Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019)[1] was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender.

[12] While on leave from Bard and on a separate scholarship to Columbia University, she met musician James Tenney, who was attending The Juilliard School.

[16] These works integrated the influence of artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists.

[18] She is considered a "first-generation feminist artist", a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago.

[20] Influenced by figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Wilhelm Reich, and Kaprow, Schneemann found herself drawn away from painting.

[21] Through one of Tenney's colleagues at Bell, Billy Klüver, Schneemann met figures such as Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, which got her involved with the Judson Memorial Church's art program.

[21] There, she participated in works such as Oldenburg's Store Days (1962), and Robert Morris's Site (1964), where she played a living version of Édouard Manet's Olympia.

[21] Schneemann got to personally know many New York musicians and composers in the 1960s, including George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

[25] Schneemann said that at the time she did not know about the symbolism of the serpent in ancient cultures in figures such as the Minoan Snake Goddess and, in fact, learned of it years later.

Artist Valie Export cites Eye Body for the way in which Schneemann portrays "how random fragments of her memory and personal elements of her environment are superimposed on her perception.

[31] Her Letter to Lou Andreas Salome (1965) expressed Schneemann's philosophical interests by combining scrawlings of Nietzsche and Tolstoy with a Rauschenberg-like form.

Fuses portrayed her and her then-boyfriend James Tenney (who also created the sound collages for Schneemann's Viet Flakes, 1965, and Snows, 1970)[35] having sex as recorded by a 16 mm Bolex camera,[18] as her cat, Kitch, observed nearby.

[36] Fuses was motivated by Schneemann's desire to know whether a woman's depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art[37] as well as a reaction to Stan Brakhage's Loving (1957), Cat's Cradle (1959) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959).

[39] Despite her friendship with Brakhage, she later called the experience of being in Cat's Cradle "frightening," remarking that "whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend's film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity.

[36] Various images including Schneemann and the man appear in different quadrants of the frame while a disorienting soundtrack of music, sirens, and cat noises, among other things, plays in the background.

The sound and visuals grow more intense as the film progresses, with Schneemann narrating about a period of physical and emotional illness.

Using the motions of her body to make marks with a crayon, the artist maps time processes as a video monitor records her movement.

Schneemann intended to do away with performance, a fixed audience, rehearsals, improvisation, sequences, conscious intention, technical cues, and a central metaphor or theme in order to explore what was left.

Art Historian David Hopkins suggests that this performance was a comment on "internalized criticism" and possibly "feminist interest" in female writing.

[7] Interior Scroll, along with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, helped pioneer many of the ideas later popularized by the off-broadway show The Vagina Monologues.

[16] Her 1994 piece Mortal Coils commemorated 15 friends and colleagues who had died over two years, including Hannah Wilke, John Cage, and Charlotte Moorman.

In December 2001, she unveiled Terminal Velocity, which consisted of a group of photographs of people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"[32] She cited her studies with painter Paul Brach as teaching her to "understand the stroke as an event in time" and to think of her performers as "colors in three dimensions.

[60] Art history professor Kristine Stiles asserts that Schneemann's entire oeuvre is devoted to exploring the concepts of figure-ground, relationality (both through use of her body), and similitude (through the use of cats and trees).

[18] Her 1976 piece Up to and Including Her Limits, too, invokes the gestural brush strokes of the abstract expressionists with Scheemann swinging from ropes and scribbling with crayons onto a variety of surfaces.

[63][64] Though works such as Eye Body were meant to explore the processes of painting and assemblage, rather than address feminist topics, they still possess a strong female presence.

[66][67] According to artist and lecturer Johannes Birringer, Schneemann's work resists the "political correctness" of some branches of feminism as well as ideologies that some feminists claim are misogynist, such as psychoanalysis.

[68] He also asserts that Schneemann's work is difficult to classify and analyze because it combines constructivist and painterly concepts with her physical body and energy.

[21] Critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, "Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire.

Nancy Princenthal notes that modern viewers of Meat Joy are still squeamish about it; however, now the reaction is also due to the biting of raw chicken or to the men hauling women over their shoulders.