“Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic, I established my body as visual territory,” observed Carolee Schneemann, looking back at her 1963 artwork Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera. On this – one in all her most enduring works – the American artist painted her body and employed a medley of props for a series of performance-based photographs. “Not only am I a picture maker,” she said, “but I explore the image values of flash material I decide to make work with.” Adopting the moniker Eye Body, a recent group show at TJ Boulting is bringing together 12 artists whose practices, largely photographic, echo Schneemann’s transgressive actions. 

“It’s been brewing for a very long time,” explains gallerist and curator, Hannah Watson on a Zoom call. “I work with a number of artists that use themselves of their work, and I’m at all times quite enthusiastic about people terming it self-portraiture – since it’s not, it’s performance. In actual fact, more often than not they’re something totally different.” 

Juno Calypso, presenting Silhouette II (2022), has long utilised wigs and masks to invoke a personality she calls Joyce, while Daisy Collingridge physically steps into the candy-coloured fabric sculptures she terms Squishies (named Burt, Hillary, Dave and Clive respectively). Elsewhere, Sam Keelan plays the role of a person separating his toy collection from his ex-husband’s in Courtroom (2020), and Atong Atem photographs herself in character as relations from personal albums. “We sing songs to inform history and we dress up and sit for photographs to mythologise our histories,” she writes within the accompanying press notes. 

“Performance itself is an activist medium” – Hannah Watson

“Something that gets related to Juno and Haley [Morris-Cafiero]’s work is this concept that if you happen to’re a female artist and also you’re in your image, you’re making a press release about being a lady, feminism, independence, beauty…,” says Watson, reflecting on how the work is received. While feminism and identity are outstanding themes in most of the pieces, the performances also explore gender, queerness, body image, activism, humour and private history she notes. “With Juno, she’s creating characters. She’s in all of her photographs, but purely because when she started off – photographing other people – she found it so intensely awkward. It was liberating for her to be on her own and literally use herself.” In chatting with Morris-Cafiero she says, Watson learned that her core references weren’t photographers, but performance artists equivalent to Laurie Anderson and Adrian Piper. 

“Performance itself is an activist medium, and a number of the artists have that element of their work. It’s not about making a reasonably picture a number of the time, it’s actually something quite daring and statement-like,” continues Watson, who was also inspired by Performing for the Camera, which opened at Tate Modern in 2016. 

For Rose English, presenting two horse-focused pieces from the Nineteen Seventies, the work foregrounds how women’s bodies are sometimes fetishised, while Morris-Cafiero’s Weight Bearing series examines the role of societal expectations in relation to body image. 

“Carolee Schneemann represents a number of things when it comes to feminist art history and performance,” says Watson. “And reading about Eye Body was interesting because, for her, it was about painting; her physical use of her body was a sort of exploration of the physicality of what paint and painting was. She was pushing that concept, however the cool thing was this concept that you just’re within the image and also you make the image, and using that sort of dichotomy to do what you should do.” 

Ultimately grounded within the sometimes confrontational partnership between performance and photography, Eye Body looks to where the emphasis is presumed by the viewer. Within the series Front, Trish Morrissey approaches groups on the beach, swapping places with [usually] a mother inside the party, and asking her to take their picture. “Simply because you’re within the photograph, people say, ‘Oh, you take photos of yourself’, but Trish shouldn’t be that person,” explains Watson. “She says, ‘I’m not this psychopathic woman who’s infiltrating families on beaches. It’s a performance, it’s not me.’ And performance is that this ephemeral thing, so how do you capture that? How do you make concrete your ideas? Through the photograph. So the show is about having the work seen in that light, just switching the context barely.”

Eye Body is running at TJ Boulting from March 29 until April 29 2023.