The careers of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Stephen Cripps are unthinkable today

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above and buckets of paint sloshed underfoot.

Since her expulsion from Bard College ten years earlier for the ‘moral turpitude’ of painting herself in the nude, Schneemann had made a name for getting naked while persisting in calling herself a painter – a claim that was just about tenable in the case of ‘Meat Joy’, less so in the case of ‘ICES STRIP/ISIS TRIP’ (1972), her one-woman performance on a London to Edinburgh festival train which started with a striptease in the dining car while reciting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and ended with her roller-skating up and down the aisle.

Despite a police raid on the London performance of ‘Meat Joy’, Schneemann moved to the city for a three-year spell in 1969 and the Barbican has welcomed her back with a major show hailing her as a trailblazer of body politics. It’s an exhaustive survey, devoting several galleries to her unremarkable early abstract expressionist canvases and messy box-constructions before she hit her stride with photographs and films involving her body. At this point things get more interesting visually, if not logico-philosophically. Rejecting hierarchies she regarded as patriarchal, Schneemann gave everything equal artistic value. A wall is devoted to ‘Infinity Kisses (I)’ (1981-87), a grid of photographs of her daily tongue smooches with her cat Cluny. ‘THE CAT IS MY MEDIUM,’ she wrote of a previous pet. Oh, purr-leaze!

As Rossini said of Wagner, Schneemann has some good moments but some bad quarters of an hour.