This groundbreaking feminist artist’s work looked to ‘demystify the female genital experience’

On a warm August evening in 1975, in the middle of an East Hampton gallery, artist Carolee Schneeman applied broad strokes of dark paint to her face and naked body, then pulled a paper scroll from her vagina and read aloud from it.

The text was drawn from another one of her pieces, Kitch’s Last Meal, a Super-8 film about a couple made from the perspective of their cat. It was a cheeky gesture with a strange, nesting-doll effect: the artist literally pulling one work of art out of another. The performance, titled Interior Scroll, was part of an exhibition called “Women Here and Now,” which was organized by two prominent artists, Joan Semmel and Joyce Kozloff, to mark International Women’s Year, as the United Nations had dubbed 1975. Schneeman described the piece as part of a “sustained attempt to demystify the female genital experience, acknowledge it as something various, positive, and alive, instead of as some dead envelope to be torn apart or penetrated.” Since moving to New York in 1962, Schneeman had been making a name for herself as an envelope-pushing artist working primarily with her body. Interior Scroll solidified her place as a liberated, out-there pioneer.

At the time, East Hampton was known as an artist’s colony, popularized by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Larry Rivers, and others. “We were in the belly of the beast,” Semmel said of the heavily male-dominated Abstract Expressionism scene in East Hampton, where she and other female artists didn’t always feel welcome. Pollock’s wife, painter Lee Krasner, allegedly fearful of being marginalized as a female artist, had curtly declined the invitation to participate in the show. “We were fearful of all-women shows too,” Semmel told The East Hampton Star. “They could be the kiss of death.” But she and Kozloff, along with artists who appeared in the show like Carolee Schneeman and Miriam Shapiro, felt that carving out space for women artists at the time was vital. “It was totally mobbed,” read the Star’s review of the show. “Everybody came with a sense of passion and interest. It had the feeling of buzz and spectacle.”

During Interior Scroll, Schneeman also read from her book, Cézanne, She Was A Great Painter, while performing a series of what she called “action model poses.” The xeroxed tract, like other written work of Schneeman’s, is both playful and searingly direct, particularly about the plight of women. One page contains a recipe for “Americana I Ching Apple Pie,” which begins, “Go into the kitchen in defiant joyful anger.” Another section of the recipe alerts the reader, “You are in this kitchen because you do not have a penis. Keep this in mind as you crush the garlic with the heel of your shoe. You are in this kitchen because you have or might have a baby.” As she has said, “My works go from ecstatic pleasure to rage and fury. “

Schneeman grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Bard College on a full scholarship before studying art at the University of Illinois. She works in various media, but she was trained as a painter, and a painterly sensibility guides her work. She has even likened her own performances to three-dimensional paintings. But she was drawn to the immediacy of performance, both because of the dynamic way it draws the gaze of viewers and entrances them, and because it subverts the staid, static tradition of paint on canvas. Schneeman longed to get away from the “heroic implication” of the paintbrush, which she thought “belonged to abstract expressionist male endeavor.”

During this period, many women artists—such as Lynda Benglis, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke—used their own bodies as models and canvases in order to play with ideas about agency and manipulate the conventions of self-representation, challenging viewers to confront the artist as both image and auteur. Schneeman’s work in particular dealt with “vulvic space.”

“I thought of the vagina in many ways — physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the source of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation,” she said. “I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiralled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual powers. This source of ‘interior knowledge’ would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh … the source of conceptualising, of interacting with materials, of imagining the world and composing its images.”

It’s a central paradox of patriarchy that representations of female nudity are often welcomed when made by men and greeted with hostility when women themselves create and control them. No one knew this better than women artists of the 1960s and 70s. Schneeman herself had a painting pulled from her senior show by outraged faculty — it depicted her then-partner, composer James Tenney, naked. She has gone on to field much criticism. Many of her critics in the 1970s and 80s were mainstream feminists who disliked what she called her “erotic-positive” work, thinking it was too close to porn and a form of self-objectification. Others found the work essentialist, arguing that it reduced female experience to its most elemental symbol, the vagina, and advanced sexist or overly simple ideas about the link between the feminine, nature, and sexuality. Sometimes her work was undermined because she was pretty. The artist told Artsy in 2016 that “until a few years ago,” her work was rejected by most galleries.

Regardless, Schneeman is regarded as a central figure in the canon of feminist art. Her early films and performances are also understood as a critical contribution to the field of performance art, which was still discovering itself in the 1970s. Interior Scroll, in particular, has long been celebrated, though the artist believes the attention it has garnered has kept some people from exploring her incredibly wide-ranging multimedia oeuvre.

Though she doesn’t find her own work shocking, Schneeman has always pushed boundaries. She was making cat art long before cat memes — as in Kitch’s Last Meal or her 1980s series Infinity Kisses, a grouping of color photographs of Schneeman making out with her cats — and working with meat before Lady Gaga, as in Meat Joy, the radical early performance in which whole raw chickens, fish, and sausages were thrown onto the writhing, nearly naked performers, who lay on the ground. Her primary motivation has always been to explore the body and its many capacities and meanings. As Schneeman said in a 2015 interview with Bomb magazine, “I’m interested in sensuous pleasure and the power of the naked body as an active image rather than the same old, pacified, immobilized, historicized body.”