Carolee Schneemann

Meat Joy, Paris, 1964 Where Klein's models were directed from a distance, Schneemann's nine performers in Meat Joy acted for themselves, rolling together, painting one another's bodies and rubbing raw chicken, fish and sausage across each other. It was a deliberate argument for pleasure and the body as material, made by a woman at a time when that body was usually the subject rather than the author. First performed in May 1964 at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris, it went on to London, where police raided the event, and to Judson Memorial Church in New York that November. The New York version was restaged in a television studio so Pierre Dominique Gaisseau could film it, and that film is how it is mostly seen now.