Around that time, Schneemann became involved in New York City’s experimental downtown scene. She began making performances that she called “kinetic theater”—scored events for groups of performers that fell somewhere between dance, theater, and happenings. The most famous of these is Meat Joy (1964), a quasi-orgiastic ritual in which nine performers undressed and carried out a series of actions with rope, paint, papers, plastic sheets, as well as raw chickens, mackerel, and hot dogs. One of the biggest challenges of curating past performance works is conveying their power with only documentation to show. But the video of Meat Joy remains stirring. There’s something undeniably discomfiting about watching near-naked performers roll around and rub raw chickens all over their bodies, and in our day and age, any image that creates discomfort without the use of violence seems worth lingering on.

What does get lost, somewhat, is the cultural and political context in which such a performance took place (an issue that could be addressed with better wall text). It can be tempting today to dismiss Meat Joy as a formless act of empty hedonism, but Schneemann rigorously orchestrated it, and she did her other performances, through the use of drawings, which are on display, and a score, which is included in the catalogue. She was exploring aesthetic possibilities and cultural taboos. (Meat Joy apparently so tested taboos that a man tried to strangle Schneemann during its 1964 Paris premiere.) “The cultural surround intensifying my sensuous rituals was motivated in contrast to the endless brutalities of the Vietnam War,” Schneemann wrote. “My propositions of ecstatic connection were in reaction to a government shaped by assassinations and militaristic aggressions.”

Schneemann tackled the Vietnam War head-on in a 1965 film titled Viet-Flakes and a 1967 performance called Snows, which used the former as its “heart and core,” she wrote. In Viet-Flakes a camera zooms in and out on suppressed images of atrocities from the war, set to a soundtrack of cut-up American pop songs and Vietnamese music. It feels a bit too much like a formal exercise to be potent. Snows featured an elaborate set, fake snow, five films projected in 360 degrees, and performers who enacted a series of physically intense actions that included falling, crawling, and grabbing and dragging each other’s bodies. It seems to have been a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk of suffering. Unfortunately, at MoMA PS1 its intensity doesn’t come through, perhaps because video documentation flattens the complex layering of media it contained live.

Schneemann has continued to make work about wars and suffering over the decades—what she calls her “atrocity collection”—including an artist’s book, collages, and more pieces about the 1982 Lebanon War; a series of enlarged images of newspaper photographs of people falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11; and an installation titled More Wrong Things (2000), which consists of TV screens arrayed at different heights and connected by a web of dangling wires. The TVs juxtapose graphic images of political violence with mundane ones from Schneemann’s life—a common technique throughout her oeuvre that doesn’t serve her well. Though it suggests an admirable honesty, an admission that she’s only experiencing these conflicts at a remove, it also centers her in a way that compounds the problem of her atrocity works: They feel lacking in a deep engagement with the sociopolitical realities represented by the images they contain.

