Carolee Schneemann. Meat Joy.

Three performances in 1964

Meat Joy was first performed in Paris on 29 May 1964, at the Festival de la Libre Expression at the American Center. Nine performers. Schneemann was the central woman; the central man was Daniel Pommereulle.

Ten days later, on 8 June, the work moved to London, performed at Denison Hall with eight people. In November of the same year, from the 16th to the 18th, it came to New York, within the Judson Dance Theater programme at Judson Memorial Church. Nine performers again, Schneemann at the centre beside the composer James Tenney.

Three cities, three casts, one set of materials. Raw fish. Raw chickens. Sausages. Wet paint. Transparent plastic. Rope. Brushes. Scraps of paper.

What happened on the floor

The performers begin slowly, shedding clothes, lying down, tangling together. Then paper is thrown. Then paint is smeared on skin. Then the fish, the chickens and the sausages are dropped among the rolling bodies.

There is no plot. There is a rhythm: tender, wild, precise, abandoned. Schneemann described the piece as an erotic rite, excessive and indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material. Viewers might find it sensual, comic, joyous or repellent. She let all of those reactions exist at once.

Schneemann trained as a painter. She called works like this kinetic theater. In her mind the floor was a large canvas, and the human body was brush, colour and surface at the same time.

Here smell is not a side detail. Raw fish turns briny fast. Raw chicken smells of skin and fat. Wet paint smells of solvent. All of it travels straight to the audience, with no explanation needed.

Flesh as a material

In the early 1960s, American painting still revolved around men standing in front of canvases. Schneemann stepped inside the picture. She used her own body and the bodies of others as material, placed beside meat bought at the market.

Putting human flesh beside animal flesh is an uncomfortable gesture. It is a reminder that skin is also meat: warm, smelling, bound to decay. Beauty and brine cannot be separated. The audience cannot only look; they have to smell, hear the paper rustle, see skin stuck with paint.

This is why Meat Joy is so often cited as a landmark of performance art and of feminist art. Read from the side of smell, it is also one of the early works to let living flesh, dead flesh and the human body share a room openly.

The film and what it lost

The 1964 performances were shot on 16mm film. In 2008 Schneemann edited a composite film from the original footage, about ten and a half minutes long, in colour with sound. That is how most people now know Meat Joy.

The film keeps the movement, the paint, the laughter. It cannot keep the smell. On screen, bodies roll among fish and chickens and nothing reaches the nose. The work becomes cleaner and easier to watch than it was on the night.

That gap is what deserves attention. Meat Joy reminds us that part of performance exists only in the room, on that evening, for those standing close enough. In the same line as Janine Antoni's licked chocolate and bathed soap busts, it shows body and material working together in ways the eye alone cannot fully grasp.