Carolee Schneemann

            Carolee Schneemann is an American artist born in 1939. She began her art career as a painter and in 1961, she completed her MFA in painting at the University of Illinois and moved to New York. While in New York, she was drawn to the emerging Downtown performance scene. She became interested in using the stage as a 3D space to make art with the body and many different materials. She felt as though she was “a painter who had in effect enlarged her canvas.” She had a studio on West 29^th Street in what used to be a fur manufacturer’s workshop. With this new larger space, she was able to gather people to work on performances. In 1967, Schneemann made a film called “Body Collage” in which she covers her body with wallpaper paste and molasses and then runs, rolls, leaps and falls into pieces of white printer’s paper creating a physical college. Her intention was not to use her body as part of the collage, but to incorporate movement so that the collage would express physical activity.

In her piece “Up to and Including Her Limits (1976),” she was influenced by Jackson Pollock’s technique of action painting, which is when artists painted with bold gestures that express physical movement such as drips, splashes, or broad brushstrokes. In this video, Schneemann is hung from the ceiling on a rope harness naked, and is drawing on paper. She is allowing the momentum of her body swinging on the rope to draw this piece and express the physical movements involved.