Unforgivable is the title of a new book that looks back on the life and works of pioneering performance artist Carolee Schneeman. I found out about the book from an article I flipped into our Flipboard magazine the other night. Here’s a bit from The Guardian…
Don’t bring your underaged children or grandchildren. Don’t bring your grandmother or other relatives. Don’t bring your out-of-town guests. The current exhibit is awful. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t art.”
A new book about Carolee Schneemann begins with this warning from a visitor to one of her exhibitions. This review may seem harsh or hysterical, but it’s also fitting: at 76 years old, the artist still divides opinion. For the last 50 years, she has made art that tackles terrorism, war, sex, sensuality and love – “everything from the joyful to the more violent and ferocious aspects of American culture, with the outrage always coming from a very American sense of righteousness”. The book chronicles it all. It is called Unforgivable.
Schneemann’s art has always been raw and personal – and often reviled. I ask if she sees herself as fearless. “No, I think I’m stubborn,” she says. “In the beginning, I had no precedent for being valued. Everything that came from a woman’s experience was considered trivial. I wasn’t sure if my work would shift that paradigm or not, but I had to try.”
Schneemann didn’t just shift the paradigm – she exploded it. Works like Eye Body, from 1963 (in which the naked artist appeared as a warlike Gaia, covered in feathers and fur) met the male gaze unblinking – although critics were more alarmed by the sight of her clitoris than by the snakes decorating her torso.
She had a dancer’s poise, which she used for perversion in pieces such as the film Up to and Including Her Limits, in which she painted while nude and swinging in a harness. Keen to discard feminist cliches, she wanted audiences to see her as ecstatic rather than angry. “My work doesn’t have any kind of furious narrative,” she explains. “It emphasises energy.”
Here’s a long Q&A with the artist from 2008…
