Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was bold with her art. She moved between forms like video and performance, though she always maintained she was a painter. Her work challenged people to see women -- their roles, and their bodies -- in a different light.
Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was bold with her art. She moved between forms like video and performance, though she always maintained she was a painter. Her work challenged people to see women -- their roles, and their bodies -- in a different light.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we’re talking about visionaries -- women who made profound contributions to the fields of photography, film, sculpture, and the performing arts. Many of these women were radical artists who pushed conceptual boundaries within and beyond the art world.
Today, we’re talking about a woman who was bold with her art. She moved between forms like video and performance, though she always maintained she was a painter. Her work challenged people to see women -- their roles, and their bodies -- in a different light.
Let’s meet Carolee Schneeman.
Carolee Schneeman was born in 1939 in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania. Her father was a country doctor, and she grew up fascinated by anatomy books and the “physicality” of the injured patients he treated in their home.
“No fantasy of the sanitized body in this household,” she later said in an interview.
In 1955, Carolee enrolled at Bard College on a scholarship and studied painting. She ran into a wall of sexism. Her friends and colleagues -- young men -- would steal her tools, claiming they needed them more than she did.
Then, in her junior year, Carolee got kicked out of Bard for “moral turpitude.” They didn’t explain what they meant by this. Carolee recalled that 20 years later, she realized what they were likely referring to. At the time, she didn’t have access to nude models in school. And so, she painted nude self-portraits instead.
When Carolee shared these works, it didn’t sit well with her professors or the administration. After getting expelled, she went and lived in New York City for a year and studied at Columbia (where they did have models), before returning to Bard to graduate with her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. It wasn’t the last time Carolee’s own body and image would be the focus of her art.
Carolee was always searching for other women in the male-dominated art world. So much of the work she found was somehow associated with a man -- a publisher or writer or family member. And she engaged with that more directly when she began studying European traditions in graduate school, at the University of Illinois.
She would re-attribute works she believed were wrong, and began forming a new view of women in art history.
In 1961, Carolee completed her MFA in painting and returned to New York City. She joined up with other avant-garde artists such as Claes Oldenburg and even ended up at Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Carolee, though a painter at heart, became well-known for her provocative, sometimes erotic, video art and performances. In 1964, her work Meat Joy used a concept called kinetic theater. Carolee and seven other performers were covered in paint and paper, and crawled around, engaging with raw meat.
In 1975, she performed the first of two showings of the work, Interior Scroll. Carolee undressed, got on top of a table, painted herself, and then began to pull a scroll from her vagina, reading the text aloud. The text highlighted criticism she faced from a male artist, with lines that included:
“they will patronize you humor you
try to sleep with you want you to transform them
with your energy”
Another big theme in Carolee’s work was her cat, Kitch. The cat would show up in photo collages, paintings, video and performance works. A later film piece from 2008, called Infinity Kisses features her with a later cat companion… kissing, pushing the boundaries of intimacy and sensuality.
Carolee continued to adapt her view of painting into performance and video work, always veering toward the more radical. She focused on themes such as pleasure and death, even focusing on her own experience with breast cancer.
Despite her notorious nature, she didn’t get gallery representation for decades. And it wasn’t until the 1990s that she had her work shown in museums. But she was never quiet about this snubbing. In 1999 she was invited to serve as a nominator for the MacArthur Fellows program. In response, she wrote a letter to the director of the Foundation that said:
“People find it unbelievable that in thirty years I have sold only two works to museums in the U.S.A. I am not the only woman artist with a distinguished history who has no way to sustain her work, nor provide for her future. [...] Perhaps you will understand that being in dire straits while enduring a fantasy of success and achievement makes it impossible to fulfill your request.”
Near the end of her life, she finally gained the respect and acknowledgment she was seeking. MoMA PS1 in New York featured her retrospective, and she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
Carolee died from breast cancer in 2019, at the age of 79.
All month, we’re honoring incredible, artistic visionaries.
For more information and pictures of some of the work we’re talking about, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. And another special thanks to Alesandra Tejeda who curated this month’s theme.
Talk to you tomorrow!