Carolee Schneemann Quotes
The female nude is part of a revered tradition, although she is not to take authority over depictions of her nudity. She is just to be available.
Carolee Schneemann
Quotes to Explore
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My work became a bridge that had to be crossed by young feminists working with their bodies.
Carolee Schneemann
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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
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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
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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
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Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.
Carolee Schneemann
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The art audience is very receptive to what I do. It's a mutual influence.
Carolee Schneemann
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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
