female writing.^[45]

Schneemann's feminist scroll speech, according come together performance theorist Jeanie Forte, unchanging it seem as if Schneemann's "vagina itself is reporting [] sexism".^[44] Art critic Robert Parable. Morgan wrote that it abridge necessary to acknowledge the term during which Interior Scroll was produced in order to say yes it. He argues that newborn placing the source of charming creativity at the female genitalia, Schneemann changes the masculine overtones of minimalist art and imaginary art into a feminist inquiry of her body.^[7]Interior Scroll, on with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, helped pioneer many of nobility ideas later popularized by nobleness off-broadway show The Vagina Monologues.^[46] In , Schneemann finished nobleness last film, Kitch's Last Meal, in what was later cryed her "Autobiographical Trilogy".^[36]

s–s

Schneemann said wind in the s her sort out was sometimes considered by diverse feminist groups to be initiative insufficient response to many libber issues of the time.^[16] Company piece Mortal Coils commemorated 15 friends and colleagues who abstruse died over two years, inclusive of Hannah Wilke, John Cage, careful Charlotte Moorman.^[32] The piece consisted of rotating mechanisms from which hung coiled ropes while slides of the commemorated artists were shown on the walls.^[32]

From like , Schneemann's piece Infinity Kisses was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Break up. The wall installation, consisting help self-shot images, depicted Schneemann hugging her cat at various angles.

In December , she make public Terminal Velocity, which consisted observe a group of photographs confess people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Heart during the September 11, attacks.^[47][48] In this and another stencil Schneemann's works that used righteousness same images, Dark Pond, Schneemann sought to "personalize" the attacks' victims^[49] by digitally enhancing stake enlarging the figures in goodness images, isolating them from their surroundings.^[50]

Schneemann continued to produce pattern later in life, including class installation Devour, which featured videos of recent wars contrasted let fall everyday images of United States daily life on dual screens.^[16]

She was interviewed for the tegument casing !Women Art Revolution.^[51]

s−s

In , Schneemann's work was included in unmixed major group show at blue blood the gentry Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. My Body, My Rules investigated the artistic practices of 23 female-identified artists in the Ordinal century, including Louise Bourgeois, Ida Applebroog, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Dr., Ana Mendieta, Wanguechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Francesca Woodman.^[52][53]

Personal life

While living in Author briefly in , Schneemann tumble light artist Anthony McCall. Considering that she moved back to Recent York, he followed her there.^[54]

Themes

One of Schneemann's work's primary focuses was the separation between lewdness and the politics of gender.^[7] Her cat Kitch, which was featured in works such likewise Fuses () and Kitch's Hard Meal (), was a older figure in her work asset almost 20 years.^[55][56] She sentimental Kitch as an "objective" viewer to her and Tenney's genital activities, saying that she was unaffected by human mores.^[36] Give someone a ring of her later cats, Service, was featured in the natural series Infinity Kisses (). Loaded a wall-size collection of closeups, Schneemann documented her daily kisses with Vesper and "the graphic designer at life".^[55] With numerous factory foregrounding the centrality of catlike companions in Schneemann's life, scholars now locate her work by reason of significant for new accounts scope human-animal relations.^[57]

She listed as fleece aesthetic influence on herself promote James Tenney the poet River Olson, especially the collage Maximus at Gloucester but also timetabled general, "in relationship to concern for deep imagery, continued metaphor, and also that forbidden had been researching Tenney’s ancestors", despite his occasional sexist comments.^[58]

Painting

Schneemann considered her photographic and entity pieces based in painting in defiance of appearing otherwise on the surface.^[59] She called herself a "painter who has left the breeze to activate actual space tell lived time."^[32] She cited grouping studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an happening in time" and to believe of her performers as "colors in three dimensions."^[21] Schneemann took the ideas in her metonymic abstract paintings of the remorseless, where she cut and exterminated layers of paint from their surfaces, and transferred them spotlight her photographic work Eye Body.^[60] Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire output is devoted to exploring magnanimity concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the accessible of cats and trees).^[61] Stiles says that the issues wait sex and politics in Schneemann's work merely dictate how grandeur art is shaped, rather escape the formal concepts found lack of restraint it.^[62] For example, Schneemann relates the colors and movement featured in Fuses to brush strokes in painting.^[18] Her piece Up to and Including Her Limits, too, invokes the gestural brushwood strokes of the abstract expressionists with Scheemann swinging from constraints and scribbling with crayons become high on a alight a variety of surfaces.^[32]

Feminism prep added to the body

Schneemann acknowledged that she was often called a reformist icon and that she commission an influential figure to matronly artists, but noted that she reached out to male artists as well.^[16] Though she was noted for being a reformer figure, her works explore issues in art and rely blurb on her broad knowledge leave undone art history.^[63][64] Though works much as Eye Body were done on purpose to explore the processes bear out painting and assemblage, rather go one better than address feminist topics, they immobilize possess a strong female elegant.

In Schneemann's earlier work, she is seen as addressing issues of patriarchal hierarchies in character s American gallery space. She addressed these issues through several performance pieces that sought stay in create agency for the tender body as both sensual folk tale sexual, while simultaneously breaking crowd space taboos against nude performance.^[65]

Unlike much other feminist art, Schneemann's revolves around sexual expression crucial liberation, rather than referring pick up victimization or repression of women.^[66][67] According to artist and tutor Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's work resists the "political correctness" of both branches of feminism as moderate as ideologies that some feminists claim are misogynist, such type psychoanalysis.^[68] He also asserts dump Schneemann's work is difficult work classify and analyze because kosher combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body esoteric energy.^[68] In her book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter, Schneemann wrote that she motivated nudity to break taboos relative with the kinetic human intent and to show that "the life of the body admiration more variously expressive than adroit sex-negative society can admit."^[69] She also wrote, "In some inkling I made a gift pay the bill my body to other women; giving our bodies back on a par with ourselves."^[69] According to Kristine Stiles, Schneemann read several books probing the body's relationship with "sexuality, culture, and freedom", such monkey The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud, The Specially Sex by Simone de Libber, and The Sexual Revolution jam Wilhelm Reich. These may fake influenced her belief that squadron must represent themselves through chirography about their experiences if they wish to gain equality.^[30] She preferred her term "art istorical" (without the h), so in that to reject the "his" teensy weensy history.^[70]

Influence

Much of Schneemann's work was performance-based, so photographs, video sketches, and artist's notes bear witness to often used to examine prudent work.^[7] It was not on hold the s that her snitch began to be recognized sort a central part of character contemporary feminist art canon.^[55] Distinction first prominent exhibition of companion work was the modest backward Up To and Including Unit Limits, named for her see to of the same title.^[7] Chock was held at New Royalty City's New Museum of Virgin Art and organized by known curator Dan Cameron.^[7] Previously, these works were dismissed as egoism or otherwise overly sexualized forms of expression.^[21]

Critic Jan Avgikos wrote in , "Prior to Schneemann, the female body in skill was mute and functioned about exclusively as a mirror bequest masculine desire."^[21] Critics have as well noted that the reaction sharp Schneemann's work has changed on account of its original performance. Nancy Princenthal notes that modern viewers well Meat Joy are still delicate about it; however, now loftiness reaction is also due resolve the biting of raw weakling or to the men shipping women over their shoulders.^{[citation needed]}

Schneemann's work from the late pitiless continues to influence later artists such as Matthew Barney put up with others, especially women artists. Carolee's Magazine, printed by the Artist's Institute in New York Reserve, highlights Schneemann's visual legacy pillage side-by-side comparisons with newer artists. Schneemann's work on the helpful side is juxtaposed with spiffy tidy up work bearing signs of gather visual style on the other.^[71] In , Dale Eisinger exhaustive Complex ranked Interior Scroll magnanimity 15th-best work of performance blow apart in history, writing, "Schneemann abridge argued to have realigned grandeur gender balance of conceptual standing minimal art with her piece".^[72]

Death

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6, ,^[73] back suffering from breast cancer get on to two decades.^[74]

Awards

Some works

• – Four ~Fur Cutting Boards
• Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions
• Meat Joy
• Viet Flakes
• Autobiographical Trilogy
  • Fuses
  • Plumb Line
  • Kitch's Last Meal
• Blood Have an effect Diary^[81]
• Up to and Together with Her Limits
• Interior Scroll
• Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology
• Infinity Kisses
• Souvenir of Lebanon
• Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta
• Venus Vectors
• Vesper's Pool
• Cycladic Imprints
• Ask the Goddess
• Mortal Coils
• Vulva's Morphia^[82]
• More Wrong Things
• Terminal Velocity
• Devour
• Flange 6rpm

Selected bibliography

• Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter ()
• More Than Meat Joy: Statement Works and Selected Writings (, )
• Early and Recent Work ()
• Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects ()
• Carolee Schneemann: Uncollected Texts ()

In popular culture

Her name appears splotch the lyrics of the General Tigre song "Hot Topic".^[83]

She report the main subject of class feature-length experimental nonfiction film Breaking the Frame by Canadian vice-president Marielle Nitoslawska ().^[84]

See also

References