Conversation with Carolee Schneemann, New York, 2003

In this conversation, Carolee Schneemann delves into her work as a feminist artist who has challenged societal norms since the 1960s. She discusses her use of the body in the piece Eye Body from 1963, aiming to transgress the repressive regurgitation of femininity prevalent in pop art. The work investigated whether she “could be both the nude and the creator of a transgressive meaning.” Schneemann's discourse confronts the cultural history and societal betrayals that have shaped contemporary norms, particularly the suppression of female sexuality and the contributions of women artists.
In her later work, such as Devour, Schneemann juxtaposes sensuousness with violence, challenging viewers to engage with the underlying menace of everyday life. She emphasizes the artist's role as a harbinger of awareness, navigating the complexities of a world threatened from within its own structures.

During the interview, Schneemann interacts with her cat while her work is screened in the background. She addresses ageism, noting, "It's very hard to get grants and funding. I get letters back saying we are only going to support emerging younger artists." At the same time, she highlights the unique insights that come with aging: “You have a lot more privacy in a way, and a chance to regard forward and backward simultaneously.”

Schneemann reflects on how her practice is continuously flattened, with many curators wanting to confine her complex body of work to a few naked events. “I describe it as my body [having] obscured the body of work. And that's a lousy trick.” She also addresses the generating of a feminist vocabulary in the 1970s through separatism: "Women finally decided that in order to define our lost history and the potentiality of our work as artists, we had to be apart from the men because when we shared it with them, they always wanted to solve our issues, define them, and take them over."

This gives rise to the question: What direction will feminism take in a world "where this irrepressible need of the hyper-masculine to keep reasserting itself at any cost" persists? Schneemann reminds us: "Feminism now has to insist on the territories that it has opened and explored and the cohesive, integrative negotiating values that it represents."