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I think of myself as a feminist artist, because I'm for feminism. But my work is not generally
about feminism per se. It's about something that I take as a given: we want people to
grow and be liberated, and equal. And we're moving towards a better world. A better world:
that's the idea. That's the liberal idea: we're moving to a better world. And it's not
going to be a better world if feminism is not mixed into that. It just won't be. So
it's automatic.
But I could also call myself a gay activist, and certainly civil rights. All those things,
it's all part of the same stuff. It wasn't my intention to focus specifically in this
piece about feminist art, but it's what it turned out to be, because I picked a prototypical
- the Promethean - feminist artist herself, Carolee Schneemann, who started us thinking
about (at least one of a number of people who started us thinking about) the body, and
the female body specifically. And I don't think that initially she was trying to load
in political concepts that were specifically feminine. She was coming from, I think, initially,
a liberation kind of thing.
This chart piece is really specifically about Carolee Schneemann, but also shows kind of
a general branching of interest in work that is about performance and the body, and shows
people (previous artists) who she claims influenced her in some way, like Artaud is really big
for her, with the Theater of Cruelty. And then people who are working at the same time.
And of course there was a real dialogue going on when she was working with Judson Dance
Theater, and working with people like Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg….and
then people who had a kind of a firmer idea about what it was that was going on. So when
she actually started making work that was clearly about feminism, which is about ten
years later, she was part of a movement by that time. She was part of a movement.
No one else has really said, as far as I know, Carolee did this, and when Annie Sprinkle
did this, that she was somewhat standing on the shoulders of Carolee. But I could make
those kinds of connections. And maybe other people have. So that's what that chart sort
of did, is it laid out the people that Carolee claimed as her predecessors, then her contemporaries,
that she worked with together to develop these ideas, and it actually picks a few high points
in her career. Because I think she had a few really classic, definitive pieces, and they
were about ten years apart, which is really great for an artist to be able to be hitting
more than one mark. She hits more than one mark, and usually a famous artist has one
idea; Carolee had more than one. And then the sort of echo of all that kind of work
is the rest of the chart.