Carolee Schneemann

Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues. • Illustration — Keynote address given by Schneemann on October 23, 2008 Schneemann taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, Rutgers University, and SUNY New Paltz. She also published widely, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976) and More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979). Her works have been associated with a variety of art classifications, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, the Beat Generation, and happenings.

Carolee Schneemann studied at University of Illinois System, Bard College and Oak Lane Day School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is visual arts. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are happening, performance art and body art. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City, Urbana and New Brunswick. Employment is recorded with Rutgers University, Hunter College and California Institute of the Arts. Work by Carolee Schneemann is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Tate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Courage Award for the Arts, Anonymous Was A Woman Award and Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

• Name — Carolee Schneemann • Born — 12 October 1939 • Birthplace — Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 6 March 2019 • Place of death — New Paltz, New York, U.S. • Movement — Feminist art, Neo-Dada, Fluxus, happening • Field — Visual art, performance art • Education — Bard College (BA) University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MFA)

Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman and raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania. As a child, her friends described her in retrospect as "a mad pantheist", due to her relationship with, and respect for, nature. As a young adult, Schneemann often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she cited her earliest connections between art and sexuality to her drawings from ages four and five, which she drew on her father's prescription tablets. Her family was generally supportive of her naturalness and freeness with her body. Schneemann attributed her father's support to the fact that he was a rural physician who had to often deal with the body in various states of health. Schneemann was awarded a full scholarship to New York's Bard College. She was the first woman from her family to attend college, but her father discouraged her from an art education. While at Bard, Schneemann began to realize the differences between male and female perceptions of each other's bodies while serving as a nude model for her boyfriend's portraits and while painting nude self-portraits. While on leave from Bard and on a separate scholarship to Columbia University, she met musician James Tenney, who was attending The Juilliard School. Her first experience with experimental film was through Stan Brakhage, Schneemann's and Tenney's mutual friend. After graduating from Bard in 1962, Schneemann attended the University of Illinois for her graduate degree. Schneemann's image is included in the iconic 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. Her painting began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork. These constructs share the heavily textural characteristics in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. She described the atmosphere in the art community at this time as misogynistic and said that female artists of the time were not aware of their bodies. These works integrated the influence of artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists. Schneemann focused on expressiveness rather than accessibility or stylishness. But she still called herself a formalist, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance themselves from male-oriented art history. She is considered a "first-generation feminist artist", a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago. They were part of the feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s that developed feminist writing and art. Schneemann became involved with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to "crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, walk, go through mud". Soon thereafter she met Allan Kaprow, the primary figure of happenings, in addition to artists Red Grooms and Jim Dine. Influenced by figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Reich, and Kaprow, Schneemann found herself drawn away from painting. In 1962, Schneemann moved with Tenney from their residence in Illinois to New York City, when Tenney obtained a job with Bell Laboratories as an experimental composer. Through one of Tenney's colleagues at Bell, Billy Klüver, Schneemann met figures such as Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved with the Judson Memorial Church's art program. There, she participated in works such as Oldenburg's Store Days (1962), and Robert Morris's Site (1964), where she played a living version of Édouard Manet's Olympia. She contributed to Oldenburg's happening, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek in upstate New York, Birth of the American Flag (1965). Around this time she began to self-represent her nude body in works, feeling that it needed to be reclaimed from the status of a cultural possession. Schneemann got to personally know many New York musicians and composers in the 1960s, including George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. She was also highly interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such as Willem de Kooning. But despite her numerous connections in the art world, New York galleries and museums were not interested in Schneemann's painting-constructions. Oldenburg suggested that there would have been more interest in Europe. The first support for Schneemann's work came from poets such as Robert Kelly, David Antin, and Paul Blackburn, who published some of her writings. Production on Schneemann's work Eye Body began in 1963. Schneemann created a "loft environment" filled with broken mirrors, motorized umbrellas, and rhythmic color units. To become part of the art herself, she covered herself in various materials, including grease, chalk, and plastic. She created 36 "transformative-actions"—photographs of herself in her constructed environment by Icelandic artist Erró. Among these images is a frontal nude featuring two garden snakes crawling on Schneemann's torso. This image drew particular attention both for its "archaic eroticism" and her visible clitoris. Schneemann said that at the time she did not know about the symbolism of the serpent in ancient cultures in figures such as the Minoan Snake Goddess and, in fact, learned of it years later. Upon its presentation to the public in 1963, art critics found the piece lewd and pornographic. Artist Valie Export cites Eye Body for the way in which Schneemann portrays "how random fragments of her memory and personal elements of her environment are superimposed on her perception."

• Illustration — Schneemann in 2008 Schneemann said that in the 1980s her work was sometimes considered by various feminist groups to be an insufficient response to many feminist issues of the time. Her 1994 piece Mortal Coils commemorated 15 friends and colleagues who had died over two years, including Hannah Wilke, John Cage, and Charlotte Moorman. The piece consisted of rotating mechanisms from which hung coiled ropes while slides of the commemorated artists were shown on the walls. From 1981 to 1988, Schneemann's piece Infinity Kisses was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The wall installation, consisting of 140 self-shot images, depicted Schneemann kissing her cat at various angles. In December 2001, she unveiled Terminal Velocity, which consisted of a group of photographs of people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. In this and another of Schneemann's works that used the same images, Dark Pond, Schneemann sought to "personalize" the attacks' victims by digitally enhancing and enlarging the figures in the images, isolating them from their surroundings. Schneemann continued to produce art later in life, including the 2007 installation Devour, which featured videos of recent wars contrasted with everyday images of United States daily life on dual screens. She was interviewed for the 2010 film!Women Art Revolution.

In 2020, Schneemann's work was included in a major group show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. My Body, My Rules investigated the artistic practices of 23 female-identified artists in the 21st century, including Louise Bourgeois, Ida Applebroog, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Ana Mendieta, Wanguechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Francesca Woodman.

While living in London briefly in 1973, Schneemann met light artist Anthony McCall. When she moved back to New York, he followed her there. Carolee Schneemann was born in 1939 in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia to a rural physician and a homemaker. The first woman in her family to attend college, she studied at Bard College but was briefly suspended for "moral turpitude" after painting a nude self-portrait; she subsequently transferred to Columbia University and later earned an MFA from the University of Illinois. In 1955, she met experimental composer James Tenney, with whom she maintained a long-term relationship and marriage that lasted until 1968. Their domestic and sexual life became the subject of her pioneering autobiographical film Fuses (1967), which also featured her beloved cat, Kitch. Schneemann later lived with artist Anthony McCall in New York City during the 1970s and had a subsequent relationship with Bruce McPherson. Throughout her life, she was deeply devoted to her cats—including Kitch, Vesper, and La Niña—viewing them as essential muses and "co-creators" who informed her understanding of space and intimacy. From 1964 until her death in 2019, she resided and worked in an 18th-century stone farmhouse in New Paltz, New York, a property she considered a primary collaborator in her artistic practice.

One of Schneemann's work's primary focuses was the separation between eroticism and the politics of gender. Her cat Kitch, which was featured in works such as Fuses (1967) and Kitch's Last Meal (1978), was a major figure in her work for almost 20 years. Schneemann used Kitch as an "objective" observer to her and James Tenney's sexual activities, saying that she was unaffected by human mores. One of her later cats, Vesper, was featured in the photographic series Infinity Kisses (1986). In a wall-size collection of 140 photos, Schneemann documented her daily kisses with Vesper and "the artist at life." With numerous works foregrounding the centrality of feline companions in Schneemann's life, scholars now locate her work as significant for new accounts of human-animal relations. Schneemann listed as an aesthetic influence on herself and James Tenney the poet Charles Olson, especially the collage Maximus at Gloucester but also in general, "in relationship to his concern for deep imagery, sustained metaphor, and also that he had been researching Tenney's ancestors", despite his occasional sexist comments.

Schneemann considered her photographic and body pieces based in painting despite appearing otherwise on the surface. She called herself a "painter who has left the canvas to activate actual space and lived time." She cited her studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an event in time" and to think of her performers as "colors in three dimensions." Schneemann took the ideas in her figurative abstract paintings of the 1950s, where she cut and destroyed layers of paint from their surfaces, and transferred them to her photographic work Eye Body. Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire oeuvre is devoted to exploring the concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the use of cats and trees). Stiles says that the issues of sex and politics in Schneemann's work merely dictate how the art is shaped, rather than the formal concepts found behind it. For example, Schneemann relates the colors and movement featured in Fuses to brush strokes in painting. Her 1976 piece Up to and Including Her Limits, too, invokes the gestural brush strokes of the abstract expressionists with Schneemann swinging from ropes and scribbling with crayons onto a variety of surfaces.

Schneemann acknowledged that she was often called a feminist icon and that she is an influential figure to female artists, but noted that she reached out to male artists as well. Though she was noted for being a feminist figure, her works explore issues in art and rely heavily on her broad knowledge of art history. Works such as Eye Body were meant to explore the processes of painting and assemblage, rather than address feminist topics, though they still possess a strong female presence. In Schneemann's earlier work, she is seen as addressing issues of patriarchal hierarchies in the 1950s American gallery space. She addressed these issues through various performance pieces that sought to create agency for the female body as both sensual and sexual, while simultaneously breaking gallery space taboos against nude performance. Unlike much other feminist art, Schneemann's revolves around sexual expression and liberation, rather than referring to victimization or repression of women. According to artist and lecturer Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's work resists the "political correctness" of some branches of feminism as well as ideologies that some feminists claim are misogynist, such as psychoanalysis. He also asserts that Schneemann's work is difficult to classify and analyze because it combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body and energy. In her 1976 book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter, Schneemann wrote that she used nudity to break taboos associated with the kinetic human body and to show that "the life of the body is more variously expressive than a sex-negative society can admit." She also wrote, "In some sense I made a gift of my body to other women; giving our bodies back to ourselves." According to Kristine Stiles, Schneemann read several books exploring the body's relationship with "sexuality, culture, and freedom", such as The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich. These may have influenced her belief that women must represent themselves through writing about their experiences if they wish to gain equality. She preferred her term "art istorical" (without the h), so as to reject the "his" in history.

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6, 2019, after suffering from breast cancer for two decades.

• 1962–63: Four ~Fur Cutting Boards • 1963: Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions • 1964: Meat Joy • 1965: Viet Flakes • Autobiographical Trilogy • 1964-67: Fuses • 1968-71: Plumb Line • 1973-78: Kitch's Last Meal • 1972: Blood Work Diary • 1973-76: Up to and Including Her Limits • 1975: Interior Scroll • 1981: Fresh Blood: A Dream Morphology • 1981-88: Infinity Kisses • 1983-2006: Souvenir of Lebanon • 1986: Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta • 1986-88: Venus Vectors • 1987-88: Vesper's Pool • 1990: Cycladic Imprints • 1991: Ask the Goddess • 1994: Mortal Coils • 1995: Vulva's Morphia • 2001: More Wrong Things • 2001: Terminal Velocity • 2007: Devour • 2013: Flange 6rpm

She is the main subject of the feature-length experimental nonfiction film Breaking the Frame by Canadian director Marielle Nitoslawska (2012).

Carolee Schneemann worked in visual arts. Her work is associated with Fluxus, feminist art and abject art. She was employed by Rutgers University, Hunter College and California Institute of the Arts. She worked at New York City, Urbana, New Brunswick and Santa Clarita.

Carolee Schneemann is recorded as having studied at University of Illinois System, Bard College and Oak Lane Day School.