The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann

Abstract

The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann Maura Reilly I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas. —Schneemann, 1993 Carolee Schneemann's paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s have been a significantly overlooked aspect of her oeuvre. Eclipsed by her signature works in performance and film, the paintings have often been considered early or immature work rather than an artistic foundation fundamental to understanding the entirety of Schneemann's practice. This essay traces Schneemann's works from 1957 to the present, highlighting the transfor mation from traditional paintings on canvas in the lineage of abstract expressionism to painting constructions and kinetic sculptures to group and solo performances, installations, and films. Taking this historical trajectory through Schneemann's work demonstrates how her explora tions within other mediums derive from "extending visual principles off the canvas." It helps to appreciate her paintings and drawings as impor tant corollaries to the kinetic theater, Judson Dance Theater performances, and films that she was producing simultaneously. The essay's intention is to reconsider Schneemann as a painter who has never ceased conceptual izing her work as always related to the painterly gesture, to prying open "the frame," and to conceiving of the body itself as tactile material. Her most significant works, treasured by many, misunderstood by some, can be reenvisioned, then, as what Schneemann herself has called, "exploded FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 621 opposite Quarry Transposed (Central Park in the Dark) (I960) 622 Maura Reilly canvasses"1 or as performative paintings, filmic paintings, kinetic paint ings—always with the pictorial concerns of painting remaining as the grounding mechanism and unifying field. Schneemann's formal training as an artist began in landscape paint ing and with endless hours of life drawing, as is evident in her early works on canvas—such as Summer I (Honey Suckle) (1959)—that reveal her signature luscious brushwork and all-over compositions. These late 1950s pre-New York works also reflect a love of paint's tactility, its materiality, its object hood—an important concept that assisted Schneemann in moving the gesture farther off the canvas. Schneemann moved to New York City in 1961 after finishing her master of fine arts in painting at the University of Illinois. Almost immediately, she Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963) Action for camera. Photo: Erro. opposite Body Collage 0968) Performance, New York City. Photo: Michael Benedikt. 624 Maura Reilly became situated squarely within what in the 1960s was called the "experi mental avant-garde," a place also occupied by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and other second-generation abstract expressionist artists. Indeed, like them, Schneemann was interested in exploring the new aesthetic options made available in the wake of Action Painting. How could Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning's spatial frac ture be expanded beyond the canvas and into space and time? Schnee mann's intermedia works from the late 1950s through the 1970s demon strate her continuous investigation of this question. Schneemann's painting constructions—like Richard Stankiewicz's junk sculptures, Rauschenberg's "combines," Oldenburg's painted corrugated cardboard reliefs, or John Chamberlain's crushed auto assemblages—cull together non-art materials from life, ones that retain biographical refer ences and which, in their rawness, call to mind the appearance and spirit of spatial analysis in painting. Schneemann's Quarry Transposed (i960), Sphinx (1961), Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1961), Fur Wheel (1962), and Notes to Lou Andre Salome (1965) are large painting constructions that exemplify her interest in assemblage and departure from the flat canvas. In each, paint becomes one of many materials from life that can be applied to or cut into surfaces, along with photographs, wood, fabric, audiotape, glass, cellophane, under pants, and so forth. Each demonstrates the artist's continued desire to push painting through the canvas, out of the frame, and into the specta tor's space, while at the same time structuring the "real" with the visual composition of a painter's eye. Fur Wheel adds the element of movement, signaling Schneemann's entry into kinetic sculpture...