Carolee Schneemann at Barbican review: An emotionally draining look at a courageous artist

Barely clad men and women writhe around in raw fish, meat and paint. This is Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 performance Meat Joy, in which a troupe of performers indulge in improvised male-female role-play – including simulating sex. It sounds like everyone’s idea of the ultimate wild and wacky Sixties “happening”, and it’s one of many gender-expanding works in the Barbican’s major exhibition.

Schneemann’s solo naked performances included roller skating the length of a high-speed train while reciting Wittgenstein. She was a pivotal figure in the 1960s New York “downtown scene”, when the likes of John Cage, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg rewrote the rulebook on what art can be, permanently smashing barriers between painting, film, music and performance. Yet Schneemann has been marginalised in histories of this hugely influential period, and not least because she was a woman.

Since 2017, however, when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, and her death in 2019, Schneemann’s profile has risen hugely.

This exhibition makes claims for her as one of the most important artists of the past half-century, for the way she established the female body and its physical processes, not as objects of scrutiny, but as artistic mediums in their own right.

Yet the show’s first big surprise is that this fiery feminist, whose aim was to “eroticise America’s guilt-ridden society”, considered herself first and foremost a painter, and her first and possibly most enduring influence was the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne.

A doctor‘s daughter from Pennsylvania, born “in the 1930s”, Schneemann sidestepped her parents’ ambitions for her to become a secretary to study painting at the prestigious Bard College. She was soon expelled for “moral turpitude”, after painting herself naked; her prominent rendering of her genital area may have had something to do with it. While an early self-portrait and a male nude are a touch messy and amateurish, the best of her early abstracted landscapes have a raw exuberance and a feel for the liquid properties of paint that are redolent of a Cezanne on mind-expanding drugs.

Moving to New York in 1962, Schneemann, in tune with the interests of the time, began exploring the idea of the painting as an “event”. If her large assemblages of paint, three-dimensional objects and photographs, such as Colorado House (1962), are clearly very indebted to male contemporaries such as Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell, they have a distinctive energy and feel for colour that takes them beyond mere imitation. Her responses to Cornell’s celebrated box collages have a barely contained violence with their smashed glass and furiously applied paint that is at complete variance with Cornell’s twee originals.

It was only a matter of time before she expanded the scale of these boxes and put herself into them to create a kind of proto-performance art she called “kinetic theatre”. In 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963) she’s seen naked in a her studio, smeared in paint, so she appears one with her canvases, sheathed in plastic or with live snakes wriggling across her prone body.

Meat Joy, that seminal 1964 happening, with its near-naked couples and raw meat, can be seen here on film. It has a mood of madcap abandon. Having paint thrown over the performers links the work back – in the artist’s mind at least – to good old-fashioned easel painting. And in contrast to the po-faced approach of much later performance art, everyone looks as though they’re having a hilarious time.

Schneemann’s notorious film Fuses (1964-67), which shows the artist and her then partner, the composer James Tenney, having sex, gives an even stronger sense of being in revolutionary times when anything seemed possible. But don’t come expecting porn. The emphasis is as much on the abstract textures of scratched and blurring celluloid as it is on the couple’s grainy genitalia and humping bodies. While it gives a genuine sense of tenderness and personal intimacy, at 29 minutes it may test some viewers’ patience.

Indeed, many of Schneemann’s performances that were clearly ground-breaking at the time are evoked only through relatively small black and white photographs, and the scenes of naked cavortings and figures rolling in heaps of torn paper become a touch monotonous. The sheer tonnage of historical material in the show’s downstairs rooms – fliers, notes and hand-decorated scrapbooks, all interesting, but quite small-scale – left me feeling like I was trapped in Schneemann’s personal archive, with her in it.

open image in gallery

The monomania underlying her formidable energy becomes exhausting. As she gets her kit off yet again in film or photographs, to turn herself into a living collage or perform a striptease in a railway dining car, it’s easy to see why some of her feminist peers accused her of narcissism and self-exploitation. Indeed, you can’t help wondering if Schneemann would have been quite so confident about bearing all if she hadn’t been a pleasant-looking young woman with a figure that “embodied American conventions of white, thin, feminine beauty” as the wall texts put it.

Mortal Coils (1994-95), in which motorised spirals of rope shift drifts of white dust – resembling cremated ashes – around the gallery floor, is all the more powerful as a metaphor for loss because the artist herself isn’t in it.

Yet, while it’s good to see her looking outside her immediate emotional sphere in works on Vietnam, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and, more recently, 9/11, when Schneemann isn’t rampaging through her work starkers you almost miss that rowdy energy.

Despite her determination to “die a painter“, the few later paintings we’re shown – responding to Lebanon – lack the conviction of her earlier canvases, and Cezanne isn’t in sight. Instead, she extended her determination to use her body as her medium, and her enthusiasm for having sex on camera, right into the show’s penultimate work, Plague Column: Known Unknown (1995), a large room-filling installation on the lymphoma and breast cancer that killed her.

I came out of this exhibition emotionally drained: maddened by Schneemann at times, but in awe at her courage, energy, off-the-wall humour and determination to take on the challenges of her times. I can’t think of another exhibition that takes the viewer so powerfully into a period when the Pandora’s box was opened on art, politics and human relationships in ways the world hasn’t come to terms with even now.

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, Barbican Art Gallery, until 8 January 2023