Painting Politically: The Trangressions of Carolee Schneemann and Miriam Cahn

Sydney Srnka

Advisor: Dr. Adele Nelson

Abstract

The relationship between performance art and painting is interconnected, especially within the history of women artists. Paint has been the primary form of visual culture and art historical depictions of the female body for centuries, socially marking these bodies with fantasies and disembodying them with aesthetics. While paint continued to be gendered as masculine, it remained apolitical for female artists who found themselves without agency or representation in painting. Performance art and other non-traditional mediums became ways for women artists to communicate body politics, merge the private and political, claim active agency, and force new ways of viewing the female body in art. This feminist intervention in art ruptured the reigning material and gender hierarchy from the 1960s to the 1980s. This intervention was rooted in painting, though, making paint perpetually bound to feminist art and further complicating the relationship between women artists and this medium. Carolee Schneemann and Miriam Cahn, who both abandoned conventional painting for more performative methods in their early careers, embody this condition as they continued to explore and challenge the traditions and gender of painting even after their initial departure from it. By analyzing the works of Cahn and Schneemann, this thesis will explore the tumultuous relationship between performance art and painting, as well as how these artists used performance art and their explicit bodies to transgress paint and turn it into a political tool for feminism.