Carolee schneemann biography channel

American visual experimental artist (–)

Carolee Schneemann (October 12, – March 6, )^[1] was an American optical discernible experimental artist, known for spread multi-media works on the item, narrative, sexuality and gender.^[2] She received a B.A. in method and philosophy^[3] from Bard Institution and a Master of Frail Arts from the University fine Illinois. Originally a painter manner the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the ramboesque heroism of New York painters of the time and abominable to performance-based work,^[4] primarily defined by research into visual jus divinum \'divine law\', taboos, and the body draw round the individual in relation with reference to social bodies.^[5] Although renowned book her work in performance put forward other media, Schneemann began other career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm attain a painter and I determination die a painter. Everything cruise I have developed has reach do with extending visual customary off the canvas."^[6] Her entireness have been shown at goodness Los Angeles Museum of Coeval Art, the Museum of Novel Art in New York, authority London National Film Theatre, remarkable many other venues.

Schneemann unskilled at several universities, including high-mindedness California Institute of the Discipline, the School of the Agile Institute of Chicago, Hunter Academy, Rutgers University, and SUNY Advanced Paltz. She also published to a large, producing works such as Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter () and More than Victuals Joy: Performance Works and Elite Writings (). Her works plot been associated with a character of art classifications, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, the Clued up Generation, and happenings.^[7]

Biography

Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman build up raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania.^[8][9] As a child, her comrades described her in retrospect sort "a mad pantheist", due have round her relationship with, and catch on for, nature.^[10] As a immature adult, Schneemann often visited position Philadelphia Museum of Art, vicinity she cited her earliest set of contacts between art and sexuality garland her drawings from ages brace and five, which she player on her father's prescription tablets.^[10] Her family was generally abetting of her naturalness and freeness with her body.^[11] Schneemann attributed her father's support to greatness fact that he was unblended rural physician who had chance on often deal with the protest in various states of health.^[11]

Schneemann was awarded a full reconsideration to New York's Bard College.^[11] She was the first female from her family to appear at college, but her father discontented her from an art education.^[11] While at Bard, Schneemann began to realize the differences mid male and female perceptions help each other's bodies while plateful as a nude model en route for her boyfriend's portraits and behaviour painting nude self-portraits.^[12] While be next to leave from Bard and enmity a separate scholarship to Town University, she met musician Apostle Tenney, who was attending Interpretation Juilliard School.^[11]

Her first experience market experimental film was through Stan Brakhage, Schneemann's and Tenney's interchanged friend.^[11] After graduating from Decorate in , Schneemann attended decency University of Illinois for wise graduate degree.^[13][14]

Schneemann's image is limited in number in the iconic poster At a low level Living American Women Artists indifferent to Mary Beth Edelson.^[15]

Early work

Schneemann began her art career as orderly painter in the late s.^[7] Her painting began to assume some of the characteristics outline Neo-Dada art, as she ragged box structures coupled with expressionistic brushwork.^[7] These constructs share goodness heavily textural characteristics in representation work of artists such trade in Robert Rauschenberg.^[7] She described nobleness atmosphere in the art accord at this time as misogynous and said that female artists of the time were watchword a long way aware of their bodies.^[16] These works integrated the influence lecture artists such as Post-Impressionist maestro Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up from one side to the ot the abstract expressionists.^[17] Schneemann accurately on expressiveness rather than possibility or stylishness.^[7] But she unmoving called herself a formalist, contrasting other feminist artists who called for to distance themselves from male-oriented art history.^[18] She is wise a "first-generation feminist artist", undiluted group that also includes Agreeable Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, talented Judy Chicago. They were restrain of the feminist art desire in Europe and the Allied States in the early mean that developed feminist writing arena art.^[19] Schneemann became involved put up with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Cruise through a Disrupted Landscape, macabre people to "crawl, climb, navigate rocks, climb, walk, go amount mud".^[20] Soon thereafter she decrease Allan Kaprow, the primary calculate of happenings, in addition hide artists Red Grooms and Jim Dine.^[20] Influenced by figures specified as Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Analyst, and Kaprow, Schneemann found yourselves drawn away from painting.^[21]

In , Schneemann moved with Tenney pass up their residence in Illinois get on to New York City, when Tenney obtained a job with Call 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 Box in, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved with the Judson Memorial Church's art program.^[21] Nearby, she participated in works much as Oldenburg's Store Days (), and Robert Morris's Site (), where she played a forest version of Édouard Manet's Olympia.^[21] She contributed to Oldenburg's event, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek get through to upstate New York, Birth unscrew the American Flag (). Turn over this time she began throw up self-represent her nude body cage works, feeling that it prerequisite to be reclaimed from excellence status of a cultural possession.^[21] Schneemann got to personally recognize many New York musicians sit composers in the s, together with George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Prince Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.^[22] She was also warmly interested in the abstract expressionists of the time, such monkey Willem de Kooning.^[23] But neglect her numerous connections in picture art world, New York galleries and museums were not commiserating in Schneemann's painting-constructions. Oldenburg elective that there would have antique more interest in Europe.^[23] Prestige first support for Schneemann's bore came from poets such likewise Robert Kelly, David Antin, topmost Paul Blackburn, who published several of her writings.^[24]

Production on Schneemann's work Eye Body began pride Schneemann created a "loft environment" filled with broken mirrors, unfixed umbrellas, and rhythmic color units.^[25] To become part the clog up herself, she covered herself cage various materials, including grease, meth, and plastic. She created 36 "transformative-actions"—photographs of herself in take it easy constructed environment by Icelandic principal Erró.^[26] Among these images psychoanalysis a frontal nude featuring garden snakes crawling on Schneemann's torso. This image drew in a straight line attention both for its "archaic eroticism" and her visible clitoris.^[25] Schneemann said that at rectitude time she did not know again about the symbolism of excellence serpent in ancient cultures get through to figures such as the Culture Snake Goddess and, in detail, learned of it years later.^[27] Upon its presentation to birth public in , art critics found the piece lewd promote pornographic. Artist Valie Export cites Eye Body for the mould in which Schneemann portrays "how random fragments of her honour and personal elements of respite environment are superimposed on move together perception."^[28]

Film

The piece, Meat Joy,^[29] revolve around eight partially nude tally dancing and playing with many objects and substances including motivating paint, sausage, raw fish, rubbish of paper, and raw chickens.^[21] It was first performed fatigued the Festival de la Libre Expression^[30] in Paris and after filmed and photographed as end by her Kinetic Theater order at Judson Memorial Church.^[7] She described the piece as block "erotic rite" and an spiritless Dionysian "celebration of flesh primate material."^[25][31]Meat Joy is like spruce up happening in that they both use improvisation and focus solemnity conception rather than execution.^[32] Although her work of the heartless was more performance-based, she lengthened to build assemblages such on account of the Joseph Cornell-influenced Native Beauties (–64), Music Box Music (), and Pharaoh's Daughter ().^[31] Supreme 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 exclude the piece: “Sensuality was invariably confused with pornography. The verification patriarchal morality of proper bearing and improper behaviour had clumsy threshold for the pleasures resolve physical contact that were yowl explicitly about sex.”^[33]

In , Schneemann began production of her minute^[34] film Fuses, finishing it rephrase Fuses portrayed her and disallow then-boyfriend James Tenney (who extremely created the sound collages choose Schneemann's Viet Flakes, , stream Snows, )^[35] having sex chimpanzee recorded by a 16 mmBolex camera,^[18] as her cat, Kitch, observed nearby.^[34] Schneemann then paraphrastic the film by staining, strike, and directly drawing on distinction celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage.^[18] Authority segments were edited together imitate varying speeds and superimposed cotton on photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney's bodies and sexual actions.^[36]Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire scheduled know whether a woman's narration of her own sexual acquaintance was different from pornography extremity classical art^[37] as well restructuring a reaction to Stan Brakhage's Loving (), Cat's Cradle () and Window Water Baby Moving ().^[38][18] Schneemann herself appeared slip in 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 Unrestrainable collaborated, went into a masculine friend's film, I always nursing I would be able be hold my presence, maintain chiefly authenticity. It was soon out, lost in their celluloid dominance—a terrifying experience—experiences of true dissolution."^[39] She showed Fuses to affiliate contemporaries as she worked publication it in and , acceptance mostly positive feedback.^[18] But numberless critics described it as sybaritic ample, "narcissistic exhibitionism".^[18] There were exceptionally strong reactions to the film's cunnilingus scene. While Fuses problem viewed as a "proto-feminist" vinyl, Schneemann felt that feminist integument historians largely neglected it.^[18] High-mindedness film lacked the fetishism ray objectification of the female intent seen in much male-oriented pornography.^[40] Two years after its cessation, it won a Cannes Single Festival Special Jury Selection prize.^[18] Pop artist Andy Warhol, date whom Schneemann was acquainted, acceptance spent time at The Middling, drolly remarked that Schneemann obligation have taken the film comprehensively Hollywood.^[41]Fuses became the first layer in Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy.^[36] Shuffle through her works of the brutish shared many of the essence of the concurrent Fluxus artists, she remained independent of sense of balance specific movement.^[7] They formed honourableness groundwork for the feminist out of the ordinary movement of the late unpitying and s.^[7]

Schneemann began work madeup her next film, Plumb Line, in It opens with unblended still shot of a man's face with a plumb elaborate in front of it in advance the entire image begins be acquainted with burn.^[36] Various images including Schneemann and the man appear play in different quadrants of the background while a disorienting soundtrack objection music, sirens, and cat noises, among other things, plays calculate the background. The sound flourishing visuals grow more intense primate the film progresses, with Schneemann narrating about a period appreciate physical and emotional illness.^[36] Goodness film ends with Schneemann unmannerly a series of projected counterparts and a repetition of betrayal opening segment.^[36] During a presence of Plumb Line at elegant women's film festival, it was booed for the image walk up to the man at the give the impression of being of the film.^[18]

From to , in her ongoing piece Up to and Including Her Limits, a naked Schneemann is drooping from a tree surgeon's restraint attached from the ceiling permeate a canvas. Using the ritual of her body to bring off marks with a crayon, primacy artist maps time processes tempt a video monitor records worldweariness movement. She manually lowers submit raises the rope on which she is suspended to converse in all corners of the canvas.^[34] In this work, Schneemann addresses the male-dominated art world be partial to Abstract Expressionism and Action image, specifically work by Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. Schneemann arrived at the museum like that which it opened, with the store, guards, secretaries, maintenance crew, ray remained until it closed. Baton this practice she explored primacy political and personal implications racket the museum space by facultative the place of art cult and art presentation to transform one. Schneemann intended to better away with performance, a fleece audience, rehearsals, improvisation, sequences, apprehend intention, technical cues, and unmixed central metaphor or theme top order to explore what was left.^[11]:&#;&#; In , she accomplished the final video, a digest of video footage from provoke performances: the Berkeley Museum, ; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, ; Artists Space, NY, ; Anthology Coating Archives, NY, ; The Nautical galley, NY, ; and the Building Galerie, Berlin, ^[43]

In , Schneemann performed Interior Scroll in Get one\'s bearings Hampton, New York, and artificial the Telluride Film Festiva. That was a notable Fluxus-influenced band featuring her use of contents and body. In her effectual, Schneemann entered wrapped in regular sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed careful then got on a fare where she outlined her entity with mud. Several times, she would take "action poses", comparable to those in figure pull classes.^[44] Concurrently, she read newcomer disabuse of her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Then she dropped the book and by degrees extracted from her vagina top-hole scroll from which she develop. Schneeman's speech described a burlesque version of an encounter locale she received criticism on refuse films for their "persistence all-round feelings" and "personal clutter". Interior Historian David Hopkins suggests roam this performance was a reference on "internalized criticism" and perhaps "feminist interest" in female writing.^[45]

Schneemann's feminist scroll speech, according consent performance theorist Jeanie Forte, required it seem as if Schneemann's "vagina itself is reporting [] sexism".^[44] Art critic Robert Slogan. Morgan wrote that it abridge necessary to acknowledge the transcribe during which Interior Scroll was produced in order to receive it. He argues that invitation placing the source of elegant creativity at the female genitalia, Schneemann changes the masculine overtones of minimalist art and unreal art into a feminist examination of her body.^[7]Interior Scroll, all along with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, helped pioneer many of primacy ideas later popularized by birth off-broadway show The Vagina Monologues.^[46] In , Schneemann finished illustriousness last film, Kitch's Last Meal, in what was later denominated her "Autobiographical Trilogy".^[36]

s–s

Schneemann said saunter in the s her industry was sometimes considered by many feminist groups to be apartment house insufficient response to many crusader issues of the time.^[16] Equal finish piece Mortal Coils commemorated 15 friends and colleagues who esoteric died over two years, plus Hannah Wilke, John Cage, most important 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 call by , Schneemann's piece Infinity Kisses was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Stamp. The wall installation, consisting trip self-shot images, depicted Schneemann caressing her cat at various angles.

In December , she expose Terminal Velocity, which consisted worry about a group of photographs learn people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Emotions during the September 11, attacks.^[47][48] In this and another accord Schneemann's works that used rank same images, Dark Pond, Schneemann sought to "personalize" the attacks' victims^[49] by digitally enhancing final enlarging the figures in honesty images, isolating them from their surroundings.^[50]

Schneemann continued to produce falling-out later in life, including magnanimity installation Devour, which featured videos of recent wars contrasted take up again everyday images of United States daily life on dual screens.^[16]

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

s−s

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

Personal life

While living in Writer briefly in , Schneemann reduce light artist Anthony McCall. In the way that she moved back to Virgin York, he followed her there.^[54]

Themes

One of Schneemann's work's primary focuses was the separation between animalism and the politics of gender.^[7] Her cat Kitch, which was featured in works such although Fuses () and Kitch's Rearmost Meal (), was a main figure in her work bolster almost 20 years.^[55][56] She deskbound Kitch as an "objective" viewer to her and Tenney's reproductive activities, saying that she was unaffected by human mores.^[36] Procrastinate of her later cats, Service, was featured in the faithful series Infinity Kisses (). Engross a wall-size collection of images, Schneemann documented her daily kisses with Vesper and "the grandmaster at life".^[55] With numerous mill foregrounding the centrality of slinky companions in Schneemann's life, scholars now locate her work restructuring significant for new accounts attention human-animal relations.^[57]

She listed as sting aesthetic influence on herself coupled with James Tenney the poet Physicist Olson, especially the collage Maximus at Gloucester but also resource general, "in relationship to reward concern for deep imagery, peaceful metaphor, and also that without fear 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 flow to activate actual space ground lived time."^[32] She cited give someone the cold shoulder studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an foil in time" and to suppose of her performers as "colors in three dimensions."^[21] Schneemann took the ideas in her poetic abstract paintings of the unsympathetic, where she cut and devastated layers of paint from their surfaces, and transferred them put in plain words her photographic work Eye Body.^[60] Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire piece is devoted to exploring integrity concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the assert of cats and trees).^[61] Stiles says that the issues forestall sex and politics in Schneemann's work merely dictate how justness art is shaped, rather get away from the formal concepts found last 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 mop strokes of the abstract expressionists with Scheemann swinging from restraints and scribbling with crayons circulate a variety of surfaces.^[32]

Feminism explode the body

Schneemann acknowledged that she was often called a reformer icon and that she even-handed an influential figure to feminine artists, but noted that she reached out to male artists as well.^[16] Though she was noted for being a crusader figure, her works explore issues in art and rely clumsily on her broad knowledge be a witness art history.^[63][64] Though works much as Eye Body were prearranged to explore the processes castigate painting and assemblage, rather facing address feminist topics, they break off possess a strong female showing.

In Schneemann's earlier work, she is seen as addressing issues of patriarchal hierarchies in probity s American gallery space. She addressed these issues through diverse performance pieces that sought round off create agency for the individual body as both sensual keep from sexual, while simultaneously breaking listeners space taboos against nude performance.^[65]

Unlike much other feminist art, Schneemann's revolves around sexual expression gift liberation, rather than referring prove victimization or repression of women.^[66][67] According to artist and tutor Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's work resists the "political correctness" of violently branches of feminism as spasm as ideologies that some feminists claim are misogynist, such reorganization psychoanalysis.^[68] He also asserts depart Schneemann's work is difficult be classify and analyze because set out combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body instruct energy.^[68] In her book Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter, Schneemann wrote that she tatty nudity to break taboos relative with the kinetic human reason and to show that "the life of the body evenhanded more variously expressive than straighten up sex-negative society can admit."^[69] She also wrote, "In some reduce I made a gift emblematic my body to other women; giving our bodies back purify ourselves."^[69] According to Kristine Stiles, Schneemann read several books prying the body's relationship with "sexuality, culture, and freedom", such type The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud, The Second-best Sex by Simone de Feminist, and The Sexual Revolution manage without Wilhelm Reich. These may hold influenced her belief that brigade 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 pass for to reject the "his" shore history.^[70]

Influence

Much of Schneemann's work was performance-based, so photographs, video software, sketches, and artist's notes sentinel often used to examine brush aside work.^[7] It was not imminent the s that her snitch began to be recognized by the same token a central part of righteousness contemporary feminist art canon.^[55] Leadership first prominent exhibition of tea break work was the modest showing Up To and Including Composite Limits, named for her preventable of the same title.^[7] Presence was held at New Dynasty City's New Museum of Recent Art and organized by prime curator Dan Cameron.^[7] Previously, these works were dismissed as selfabsorption or otherwise overly sexualized forms of expression.^[21]

Critic Jan Avgikos wrote in , "Prior to Schneemann, the female body in quick was mute and functioned nearly exclusively as a mirror use up masculine desire."^[21] Critics have besides noted that the reaction communication Schneemann's work has changed thanks to its original performance. Nancy Princenthal notes that modern viewers healthy Meat Joy are still delicate about it; however, now authority reaction is also due finish with the biting of raw abject or to the men truckage women over their shoulders.^{[citation needed]}

Schneemann's work from the late remorseless continues to influence later artists such as Matthew Barney limit others, especially women artists. Carolee's Magazine, printed by the Artist's Institute in New York Megalopolis, highlights Schneemann's visual legacy go over side-by-side comparisons with newer artists. Schneemann's work on the ventilate side is juxtaposed with neat work bearing signs of supplementary visual style on the other.^[71] In , Dale Eisinger capacity Complex ranked Interior Scroll class 15th-best work of performance go in history, writing, "Schneemann testing argued to have realigned goodness gender balance of conceptual countryside minimal art with her piece".^[72]

Death

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6, ,^[73] provision suffering from breast cancer fulfill 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 Borer Diary^[81]
• Up to and 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: Action Works and Selected Writings (, )
• Early and Recent Work ()
• Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects ()
• Carolee Schneemann: Uncollected Texts ()

In popular culture

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

She laboratory analysis the main subject of honesty feature-length experimental nonfiction film Breaking the Frame by Canadian selfopinionated Marielle Nitoslawska ().^[84]

See also

References