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Stony Brook University SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman's Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik A Dissertation Presented by Sophie Landres to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Criticism Stony Brook University May 2017 Copyright by Sophie Landres 2017 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Sophie Landres We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Andrew Uroskie – Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History Zabet Patterson - Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History Megan Craig – Third Member Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy Kathy O’Dell - Outside Member Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman's Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik by Sophie Landres Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Criticism Stony Brook University 2017 Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the cellist and Happenings artist Charlotte Moorman performed avant-garde compositions in a manner that exceeded her job description. Rather than interpret scores with fidelity to the composers’ intent, she read political or affective content into notation, ignored time brackets, and explored what I will refer to as the meta-histrionics of simultaneously being and being tasked to act like a professional performer. Moorman’s most notorious performances occurred while working with the composer and media artist, Nam June Paik. Beginning with their first collaboration in 1964 and concluding with the 1969 performance that followed her arrest for indecent exposure, this dissertation analyzes how Moorman’s radical interpretation style conditioned the methods and politics underlying their co-creations. It reveals that their conflation of Cagean indeterminacy with operatic motifs sought to defy both social and compositional control over performing bodies. Such a conflation reflected their roles within systems of production and is best understood through the automatons that populate their performances. As analogies for aesthetic hybridity, uncanny effects, and the rebellion of subaltern populations, automatons embodied the amalgamated form as well as the counter- cultural sentiment of the compositions in which they were situated. Against the conceit that Moorman and Paik’s experimentation with cybernetic instruments “humanized technology,” I argue that cyborgs, robots, and “living sculptures” denounced the instrumentalization of women and workers. I further argue that Moorman’s meta-histrionics, transhuman identification with her cello, and criminal trial helps usher a feminist discourse on objectification into the postwar media ecology. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Opera for Automatons I. Reversing the Refrain 1 II. Interpreting Interpretation: A Self-Reflecting Role 6 III. Opera Seria, Opera Buffa 13 IV. Instrumental Synecdoches 19 Chapter One Interpretations of Indeterminacy I. Limitations within the Infinite 26 II. Annotations and Electronics 31 III. The Human Cello 40 Chapter Two Acting Like Herself: A Transvaluative Style I. Meta-histrionics and Transhumanism 49 II. The Boredom and Intensity Dialectic 62 III. Boredom, Entertainment, and Class 74 IV. Conventional Theatricality and Skill as a Working Class or Capitalist Virtue 85 Chapter Three The First Non-Human Action Artist I. Originale All Over Again 98 II. An Avatar of Fear and Failure 105 III. Instrumental Substitutions 114 IV. The Technological View of Boredom and Intensity 125 Chapter Four A Live Greek Female Torso I. The Offense: Sex and Indeterminacy 130 iv II. Shock and Arrest 132 III. Defending the Uncanny 140 IV. The Social Uniform Code 145 Chapter Five The Automaton’s Return I. Cybernated Life 151 II. Mechanisms of Humor 155 III. On Bras and Mediation 160 IV. The Machine is Us 165 Epilogue 168 Bibliography 173 v Introduction OPERA FOR AUTOMATONS I. Reversing the Refrain An art critical refrain runs through the most concentrated period of collaboration between Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. Whether in discussion of Robot Opera (1964) or TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), their work is commonly explained through Paik’s quip that he was humanizing technology.1 Sometimes the refrain is used to support Paik’s nomination as the progenitor of video art. Sometimes the refrain appears alongside vague or decontextualized references to Marshall McLuhan and Norbert Wiener. Themes vary from the aesthetic use of cybernetics to the democratization of television, but the refrain always returns us to a place where Paik is the rondo’s sole subject. A strange thing happens when we allow Moorman’s contribution to creep into the analysis. The due order that holds composer over interpreter, script over action, artifact over event, and male over female no longer holds. With the order transposed, the work calls for a transposition in the refrain as well. Acknowledging Moorman’s radical interpretive style and experience with forces of social regulation, the sunny notion of humanized technology comes bound in the hazy, backwards form of instrumentalized humans. 1 See for example, Wulf Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” in Nam June Paik Video Works 1963-88 (London: Hayward Gallery, 1988); Glen Collins, “Charlotte Moorman, 58, Is Dead; A Cellist in Avant-Garde Works,” The New York Times, Saturday, November 9, 1991, 36; Edith Decker-Phillips’ Paik Video, (Barrytown, N.Y: Barrytown, Ltd, 1998); John G. Hanhardt and Nam J. Paik, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 37; and Henry Martin, “Nam June Paik: Video is Boring,” in The Electronic Wizard: Nam June Paik and the Invention of Videoart (Torino: Hopefulmonster Editore, 2003), 12. The catch phrase even appears in various editions of the popular art history text book, Gardner's Art through the Ages. 1 Indeed, automatons populate Moorman and Paik’s early collaborations. One first appears during Moorman’s 1964 New York Avant Garde Festival, where Paik debuted his robotic doppelgänger, Robot K-456 (1964). In addition to promoting the festival, the radio controlled, hermaphroditic, and malfunctioning robot served as Moorman’s accompaniment in multiple iterations of Paik’s Robot Opera (1964). Concurrently, Paik began serving as Moorman’s “human cello” in her controversial interpretation of John Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player ([1955], 1960). Bare-chested, he crouches between Moorman’s legs with a cello string pulled taut across his back. In some performances, the sequence would be followed by Moorman playing an electric stringed World War II practice bomb so that Paik’s body interchanged with instruments of music, pleasure, and war. We then see Moorman playing the role of a “living statue” in the performance of Opera Sextronique (1967) that was interrupted by her arrest for indecent exposure. Although Moorman was later bound to a suspended sentence, the living statue returned in TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969). In ironic compliance with the law, her cyborgian costume covered her breasts with television monitors that Paik engineered for her to disruptively manipulate by bowing her cello. These sexually and electrically charged automatons were unruly and uncanny objects, as indeterminate as the musical scores they performed. Their tasks were often tedious yet difficult to control, threatening to disrupt functioning systems, fail, or cease to perform. Automatons were not foreign to postwar art or to the discourse that surrounds it. In fact, they were frequently evoked to explain art forms that seemed alien upon arrival. Susan Sontag’s “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” was one of the first critical essays to address the 2 “new, and still esoteric, genre of spectacle” that characterizes Moorman and Paik’s endeavors.2 In her analysis, automatons describe the benumbed affect and prop-like treatment of Happenings participants. They distinguish the genre as “new” while evincing its derivation from Surrealism, Antonin Artaud’s purposely shocking dramaturgy in particular. Michael Kirby offered a similar account of “the inanimate ‘actor’” in Happenings, as have more recent studies by scholars such as Judith Rodenbeck, William Kaizen, and Mildred L. Glimcher.3 Artists including Moorman, Paik, Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, and Allan Kaprow also concede that the disturbing comportment of automatons was a crucial aspect of their work, and one stemming from the historical avant-garde. In addition to the dramaturgical automatism preceding Happenings, static art made by Futurist, Surrealist, and Dada artists reveled in depictions of machine-human hybrids. In its very title, Raul Hausmann’s assemblage Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age) (ca. 1920) claims that the modern era is defined by automatism. While his head sprouts tools of industry, musical signifiers humanize objects and objectify humans in Sophie Taeuber’s dancing “King Stag” marionettes
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