Carolee Schneemann (Pensilvania, 1939) began her artistic career as a painter during the 1950s. Although Schneemann moved towards performance she considers her photographic and body pieces to still be based in painting despite appearing otherwise on the surface. She has describes herself as ‘a painter who has left the canvas to activate actual space and live time’. Carolee Schneemann is one of the pioneers of performance, installation, and video art. She contributed substantially to a redefinition of performance art practice, especially discourse on the body, sexuality and gender. She uses her nude body feeling that it needed to be seized back from the status of a cultural possession.

Carolee Schneemann’s unique contribution to art history, and to painting in particular, has been literally to draw the eye back to the body that sees: both to de body’s inextricable connection to what is seen to its role in determining the nature of the seen. Schneemann focuses her attention on how the interstices of space are determined by the inner and outer eyes, and doing so raises quintessential philosophical problems about how space comes to be shaped by the ideologies of gender, sex, and politics.