Eye Body #10, from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera

Carolee Schneemann was best known as an influential feminist photographer, performance artist, and video artist, but she began her career as a gestural painter. To further incorporate action into her canvases, she began to cut up and reassemble them, adding found objects and motorized elements. In the early 1960s, she created environments from these reconstructed paintings, which became the settings for performances such as 1963’s Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera. For this project, the Icelandic Pop artist Erró photographed Schneemann posing nude with various props, suggesting an erotic ritual. Her body was smeared with grease and paint that echoed the brushstrokes on the canvases. “I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material—a further dimension of the construction . . . I am both image maker and image,” she wrote.

Schneemann continued to use her body to explore her lived experience and broader issues of gender and sexuality in landmark performances such as Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975). She inscribed this photograph to Robertson while she was a visiting associate professor in transmedia, painting, and drawing at UT Austin from 1989 to 1991.