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.
With one of her earliest performances she said she wanted to destroy “the separation of audience and performer”, a compulsion throughout her career. As with other performance artists, this makes putting together a survey of her work fiendishly difficult. We are necessarily separated from her by the fact that we see much of her work — especially from the first, and best, decade or so — solely through documentation.
But while I spent much of my time at the Barbican feeling envy of those who saw Schneemann’s works live, she’s different from many of her performance-art peers in two ways: she was an obsessive documenter of her events, through photography (in which she had several notable collaborators), drawing, descriptive text and more. But also — most crucially — she was an “image maker”, as she herself put it.
Seeing the abundant photos and videos of the work, you realise that, for all the wild abandon that they might initially project, they’re also tautly composed. Schneemann thought of herself as a painter but the show’s curator, Lotte Johnson, rightly argues that she’s more of a collagist, always bringing materials together — her body, paint, found materials, paper, and so on — and endlessly transforming them, mining their possibilities and personal and political potential. She called this a process of “interference”.
It’s a convincing thread through the show, from her earliest paintings, picking up on Abstract Expressionism in the US, but never abandoning the figure, through her “painting-constructions”, bringing together paint, photographic images and sculpture, to her boxes — often featuring broken glass and some of which she’d set fire to — right up to the later work Known/Unknown: Plague Column (1995–96), exploring her breast cancer and lymphoma diagnosis.
Glass shards also featured in her earliest performances, Glass Environment for Sound and Motion (1962) and Eye Body, where she effectively exploded the painting-constructions in the studio, making them into a total environment of which she was a part. The Icelandic photographer Erró’s images of Eye Body are about as seminal as performance documentation gets. I’ve seen them perhaps dozens of times now but they are as magnetic and dynamic as ever here, and all the more vivid for having some of the constructions Schneemann is shown interacting with placed alongside them in the show.
A brilliant room reflects how Schneemann’s tendencies chimed perfectly with a radical group of choreographers and artists gathered in New York’s Judson Dance Theater, where several of Schneemann’s most compelling pieces were performed. They included Meat Joy, the video and photos for which show the mixed-gender group, including Schneemann, involved in a seeming bacchanal, which also unavoidably puts into question the power dynamics between the men and the women.
More explicitly feminist work was to come, particularly in Interior Scroll, where Schneemann first struck the poses of a life model while reading her text that described a dream in which women artists in the year 2000 should not experience the same discrimation she encountered (fat chance, we can now ruefully attest). She then unravelled a scroll from her vagina, reading its description of an encounter with a sexist film-maker.
Up to this point, with other works about what Schneemann called “vulvic space”, the show is near-perfect. It becomes more hit-and-miss with Schneemann’s political work, addressing the Vietnamese and Balkan wars, the Aids crisis and more. Somehow, despite her incorporation of often shocking imagery, the compositional directness and her own stark voice are more elusive here.
It’s one thing being commendably comprehensive — and I doubt we’ll see a more thorough analysis of her singular achievement — but it makes parts of the second half of the show something of a slog. Still, Plague Column’s fragmented reflections on illness and its effects are a jarring return to form late on, proving that her brilliance as image-maker and political and natural force never deserted her.
