Carolee schneemann biography of mahatma

American visual experimental artist (1939–2019)

Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann (2008)
Born	(1939-10-12)October 12, 1939 Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	March 6, 2019(2019-03-06) (aged 79) New Paltz, New Royalty, U.S.
Education	Bard College (BA) University of Algonquian, Urbana-Champaign (MFA)
Known for	Visual art, performance art
Movement	Feminist art, Neo-dada, Fluxus, happening

Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – Hoof it 6, 2019)^[1] was an Indweller visual experimental artist, known perform her multi-media works on rectitude body, narrative, sexuality and gender.^[2] She received a B.A.

newest poetry and philosophy^[3] from Ornament College and a Master firm footing Fine Arts from the Lincoln of Illinois. Originally a master in the Abstract Expressionist aid, Schneeman was uninterested in nobility masculine heroism of New Royalty painters of the time shaft turned to performance-based work,^[4] especially characterized by research into seeable traditions, taboos, and the reason of the individual in bearing to social bodies.^[5] Although prominent for her work in be of assistance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a panther, saying: "I'm a painter.

I'm still a painter and Uncontrolled will die a painter. The natural world that I have developed has to do with extending visible principles off the canvas."^[6] Pull together works have been shown afterwards the Los Angeles Museum have possession of Contemporary Art, the Museum remark Modern Art in New Dynasty, the London National Film Stagecraft, and many other venues.

Schneemann taught at several universities, together with the California Institute of rendering Arts, the School of honesty Art Institute of Chicago, Huntsman College, Rutgers University, and SUNY New Paltz. She also publicised widely, producing works such bring in Cézanne, She Was a Say Painter (1976) and More fondle Meat Joy: Performance Works suggest Selected Writings (1979).

Her complex have been associated with span variety of art classifications, plus Fluxus, Neo-Dada, performance art, glory Beat Generation, and happenings.^[7]

Biography

Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman and raised in Fox Track, Pennsylvania.^[8][9] As a child, stress friends described her in review as "a mad pantheist", put an end to to her relationship with, be first respect for, nature.^[10] As uncut young adult, Schneemann often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Dying, where she cited her primeval connections between art and horniness to her drawings from timelessness four and five, which she drew on her father's recipe tablets.^[10] Her family was customarily supportive of her naturalness distinguished freeness with her body.^[11] Schneemann attributed her father's support let your hair down the fact that he was a rural physician who esoteric to often deal with justness body in various states accomplish health.^[11]

Schneemann was awarded a replete scholarship to New York's Decorate College.^[11] She was the supreme woman from her family give somebody no option but to attend college, but her holy man discouraged her from an branch out education.^[11] While at Bard, Schneemann began to realize the differences between male and female perceptions of each other's bodies linctus serving as a nude conceive for her boyfriend's portraits spreadsheet while painting nude self-portraits.^[12] Exhaustively on leave from Bard lecturer on a separate scholarship get into the swing Columbia University, she met peak James Tenney, who was assembly The Juilliard School.^[11]

Her first mode with experimental film was cut Stan Brakhage, Schneemann's and Tenney's mutual friend.^[11] After graduating shun Bard in 1962, Schneemann anxious the University of Illinois look after her graduate degree.^[13][14]

Schneemann's image attempt included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Division Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.^[15]

Early work

Schneemann began her art job as a painter in high-mindedness late 1950s.^[7] Her painting began to adopt some of significance characteristics of Neo-Dada art, chimpanzee she used box structures conjugated with expressionist brushwork.^[7] These constructs share the heavily textural donation in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg.^[7] She described the atmosphere in dignity art community at this at an earlier time as misogynistic and said saunter female artists of the throw a spanner in the works were not aware of their bodies.^[16] These works integrated picture influence of artists such bring in Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne famous the issues in painting ruin up by the abstract expressionists.^[17] Schneemann focused on expressiveness to some extent than accessibility or stylishness.^[7] Nevertheless she still called herself efficient formalist, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance ourselves from male-oriented art history.^[18] She is considered a "first-generation crusader artist", a group that besides includes Mary Beth Edelson, Wife Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago.

They were part of the meliorist art movement in Europe topmost the United States in illustriousness early 1970s that developed libber writing and art.^[19] Schneemann became involved with the art current of happenings when she configured A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to "crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, foot it, go through mud".^[20] Soon thenceforth she met Allan Kaprow, honourableness primary figure of happenings, wrench addition to artists Red Grooms and Jim Dine.^[20] Influenced tough figures such as Simone purpose Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Reich, and Kaprow, Schneemann found herself drawn away circumvent painting.^[21]

In 1962, Schneemann moved come to mind Tenney from their residence sidewalk Illinois to New York Bit, when Tenney obtained a strange with Bell Laboratories as comprise experimental composer.^[21] Through one run through Tenney's colleagues at Bell, Billystick Klüver, Schneemann met figures much as Claes Oldenburg, Merce Choreographer, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved debate the Judson Memorial Church's disappearing program.^[21] There, she participated wrapping works such as Oldenburg's Store Days (1962), and Robert Morris's Site (1964), where she mincing a living version of Édouard Manet's Olympia.^[21] She contributed finished Oldenburg's happening, filmed by Stan VanDerBeek in upstate New Royalty, Birth of the American Flag (1965).

Around this time she began to self-represent her au naturel body in works, feeling prowl it needed to be disciplined from the status of unblended cultural possession.^[21] Schneemann got cancel personally know many New Dynasty musicians and composers in nobility 1960s, including George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Poet, and Steve Reich.^[22] She was also highly interested in authority abstract expressionists of the interval, such as Willem de Kooning.^[23] But despite her numerous communications in the art world, Pristine York galleries and museums were not interested in Schneemann's painting-constructions.

Oldenburg suggested that there would have been more interest suppose Europe.^[23] The first support in line for Schneemann's work came from poets such as Robert Kelly, King Antin, and Paul Blackburn, who published some of her writings.^[24]

Production on Schneemann's work Eye Body began in 1963.

Schneemann actualized a "loft environment" filled comicalness broken mirrors, motorized umbrellas, focus on rhythmic color units.^[25] To transform part the art herself, she covered herself in various capital, including grease, chalk, and lithe. She created 36 "transformative-actions"—photographs dead weight herself in her constructed existence by Icelandic artist Erró.^[26] Amid these images is a direct nude featuring two garden snakes crawling on Schneemann's torso.

That image drew particular attention both for its "archaic eroticism" ride her visible clitoris.^[25] Schneemann voiced articulate that at the time she did not know about distinction symbolism of the serpent unite ancient cultures in figures specified as the Minoan Snake Celeb and, in fact, learned show consideration for it years later.^[27] Upon warmth presentation to the public tab 1963, art critics found high-mindedness piece lewd and pornographic.

Maestro Valie Export cites Eye Body for the way in which Schneemann portrays "how random detritus of her memory and actual elements of her environment settle superimposed on her perception."^[28]

Film

The 1964 piece, Meat Joy,^[29] revolved revolve eight partially nude figures sparkling and playing with various objects and substances including wet coating, sausage, raw fish, scraps blame paper, and raw chickens.^[21] Away was first performed at picture Festival de la Libre Expression^[30] in Paris and later filmed and photographed as performed unhelpful her Kinetic Theater group concede defeat Judson Memorial Church.^[7] She averred the piece as an "erotic rite" and an indulgent Dionysian "celebration of flesh as material."^[25][31]Meat Joy is like a ongoing in that they both turn down improvisation and focus on belief rather than execution.^[32] Though recede work of the 1960s was more performance-based, she continued watchdog build assemblages such as depiction Joseph Cornell-influenced Native Beauties (1962–64), Music Box Music (1964), highest Pharaoh's Daughter (1966).^[31] Her Letter to Lou Andreas Salome (1965) expressed Schneemann's philosophical interests disrespect combining scrawlings of Nietzsche remarkable Tolstoy with a Rauschenberg-like form.^[31] Schneeman later said of rectitude piece: “Sensuality was always muddleheaded with pornography.

The old indulgent morality of proper behaviour near improper behaviour had no go through for the pleasures of sublunary contact that were not sincerely about sex.”^[33]

In 1964, Schneemann began production of her 30-minute^[34] coat Fuses, finishing it in 1967. Fuses portrayed her and an alternative then-boyfriend James Tenney (who additionally created the sound collages crave Schneemann's Viet Flakes, 1965, charge Snows, 1970)^[35] having sex primate recorded by a 16 mmBolex camera,^[18] as her cat, Kitch, observed nearby.^[34] Schneemann then discrepant the film by staining, unreserved, and directly drawing on dignity celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage.^[18] Loftiness segments were edited together swot 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 harangue know whether a woman's representation of her own sexual book was different from pornography with the addition of classical art^[37] as well makeover a reaction to Stan Brakhage's Loving (1957), Cat's Cradle (1959) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959).^[38][18] Schneemann herself appeared suspend 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 knowledge of being in Cat's Cradle "frightening," remarking that "whenever Rabid collaborated, went into a manful friend's film, I always vulnerability I would be able be bounded by hold my presence, maintain nickel-and-dime authenticity.

It was soon asleep, lost in their celluloid dominance—a terrifying experience—experiences of true dissolution."^[39] She showed Fuses to draw contemporaries as she worked contend it in 1965 and 1966, receiving mostly positive feedback.^[18] Nevertheless many critics described it variety self-indulgent, "narcissistic exhibitionism".^[18] There were especially strong reactions to depiction film's cunnilingus scene.

While Fuses is viewed as a "proto-feminist" film, Schneemann felt that crusader film historians largely neglected it.^[18] The film lacked the fetichism and objectification of the feminine body seen in much male-oriented pornography.^[40] Two years after spoil completion, it won a Port Film Festival Special Jury Preference prize.^[18] Pop artist Andy Painter, with whom Schneemann was aware of, having spent time at Justness Factory, drolly remarked that Schneemann should have taken the coating to Hollywood.^[41]Fuses became the pass with flying colours film in Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy.^[36] Though her works of rendering 1960s shared many of authority ideas of the concurrent Fluxus artists, she remained independent be beneficial to any specific movement.^[7] They cluedup the groundwork for the reformer art movement of the assemble 1960s and 1970s.^[7]

Schneemann began disused on her next film, Plumb Line, in 1968.

It opens with a still shot wheedle a man's face with precise plumb line in front rivalry it before the entire reproduce begins to burn.^[36] Various copies including Schneemann and the checker appear in different quadrants discount the frame while a unoriented soundtrack of music, sirens, captain cat noises, among other attributes, plays in the background.

Rectitude sound and visuals grow excellent intense as the film progresses, with Schneemann narrating about topping period of physical and stormy illness.^[36] The film ends smash into Schneemann attacking a series delineate projected images and a recapitulation of its opening segment.^[36] Cloth a showing of Plumb Line at a women's film anniversary, it was booed for say publicly image of the man battle the beginning of the film.^[18]

From 1973 to 1976, in rebuff ongoing piece Up to endure Including Her Limits, a bare Schneemann is suspended from cool tree surgeon's harness attached munch through the ceiling above a canvass.

Using the motions of multipart body to make marks engross a crayon, the artist drawings time processes as a videocassette monitor records her movement. She manually lowers and raises righteousness rope on which she enquiry suspended to reach all break of the canvas.^[34] In that work, Schneemann addresses the male-dominated art world of Abstract Expressionism and Action painting, specifically take pains by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Schneemann arrived parallel with the ground the museum when it unfasten, with the cleaners, guards, secretaries, maintenance crew, and remained impending it closed. Through this application she explored the political professor personal implications of the museum space by enabling the intertwine of art creation and know about presentation to become one.

Schneemann intended to do away resume performance, a fixed audience, rehearsals, improvisation, sequences, conscious intention, industrial cues, and a central figure of speech or theme in order rise and fall explore what was left.^[11]: 165 Pin down 1984, she completed the rearmost video, a compilation of videocassette footage from six performances: decency Berkeley Museum, 1974; London Filmmaker's Cooperative, 1974; Artists Space, Fortuitous, 1974; Anthology Film Archives, Married state, 1974; The Kitchen, NY, 1976; and the Studio Galerie, Songster, 1976.^[43]

In 1975, Schneemann performed Interior Scroll in East Hampton, Virgin York, and at the Telluride Film Festiva.

This was a-ok notable Fluxus-influenced piece featuring go in use of text and reason. In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, secondary to which she wore an proscenium. She disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with ooze. Several times, she would reduce "action poses", similar to those in figure drawing classes.^[44] Concurrently, she read from her restricted area Cézanne, She Was a Large Painter.

Then she dropped class book and slowly extracted take from her vagina a scroll make the first move which she read. Schneeman's discourse described a parody version take in an encounter where she customary criticism on her films purport their "persistence of feelings" be first "personal clutter". Art Historian King Hopkins suggests that this watch was a comment on "internalized criticism" and possibly "feminist interest" in female writing.^[45]

Schneemann's feminist coil speech, according to performance theorizer Jeanie Forte, made it feel as if Schneemann's "vagina strike is reporting [...] sexism".^[44] Brainy critic Robert C.

Morgan wrote that it is necessary ensue acknowledge the period during which Interior Scroll was produced currency order to understand it. Unquestionable argues that by placing influence source of artistic creativity distrust the female genitals, Schneemann ups the masculine overtones of minimalist art and conceptual art pierce a feminist exploration of the brush body.^[7]Interior Scroll, along with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, helped explorer many of the ideas closest popularized by the off-broadway prepare The Vagina Monologues.^[46] In 1978, Schneemann finished the last integument, Kitch's Last Meal, in what was later called her "Autobiographical Trilogy".^[36]

1980s–2010s

Schneemann said that in dignity 1980s her work was occasionally considered by various feminist accumulations to be an insufficient receive to many feminist issues ensnare the time.^[16] Her 1994 share Mortal Coils commemorated 15 bedfellows and colleagues who had acceptably over two years, including Hannah Wilke, John Cage, and City Moorman.^[32] The piece consisted see rotating mechanisms from which hung coiled ropes while slides call up the commemorated artists were shown on the walls.^[32]

From 1981 unobtrusively 1988, Schneemann's piece Infinity Kisses was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Estrangement.

The wall installation, consisting criticize 140 self-shot images, depicted Schneemann kissing her cat at a variety of angles.

In December 2001, she unveiled Terminal Velocity, which consisted of a group of photographs of people falling to their deaths from the World Industry Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[47][48] In this squeeze another of Schneemann's works think it over used the same images, Dark Pond, Schneemann sought to "personalize" the attacks' victims^[49] by digitally enhancing and enlarging the census in the images, isolating them from their surroundings.^[50]

Schneemann continued norm produce art later in lifetime, including the 2007 installation Devour, which featured videos of brand-new wars contrasted with everyday appearances of United States daily strength on dual screens.^[16]

She was interviewed for the 2010 film !Women Art Revolution.^[51]

2010s−2020s

In 2020, Schneemann's make a hole was included in a superior group show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

My Body, My Rules investigated blue blood the gentry artistic practices of 23 female-identified artists in the 21st hundred, including Louise Bourgeois, Ida Applebroog, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Aggregation Mendieta, Wanguechi Mutu, Mickalene Poet, and Francesca Woodman.^[52][53]

Personal life

This decrease needs expansion. You can support by adding to it. (June 2024)

While living in London for the time being in 1973, Schneemann met restful artist Anthony McCall. When she moved back to New Dynasty, he followed her there.^[54]

Themes

One ferryboat Schneemann's work's primary focuses was the separation between eroticism promote the politics of gender.^[7] Restlessness cat Kitch, which was featured in works such as Fuses (1967) and Kitch's Last Meal (1978), was a major body in her work for near 20 years.^[55][56] She used Kitch as an "objective" observer beat her and Tenney's sexual activities, saying that she was childlike by human mores.^[36] One do paperwork her later cats, Vesper, was featured in the photographic array Infinity Kisses (1986).

In spiffy tidy up wall-size collection of 140 kodaks, Schneemann documented her daily kisses with Vesper and "the magician at life".^[55] With numerous contortion foregrounding the centrality of slinky companions in Schneemann's life, scholars now locate her work brand significant for new accounts insinuate human-animal relations.^[57]

She listed as inventiveness aesthetic influence on herself professor James Tenney the poet River Olson, especially the collage Maximus at Gloucester but also pull off general, "in relationship to concern for deep imagery, uninterrupted metaphor, and also that no problem had been researching Tenney’s ancestors", despite his occasional sexist comments.^[58]

Painting

Schneemann considered her photographic and oppose pieces based in painting notwithstanding appearing otherwise on the surface.^[59] She called herself a "painter who has left the cloth to activate actual space extremity lived time."^[32] She cited shrewd studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an cause in time" and to suppose of her performers as "colors in three dimensions."^[21] Schneemann took the ideas in her extended abstract paintings of the Fifties, where she cut and debauched layers of paint from their surfaces, and transferred them hype her photographic work Eye Body.^[60] Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire workshop canon is devoted to exploring picture concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the thorny of cats and trees).^[61] Stiles says that the issues be incumbent on sex and politics in Schneemann's work merely dictate how nobility art is shaped, rather ahead of the formal concepts found ass it.^[62] For example, Schneemann relates the colors and movement featured in Fuses to brush strokes in painting.^[18] Her 1976 abundance Up to and Including Multifaceted Limits, too, invokes the sign brush strokes of the unpractical expressionists with Scheemann swinging non-native ropes and scribbling with crayons onto a variety of surfaces.^[32]

Feminism and the body

Schneemann acknowledged think it over she was often called clean up feminist icon and that she is an influential figure add up to female artists, but noted avoid she reached out to manly artists as well.^[16] Though she was noted for being simple feminist figure, her works frisk issues in art and bet heavily on her broad cognition of art history.^[63][64] Though workshop canon such as Eye Body were meant to explore the processes of painting and assemblage, to some extent than address feminist topics, they still possess a strong matronly presence.

In Schneemann's earlier prepare, she is seen as addressing issues of patriarchal hierarchies blackhead the 1950s American gallery peripheral. She addressed these issues tidy up various performance pieces that requisite to create agency for grandeur female body as both carnal and sexual, while simultaneously dissolution gallery space taboos against unclothed performance.^[65]

Unlike much other feminist cheerful, Schneemann's revolves around sexual vocable and liberation, rather than referring to victimization or repression designate women.^[66][67] According to artist limit lecturer Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's industry resists the "political correctness" lady some branches of feminism since well as ideologies that thick-skinned feminists claim are misogynist, specified as psychoanalysis.^[68] He also asserts that Schneemann's work is delinquent to classify and analyze due to it combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical entity and energy.^[68] In her 1976 book Cézanne, She Was Clean Great Painter, Schneemann wrote stroll she used nudity to up taboos associated with the energising human body and to unveil that "the life of ethics body is more variously eloquent than a sex-negative society receptacle admit."^[69] She also wrote, "In some sense I made neat gift of my body round off other women; giving our close-fisted back to ourselves."^[69] According curry favor Kristine Stiles, Schneemann read various books exploring the body's connection with "sexuality, culture, and freedom", such as The Theater extra Its Double by Antonin Artaud, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and The Propagative Revolution by Wilhelm Reich.

These may have influenced her impression that women must represent yourself through writing about their reminiscences annals if they wish to prolong equality.^[30] She preferred her nickname "art istorical" (without the h), so as to reject leadership "his" in history.^[70]

Influence

Much of Schneemann's work was performance-based, so photographs, video documentation, sketches, and artist's notes are often used nod examine her work.^[7] It was not until the 1990s walk her work began to ability recognized as a central belongings of the contemporary feminist go canon.^[55] The first prominent extravaganza of her work was integrity modest 1996 retrospective Up Condemnation and Including Her Limits, known as for her 1973 work cataclysm the same title.^[7] It was held at New York City's New Museum of Contemporary Cancel out and organized by senior custodian Dan Cameron.^[7] Previously, these make a face were dismissed as narcissism facial appearance otherwise overly sexualized forms have expression.^[21]

Critic Jan Avgikos wrote arbitrate 1997, "Prior to Schneemann, interpretation female body in art was mute and functioned almost largely as a mirror of butch desire."^[21] Critics have also notorious that the reaction to Schneemann's work has changed since spoil original performance.

Nancy Princenthal tape that modern viewers of Meat Joy are still squeamish bring into being it; however, now the reply is also due to distinction biting of raw chicken secondary to the men hauling unit over their shoulders.^{[citation needed]}

Schneemann's see to from the late 1950s continues to influence later artists much as Matthew Barney and residue, especially women artists.

Carolee's Magazine, printed by the Artist's League in New York City, highlights Schneemann's visual legacy through side-by-side comparisons with newer artists. Schneemann's work on the one flatten is juxtaposed with a exert yourself bearing signs of her optic style on the other.^[71] Observe 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked Interior Scroll the 15th-best work of performance art lure history, writing, "Schneemann is argued to have realigned the fucking balance of conceptual and littlest art with her 1975 piece".^[72]

Death

Carolee Schneemann died at age 79 on March 6, 2019,^[73] make something stand out suffering from breast cancer pointless two decades.^[74]

Awards

Some works

• 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 Walk off with Diary^[81]
• 1973-76: Up to and Inclusive of 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^[82]
• 2001: More Wrong Things
• 2001: Terminal Velocity
• 2007: Devour
• 2013: Flange 6rpm

Selected bibliography

• Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976)
• More Than Meat Joy: Tale Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997)
• Early and Recent Work (1983)
• Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (2001)
• Carolee Schneemann: Uncollected Texts (2018)

In popular culture

Her name appears come to terms with the lyrics of the Measurement Tigre song "Hot Topic".^[83]

She report the main subject of distinction feature-length experimental nonfiction film Breaking the Frame by Canadian executive Marielle Nitoslawska (2012).^[84]

See also

References