Carolee Schneemann: I don't even like the word 'relax'! If I have a pa...

Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.

Carolee Schneemann

trust-yourself stubborn love-you

Drawing and masturbation were the first sacred experiences I remember.

Carolee Schneemann

sacred drawing experience

I wouldn’t want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there’s a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you’re an artist and you’re a feminist.

Carolee Schneemann

visionaries feminist artist

How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.

Carolee Schneemann

president trying thinking

In the end, it's always a single person who makes change. But I do think we should try to send artists out into the world and not have them all stick together in the big cities.

Carolee Schneemann

artist trying thinking

I assume the senses crave sources of maximum information, that the eye benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of complexity and substance, . . . conditions which alert the total sensibility - cast it almost in stress - extend insight and response, the basic responsive range of empathetic-kinesthetic vitality.

Carolee Schneemann

stress eye exercise

I grew up doing farm work, and there's a deep connection between the demands of farming and the demands of art creation. My sense of space and material has a lot to do with having been a chicken-killer and working with cows.

Carolee Schneemann

farming creation art

I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.

Carolee Schneemann

painter canvas principles

The people from where I grew up have no appreciation for Paleolithic rocks or menstrual calendars. I'm a retriever of lost iconographies. But I had real training and have deep discipline, and I believe in it. Too much of the work I see today is just cultural junk. It's very superficial and has no rigor. It doesn't address the dynamic and real politics of an aesthetic structure.

Carolee Schneemann

real appreciation believe

It's really hard to have a fair discussion when you're faced with militarism, aggression, and greed. The militarists do not want dialogue. They want what they want. They're psychotic. They're greedy, they're narcissistic, and they're dangerous.

Carolee Schneemann

narcissistic psychotic greed

It's a very difficult age when the forces of time want to destroy us and take us away. They're just snatching people like devils; death comes and grabs each of us.

Carolee Schneemann

devil age people

An older friend once told me, "Life didn't ask for your opinion," which I liked.

Carolee Schneemann

opinion

My teachers always said, "You're very talented, but don't set your heart on art. You're only a girl." I was inspired by Virginia Woolf in 1960, but they wouldn't let me write about her. They said she was a trivializer. I also wanted to do a paper on Simone de Beauvoir, and my philosophy teacher said, "Why would you write about the mistress? Write about the master." That was Sartre.

Carolee Schneemann

girl teacher art

The way I understand composition and form and my ability to enter into material all comes from my disciplines and my commitment as a painter - my energy, my arm, my eyes, my sense of space and form and time. It's a wonderful realm for me. I never leave it.

Carolee Schneemann

discipline eye commitment

We don't necessarily need so many artists. I recommend that many of the people who think they want to be artists should go into the American Friends Service Committee, or do government outreach to communities that don't have water, or that need seeds or ecological assistance. It would create a system in which people with engaged sensibilities and potential insight assist instead of imposing. I think it could leap right out of the art world into wonderful community action.

Carolee Schneemann

people art thinking

I'm used to working with neglect and misunderstanding, so this has been really challenging. It's a different psychic realm. The Lion did not land easily here.

Carolee Schneemann

neglect different challenges

I don't even like the word 'relax'! If I have a partner and we make love a lot, then I'm in a very pure state of being.