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the audience during a talk in 1968 in Britain by coming out wearing farmers’
overalls and dressing and undressing as she spoke. The crowd, as Schneeman
told it, “went a bit nuts” and was “outraged”—“how can she be naked and
talk about art history,” they were thinking.
In that way, Schneeman became a pioneer in what is today the popular
form of performance art, or body art, often sexual and considered vulgar by
many. Schneeman’s performances often featured nudity and themes of sex.
Her most controversial works at the time were Eye Body and Meat Joy. In the
former, she presented a series of 36 pictures of herself naked, covered in
grease, chalk, plastic, or toy snakes. In Meat Joy, 4 women and 4 men, in
underwear, writhed on a heap on the floor and fondled sausages, chicken, and
fish. She called it “an ecstatic group ritual.” Some observers called it “bril-
liant” but one spectator jumped up and tried to strangle Schneeman. She then
turned Meat Joy into a video, with one critic blasting her, saying “your films
aren’t really films.” That did not stop her, though. She explained that “my
works go from ecstatic pleasure to rage and fury.” Later she created a more
shocking work, Interior Scroll, in which she stood naked on a table and removed
a strip of paper from her vagina and read an imaginary conversation with a
condescending male filmmaker from it. Schleeman had undoubtedly risen to
the ranks of well-known artists, but still found herself secondary to male
painters and performers, and angrily and frankly called herself the “cunt mas-
cot on the men’s art team.” She continued to do more traditional political art
too. She created “Viet Flakes,” a collage depicting atrocities from the Vietnam
War, and “Terminal Velocity,” images of bodies falling from the World Trade
Center during the terrorist attacks of 2001. She also created a legacy for
performance art like that done by contemporary celebrities like her friend
Yoko Ono or Lady Gaga, and destroyed conventional morality to make possible
later controversial works like Piss Christ, a work by Andres Serrano which
showed a crucifix in a jar of urine. Art, as it had long been, was a force for
political dissent and activism in the 1960s.Movements and Democracy in the Sixties
While African Americans, Women, and Chicanos gained more attention than
other movements in the decade, the whole period was marked by action by
groups that had previously been kept outside the power elite demanding
changes, demanding a new idea of democracy that would give them eco-