Carolee Schneemann
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) is an American performance artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. A member of the Fluxus group, her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relationship to social bodies. Her most famous works include Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), Meat Joy (1964), Fuses (1967), and Interior Scroll (1975)
She has published widely, producing works such as Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976) and More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997).
Schneeman’s “Meat Joy”
- Practitioners were eager to join forces with other avant-gardes (e.g., Carolee Schneemann’s “Meat Joy” at the Paris Festival of Free Expression, Fluxus internationalism) From Happenings to Performance, 60s to 70s (to now)
Fuses
In 1964, Schneemann began production of her film Fuses. Fuses was a mixture of collage and painting featuring Schneemann and her then-boyfriend James Tenney having sex. Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire to know if a woman's depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art. She showed the film to her contemporaries as she worked on it in 1965 and 1966, receiving mostly positive feedback, though some did think it was "narcissistic exhibitionism." She received an especially strong reaction regarding the cunnilingus scene of the film. While, Fuses is viewed as a "proto-feminist" film, Schneemann feels that it was largely neglected by feminist film historians.