Schneemann uncompromisingly used her own body to explore both the contemporary politics of gender and ancient ritual. “It’s propulsion is toward the ecstatic,” Schneemann wrote, “shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.” In it, eight mostly naked men and women cavorted in both scripted and improvised movements with raw fish, chickens, sausages among other things. Schneemann described it as having “the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material”. Paint was just one of the materials in Meat Joy (1964), perhaps her most famous work.

She told Rist: “The way I understand composition and form and my ability to enter into material all comes from my disciplines and my commitment as a painter-my energy, my arm, my eyes, my sense of space and form and time. Indeed, Schneemann maintained that despite the fame she gained as a performance artist, she was always, at heart, a painter. The work exemplifies the way that the heroic “action painting” of Jackson Pollock was re-imagined by feminist artists of the 1960s. Schneemann made a former furriers on 29th Street her home, and it directly influenced her work: in what might be regarded as her breakthrough piece, Four Fur Cutting Boards (1962–63), now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she used the fur scraps and cutting boards left in the space combined with, among other things, hubcaps, lights and stockings and gestural painterly marks to create what she memorably described as an “exploded canvas”. Many artists in that scene occupied Downtown spaces left empty as traditional industry declined.

Schneemann was a founder member of the Judson Dance Theater, that extraordinary gathering of figures in Greenwich Village who would help determine the course of art and performance over several decades, including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. She studied at the University of Illinois before making her way to New York in 1961, where she was quickly immersed in the Downtown performance scene that became the crucible for a revolution in art, theatre and contemporary dance. She was born in rural Pennsylvania, where she grew up doing farm work (“there’s a deep connection between the demands of farming and the demands of art creation”, she told the artist Pipilotti Rist in a wonderful 2017 conversation for Interview magazine ). Her influence was enormous: as Schneemann herself put it when talking to the Guardian in 2014, her work “became a bridge that had to be crossed by young feminists working with their bodies.” The pioneering painter, performance artist and film-maker Carolee Schneemann has died, aged 79.

Timesnatch