‘I’m still a painter and will die a painter’

Carolee Schneemann embodied an era of late twentieth century live art that was all about pushing boundaries. Works such as ‘Meat Joy’ (1964) indulged in orgiastic celebrations of bodies in motion in collective acts of play. ‘Meat Joy’ itself saw near naked participants roll around in bucket loads of paint while assorted foodstuffs rained down on them like an action painting come to full liberating life.

While Barbican’s overview of Schneemann puts photographic documentation of such works at the centre of her half-century of iconoclastic wildness prior to her death in 2019 aged 79, this epic homage goes a lot further. This is clear from the insistent thwack of a mechanically controlled mop beating the top of the television set it is attached to that permeates the air as you move through the exhibition. It is clear too from Schneemann’s declaration quoted at its start.

‘I’m a painter,’ Schneemann said. ‘I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles of the canvas.’

In her heart, it seems, Schneemann remained rooted to her instinctive sense of tradition in everything she did, however much she might have kicked against the pricks. The end result in her vast output collected in twelve sections spread across two floors of the gallery is an ever expanding, ever morphing self-portrait laid bare.

Body Politics introduces us to the Pennsylvania girl who was expelled from her upstate New York college for ‘moral turpitude’ after painting herself naked because there were no life models. Schneemann thought Cezanne was a woman because of the second half of his name. She would dance before she started painting, and play music while she worked. All those taboos busted, and she’d only just begun.

The abstract swirls of her early paintings barely contain her, before she burst through the frame to open up a new artistic life. The self-portraits that were presumably the root of her moral turpitude see her stare defiantly back at herself. Her ‘Life Books’ collage photographs, receipts and phone numbers of everyday encounters with friends, lovers and cats, always cats.

There was movement from the start, as seen in ‘Pin Wheel’ (1957), a painting spun every half hour or so by a gallery assistant, causing criss-crossing splashes of colour to appear to veer off in different directions. As the exhibition notes observe, the question of how a painting could be understood as an event remained one of Schneemann’s central preoccupations.

Schneemann’s box constructions saw her subvert ornate decorative whimsy by committing arson on her diorama-like creations, then filling them with shards of broken mirrors rescued from the debris. Sound tracked by the slightly strangled nursery rhyme chimes of burnt out music box tape loops, this made for something more fractured and distressed, Schneemann’s art literally born in flames.

In the photographs drawn from ‘Eye Body’ (1963), Schneemann faces the camera like a self-deified earth goddess crawling from the underworld to square up to what she called the ‘Art Stud Club’. In some she clutches fragments of broken mirrors that distort or multiply her self-created image.

Her early adventures in performance were forged during her time with the Greenwich Village based Judson Dance Theater, with extensive documentation of pivotal multi-media works such as ‘Newspaper Event’ (1963) and ‘Chromelodeon’ (1963) showing off Schneemann’s ensemble based ‘kinetic theatre’ in full flight.

Schneemann recalled her time with JDT as ‘uncircumscribed community cooperative competitive audacious; unconscious of how deeply we moved within one another’s dreams and efforts.’ This was a scene by any other name, one great big Happening, greater than the sum of each individual part.

‘Meat Joy’ has its own room, with film footage showing alongside a wealth of images. These are peppered with era defining anecdotes, such as the one about how the London performance was forced to end abruptly as the police arrived, with the cast driven away beneath blankets in the backs of cars.

An intimate self-portrait comes in ‘Fuses’ (1964-67), which shows film of Schneemann and her then partner, experimental composer James Tenney, having sex, with the film stock customised with paint, acid and other interventions. Going beyond conventional restrictions of form and content, this makes something as disorientating as the transcendent power of the acts it depicts.

The collective power of play found in Schneemann’s work with JDT comes to the fore again in ‘Water Light/Water Needle’ (1966), in which performers use ropes like tightrope walkers or gymnasts to explore the physical chemistry required to interact in such a restricted and disciplined environment.

Later solo ventures include ‘Ices Strip/Isis Trip’ (1972), performed by Schneemann on a London to Edinburgh train as part of the International Carnival of Experimental Sound. Here, Schneemann stripped naked while standing on a dining car table, reciting Wittgenstein’s 1922 treatise on language and reality, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, replacing numbers with rail times before roller skating up and down the carriage.

Souvenirs of such serious fun are shown alongside other 1970s works in the more maze-like downstairs gallery space. Some of these date from Schneemann’s time living in London, where she exiled herself in protest at the Vietnam war. This followed works such as Viet-Flakes (1962-67), which showed hand-held Super 8 footage of collected newspaper images of the war. This fed into the performance piece, ‘Snows’ (1967), part of which featured images of the war projected onto performers wrapped in silver foil.

London works include the tellingly named ‘Up to and Including Her Limits’ (1971-76). This saw Schneemann hang naked from a rope, crayoning on the floor and walls as she swung, as if re-enacting ‘Pin Wheel’ with her own body.

While Schneemann maintained a provocative feminist focus throughout the 1970s, she looked increasingly beyond issues of the self. This is where the mechanical mop swings into view. ‘War Mop’ (1983) formed part of The Lebanon Series (1981-99), and shows images of bomb damage in Beirut on the screen, while the mop slaps against the monitor. In its mechanical repetition, the mop becomes a symbol of the domestic mundanities of cleaning up after the mess depicted on screen, but which sounds like torture.

In the midst of her unflinching responses to global atrocities, Schneemann also squared up to both her personal mortality and that of her peers. In ‘Known/Unknown: Plague Column’ (1995) her recently diagnosed cancer is confronted head-on. ‘Mortal Coils’ (1994-95) features photographs of the dead, including composer John Cage and filmmaker Derek Jarman, as fifteen ropes hang down from ceiling to floor. They slowly rotate, not of any human volition as Schneemann might have made happen in one of her performances, but by means of unseen mechanical forces.

Schneemann continued to explore how life goes on even as the world appears to be exploding itself out of existence for another quarter of a century in moving image based installations such as ‘More Wrong Things’ (2000), ‘Devour’ (2003-04) and ‘Precarious’ (2009), all on show here. Collected in this way, Body Politics becomes a monumental elegy to the life force that powered Schneemann, and all the the moral turpitude she left in her wake.

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Neil Cooper is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh.

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Carolee Schneemann, Body Politics is at Barbican, London 8 Sep 2022-8 Jan 2023

www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/carolee-schneemann-body-politics