Carolee Schneemann: A Radical Feminist Art Pioneer | Barbican Exhibition

Archiving ephemeral art forms like performances and installations presents unique challenges because these works cannot be simply stored like traditional art objects; instead, they require documentation, contextual materials, and often reconstruction efforts to preserve their essence, raising fundamental questions about what constitutes the 'original' work and whether the archival process itself transforms the artwork into a 'second reality' that may lose its original political and contextual meaning.

Museums face fundamental challenges when collecting performance and live art because these practices are inherently ephemeral and question traditional notions of authorship and object-based collection models; successful preservation requires establishing collaborative relationships with artists, treating materials as documents that capture potentiality rather than finished objects, and developing new methodologies that embrace process over possession.

Performance art fundamentally challenges traditional notions of preservation. The artist explains that all produced work is ephemeral with no formal edition, maintaining only recordings from real-time sessions and rehearsal files. This raises critical questions about archival responsibility: should partitions be activated by third parties? Can other artists reactivate these works? The company Beau Geste de la Danse exemplifies these challenges, with Dominique Boivin's recollections and Christine Hervé's notes being the only remaining traces. Collaborative documentation through large notebooks, archived in studios, provides potential resources for future reactivation, representing a systematic approach to preserving ephemeral artistic processes.

Archiving performance art presents unique challenges because performances are ephemeral and cannot be fully captured. Vân Đỗ explains that while object-based or video art can be viewed repeatedly, performances cannot be re-experienced in their original form. The group Phụ Lục has struggled with inadequate documentation, with many works lost over 15 years of practice. Vân Đỗ created a systematic archive that allowed the group to see their work comprehensively for the first time, which moved them deeply. This highlights the importance of documentation for preserving artistic heritage and establishing positions in art history.

Wes Taylor discusses the challenges of documenting and archiving experiential and ephemeral art, noting that traditional documentation methods often fail to capture the essence of such work. He describes how the documented version of performance or experiential work never fails to disappoint, as it cannot fully capture the live experience. He also discusses using VR and 3D tools to create immersive experiences that can exist beyond physical spaces, though he notes he is not a huge fan of VR as a medium itself.

This segment presents a comprehensive analysis of the body political and feminist body politics. The body political is defined as a regime that narrates and delimits a body, where each narration both reveals and conceals. The presentation argues that political philosophies of visibility, whose primary intention seems to be making visible those without a part, are merely variations of social historiographies that called for giving voice to the voiceless. Both positions are equally limited and failed, with their limitation and failure tied to the strong pretension of presence and identity that they presuppose. The gaze and voice reproduce the coordinates of the ocular-centric regime of light, which has been describing since ancient times the space of the common, in the duality of the luminous idea (reason) and the production of images (passional body). These coordinates organize an antinomic scenario for narrating and seeing a body, which requires its deactivation. The withdrawal or deactivation of the sexual difference understood as pure organ, flesh, and fluids destined for species reproduction allows for the exposure of a body whose sexual nature is described culturally, with functions, roles, places, and times framed within a hetero-normal gender order. This visibility allows for the affirmation of 'this body is mine' and the certainty of the ineffability of identity. The double of identity is culpability, as the presence narrated from the luminous register of the visible entails following a set of rules and accepting functions and roles. Not fulfilling this mandate constitutes an act of culpability. The body is at the center of political calculation, whether individual, global, or local, which complicates any politics whose politicity is encoded in the body. Each mode of production generates its own temporality, which knots together subjectivities, practices, and technologies in relation to forms of work. The vertiginous transition of digital technologies to the migration of work toward platforms tends to reduce temporality to a singular present. The circulation of information and images in social networks resembles a loop rather than a progression. The climate crisis contributes from another zone the certainty of the end of time or that there is no more time. When time is reduced to the experience of the Bolivian, it is not strange that the body becomes the place of such reduction. The body is the site where the possibility of altering the dominant order should be articulated, identified through symptoms such as the valorization of the body as individual experience, an expanding market in body care and strengthening, the materialist turn attempting to recover corporalities that had been forgotten in studies, analyses, and genealogies, and performance as a fetish word that comes to describe each action of subjects of this time. A feminist body politics should be named as such, a politics that explicitly in its enunciation what has always been part of it: the body. More than that, it should be named as feminist body politics, opposing the conservative persistence of the hetero-normal gender device. Unlike the ocular-centric regime with its light, shadow, center, and margin, a feminist body politics seeks the alteration of visibility hierarchies and classifications of the coordinates of the current political visual order. For this alteration to occur, feminist body politics need to integrate narratives belonging to other archives, other presents of forgotten struggles by histories of emancipation, which activate the present by altering and liberating it. Feminist body politics contains a paradox in its commitment: from its staging, even when a situated intervention is possible, one must not forget that a feminist body politics is always protest and claim of a body that rebels against an unjust order. Its vocation is iteration, so that the action of a feminist body politics always exceeds its own action. The repetition never repeats the same thing; repeating a cry, dance, or performance insists on bringing to present a movement whose origin is unknown and whose traceability is impossible. The act does not refer to identity, so the act of repetition is more like a contagion that spreads, disregarding nations, treaties, and languages. Only bodies that are affected and affect others exist. This is the paradoxical moment of feminist body politics, where its movement is reticular, connecting point to point and other points in a mesh that extends against the body. The presentation traces the reticular figure in Western mythology, noting that women have been associated with threads, embroideries, and textiles since ancient times. In Western mythology, Athena is skilled with the sword and also with threads; one of her tasks is the protection of the textile. However, the myth of Arachne, a young weaver who claims to be the best weaver, challenges Athena to a contest of threads and looms. Athena, disguised as an old woman, waits for Arachne's retraction, which does not come. Athena accepts the challenge, disposing of two looms. The contest is simple: both must weave a story, and the one with the most realistic weave will be the winner. Arachne weaves a complex scene composed of 22 stories of sexual violence and coercion against women, whether goddesses or humans, committed by the gods of Olympus. The presentation continues tracing the reticular figure in mythology, noting that Athena seems to be also the goddess of protection of masculine violence. The myth of Penelope, who weaves during the day to undo her work at night to discourage suitors, is also cited. In a story of revenge, Clytemnestra plans the assassination of Agamemnon using a red tunic whose function is to immobilize destiny, time, life, and death, woven in the laborious hands of women. The Moiras (Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) weave life and death in daily work. The presentation argues that the reticular figure, when women are evoked in proximity to threads and networks, is not new, but when philosophy attempts to imagine politics outside the straight lines of the program or treatise to favor curvatures, inclinations, and entanglements, the reticular figure appears there.

Contemporary feminist artists use the internet not as an escape from embodied experience but as a space to explore and challenge the relationship between digital technology and bodily existence, moving beyond early cyberfeminist ideals of disembodiment toward recognizing that even in virtual spaces, our material bodies and social identities remain central to how we experience and resist technological systems.

The female body serves as both a vehicle of expression and a key site for political emergence through touch, vulnerability, and the visceral. This challenges modernist mind-body dualities by foregrounding sensing as a modality for ethics and politics of remembrance. Artists navigate traumatic histories through witnessing and remembering, using their own bodies to articulate aftermath without enacting further violence. The multi-disciplinary approach encompasses video, film, performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, creating embodied practices that challenge traditional boundaries between artistic media.

Cyberfeminism is a co-authored, constantly mutating history of feminist digital activism that emerged in 1991 when the Australian collective VNS Matrix and British theorist Sadie Plant independently coined the term, challenging how marginalized communities could shape cyberspace; this collaborative index, gathering three decades of online activism and net art, demonstrates that technology is never neutral but reflects human intentions, and that embodied experience and nonlinear reading practices are essential for critically engaging with technological systems.

Donna Haraway's 1985 'A Cyborg Manifesto' proposes that the cyborg—a hybrid of machine and organism—serves as a powerful metaphor for challenging rigid categories of gender, race, and identity by embracing fluid, boundary-transcending subjectivity; Haraway critiques traditional feminism's reliance on fixed identity categories and essentialism, arguing instead for an intersectional approach that recognizes how individuals exist at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities, thereby offering a more inclusive and adaptable framework for feminist politics in the technological age.

Carolee Schneemann's 1975 performance 'Interior Scroll' supplants 'Meat Joy' as her defining work. Schneemann comes on stage covered in paint and slowly pulls a thin paper scroll from her vagina, reading aloud an attack highly gendered on her by a male structuralist filmmaker. This represents a transformation from the earlier ecstatic vision of eros toward more explicitly gendered and confrontational work.

Renata Burton's 'Tender Touches' series (1975) used pacifiers and knives to explore vulnerability and resistance. Carolee Schneemann's 'Meat Joy' (1964) featured her naked body covered in red paint surrounded by raw food, challenging body-material separation. Her 'Interior Scroll' involved extracting a paper scroll from her vagina, symbolizing female knowledge extraction. Feminist theorists argue pornography and platforms like OnlyFans commodify female sexuality, reducing women to objects of male desire. Audre Lorde defined eroticism as internal power and satisfaction suppressed in women, encompassing all activities from eating to working, performed with genuine joy. Amelia Jones argues that in male-dominated systems where women are objectified, female nudity is inevitably degraded. The question of whether female nudity represents liberation or pornography depends on how the body is perceived and controlled. Andrea Dworkin argues sexuality is constructed on a hierarchy where men dominate and women submit. To liberate women, a new form of sexuality must be created. Belgium's 2022 law decriminalizing prostitution granted sex workers health insurance and pensions, but critics argue this grants men the right to purchase and control women's bodies.

Carolee Schneemann emptied her body via the vagina while enrolling a parchment, calling it a fusion of the Bible with Gustav Corbet. The word is the origin of the world. This piece represents the continuation of the emptying gesture through the most intimate bodily orifice, challenging boundaries between sacred text and bodily function.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was one of the most important figures in modern American performance art. Her work explored sexuality, gender, and the human body, challenging societal norms about female sexuality during the 1960s and 1970s. Key pieces include 'Interior Scroll' (where she read from a scroll pulled from her vagina), 'Up to and Including Her Limits' (where she suspended herself in a white box and marked the floor with charcoal), and 'Meet Joy' (featuring bikini-clad bodies covered in dead meat and fish). Her work emphasized female ownership of sexuality and the human body as a potent symbol in art, not just a delivery system.