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Works by Carolee Schneemann
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One of the most badass artists of her time, Carolee Schneemann is an unforgettable character.
Starting young, Schneemann drew sexually explicit art at the early age of four... on her dad's stuff no less! While her connection to human sexuality may have been embedded in her character from a young age, it wasn’t until her college years when she posed nude for figure painters that she discovered her true calling. Nudity!
Schneemann describes her work as “personal, intuitive, volcanic, messy, bloody, eruptions, visceral, and blatant”. Can you guess what it's about? That’s right, the female form in all its glory! Feeling that she was the "cunt mascot on the men's art team”, she made it her life’s work to crush the sexism that ran rampant in the male dominated art world and she used her body and blood to do so. (Sartle may or may not be working on making a "cunt mascot" come to life...)
Observing that most women at the time were still made to feel inferior and ashamed of their life-giving bodily functions, she headed the feminist art movement in an attempt to liberate her female friends from the political and social restrictions of their gender. It was girl power in the best, weirdest way: using period blood, raw meat, and the greatest tool of all, the vagina.
Though lots of Schneemann’s most famous pieces use unconventional media, her creative endeavors reached as far as writing books and staring in films. While her art may not be suitable for youngsters, there's no doubt that her flesh-filled productions took the art world by storm and destroy some pesky social taboos surrounding gender and sexuality.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. 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.
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.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Carolee Schneemann
