Carole Schneemann

The performances by Carole Schneemann are as provocative feminist patriarchal to the idea that women can be read and interpreted. It was for her to regain possession of his body, to change the status, look at women in body differentiating male and female bodies.

We must remember that the sixties saw the beginning of a real change in the practices of the visual arts in Europe and the United States. This change coincides with the changes in popular consciousness, a revolt against the social and political foundations. Painting and sculpture which until now reigned supreme happening in the background suspicious Carole Schneemann uses his body so provocative, through multiple formats: performance, dance, film, painting, drawing, photography, video…
Born in 1939 in Fox Chase, a small town in Kentucky, she moved to New York, where she still resides. His first exhibition was held in 1972 at the Museum of the faculty of Berkeley, California in the middle and wave hippie… since 1979, it states in Europe, in Amsterdam. In New York, it focuses on the NY School of painting and its research aimed at pushing the limits of the table and traditional painting. His early work using many materials and it is based assemblies, the famous boxes of Joseph Cornell.
Between 1962 and 1964, she worked exclusively on the female body, especially on the male gaze. She will also participate in other performance and visual artists not least as Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Bob Morris.
Also in this period, the feminist consciousness has also encouraged women artists to reclaim their own image and to explore new strategies of representation and artistic practices could save a woman and her demeaning image of his position, following the matriarchal system.
With Eye Body (1963), she painted his body and is covered in snakes, his studio became a stage play of mirrors, ropes, tarps, glue ... His body is a material among others. In Up to and Including her Limits in 1976, it proposes a new approach to painting hangs in a harness, the body suspended, gravitation, it's experiment in pictorial space to the limits of his body and forced.
"When the body is in the eye, the visual sensations seized of the entire body." Outlining her menstrual blood on fabrics, in Blood Work Diary, 1972. But his work disturbing, especially feminists public: in his film, an orgy filmed, Meat Joy (Joy of the Chair, 1964), the players play with naked feed and the artist plays a nymphomaniac, it shown in a film festival for women in Chicago. It shocked the public by what is perceived as a porno film classic. A female hostility of the same type welcomes his other film Fuses (fuses) in 1967, in which she filmed the composer James Tenney doing love. And his famous Interior Scroll performance had caused outrage many feminists !
It will affect many avant-garde feminist as Kathy Acker, Lyndia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, but also Feminist theorists like Judith Butler, and even artists' male 'as Mathew Barney. His books are as important both in the field of art that feminism! With More than Meat Joy published in 1979, she theorizes performance.

The photographs and films are the result of these assemblies where it is often incorporated in the material.Sophie Delpreux Mistress lecturer in art history University of Lyon II. Highlighted the work Carole Schneemann during the symposium INHA "Back on the art of assembly" in March 2008