The artwork that nearly killed Carolee Schneemann
How do you express carnal desire in a way that’s fittingly avant-garde enough to shock even a 1960s progressive art crowd? Carolee Schneemann’s answer was to have eight nearly nude performers writhe around in wet paint, paper, sausages, and raw chickens. The 1964 piece was called Meat Joy, a now revered feminist celebration of flesh and excess that nearly got Schnneemann killed.
First performed in Paris at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Schneemann described it as an “erotic rite”, chiming with similar ’60s performance pieces whose conceptual nature was deemed more important than the actual “art” produced. No matter the artistic value of the piece, no matter how divisive its nature, the reaction she received in Paris was abhorrent.
As the performers began rubbing bare skin with carcasses, a man in the audience became so incensed that he burst onto the stage. He grabbed Schneemann and started to strangle her. The surrealist nature of the performance left onlookers unsure if it was part of the show, another comment on the gender dynamics Schneemann so often explored. Eventually, two women realised the severity of the situation and leapt to her defence, dragging the man off of her.
“I never anticipated such a degree of anger, rage, fury – and embracing the issues as well,” she reflected in 2017. “Everything seemed to be happening at once without my participation to the degree of depravity.”
It didn’t deter Schneemann from taking the piece around the world. Only days later, it was performed again with members of New York’s Judson Dance Theatre in England. Moments into the performance, police ran them off the stage. The artist later filmed and photographed it entirely, as performed by the Kinetic Theatre Group, committing it to the public consciousness forever.
Reflecting on the reactions to the piece, which ranged from the murderous to the outraged, Schneeman later said: “Sensuality was always confused with pornography, the old patriarchal morality of proper behaviour and improper behaviour had no threshold for the pleasures of physical contact that were not explicitly about sex”. Her pieces continued to shock and divide. Schneemann once filmed herself having sex as her cat looked on, and in 1975, performed Interior Scroll, which saw her pull a scroll out from her vagina and read it aloud.
For better or worse, Schneemann’s work typified a period where free love, boundary-pushing, and an almost obsessive fascination with genitalia were staples of progressive artists. Critics continued to baulk, and she continued to defend her art.
“There is motive, process, and notes surrounding this work,” she told Dazed. “It has been misrepresented as egregious because there is a terrible depravity that rarely shifts between sensuousness and pornography. The culture doesn’t get the difference and it’s critical to sensitivity, ecology, nature, your body, your food, to every kind of physical interchange we experience.”
