The Persistence of Her “Painterly Mess”: Reconstructing Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body Environment (1963–present)

In December 1963, American artist Carolee Schneemann’s New York City workspace, a disused furrier’s loft, became the backdrop for a series of black-and-white photographs collectively titled Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera. In these images, Schneemann poses her nude body among the in-progress artworks, open paint cans, tangles of rope, and discarded bits of fur littering the studio. Scholars narrate the photograph series as the first example of Schneemann including her own body in her work, often situating it as a precursor to the artist’s subsequent "kinetic theater" projects of the 1970s. What this narrow historical framing overlooks, however, is that the artist’s studio space, the setting for her landmark “transformative actions for camera,” has an extended history all its own. This paper relies on original archival research to trace the afterlife of Schneemann’s 1963 studio environment as it was repeatedly reconstructed for exhibitions in the 1990s before being separated into discrete artworks and acquired by museums in the 2010s. The material and ontological transformations undergone by the Eye Body environment help us understand how experimental artists like Schneemann carefully negotiated their own visibility and self-presentation within the institutions of art that once overlooked them. Though the afterlife of Schneemann’s Eye Body environment seemingly attests to the “tidying” of her detritus-laden tableau for museum exhibition and acquisition, this paper demonstrates how the complex history of this work is, in fact, a story of persistent and provocative “messiness.”