It’s a fact that Carolee Schneemann created several of the greatest works in the canon of performance art. With solo pieces like Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963) and Interior Scroll (1975/77), and those devised for ensembles like Meat Joy (1964), she made her body an “integral material”, as she put it, in her work, using it to address eroticism, feminist politics and the exclusion of women from art history, ancient votive symbology and more.
With an unerring directness and frankness, she confronted her love affairs and friendships, her relationship with the cats that accompanied her existence, her home and environment, her response to current affairs, and her 1990s cancer diagnosis. For Schneemann, the subject of this major new exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, life and art were always intertwined.
