Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963. Paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glass, plastic with the studio installation “Big Boards.” Photography by Erró
Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist, transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.
Her painting, photography, performance art and installation works have shown at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled “Up To And Including Her Limits”
Schneemann states about Eye Body... I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material-- a further dimension of the construction... I am both image-maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will.
