13 / The Body
| Artist / Origin |
Carolee Schneemann (American, b. 1939)
Region: North America
|
|---|---|
| Date |
1964
Period: 1900 CE - 2010 CE
|
| Material | Group performance with raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, plastic, rope, and shredded scrap paper |
| Credit | Courtesy of the artist |
expert perspective
| RoseLee GoldbergDirector/Curator, PERFORMA | ||
| Carolee SchneemannArtist |
expert perspective
RoseLee Goldberg
Director/Curator, PERFORMA
“backThe live is where so many ideas of the twentieth century, the radical ideas, really begin. I think people turn to performance because there’s a lot of license to do whatever you want to do. There are no rules, no regulations. And actually very few critics and very few people who are going to kind of say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to what you’re doing. So I think that’s been a very interesting part of the politics both of Feminism and of Multiculturalism in the sixties through the eighties.
I think in terms of Feminism, it reflects as much as leads the way in terms of consciousness-raising. Performance allowed artists to really go out and activate—put into action—these various ideas that they were looking at. And indeed, they were pretty shocking a lot of the times. So, there’s a way to insist on attention being given to what the various artists were doing. For example, Carolee Schneemann, insisting on the body and trying to push it away from the idea of the object, which everybody was talking about, and more into this more expressive way of dealing with politics at the time.”