To mark her passing and to honour International Women’s Day, NOWNESS presents her last ever interview on film
Two days ago, at the age of 79, one of the most formative feminist artists of the 20th century passed away. Carolee Schneemann was perhaps best known for her visceral – and shocking for its time – performance-based work, that confronted societal norms, sexual behaviour and gender during the second-wave movement of the 1960s. Alongside her contemporaries, including the likes of Judy Chicago and Hannah Wilke, Schneemann paved the way for contemporary art as we know it today.
In Meat Joy, 1964, she staged an Dionysiac peformance where a mass of bodies were documented on film writhing in raw chicken, mackerel, sausages and wet paint. The artist described the piece as a an “erotic rite” and “celebration of flesh as material”. 11 years on, Schneemann would enact Interior Scroll (1975), where she read aloud from a long document pulled slowly out of her vagina. “(I don’t take the advice of men who only talk to themselves)”, part of the text exclaimed.
In the years that followed, Carolee Schneemann remained a trailblazing figure, making politicised work responding to the September 11 attacks in New York, and the human cost of global conflict. Her acheivements were recognised at the Venice Biennale in 2017, where she was awarded the Golden Lion Award. Today, NOWNESS presents her last ever recorded interview as part of its Raw Materials Series, to mark International Women’s Day and commemorate her extraordinary life and legacy.
Watch the film below.
