Schneemann created viscerally inspired performances in the 1960s and 1970s but also delved into collage, assemblages, film, and photography. Often her ideas for her work came from dreams, finding inspiration in the sequences of images and sounds in the unconscious nocturnal workings of her mind. She reveled in challenging social taboos in her work and set out to bring down, "the psychic territorial power lines by which women were admitted to the Art Stud Club." In the early 1960s, she travelled to Paris where she first performed her work Meat Joy in 1964, a multi-media spectacle involving raw meat, sexuality, and pop music. That same year she began work on her first major film, Fuses (1964-1967), a tribute to her sexual and emotional relationship with Tenney and the first of her autobiographical trilogy. Her next film, Plumb Line(1968) dealt with the unraveling of an heterosexual relationship and provided her with catharsis as her relationship with Tenney ended that same year. She had many other relationships during her career, but none that resulted in multiple collaborations. Despite the tumultuous end to their long-term relationship, she did maintain correspondence with Tenney, and even wrote to him about her subsequent relationship with fellow artist and filmmaker Anthony McCall.
Throughout the 1970s, she continued to collaborate with Fluxus, Performance and Happenings artists, and she maintained correspondence with Kaprow throughout their lives. Schneemann refined her performance aesthetic through works like Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-1976) an embodied exploration of the theme of the artist's gesture, which she first performed at Grand Central Station in New York City at the Avant Garde Festival. Her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, at the Women Here and Now conference in East Hampton, Long Island, was photographed by her partner at the time, McCall, and is a germinal example of her feminist exploration of the female body as both subject and object of art, as well as the source of its creation.
--theartstory.org