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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.

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Opera for Automatons: 's Early Collaborations with

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 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 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 occurred while working with the composer and media artist, Nam June Paik. Beginning with their first collaboration in 1964 and concluding with the 1969 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 , robots, and “living ” 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 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. 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 Code 145

Chapter Five The Automaton’s Return

I. Cybernated Life 151 II. Mechanisms of Humor 155 III. On 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 (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 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 , 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,” , 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 ’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 , 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 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 ,

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, , and 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 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 (1918), Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), and Salvador Dali’s Masochistic

Instrument (c. 1934). To Hal Foster, automatons played a part in how Surrealists redirected the inevitable return of repressed desire and trauma to critique the conditions of war, capitalism, and

2 Susan Sontag, “Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York, N.Y: Picador U.S.A, 2001), 263. Moorman and Paik’s association with and will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

3 Kirby writes, “the performer frequently is treated in the same as a prop or a stage effect… As the individual creativity and technical subtlety of the human operation decreases, the importance of the inanimate “actor” increases… Performers become things and things become performers.” Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 19. Also see Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011); Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” Grey Room, No. 13 (Autumn, 2003): 54-79; William Kaizen, “Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting,” Grey Room, No. 13 (Autumn, 2003): 80-107; and Mildred L. Glimcher, Happenings: New York, 1958–1963, exh. cat. (New York: Pace Gallery, 2012).

3 social order experienced in the aftermath of World War I.4 Likening their junk material basis to repressed things that resurface in strange yet familiar forms, he argues that the uncanniness aroused by automatons reflects life in western capitalism—life conditioned by shocking technological developments and estranging consumption patterns. The automaton’s postwar revival can be considered an uncanny reoccurrence in itself. Through an eerie form and recursive aesthetic gesture, it affirmed a cyclical condition in which unsettling experiences (in art as in life) may be repressed but never resolved.

Concurrent with performance participants that resembled objects, art objects were increasingly seen animated in the postwar period. Automatons appeared in discussions of sculpture’s expanded field accordingly, and helped establish a position between more familiar forms of moving and static art. In Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Frank Popper finds precedent in seventeenth century scientific curiosities as well as the pre-war avant-garde’s dynamic sculptures and reifying performances.5 He argues that costumes provided visual fantasies of machines engulfing or entrapping humans while mechanical movement signified the internalization of modern apparatuses.6 Jack Burnham’s Beyond : The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968) provides yet another reminder that ostensibly new postwar aesthetics resurrected practices from the past. Automatons are fundamental to how he anchors kinetic, electrically powered, and environmental art to a

4 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

5 Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (New York: New York Graphic Society, Ltd., 1968).

6 Popper’s examples include Hugo Ball’s “Magical Bishop” costume for a 1916 performance at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ivo Pannaggi’s costumes for the Futurist Mechanical Ballet (1919), and the stiff, jerky, repetitive, expressionless motions that imitated engines and gears in Giacomo Balla’s Printing Press (Macchina Tipografica) (1914) and Franco Casavola’s Machine of 3000 (Machina del 3000) (1924).

4 historic lineage.7 Arguing that they perpetually form us and inform us about ourselves, he claims that 1960s sculpture heralds a cybernetic understanding of life and life’s simulation. Although focused on three-dimensional objects, he credits the aesthetic application of cybernetics “in part to a crisis recognized in modern music by French and German avant-garde composers.”8

Apprehending the exhaustion of tonality, these composers used nascent technology to explore sound as it exists on a continuum. Yet, Burnham contends that their experiments

still did not answer the basic questions: where does machine creativity (or guidance)

leave off and human invention begin; and can information theory, group theory, number

theory, or any kind of mathematical analysis aid in the production of vital, meaningful

music?9

Several pages later, Burnham briefly enlists Robot K-456 (1964) to illustrate Paik’s “mastery of incantation” and how art announces “the age of the electronic humanoid plugged in for instant global communication.”10 Although he refers to Paik as “a gadfly of the musical avant- garde,” he does not suggest that the work is a reply to the questions posed mere pages earlier.11

Instead, he recounts the robot’s appearance at an unnamed art exhibition and classifies it as an attempt “by sculptors to make "sculptures" or three- dimensional systems which actually operate

7 Burnham posits that modern sculpture belongs more to a materialist, systems aesthetic than to a tradition of ideal, autonomous, and static objects. With in mind, he writes, “the object sculpture of today seeks transcendence through the seeming rationality of materialism colored with phenomenological considerations. Reification moves sculpture from its passive state as contemplative art toward more precise approximations of the systems which underlie operational reality.” Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 8.

8 Burnham argues that Europeans incorporated cybernetics into their visual art before Americans because they had more exposure to serial composition. Ibid, 343.

9 Ibid, 344.

10 Ibid, 351.

11 Ibid, 351.

5 on cybernetic principles.”12 He does not mention that it debuted at Moorman’s music-based

Avant Garde Festival of New York. Nor does he mention how it performed duets with Moorman in Robot Opera, which was usually staged in public spaces or performance venues.

Through Burnham’s double omission, the notion that Paik humanized technology is ever audible and beguiling. By unpacking Paik’s irony, analyzing Moorman’s indelible contribution, and resituating their work within the tumult of the 1960s, this dissertation picks up where the refrain leaves off. It shifts attention to the political significance of automatons as well as the musical structures that gave their performances form. In doing so, it further uncoils the self- reflective, sociality of technics that Burnham’s history proves are always at play.

II. Interpreting Interpretation: A Self-Reflecting Role

Moorman and Paik came to their collaboration with like interests. He was engrossed in two principle projects: iconoclastically repurposing electronics and instruments, and redistributing roles within performance events to cultivate a “New Ontology of Music.”13 She had just begun producing experimental performances but was well-established as a wayward cellist whose interpretation of New Music exceeded the job description.14 Rather than interpret scores with fidelity to the composers’ intent, Moorman began to read political or affective

12 Ibid, 15.

13 Nam June Paik, “New Ontology of Music” in Postmusic, The Monthly Review of the University for Avant-garde Hinduism. edited by N.J. Paik, FLUXUS a publication, 1963, reprinted in Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, and Caitlin Jones. Global Groove 2004 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004), insert not page numbered. Chapter Three provides a close reading of this text along with the other ideas and processes related to Paik’s practice at the time he met Moorman.

14 “Charlotte hated rehearsals and even changed an entire performance the day before we were to do it. This was good practice for me,” Paik acknowledged in an interview with David Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. David Ross, “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik, Toni Stooss, and Thomas Kellein, Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 62.

6 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.

Whether appearing as an irreverent and bawdry avant-gardist or a deadpan virtuoso in a flouncy , Moorman performed an exaggerated portrayal of herself. Among the many musical signifiers that helped entangle her personality with her act, her cello was the most consistent prop.15 In works where she appeared to transfigure or merge with the instrument, the familiar conceit that she “played herself” became literal and uncanny.16 This was especially the case in compositions that contained elements of indeterminacy. She seized such work as an opportunity to redistribute musical assignments, past the point of shared or vacated authorship and into a transhumanist realm where even she and her cello were confusable.

Indeterminate compositions are often characterized by the freedom they give interpreters like Moorman to exercise the rights of a composer. Their scores function more like propositions than a means to maintain control over sounds and creative acts. In part, John Cage—the composer Moorman revered above all others—developed the technique to erode the music conventions organized around the fixed intentions of a domineering composer. The Cage scholar, Julia Robinson, tellingly uses the psychoanalytic term, “unmanning,” to describe how indeterminacy enabled Cage to remove himself from the music establishment’s “patriarchal

15 Only in rare instances would Moorman perform without either a cello or cello surrogate. Notable exceptions include Paik’s One for Violin Solo (1962) and ’s Cut Piece (1964).

16 “Moorman played herself” is how Gisela Gronemeyer explained the “personal stamp” Moorman put on works regardless of their otherwise effacing or decentering aspects. As I will discuss further in Chapter Two, many other artists and critics used similar language to describe the exaggerated self-reference she enacted on stage. Gisela Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication: The American Avant-garde Cellist Charlotte Moorman,” in Charlotte Moorman, Malcolm Goldstein, and Gabriele Bonomo, Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology (Italy: Alga Marghen, 2006), n.p.

7 order.”17 Transforming the score into “a desubjectivized matrix of relations, effectively performs this radical opening out of subjectivity on the authorial control of composing,” she writes.18

Indeterminacy spread amid a wave of open forms and impersonal gestures that rattled traditionally hierarchical and individualistic art practices in the mid-century. It was a paragon of avant-garde egalitarianism. But how would removing the footprint of subjectivity effect those who were historically denied the ability to make an imprint? Might it close important avenues of recognition for those actively struggling to be seen? And for bodies that stood out as specifically different from archetypes based on well-heeled white men, was shirking subjectivity even an option?

In conventional arrangements, interpreters perfunctorily desubjectivize in the service of a composer’s intentions. Their work requires unmanning a priori. The gendered implications of interpretation unman them all the more. To serve as a medium for another’s message or a vessel to carry another’s content is a presumably female enterprise. But while female labor is often invisible, the female body is notoriously scrutinized and represented as an object of the . In the male-dominated field of postwar music, a female musician would always be seen in sharp contrast to her male counterpart. Her male counterpart could more easily dissolve into desubjectivized neutrality yet remain more likely to receive acclaim. Moorman’s paradoxically effaced and hyper-visible position tested indeterminacy’s dispersal of power and privilege. Her

17 Robinson acknowledges that when Cage began using symbolic investiture to unman compositional authority, he was also “coming to terms with his outsider position in an oppressively hetero-normative society, divorcing his wife, and eventually committing to a relationship with Cunningham. Assuming a position outside the sanctioned symbolic order of patriarchal American society in the 1940s cannot but have affected his urgent ongoing efforts to “organize” his professional place in the world.” Julia Robinson, “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage & Experimental Art (Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona [MACBA], 2009), 64.

18 Ibid, 92.

8 interpretations thus performed a different type of unmanning, one that radically re-subjectivized indeterminate scores with apparitions of gender and labor hierarchies.

Had Moorman claimed to re-author or appropriate work, her interpretations would not have so critically reflected the ambiguity of her agency. Because her practice depended on collaboration, she fostered what described as “a focused communality, an equity in which we shared, participated, developed a body of mutual concerns, aesthetically, personally,” in contrast with “old notions of power—individualistic, masculine-heroic traditions by which power accrues to those with power.”19 To Moorman, this mode of interpreting the very values of interpretation was her job. She referred to herself as many things: a producer, a cellist, a mixed-media artist, a living sculpture—but first and foremost, an interpreter.20 She believed that interpretation was as important as any written dictum and should be as topical as new technology. When (as I chronical in Chapter Four) a New York criminal court interpreted the penal code to find her performance of Paik’s Opera Sextronique indecent, she asserted, “our century is spaceships, computers, nuclear energy, Telestar, laser beams, mixed media, etc. The laws and the interpretations of the laws should progress with our growth!”21 And indeed, in collaboration with Paik, re-interpreting the role of the interpreter often entailed performing with

19 Schneemann surmised that it was not just Moorman’s gender, but her truly egalitarian approach to production that disaccorded with male-dominated master narratives and led to a distorted historical account of her work. Carolee Schneemann letter to Moorman dated September 26, 1980, Carolee Schneemann Box, Charlotte Moorman Archives, McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (CMA).

20 “I am an interpreter and not a composer,” she stated in a diaristic poem, titled Cello (1965) reprinted in the catalog for 24 Stunden (Itzehoe-Vosskate, : Hansen and Hansen, 1965), n.p. In press bios, Moorman referred to herself as an “interpreter of new music” and eventually, as a “cellist, video artist and composer” as well—one who “performs living sculptures, concerts, celebrations, Happenings, , action music, environments, mixed media, ,” in programs that “defy all traditional classification.” For a consolidated selection of bios see “Charlotte Moorman Biographical Material” in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

21 Charlotte Moorman, “An Artist in the Courtroom,” reprinted in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 55.

9 the mannerisms of futuristic technologies. Doing so created an uncanny body for their mutual concerns.

A long history binds automatons to both sound technology and politically volatile subjectivities.22 In order to capture sound as a recording and then play it back, acoustic technology was modeled after the sound receiving and generating organs of the human body.

The convincing imitation and manipulation of human sensorium suggested that the natural world was knowable and could be ruled through science.23 Along with empiricism, colonialist agendas fueled the desire to master nature and gave justification to a swarm of subjugating practices.

Rehearsing those practices in miniature, eighteenth and nineteenth century automata were designed to resemble figures deemed primitive, subaltern, and in need of civilizing supervision: wild beasts, exotic foreigners, admonitory monsters, portentous robots, and women. More specifically, they resembled tamed, restrained, and docile versions of these figures because, as anthropologist Michael Taussig notes, “controlled mimesis is an essential component of socialization and discipline.”24 Rather than powered by the cognitive faculties that

22 For more on the political and auditory genealogy of automatons, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, New : Princeton University Press, 1995), James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2011), Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

23 For example, Jonathan Sterne concludes that by imitating sound production as a source, rather than a subjectively received perception or effect, automatons were “meant to suggest a level of understanding or and mastery over nature.” Sterne, 72.

24 Taussig, 213-214, 219. Hankins and Silverman provide a telling example of how automatons were developed as mouthpieces for articulating power yet were often perceived as threats to the social order. An eighteenth-century Parisian, the abbé Mical, constructed “two mechanical flute players and, eventually, a small ensemble of automata, which he destroyed after the figures’ nudity was criticized.” He then constructed a “pair of heads that exchanged sentences praising the king,” which were widely exhibited. had first Hankins and Silverman, 186.

10 Enlightenment philosophy understood as distinctly human, these dumb (albeit astonishing) creatures came to life through mechanical compulsion and behaved according to program.

Popular objects of spectacle, automata served as prototypes for subsequent forms of entertainment. They were often dressed as musicians and their audio-visual kinetics played a distinct role in how proto-cinematic technologies were developed and theorized.25 By shaping attitudes toward emerging media, they made technology appear as a servant to humanity. In this regard, they also served as social prototypes for model employees and well-behaved (i.e. subservient) women.26 To meet the demands of a rapidly industrializing society, the ideal worker would abide laws not by understanding them, but by becoming more like a machine.

However, the gratification of mastery is always coupled with the threat of insurgency.

According to James Lastra, as sound technology advanced, so did the concern that augmented prosthetics could “usurp and surpass bodily sense organs” or “dwarf human capacity, outdate it, render it obsolete, and displace it from its traditional (and “rightful”) home altogether.”27

25 For further discussion of how automata can be understood as an analogy for cinematic experiences see Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, and Annette Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October, Vol. 29 (Summer, 1984).

26 In “On the Eve of the Future,” Michelson compares the construction of the android in the 1886 science fiction novel, L'Ève Future, by the Symbolist, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, with the way women were erotically detailed, demarcated, fragmented, and sculpturally reconstructed in High Renaissance literary and visual art. Michelson is less interested in the persistence of aesthetic tradition, than in how it evinces a correspondence between misogyny and rationalism that prefigures cinema as a philosophically inspired technology. “Woman, subjected to the analytic of dissection is then reconstituted, glorified in entirety and submission,” becoming facsimiles engineered by scientific thinking. Ibid, 10.

27 With recourse to what has been recognized as the “prosthetic” qualities of new media, Lastra contends that automatons “helped identify and announce cultural problem spots, but also helped domesticate them… serving [sic] again and again as discursive and conceptual tools for identifying, segregating, and controlling technical and representational possibilities.” Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, 7-8. Another insightful study of how prosthetics promote social conformity can be found in David, Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

11 Technophobia developed as a fear of losing corporal control—either over one’s own body or over another’s. Automatons gave this fear a human face that was hard to read.

Paik’s statements on automatons (robots in particular) were trickily ambiguous as well.

They were tinged with the sense of risk and uncertainty that permeated the postwar political and economic landscape. Take, for example, Wulf Herzogenrath’s assertion that Paik saw “the future as a time of less egocentricity, less nationalism and toil, with more leisure; a cultured leisure, like that of the slave owners in ancient Greece -but this time the slaves will be robots.”28

How does one reconcile this vision with the drive to humanize technology? Is humanizing an act of subjugation? Do robots gain a “human dimension” once they are treated as dehumanized laborers? Conversely, in this leisurely future, will slaves be robots in the sense that workers will perform increasingly instrumentalizing and objectifying tasks? Or does being a slave to cultured leisure mean will serve the culture industry and uphold the traditions of classical humanism?

In a poem titled Pensée (1965), Paik places the robot slaves in an opera. The beginning of the poem suggests that the world is not divided by race or waring economic ideologies so much as by degrees of technological development. Patching together his oft-repeated aphorisms on class, boredom, geopolitics, and technology, he proclaims, “we want to have at least as much technic that we can hate the technic” and “as much peace that we can be bored with peace.”29 He concludes the poem with a predication regarding “the mental revolution of the middles classes” in developed countries:

28 Herzogenrath, 22.

29 Poem located in Box 19, Folder 11, Nam June Paik Papers, Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

12

(less ego-centric – less ambition—

less nationalism – less diligence –

leisure for the leisure’s sake but

not as a vacation for more work...

cultured idleness à la slave owner

of Greece, but with robot-slave...)

Vive La Robot Opera?

Pensée supplies the question mark missing from readings of Moorman and Paik’s collaborations that smooth over the thornier implications of how they engaged with technology. It turns the robot’s role in the revolution from a rallying cry (viva!) to an inquiry. Is advanced technology a force of resistance? Or, does it contribute to the longevity of an elite class that continues to extract leisure from the mechanization of laborers? Another question follows in its wake: Why allude to opera? Attempting an answer requires a consideration of musicality and benefits from revisiting Moorman’s meta-histrionics and transhumanism.

III. Opera Seria, Opera Buffa

Paik was explicit about why he referred to experiments with video and digital technology as “TV opera,” “computer opera,” or “electronic opera.” “The video tape recorder cannot be over-estimated in composition (electronic opera)” he wrote, suggesting that making video art and

13 scoring opera are equivalent processes.30 “First since I have been and I am a composer, I think in music historical terms. And since there is I thought it might be a good idea to make an electronic opera: electronic sound and pictures,” he later explained.31 Paik’s intention was not to use to compose a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Rather, as Gregory

Zinman makes clear,

Opera, for Paik, was the site where media came together to create speculative audio-

visual potentialities...Paik sees the combinatory possibilities of opera as a flowering of

cross-media expressions, where older aesthetic ideas could gain purchase through new

technologies, and thereby open up the conceptual and technological spaces for new forms

and meanings. 32

A “total electronic opera” was the zenith of Paik’s ambitions. It would be so technologically constituted, digital media would do the work of musicians. Shortly after conceiving of the form,

30 Paik, “Expanded Education for the Paper-less Society” (Written Feb 1968) in The Magazine of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, issue on the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, No 6 (Sept 1968 ): 21. Paik wrote this text during the first three months of his Rockefeller grant at Stony Brook University, which Allan Kaprow arranged for him after his visa was jeopardized due to the scandal surrounding Opera Sextronique. The following year, he composed Electronic Opera No. 1 (1969) (also occasionally written, “Electronic Opera #1”), which was a montage of live dance, found footage, and prepared broadcast for WGBH Boston’s The Medium is the Medium. It begins, “This is participation TV. Please follow instructions” and instructs viewers to “close your eyes,” and then ''three-quarters close your eyes” while electronic distortions of television figures and psychedelic abstraction plays upon the screen. Electronic Opera #2 (1969) layers swirling color patterns on of a bust of Beethoven that Paik placed upon a toy piano and set on fire.

31 Paik uttered this statement in a discussion about Global Groove (1973), which is a that includes footage of Moorman playing TV Bra for Living Sculpture and TV Cello (1976). “Global Groove-TV Opera-Nam June Paik,” Cantrills Film Notes No. 20 (December 1974): 7. He also referred to Global Groove as a “TV opera.” See Cantrills Filmnotes No. 20, in Jean Brown papers, Box 35, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (GRI).

32 Gregory Zinman, “The Archival Silences of Nam June Paik’s Etude,” 5. Paper presented as part of the “Computing Frontiers” panel at Orphans X Film Symposium 2016, rep. at www.academia.edu/27123201/_The_Archival_Silences_of_Nam_June_Paiks_ETUDE_, as of April 5, 2017.

14 however, Paik returned to what he deemed the “more human” qualities of analog technology.33

Digitally depopulated opera remained a site of speculation.

Predating and prefiguring the total substitution of technology for musicians, “opera” was a title reference in Moorman and Paik’s first collaboration [Robot Opera (1964)], their most notorious collaboration [Opera Sextronique (1967)], and their performative manifesto [Mixed

Media Opera (1968)], which was a concert series-cum-rebuttal to the verdict that found

Moorman guilty of criminal conduct.34 These works similarly opened aesthetic possibilities by using new techniques to make an old art relevant. And strangely, they also alluded to a future in which seemingly unbounded technological capabilities threatened to replace performing bodies.

Moorman’s style helps account for why this later effect could precede “total electronic opera” and why the effect can be understood as operatic.

In one sense, opera was shorthand for mixed-media. In another, it indicated a specific vein of musical-dramatic art with motifs, structures, and logics that would have been familiar to both classically trained musicians. For example, the musician is a reoccurring character in opera, resulting in scenarios comparable to those in which Moorman played herself. As with

Moorman’s interpretations and Paik’s “action music” (which I will soon discuss), in all opera, music is a sonic performative. This is to say, music acts in opera. A booming sound does not merely express ferocity. It performs a ferocious deed. Its effect is visible and drives the plot.

33 Ibid, 7.

34 Mixed Media Opera (1968) was the title given to a program that Moorman and Paik performed in the wake of Moorman’s trial. It was a concert program of avant-garde music held as a fundraiser to pay for Moorman’s legal fees and loss of income. The program for the June 10, 1968 Town Hall performance in New York included a long text comprised of quotes that reference the injustice of the trial. Mixed Media Opera was earlier performed in the Wilson Auditorium during the “Spring Arts Festival ‘68” at the University of Cincinnati, April 1, 1968 and later, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on September 23, 1968. These iterations were evening concerts of popular pieces from Moorman and Paik’s repertoire. Programs in Jean Brown papers, Box 39, GRI.

15 To musicologists, this is how opera music displays its own agency.35 In the words of cultural theorist Mladen Dolar, “music, in opera, stands in a self-reflective relationship, it performs its own representation, it stages its own power and its effects.”36 Existent social issues become caught in the reflection and are critiqued through fantasy or farce.

In Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, musicologist Gary Tomlinson argues that operas always reflect the conceptions of subjectivity that prevail in the elite culture during the time they were created.37 As opera evolved throughout history, it followed changes in the listener’s relationship with supersensory metaphysics and their own sense of self. More specifically, it expressed the elite’s construction of two worlds: that of visible, sensible phenomena and that of invisible, non-sensible noumena. The correlation between those worlds and the human subject’s position within them is evident in operatic styles. Understandably, one would never encounter allusions to the yet un-hypothesized unconscious in Early Renaissance opera. According with their Neoplatonic beliefs, song imitated the harmony of the cosmos, and sound was understood as the human spirit flowing between immaterial and material realms. By the time of Early Modern opera, the Cartesian, dualistic subjectivity posited a divide between the material body and the immaterial mind. The void between those realms echoed the divide

35 See Theo Van Leeuwen provides an insightful explanation of opera music’s agency in Speech, Music, Sound (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. 1999).

36 Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), 10.

37 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). The relationship between subjectivity and musical form has been recognized by other theorists as well. For example, to Jacques Attali, music’s codified arrangements of harmony and dissonance announce new social developments. Specifically, as society transitions from a material to a nonmaterial information economy, music divulges the ensuing economic superstructure along with the behavioral patterns of the sovereign subjects. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985). See also Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004); Naomi, Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

16 between powers that characterized the political order, known as absolutism. Mozart’s most celebrated operas took the negotiation of absolute power structures as its musical-narrative organizing principle. His repertory is ambivalently divided between opera seria, which

“betray[s] the exhaustion of absolutism (with its rituals of king clemency) as the ground for operatic vocalism,” writes Tomlinson, and opera buffa, which “foreshadow[s] new possibilities for subjective autonomy.”38

Although firmly rooted in what Tomlinson might call the “post-metaphysical” idiom of the 1960s, Moorman and Paik’s operas can be understood through an analysis of these sub- genres.39 In Opera seria, rulers are exalted as “the big Other,” in the Lacanian sense that they are manifestations of the symbolic order, other than a human identity, and superior. In order to forgive a lawbreaking human, they bend the very laws they devise, demonstrating supreme power by being impervious to their own rules. The human subject performs a role akin to an interpreter. It must, as Dolar explains, prove

that it can surpass its own subjectivity, that it is willing to risk it or to sacrifice it

unquestioningly, ultimately to offer its own death; in return, the Other is ready to yield

and to show a human touch, as it were. The act of mercy has to be understood against the

background of the law, as a violation of or an act beyond the law.40

One might consider an indeterminate score redolent of the law in opera seria. It breaks from a strict compositional precedent to turn a composer into a listener and vice versa. The ultimate

38 Tomlinson, 62.

39 Opera seria and opera buffa are emblematic of opera’s heyday and manifest its structural logic. To broadly characterize a work as operatic, one must give recourse to these categories, which did not completely disappear as new styles came into being. It is for this reason that in Opera’s Second Death, Dolar and Slavoj Žižek also hone in on the topoi of opera seria and opera buffa and arrive at conclusions similar to Tomlinson’s.

40 Dolar and Žižek, Opera’s Second Death, 20.

17 authority of its instructions persists nonetheless. Rather than equalizing subject positions, the role-reversal is a symbolic exchange—symbolic investiture, as Robinson describes it. It gives subjects doses of agency to keep relations in place despite the slippage.

By coating power relations in sex and humor, opera buffa rehearses the democracy that opera seria forecloses. Developed as the bourgeois revolution gained momentum, the genre’s obsession with mistaken identity exorcised anxiety associated with toppled hierarchies. Rather than ask for forgiveness, characters act outside of their rank and overcome situations that prevent their love or success. These scenarios are presented humorously to soften the suggestion that capable and ambitious subordinates—servants and women— can outfox an unworthy ruler.

Moorman and Paik’s operas carried similar allusions. Amidst the social and technological upheavals of the 1960s, their mildly obscene slapstick rehearsed scenarios in which a human is misidentified as an instrument or an object passes for a human. To Dolar, the very act of reimagining servant/human-master/Other relationships “strives for social promotion, equality of social standing, and overcoming class differences, and in the fatal instance, it ultimately offers the perspective of a common humanity or a human community.”41 It sets a stage for the communality that Schneemann recognized as Moorman’s contribution to postwar performance.

Although Moorman and Paik’s performances were replete with new media and avant- garde techniques, their performance of subjectivity and fantastical staging of power relations harkened back to opera. By portraying commutability between unruly subjects and anthropomorphic machines, their conflation of indeterminacy and operatic motifs tested social and compositional control over performing bodies. As analogies for aesthetic hybridity, uncanny effects, and the rebellion of subaltern populations, automatons embodied the amalgamated form

41 Ibid, 25.

18 as well as the counter-cultural sentiment of the compositions in which they were situated. Such uncanny depictions—often gendered, class-conscious, and biographical— warp the presumptive universality of the quotidian gestures that had replaced expressivity in 1960s art. Demonstrating how people experience the “everyday” according to social roles and interior processes, Moorman and Paik’s baroque performances were critically self-referential even while eluding fixed representations of selfhood. To humanize technology in this manner, was to intertwine the dyads that Moorman toyed with throughout her career: the “real” verses “acted” components of performing a role, the “real” versus “synthetic” construction of bodies, and the “natural” versus

“theatrical” tension in art after Cage.

IV. Instrumental Synecdoches

The following chapters track automatons from Moorman and Paik’s first collaboration in

1964 to the 1969 performance that followed her conviction for indecent exposure. Chapter One situates the origins of Moorman’s unorthodox style in her interpretation of Cage’s 26’1.1499”, which she began studying in 1963 and annotated throughout her career.42 Through an aleatory structure that calls for indeterminate sound sources, the work safeguarded against authorial

42 Cage complained that Moorman had “been murdering [it] all along.” Quoted in Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2011), 149. On August 30, 1964, Moorman premiered a full version of 26’1.1499” during her Second Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. The following year, she began annotating the score with phrases and collage material and continued to do so until 1990, the year before she died. Here, one might note that at around the time Moorman stopped annotating 26’1.1499”, she began composing what the McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University refers to as her “Pain Diaries” (1986-1991)— a litany of sensations scrawled on scrap paper, meticulously chronicling her body’s invisible biological and psychological reactions to cancer. Like 26’1.1499”, the paper is divided into spatial time ratios but ones that change every day according to when she took a particular medicine (Tuesday Nov 9 1991 3:30AM 2 Lasix, 2 Potassium, 1 Keflex, 1 Capitan, 1 Excedrin) and when a feeling struck her as particularly notable (Monday December 12, 1988 4:50pm 1 cc shot - knives in all chest [small ones]). It also contains reminders – for example, to call Yoko Ono and pick up bagels. Whereas the notation of 26’1.1499” prefigured her body movement, the text comprising the “Pain Diaries” reverse the compositional process, beginning with felt sensations, which she then interpreted and transcribed onto paper.

19 privileges while bringing attention to nature’s infinite sonic field. But Moorman found it impossible to realize 26’1.1499” from a position of detached neutrality as even her selection of sound-making material would always be mired in gendered cultural determinations. When Paik began accompanying her in 1964, they developed a “human cello” sequence that became more elaborate and socially-resonate as the years went by. Because Paik’s previous “action music” used sexual innuendos to antagonize systems of power, Cage credited Paik when disparaging that the gesture favored “actions rather than sound events in time-” which it did.43 However, by studying Moorman’s annotations, it becomes clear that the human cello was a prototype for explorations of power and subjectivity that could only emerge from the duo’s symbiotic collaboration.

Chapter Two considers a range of Moorman’s interpretations within the zeitgeist of post-

Cagean aesthetics and post-Fordist labor. It details how her identification with cellos and electronic devices reflected a hybrid subjectivity that was both an instrumentalized worker and an uncanny rebel. It then explains how her style dovetailed with Paik’s, specifically, with regards to his “,” which breached social taboos and unleashed anarchic fantasy. At the same time, both artists discuss boredom as a quality of work, something experienced according to class and felt by those whose job it is to entertain.

I read both artist’s proclivity to perform in risky scenarios vis-à-vis what their friend Dick

Higgins referred to as “a dialectic between boredom and intensity” that was specific to their

43 John Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” reprinted in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 24. We might recall that Moorman and Paik’s collaboration began when she invited him to participate in the 1964 iteration of and ’s Originale (1961), which she produced as the crown jewel of her Second Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. The score for Originale combines the structure of serial music with Happenings improvisation, so that actions replace musical notes. It can be considered another performance to favor “actions rather than sound events in time.”

20 generation.44 The dialectic accounts for how many Fluxus event-scores and Minimalist compositions combined subtleties and extremities to draw attention to one’s phenomenological surroundings. Such work risked being so indistinguishable from life, it failed to be art.

Moorman and Paik’s engagement with the dialectic was considered too conventionally theatrical reorient spectatorship like some of the non-illusionary efforts of their contemporaneous. Rather,

I argue, they used it as a spectacular device through which to act out both the tedium and precarity of labor.45 Danger derived from testing the physical limitations of bodies and machines. Failure occurred when labor demands were unsustainable, when their automatons too eerily resembled modern life.

Chapter Three resituates Robot K-456 within the mundane danger of Cold War geopolitics and mechanized labor. While the robot is commonly understood as the patriarch of

Paik’s cybernetic sculptures, my research reminds us that it was first an instrument and understudy in heterogeneous iterations of Robot Opera (1964). The robot was thus subject to

Moorman’s interpretation style and complicit in how the duo retooled musical modalities.

Treated as interchangeable with the musicians, it reflected Moorman’s transhumanist role as a self-powered instrument that played itself. Its unpredictable break-downs provided an element of indeterminacy that was rebelliously counter-productive and open to failure. As such, it appeared to stage its own effect, as music does in opera.

44 , “Boredom and Danger” in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973, ed. by Larry Austin, Douglas Kahn and Nilendra Gurusinghe (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011), 182.

45 The neologism, “precarity,” indicates the psychological anxiety and lack of job security experienced by those working under neoliberal policies. It is gaining purchase in studies of contemporary working conditions such as Shannon Jackson’s “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 56, No. 4 (T216) (Winter, 2012).

21 In performances of Robot Opera from New York to and West Berlin, slippages between the musicians and the machine imagined a scenario in which robotics replace human laborers, humans become instruments of capitol, and rigid social laws conflict with uncontrollable subconscious instincts. When performed on the hem of the Iron Curtain, the slippage between human and machine had the tragic air of opera seria.46 However, according to

Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud—two of the modern thinkers influencing Paik—the very notion of human-machine hybridity is darkly comic and socially critical.47 And indeed Robot K-

456’s glibly vulgar and shoddy animatronics supplied the transgressive humor of opera buffa.

Beyond humanizing technology, Robot Opera ridiculed the tedium of postwar performance, the aesthetic reification of experience, and the faulty humanism of superpowers.

Moorman and Paik’s most notorious collaboration, Opera Sextronique (1967), more explicitly deployed an automaton to contest rigid social laws. In defiance of music’s aversion to sex, Moorman appeared as a Greek nude-turned-avant-garde cellist—a “living statue” that shockingly exposed herself in order to assume the role of an ideal, a symbol of sex that was not reassuringly sexy. Chapter Four analyses how the artists’ rather flip and doctrinaire performance

46 In the catalogue accompanying Paik’s 1988 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Wulf Herzogenrath asserts that the robot “likes travelling and is a symbol for the international unity of Fluxus ideas and for the question of the human dimension of technology.” Herzogenrath, 21. But during Galerie René Block’s Sixth Soirée in Berlin, Paik attempted to steer Robot K-456 across the border separating from Soviet-controlled East Germany, prompting the then director of the Kunsthalle Vienna, Toni Stooss to perceive that “the friendly robot threatens to become a Frankenstein monster.” Stooss, “Video Time-Video Space: Notes on an Exhibition,” Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 13. As a cultural export playing political speeches as it advanced, it became an agent of international conflict. Its “human dimension” recalled the instrumentalization of soldiers who embody military commands; its deployment anticipated the use of drones and other military technologies used to enter enemy territory.

47 Situating the comic within an understanding of duration, Bergson argues that replacing human, living, adaptability with the “mechanical inelasticity” of a fixed gesture or idea, universally strikes us as funny. Henri Bergson, “Laughter” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), 67. Freud discusses the automatism of humor and its transgressive drive in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960).

22 became fatefully litigious and thus subject to the repression and recursivity through which the uncanny operates. It argues that although the “living statue” was meant to transgress, a different automaton proved equally impeachable. While the performance sought liberation from repressive prohibitions, the amalgamated composition of Opera Sextronique made it so the performer was not free from instruction and sound was not free from subjectivity. The conflict between sexual and notational emancipation illustrated Cage’s warning that in partially indeterminate compositions, “a Frankenstein monster” surfaces in place of a liberating sonic event.48 This type of automaton defies the laws of nature, forcing performers to identify with the work rather than “act from their own centers.”49

Aversion to hybridity continued in the courtroom where the notion of a partially emancipated, partially controllable being befuddled determinations of agency and thus, culpability. In the eyes of the law, not wearing the clothes of a cellist proved that Moorman was not acting like a cellist. Nor was she acting from her center or acting like herself for she appeared in both her prescriptive social role and its uncanny counterpart. As with her radical interpretations, she was caught performing the wrong job and prosecuted accordingly. Many works of art allude to or symbolically transgress manifestations of power by, for example, destabilizing the author function. Power assumes an unusually tangible form in Chapter Four, testifying that the mistaken identity and role-reversals in Moorman and Paik’s operas posed an actual threat to an established order.

48 Cage’s observation is in reference to his early aleatory compositions such as The Music of Changes. In his 1958 essay, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” he cautions that using chance as a method to determine notation in an indeterminate structure forces performers to identify with the written score rather than “act from their own centers.” Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 36.

49 Ibid. 23 Although Moorman’s sentence was eventually suspended, the verdict remained in the public record and the scandal of her partial nudity remained in the public mind. Marked as either criminally lewd or the avant-garde’s sacrificial lamb, the epithet “The Topless Cellist” was fixed to her like a scarlet letter. When she performed TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) as a riposte to the guilty verdict, her labor was again eclipsed by the discourse that spoke of her spectacle. In the popular press, TV Bra for Living Sculpture was discussed as Paik’s naughty gag. More serious critics also overlooked the social and musical contraventions behind their actions. They parroted the curatorial premise that such artwork “demonstrate[s] the human use of technology” by redirecting television toward participatory aesthetic experiences and emancipatory social relationships.50 And again, acknowledging Moorman’s contribution complicates this acclimatized notion.

With recourse to the performance’s operatic logic and uncanny automaton, Chapter Five throws the “human use of technology” into question. It argues that chronicling each gesture as a direct indicant of Moorman’s creative labor reinforced her professional identity as an instrument for artistic production. Merged with her cello alter-ego, she literally “played herself” in a comically opera buffa confusion of body with machine, role with reality. This final chapter also compares the sublimation of Moorman’s performances to the concurrent myth of bra burning that sexualized, pathologized, and deformed the political message of Second Wave feminists. It argues that in both instances, the threat of reconfigured professional and gender roles triggered anxiety akin to the anxiety of seeing an inanimate object come to life. Thus, although Moorman was under legal restraint, the uncanny returns in TV Bra for Living Sculpture, as by definition it must.

50 See “TV as a Creative Medium” brochure, Howard Wise Gallery, 1969. 24 In all of these case studies, Moorman and Paik retooled at least one of two asynchronous musical modalities. The first can be thought of as problematized indeterminacy wherein the automaton stands for two partialities: the performer’s quasi-freedom from notational instruction and natural sound’s quasi-freedom from the performer’s intractable subjectivity. The second modality borrowed its structure from opera, where music self-reflectively displays its own power and comedy comes from socially transgressive role-reversal. In Moorman and Paik’s operas for the electronic age, automatons facilitate such theatrics while embodying and thus transferring the state of partiality to the musicians. The musicians meld with the instruments that serve them.

They are the technologies that seek humanization.

25 Chapter One

INTERPRETATIONS OF INDETERMINACY

I. Limitations within the Infinite

Performative interpretation has always been a large part of a musician’s vocation and never a simple matter of replication. Of course, compared to the “New Music” advanced by composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Edgard Varèse among others, classical composition has a relatively closed, set structure and no provisions for indeterminate or improvised sounds to arise. The performer is asked to reproduce defined musical units according to how they are conveyed through conventional notation. But because musical form is most perceivable through its symbolic, written representation or its ephemeral realization, even the performers of classical compositions are left to theorize as to what exactly the score dictates. They necessarily disambiguate implicit instructions, transcribe, and edit in an attempt to realize the original author’s intent. To accommodate different instruments, audiences, or performance spaces, they may also paraphrase, adapt, and arrange variation sets. The system discourages effacement to a work’s identity nonetheless and it expects performers to efface their impact on titles they do not own. There are, however, no clear measurements of fidelity or folly.51 Interpretation sustains and disseminates musical culture but it is a presumptuous enterprise. It always threatens both content and form.

51 For a more thorough discussion of the problematics concerning interpretation see Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Paul Thom, The Musician as Interpreter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

26 Charlotte Moorman was trained to avoid threat. She had studied classical cello since she was ten years old and became a student apprentice in the State Symphony by age thirteen. After receiving both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in music, she studied with

Leonard Rose at the Julliard School of Music, was the principle cello with the

Concert Orchestra, and performed as a soloist with the National Artists’ Symphonette.52 She played in the Balalaika Symphonic Orchestra, joined Jacob Glick’s Boccherini Players, and became a member of Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra in 1962. This was no easy feat for a musician, especially a woman in the male-dominated culture industry. Yet despite the promising trajectory of her career as a classical cellist, Moorman found the work stifling.

The thirty-fifth time she performed Kabalevsky’s Cello Concerto No.1, her mind started to wander. “I was sitting there,” she recounts,

wondering while I was playing the solo, I was wondering in my mind, had I turned the

gas off in my apartment in New York? And I realized, my god, if my mind can wander

like this while I’m playing the solo and I’m really bored to tears, imagine if the audience

isn’t probably terribly bored too. So I started looking for contemporary music and I

found it. I found my whole life was influenced by a piece by John Cage.53

The transformative piece was 26’1.1499” for a String Player ([1955], 1960). It is one of the compositions comprising Cage’s “The Ten Thousand Things” series, in which a ten thousand

52 Moorman had a B.A. in Music from Centenary College in Shreveport, and studied cello at the University of Texas at Austin, under Horace Britt from 1956 to 1957.

53 Fred Stern, "Charlotte Moorman and the New York Avant Garde" by Fred Stern, The National Endowment for the Arts, 1980. Kenji Kobayashi can be credited with introducing Moorman to compositions such as 26’ 1. 1499” and to the downtown avant-garde music scene. He was her classmate at the Julliard School, where she began her postgraduate studies in 1957. The first concert that Moorman produced was a 1961 Town Hall recital for Kobayashi so that he could have one, significant New York performance before returning to . Later in the year, she produced a performance for Yoko Ono and the following year, she produced what was to be the first Avant Garde Festival of New York, featuring new music by Cage, Edgard Varèse and Earle Brown.

27 beat rhythmic structure references the Buddhist and Taoist notion of infinity.54 And indeed, where Cello Concerto No.1 requires the rote repetition of a static form, 26’1.1499” has ostensibly infinite ways of being realized.

Cage composed 26’1.1499” by marking notes where creases and spots had accumulated on the sheet of music paper. He indicated time through changing space ratios and isolated sounds into duration, pitch, timber, and amplitude. The unconventional notation confounds expectations as to the relationships between sonic elements and occupies the performer’s every second with timed activity. The activity, however, is not determined by the paper imperfections alone. Treating sounds and their sources discretely, the score ambiguously asks for “sounds other than those produced on the strings. These may issue from entirely other sources, e.g. percussion instruments, whistles, radios, etc.”55 During such moments, the performer follows her own inclinations to select unspecified non-instruments. Such a window of interpretive opportunity positions 26’1.1499” between two pillars of Cage’s musical philosophy. Its closed notation resembles his early, complex, aleatory compositions such as Music of Changes (1951) and Music for Carillon (1952), yet its lack of specificity points to more open-ended compositions to come. For this reason, Piekut contends that it serves “as a pivot between chance operations, in which random procedures are used to arrive at a relatively fixed and conventional score, and indeterminacy, in which the score requires significant interpretation from its performer (in the moment or in advance of the performance).”56 Upon such a pivot, chance unbounds notes from

54 Ten thousand is used to mean an unimaginably vast, indefinite multitude that encompasses everything in space and time and is therefore also unified.

55 Explaining Cage’s notational system, Piekut finds another area that was open to indeterminacy: “throughout the piece, Cage also indicates moments when the tension on a string is to be increased or decreased indeterminately.” Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 145.

56 Ibid, 146.

28 the determination of human sentiment while indeterminacy unbounds the performer from the determination of chance.

Moorman’s devotion to the composition notwithstanding, her interpretation of

26’1.1499” was always out of sync with the score in two crucial ways. The first pertains to timing, as in the coordination of gestures at the moment and for the duration specified by the score. When Moorman began studying the work in 1963, her initial interpretation covered only the first nine pages of the eighty-five page score. Knowing that the piece would be difficult to perform, Cage made provisions for re-titling abridged renditions such as hers. What she first played received the titled 162.06” and aimed to emulate Cage and David Tudor’s rather clinical approach to realizing indeterminate compositions. She began by making a long list of found objects that would generate specific sonic qualities: a balloon to pop, sand sprinkled in a metal tray, a garbage can lid, a pistol, a penny whistle, and so on. Despite her efforts, by all accounts

(Moorman’s included), the performance was a failure. Struggling to keep up with the rapid movements, she played an arrangement that could not be considered among the work’s infinite possibilities. Yet had her timing been more precise, discordance would still have come between

Moorman’s realization and the score’s philosophical implication.

Even before Moorman intentionally added referential content to her interpretation of

26’1.1499”, the indeterminate elements of the score did more to ensconce her in cultural conventions than free her to engage with the objective sounds of a limitless realm. Consider the preparatory work she did in 1963, before taking to the stage for the first time. As Marjorie Rubin reported in The New York Times, Moorman hoped to play the sound of breaking glass

by smashing an electric-light bulb in a metal wastebasket filled with bricks. But last

week when she called some construction companies to ‘buy three or four bricks’ she was

29 laughed at. Scouting around the upper West Side at 3 a.m., she found a building halfway

demolished and was about to pick up some loose bricks when an encounter with a

skeptical policeman sent her running home empty-handed.57

Although these objects were not intended to carry referential or symbolic content, the mere act of acquiring them inadvertently tested the norms of sociality in excess of Cage’s intentions. This anecdote (which Moorman no doubt recounted for its comic effect) reveals how her possibilities for sound making were always already finite and socially determined. In an attempt to bypass the cultural definitions of musical sound, she immediately found herself mired in gender roles, rules of commerce, and the policing of behavior. Thus, from the onset, her realization of an indeterminate score avowed rather than dissolved subjective experience. And while allowed to introduce sounds that the notes could not determine, gender and economics partially predetermined what she could play.

On August 30, 1964, Moorman premiered a full version of 26’1.1499” during her Second

Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. Although her timing had improved, it was received with comparable disappointment. The following year, Moorman began annotating the score with collage material and written instructions for performative gestures. If her initial attempt proved the impossibility of assuming the role of a neutral usher for natural sounds, her later interpretations demonstrated an unabashed disinterest and disavowal of subjective neutrality.

Her attitude toward time brackets became increasingly lax as she approached indeterminacy as a space to fill with self-referential or overtly political content. These later renditions shifted emphasis from sound’s infinite possibilities to the musician’s here and now.

57 Marjorie Rubin, “Everything is Instrumental in a Way-Out Concert,” The New York Times, Saturday, August 17, 1963.

30

II. Annotations and Electronics

Abandoning her classical repertoire for postwar compositions, Moorman explained, “I do these works because I find them very exciting. They present a certain fulfillment to me that I do not receive in the traditional works.”58 She relished the ability to explore new media and modes of performance. But, as Gloria Steinem reported in 1964, above all, Moorman turned toward

“the avant-garde of “new” music because it allows more freedom to improvise.”59 The

“freedom” of New Music had also caught the attention of reader response theorists and semioticians who were interested in the reader’s active role in constructing a text. Famously,

Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” sought to undermine authorial importance by positioning language as the ultimate origin of written material.60 By extension, he argued that the listener and performer are the origins and convergent points of a musical score.

We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the ‘interpreter,’

who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than

giving it ‘expression.’ The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the

reader a practical collaboration, he later wrote in “From Work to Text” (1971).61 Umberto Eco made similar observations in

“The Poetics of the Open Work” (1962), which discusses how modern music by the likes of

58 The Strange Music of Nam June Paik, color, sound, 27 minutes (Camera Three: 1975).

59 Gloria Steinem, “Music, Music, Music, Music,” Show (January 1964): 58.

60 Asserting “it is the language that speaks, not the author,” Barthes’s popular theory sacrificed the identity of the author for an expanded notion of creation and participation. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967) first published in Aspen, no. 5 + 6, reprinted in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

61 Barthes, "From Work to Text" (1971) in Ibid, 163.

31 Stockhausen, Boulez, Luciano Berio, and Henri Pousseur extends autonomy to the performer by opening space for them to exercise judgment and make decisions over aspects such as sequence, intensity, duration, and beat. Introducing collaboration at the point of musical production, the performer was understood to actualize one possibility among the infinite possibilities for completion offered by the composer. “Every performance explains the composition but does not exhaust it,” wrote Eco, “every performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all possible other performances of the work.”62 New Music thus enthusiastically invited interpretation insofar as the performer could demonstrate that the composer’s given field of relations has many more.

26’1.1499” was never an object of finality in Moorman’s hands, but nor was it free to speak for itself. Duration is the work’s primary signified and the determinant that gives the piece its consistent identity. As in Cage’s legendary composition, 4’33” (1952), the very title,

26’1.1499” for a String Player, defines the work by the relationship between notation and musical time as measured by a clock. This measurement will be the same regardless of the indeterminate and indicated sound events that change from performance to performance.

However, within the twenty-six plus minutes of Moorman’s performances, many sequences spilled over the score’s temporal allotments.63 Given sufficient practice, she possessed the

62 Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work” (1962), reprinted in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 171. Eco is careful to acknowledge that while interpretation is not new to the field of aesthetic reception, postwar composers self-consciously incorporated interpretation into their process like never before. He argues that this is in keeping with the notions of multiplicity, ambiguity, and subjectivity concurrently recognized in the relatively nascent fields of physics, phenomenology, and psychology.

63 By favoring action and sound’s semantic function, Moorman’s sense of political, historical time and the chronometric, art-time of 26’1.1499” would always be out of synch. The tension between the two temporalities is most evident when she interrupts one performance to place a phone call to President Richard Nixon. [See ’s footage in 26’1.1499” for a String Player, color, sound, 42 minutes (New York: , 1973).] Moorman explains to the audience that she must cut the call short so to call Cage on time. (Cage did not answer because he was in Mexico.) Here, the composition’s demand for temporal precision appears to foreclose her ability to make a political statement or be heard by an authority. The call to Cage was also a way to bring the 32 technical virtuosity, concentration, and dexterity to hit each note on time. Yet she actively disfigured the compositional structure by including actions that took longer to impart their content. In doing so, Moorman subverted the decentering promise of indeterminacy. In light of

Cage’s intentions, the sounds Moorman introduced were troubling on two registers: their duration violated his compositional structure and their presentation masked their own, unadulterated nature with cultural references.

Although Moorman’s interpretation was forever in process, changing from performance to performance, it was also fundamentally expressive. Rather than help bring a potentiality of the score into being, she filled its open structure with self-expressive content, using it to explain her own relationship with the temporal world. On almost every page of her annotated score, signification outplays sound’s aural qualities. Where more orthodox interpreters would limit their utterances to shouts of “hey!” Moorman would read from a collage of personal and political material that she accumulated over the years. These annotations include the famous Cage aphorism, “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always that makes a sound” along with pop cultural ephemera that spoke to a gendered experience of the world:

Italian tampon insertion instructions, lyrics from an Icelandic lullaby, a news article reporting a gruesome rape, and advertisements for underwear, Planned Parenthood, and the 1965 film, How to Murder Your Wife.64 By treating notation as content, these sounds were too laden with social commentary to apprehend on a purely aesthetic register. They emphasized a subjective

composer into the very conversation about power that his theories instigated. After the performance, Moorman wrote a flattering letter to Cage, explaining that she had tried to reach him. Letter located in John Cage folder, Charlotte Moorman Archive (CMA), McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

64 There are also references to political figures such as Richard Nixon and Malcolm X. Piekut contends that Moorman accumulated most of the collage material during her 1965 European tour and during a period of heightened social awareness in 1973.

33 apprehension of the “something” that makes a sound rather than the continuously unfolding soundscape of an impassive universe.

Moorman’s selection of sound-making objects actively explored the determinates of gender that inadvertently factored into her initial experience accumulating them. She worked with a variety of electric devices such as mixers, samplers, and recorders. In some renditions, one could hear church bells on a tape recorder, rock albums played on a record player, and static from a radio. These sounds are very much in keeping with Cage’s interest in using technology to widen the range of possible sound material. However, Moorman’s electric sounds also came from misusing kitchen appliances. Frequently, she would reference Cage’s fascination with fungi by cooking mushrooms on a hotplate.65 “I never was a cook, but now it’s ridiculous!” she joked during one performance. Although the one-liner and sizzling mushrooms fulfilled their notational responsibility by making sounds, their aural quality was secondary to the way they signified the coincidence of musical and gender non-conformity. In similar displays of sonic , performance footage shows Moorman inserting a TV Guide into an electric toaster and putting magazine pages in an electric blender.66 Performing 26’1.1499” with Paik as her assistant, Moorman dared him to put money in the blender, exaggerating her amusement when

Paik (always the straight man to her antics) caves and fishes out the dollar bills. Built into

Cage’s score, the subversions of products marketed to women appear amidst carefully timed screams, quick pops of inflated condoms or balloons, breaking glass, and cymbals hurled across

65 Cage was an amateur mycologist and mushroom forager. He taught a class on mushroom identification at the New School for Social Research and collaborated with Alexander H. Smith on an illustrated collection of poems called, Mushroom Book (1972).

66 The blender section resembles ’s Morning Glory (1963), which Moorman performed in her 1966 New York Avant Garde Festival. It in, she sprays The New York Times with pepper and perfume, pulverizes it in a blender, and then buries the remains in a garden sprinkled with sneezing powder.

34 the stage. In one sense, the household activities serve as found gestures. They help to distinguish all sounds as musical, thereby placing art and life side by side. Paired with destructive acts, they also express a frustration with gender roles that are more easily detected in overtly feminist works such as Sandra Ogel’s Ironing (1972), the installations within Judy

Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Woman House (1972), or ’s Semiotics of the

Kitchen (1975). Rather than demonstrating the infinite possibilities of sound making, these electric devices expose the limited possibilities of a woman’s world and the consumer products that encouraged domestic confinement.

Since the Realist that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, “the everyday” has assumed a generically critical position in art. In the nineteenth century, depicting the mundane democratized who or what was worthy of recognition and representation. In the twentieth century, common materials acquired aesthetic value contra the elitist tastes of the ruling class. Displacing readymade objects, sounds, or actions into the aesthetic realm were seen to expose, parody, or resist the regulation of daily life in late capitalist society.67 Such gestures trivialized the cultural values placed on material wealth, possessive authorship, individualistic expression, and hierarchical virtuosity. In particular, Cage’s emphasis on listening to non- musical phenomena and his conflation of the everyday with the aesthetic experience, provided a discursive and methodological framework for drawing attention to the mediated, contextual, and

67 Postwar examples of the everyday include the task-based dances of the Judson School, bureaucratic organizational techniques in Conceptual works such as Dan Graham’s Homes for America (December 1966) or Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art (1966), and the detritus used as Happenings props or material for Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages. The quotidian element in these works signaled populist sentiment and perverted the aesthetic of conformity.

35 institutional codes of experience that mark acoustic space.68 Yet the everyday was predicated on a neutral subjectivity and that subjectivity was assumed to be white and male.

In studying the history behind subversive uses of everyday material, Michael E. Gardiner traces the tactic to a litany of factors that were thought to dilute people’s experiences in the postwar era. Consumerism, corporatization, bureaucratic ordering, homogenization, anti- communal isolation, and mechanical routine had become ordinary qualities of life despite their extraordinarily alienating effects. What was ordinary was therefore critiqued as that which distances us from the real. However, drawing from feminist and other marginalized positions,

Gardiner argues that critiques of the everyday have a homogenized perspective of experience, which “prevents us from grasping the qualitative features of the real; we remain blind to the nature of ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’.”69 By gendering the everyday, Moorman uncomfortably shifted the critique from a generally repressive culture to a specifically patriarchal culture. Such a critique implicated the New Left as well as the avant-garde.

With feminism on the rise, many of the women involved with Fluxus, Happenings, and

Cage-inspired dance found themselves equally unwilling and unable to disregard the cultural constructions that effected their private and professional lives. Even when incorporating indeterminacy and readymade elements into their events, women could not escape the fact that their work would always be understood as expressions of their specifically female subjectivity.

As Shannon Jackson reminds us, seemingly benign tasks became charged with gender politics when performed by women:

68 See Michael Glasmeier, “Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and an Art History of Noise” in Bernd Schulz, Resonanzen: Aspekte Der Klangkunst = Resonances: Aspects of Sound Art (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2002), 61-71.

69 He points to Dorothy E. Smith’s 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology as an example of a theory that brings critical attention to assumptions regarding the everyday. Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000), 9.

36 [Alison] Knowles also might have learned that she was received a little differently when

she offered to Make a Salad (1962) than when offered to execute a Recipe

(1963). A subtly gendered optic threatened to gender the “life” in the Art/Life

exploration, and it appeared in numerous works by women that were occasionally received

as “ungenerous.” Allan Kaprow, Steve Paxton, and Robert Dunn’s sweeping or

vacuuming “tasks” changed when a female body executed them, such as in Lucinda

Child’s Vehicle (9 Evenings 1966). After Jill Johnston’s vacuum-ridden extravaganza in

Music Walk for Dancer (1960), she received a scolding from John Cage for “not giving up

[her] ego. He meant I suppose for not giving it up to him.” It was different for [Mierle

Laderman] Ukeles to say that “Everything I say is Art is Art” than it was for Kaprow, or

for Duchamp. Female artists’ use of a conventional avant-garde lexicon threatened to

expose the gendered asymmetry of “the Everyday.”70

Inevitably understood as expressing a specifically female subjectivity, women such as Knowles,

Child, Johnston, and Ukeles upset the neutrality presumed to accompany mundane, readymade gestures. Against an infinite field of possibilities, Moorman’s everyday elements similarly distinguish experiences as subjective, culturally contingent, and unnatural, illuminating their inherent non-universality. Although the sounds still arrived as arrangements within an infinite universe, they increasingly appeared dressed in the artificial trappings of modern life.

Rather than heroic displays of conscious coordination, Moorman’s performances satirize the irrational construction of and the body’s failure to follow clock time. The frantic pace, abrupt percussive raps against the instrument, banging, and shattering seem to express the string player’s struggle against social and musical norms. In his chapter on Moorman in

70 Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 89.

37 Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, Piekut suggests that the very score of 26’1.1499” was what allowed her to break her disciplinary training and arrive at a relationship to the everyday that was different from Cage’s. His study is prefaced on the notion that, as he writes,

experimentalism performs not simply a return to daily life but an intensification of it—a

peculiar mix of the commonplace and the singular. Experimentalism is both ordinary and

extraordinary. It is the everyday world around us, as well as the possibility that this world

might be otherwise.71

Drawing heavily from Foucault’s writing on “subjectivation,” he argues that individuals become subjects by adapting external norms and embodying disciplinary techniques. Because Cage’s score challenged the accustomed body positions of classically trained cellists, Piekut contends that it challenged the subjectivity Moorman acquired through the kinesthetics of her discipline.

“Once given the opportunity to focus on her body in a new way, she chose to stage it not simply as a sound-producing mechanism but as part of a larger cultural and social formation that included all those themes so readily associated with the 1960s,” he writes.72 He concludes by redefining Moorman’ relationship to the composition. By arriving at a different notion of the everyday, her interpretation can be understood as a form of creative authorship that problematized both her disciplinary cello training and Cage’s philosophy.73

71 Piekut, 2.

72 Piekut, 172-3.

73 “Moorman problematized this problematization itself by using Cage’s technology to articulate a different notion of the everyday from that of the composer, thus redirecting his piece to a new end. The result was an “interpretation” of Cage’s work that stretched traditional expectations of that term, revealing the extent to which creative authorship was distributed in practice, even if it was still nominally retained by the “composer” in the discourse of creativity that operated in this world,” he writes. Ibid, 149.

38 Moorman was not alone in simultaneously embracing indeterminacy while refusing to empty herself of subjectivity. The generation that found structural guidance in Cage’s teachings also found that deemphasizing his predisposition against the falsifying ego helped anchor their events in the particular circumstances in which they took place. For example, in “Looking

Myself in the Mouth,” Yvonne Rainer explains how valuable Cage’s teachings had been to dancers affiliated with Judson Church. Indeterminacy, toppled hierarchies, and decentered speaking subjects were paramount to how they reimagined body movement. Yet, in order to access the endless Cagean field of heterogeneous differentiation, all performers would have to maintain the same neutral, undifferentiated position. As Rainer broadened her practice to include film-making, she became increasingly interested in dealing with selectivity, control, semiotics, and desire. She found specific current events, manifestations of imperialism, and liberation struggles equally impossible to ignore yet outside of a Cagean methodology.

Rhetorically asking, “what is John Cage’s gift to some of us who make art?” she answers,

This: the relaying of conceptual precedents for methods of nonhierarchical, indeterminate

organization which can be used with a critical intelligence, that is, selectively and

productively, not, however, so we may awaken to this excellent life; on the contrary, so

we may the more readily awaken to the ways in which we have been led to believe that

this life is so excellent, just, and right. The reintroduction of selectivity and control,

however, is totally antithetical to the Cagean philosophy, and it is selectivity and control

that I have always intuitively—by this I mean “without question”—brought to bear on

Cagean devices in my own work. In the light of semiological analysis I have found

vindication of those intuitions. In the same light it is possible to see Cage’s

39 decentering—or violation of the unity—of the “speaking subject” as more apparent than

real.74

Like Moorman, Rainer realized that attempting to bypass subjectivity was far more illusionary than attempting to recognize socio-historical situations, identity, and the difference among speaking subjects. As women encountering patriarchy at every level, their times were shaped by an absence of egalitarianism that precludes a life of infinite possible arrangements. And rather than effacing themselves or stepping aside to let world events unfurl around them, in public, private, and aesthetic realms, there was great onus to make one’s actions impactful.

III. The Human Cello

While instrumentalizing kitchen appliances introduced Moorman to kinesthetics outside her discipline and exposed the non-universality of the mundane world, Moorman’s deeper engagement with the performance of subjectivity came through instrumentalizing a human body.

Enacted as a transfiguration between Paik and her beloved cello, the “human cello” sequence became a startling signature moment in her interpretation of 26’1.1499”, which the duo frequently performed together during the most concentrated period of their collaboration. It infused the work with the more nuanced body politics that Moorman’s style implicated and it modeled the uncanny subjectivity that resurfaced throughout their joint repertoire. In works such as Robot Opera (1964), Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964), Opera Sextronique

(1967), and TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) human-object hybrids appear to transgress laws that seek to objectify or regulate the performers’ bodies. As a prototype for subsequent

74 Yvonne Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” (originally published in 1981) in John Cage, ed. Julia E. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 38.

40 automatons, the human cello points to this thematic consonance and brings Moorman’s contribution into sharper relief. It also reminds us that both artists put their bodies on the line, regardless of who authored or annotated the composition.

Paik came to the collaboration with a reputation for performing as a visceral and somatic

“Action Artist.” A “cultural terrorist” in the words of Allan Kaprow, many of his early 1960s compositions were intended to shock audiences by breaching sexual taboos or forcing them to consider the performer’s corporeality.75 Critics such as the artist Martha Rosler have found his direction of female performers to be highly exploitative. “The thread of his work includes the fetishization of the female body as an instrument that plays itself, and the complementary thread homage to other famous male artist-magicians or seers (quintessentially, Cage),” she writes in her 1985 essay, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment.”76 Yet even before Moorman began collaborating with Paik, the works left room for the performer’s sovereign interpretation and self-presentation. Rather than merely vaunting a masculinist form of sexual liberation, the sexual content often also aimed to destabilize patriarchal power structures. For example,

Serenade for Alison (1962) instructs to perform a striptease by removing multiple layers of underwear. Each removal is accompanied by offences directed against the cultural establishment, including “take off a pair of violet , and pull them over the head of a snob” and “take off a pair of blood stained panties and stuff them in the mouth of the worst music critic.” When Knowles performed the piece at the Galerie Monet in Amsterdam, she altered it so that her body remained relatively concealed. She also introduced her own

75 Allan Kaprow, “Nam June Paik” originally in Electronic Art II, 4/17 – 5/11, 1968, No. 32. Galeria Bonino Ltd., New York. Reprinted in Video Time –Video Space, 114.

76 Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Sally J. Fifer and Doug Hall (New York, N.Y: Aperture, 1990), 45, 46.

41 distractions, such as periodically interrupting the striptease to adjust the dials of a transistor radio.77

Knowles also realized Paik’s Chronicle of a Beautiful Paintress (1962), which included segments such as “In January, stain the American flag with your own monthly blood. In

February, stain the Burmese flag with your own monthly blood…expose them and yourself in a beautiful gallery.” Like ’s Vagina Painting (1965), Chronicle of a Beautiful

Paintress politicized female image making in an affront to patriarchal painting traditions. Unlike

Kubota, Paik did not (could not) perform the piece himself. His direction of a female body thus resembled ’s Anthropométries series, which relegated women to serve as “living brushes.” Yet complicating Rosler’s critique, the male bodies in Paik’s early opuses were also subject to objectifying exposures or toppled from their perch at the top of the gender hierarchy.

Paik’s use of sexual innuendos to antagonize systems of power is especially apparent in works that reference musical authority. As one of several compositions that displayed a quasi-

Oedipal relationship with Cage, Gala Music for John Cage’s 50th Birthday (1962) was a list of notorious people that Paik wanted Cage to sleep with.78 Again focusing on male bodies to challenge the musical establishment, Young Penis Symphony (1962) instructed ten young men to insert their penises in holes cut in a large sheet of white paper. Symphony No. 5 (1965) instructed an old man to play the piano with his penis for a beautiful girl who would then play the violoncello with the bow in her vagina. While these works implicated his friends and other

77 Higgins (Knowles’ husband) joked that it was a “melodramatic striptease for amateurs only.” Michael Nyman, “Nam June Paik, Composer” in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelley (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), 175 and , Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and 1958-1972 (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 69.

78 In a similar act of rebellion against Cage, Paik infamously cut the composer’s tie with scissors during his 1960 performance of Etude for Pianoforte.

42 musicians in acts of transgression, other profane actions were self-directed. For example, at the

“Neo Dada in Music” concert in Dusseldorf, Paik performed Sonata quasi una fantasia (1962) by stripping off his clothes while playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. These works can be understood as the antecedents to collaborations with Moorman in which their corporeality transgressed cultural norms and muddled the phenomenological purity of experimental postwar compositions.

We should recall that before Moorman became known as “The Topless Cellist,” Paik appeared as a topless cello in 26’1.1499”. Footage taken of a 1965 rehearsal in Paik’s loft shows him arranging material for Moorman outside of the designated stage area but still in the audience’s sight. He quietly removes his . Moorman is duteously following the score until she reaches a moment in which it calls for a percussive non-cello sound. Rather than slapping her cello (as she did in previous performances), she reaches over and slaps Paik’s shoulder.

Directly after this outburst, Moorman begins to read a list of children’s pledges: “I will obey

Mother and Dad. I will be extra careful crossing the street…” when Paik turns around and slaps her back. Without missing a beat or taking her eyes off the sheet music, Moorman murmurs,

—that’s not in the script— I will be kind to animals. I will be careful with other people’s

property. I will clean my plate at mealtime. I will be truthful. I will go to bed on time

and I will always be a good sport when playing with my friends.

The irony of the oath lingers as she resumes the procedure of making a rapid series of blunt cello and non-cello sounds with the same deadpan delivery. Shortly thereafter, Moorman puts her cello aside and Paik—still bare-chested— steps in as its proxy. He crouches down facing her, holding a string so that it stretches diagonally across his back. Minus this instrumental substitution, Moorman performs in complete adherence with the score, silently bowing and

43 plucking her human cello between the intermittent calls to make percussive noises on surrounding objects. Although they maintain a steady, focused, and serious composure, their closely facing bodies signal an intimacy at odds with the other perfunctory tasks. As Paik gets up to resume his stagehand duties, Moorman smiles slyly at the camera.

The sequence begins as veritable slapstick: after using the score to behave like a naughty child hitting her friend, Moorman reads instruction on child discipline, then breaks from the score to scold Paik for breaking from the score. The human cello that follows redirects the performance toward the performer’s musical training and embodied being. With Moorman’s arms around an “objectified” man and the man between her legs, her perfunctory body mechanics materialize when they should fade into the invisible substrata from which sounds arise. In addition to accentuating the gender dynamics that Moorman found unavoidable, the human cello drew attention to the corporeality of musical labor. Even when the cello’s contours, weight, temperature and texture are replaced by a living body, Moorman expertly pantomimes the sequence of notes, demonstrating that playing the cello is as much a manipulation of herself as it is a manipulation of the musical object. The sequence thus proffers two analogies with regard to discipline as a professional field and discipline as late capitalism’s repressive rules of conduct. First, Moorman’s decision to annotate the score with the children’s pledge creates an equivalence between musical scores and other edicts issued to restrain or normalize behavior.

Second, the transfiguration of Moorman’s cello into her musical partner equates musicians with their instruments and by extension, workers with the tools of their trade. Combined, the human cello acts much like the other automatons populating the Moorman/Paik collaboration: it fills indeterminacy with theatrical self-reference to contest social and compositional control over performing bodies.

44 Moorman and Paik’s human cello routine became more politically charged as the years went by. Indeed, by the end of the 1960s, Moorman considered it an allegory against the war in

Vietnam, which in turn signified cultural repression writ large on the geopolitical stage. “By playing Paik, I demonstrate how we Americans are oppressing the Vietnamese,” she told a reporter in 1970.79 Paik—who was born and raised in South — understood the symbolism of his Asian body similarly. “Imperialist Americans should hit yellow man,” Moorman recalls

Paik telling her.80 Moorman’s late 1960s performances accentuated the anti-war message. Near the conclusion, she would again substitute her cello, this time for an electric stringed Air Force practice bomb.81 She would often bow it with a bouquet of roses, a bud of which she would eat to conclude the performances. Kathy O’Dell surmises that whenever Moorman replaced her cello with the stringed bomb,

the cello functioned as an extension of her body in the linguistic context of the referent.

The bomb, in other words, was the thing in the world to which Moorman’s body referred.

Whether naked or clothed, her body became that with which viewers related physically,

79 This quote appears in Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014), 114.

80 Larry Miller, Charlotte Resounding, color, sound, 40 minutes (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1998).

81 Moorman first started using an electric stringed Air Force practice bomb in performances as early as 1965. Lot 76 in the Sotheby’s auction of Moorman’s estate is 2 Bomb Cellos (Performance Bomb for John Cage Piece 26’1.1499 for string player), executed circa 1965 and 1990, with Moorman listed as the creator. Moorman used the first one in performances beginning in 1965 and then produced an edition of ten Bomb Cellos in 1984. The second auctioned bomb was a “prototype for an unrealized edition.” The auction catalog explains that Moorman “referred to the ‘beautiful sounds’ made by this unconventional instrument compared to the sounds of a bomb’s actual use,” as her motivation for playing it as a cello substitute. See Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Including Property from the Charlotte Moorman Estate, London Thursday 24th June 1993, 123.

45 leaving the bomb as the thing with which audience members had to grapple

intellectually.82

The combined recognition of a body and that which refers to both it and its destruction thus asked the audience to relate physically with the consequences of war. Perhaps for this reason, of all the content Moorman poured into 26’1.1499”, she considered the instrument substitutions to be an especially political gesture:

In the piece I do by John Cage, I play the cello, then I discard the cello and play Nam

June Paik’s back as a human cello, then I discard him, then I play a bomb as a cello,

everything is highly amplified. I feel this has somewhat of a political message and

definitely a social message. In this same piece I cook, I scream, I play films, records, and

drink Coca-Cola. So, just about every piece that I do, especially the pieces of Nam June

Paik, have political or social overtones.83

She places particular emphasis on how the human body is rendered expendable through the exchangeability of an instrument, musician, and weapon. Like American soldiers and their

North Vietnamese opponents, the body is instrumentalized and then discarded. But it also appears as a shape-shifting automaton—a cello brought to life as a lover and then as a pacified, rose-rubbed bomb.

82 Kathy O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice: Charlotte Moorman and the Metaphysics of Extension,” A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, Lisa G. Corrin and Corinne Granof, eds. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 157.

83 “Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?” Source: Music of the Avant Garde 3, no.2 (6) (July 1969): 90, Reprinted in Piekut, Experimentalism, 165. Piekut notes that in the same issue, the other major interpreter of Cage’s work, David Tudor, flatly denied the political or social content of his performances by stating, “Political or social ends? No, not at all. Of course, you realize I have an advantage, because I don’t often call myself a composer. No, I just don’t think of it in those terms.” Ibid, 166.

46 In private correspondence, Cage frequently complained about Moorman’s interpretation of his work.84 His only public critique gave objection to the human cello sequence, for which he faulted Paik. Although many of Moorman’s annotations disregarded his notation, shifting attention from the sensuality of sonority to the sensuality of embodied actors appeared as the most egregious infringement and one on which Paik staked his bad boy reputation. “Paik’s involvement with sex, introducing it into music, does not conduce towards sounds being sounds.

It only confuses matters,” Cage wrote in 1993,

I am sure that his performance with Charlotte Moorman of my 26’1.1499” for a String

Player is not faithful to the notation, that the liberties taken are in favor of actions rather

than sound events in time. I am thinking of the point where Paik, stripped to the waist,

imitates a cello, his back being bowed by Charlotte Moorman.85

Although bodies must act to produce any sound event, Cage was rightly concerned that the duo’s pronounced physicality distracted from apprehending the natural occurrence of sounds in time.86

His distinction between “actions,” and “sound events” implies that moving bodies and sounds are phenomenologically adversarial, that the former can only confuse the latter. Yet confusing sounds with actions, compositional fidelity with interpretive liberty, and bodies with instruments

84 See Ibid for Piekut’s synopsis of the letters and interviews in which Cage and his friends discussed how much they disliked Moorman’s performances of 26’1.1499”. Although Cage clearly despised her interpretation, her performances often received positive reviews. Writing for The New York Times, Raymond Ericson praised Moorman’s remarkable ability to bring sound variety to the composition. Raymond Ericson, “Avant-Garde Music Festival Opens,” The New York Times, Monday, August 31, 1964, 20. Edward Greenfield’s review of a 1968 performance in London described it as both fun and endowed with an important “political moral.” Edward Greenfield, “Charlotte Moorman at the Institute of Contemporary Arts,” Guardian (London), September 24, 1968, 15. Critics such as Dan Sullivan, Peter Frank, and Gloria Steinem (then better known as a journalist than a feminist spokesperson) also spoke favorably of Moorman’s comportment, dedication, and creativity.

85 John Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” reprinted in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 24.

86 Cage had the same opinion of Paik’s other sexually explicit works, some of which he disregards as “fiction.” He believed that Paik’s sculptures, namely TV Chair and TV Buddha, were the most musical because without performance directions, the audience could hear environmental sounds. Ibid.

47 were confusions that Moorman instigated regardless of whose work she performed and whether or not sex was overtly referenced. And while Paik certainly steered their collaboration toward more erotic ends, it was a direction Moorman found appealing, if not an inevitable consequence of always being seen in the shadow of her gender.87 The human cello is very much the embrace of two musician that it appears to be. It reminds us that the reoccurring qualities and leitmotifs of their performances were determined by mutual concerns, creative instincts, and collaborative processes unbound from the handwriting that marked the score.

87 As Rothfuss acknowledges, Moorman had already experimented with performing semi-nude in her 1964 production of Originale. See Rothfuss, 102. Moreover, “If it were not for Moorman,” Paik contended, “I would have completely given up making music.” Quoted in Douglas Davis, Vom Experiment Zur Idee: Die Kunst Des 20 (Köln: DuMont Schauberg, 1975), 188. We should also remember that many program notes referred to Paik as Moorman’s assistant, implying that at times, his role was specifically subordinate to hers. See, for example, a concert at the College of Art on Friday, February 26, 1965. Concert flyer located in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, Series Folder I993. Even after establishing a name for himself in the American and European art scene, Paik is referred to as Moorman’s “Korean gentleman assistant” for a 1968 concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. “Concerto for Cello and Eggs,” Daily Mirror (Monday, September 23, 1968): 16.

48 Chapter Two

ACTING LIKE HERSELF: A TRANSVALUATIVE STYLE

I. Meta-histrionics and Transhumanism

While interpretation was celebrated for challenging singular authorship in the 1960s, it was also questioned (most famously) by the influential critic, Susan Sontag. In her well-known condemnation of hermeneutics, “Against Interpretation” (1964), Sontag took issue with the way interpretation replaces the sensual immediacy of art with its purported, utilitarian explanation.

Although literary criticism was the primary culprit in her reproach, performative interpretation follows a comparable process and can commit the same offences.88 Discontent with the elusive form that art often carries, an imprudent performer (such as Moorman) might re-render the text

(here understood as the score) to force a resolution between a sensory experience offered by the author and her own subjective, contemporary perspective. To Sontag, translating what a says rather than simply showing what it does is an anxious, speculative, ostentatious, and dishonest practice. But while arguing that interpretation intellectually stifles art and our experience of it, she concedes, “in some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, or escaping the dead past.”89 On one hand, by turning the pure form of 26’1.1499” into content, Moorman did exactly what Sontag found repugnant:

88 Sontag suggests that the lack of descriptive vocabulary for temporal form is part of why critical interpretation fixates on a text’s meaning. Revamping and alteration “presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers,” she writes, “It seeks to resolve that discrepancy.” The same could be said for the performative interpretation of a musical text. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, N.Y: Picador U.S.A, 2001), 6.

89 Sontag, 7.

49 replace a sensory experience with statements on current events. On the other hand, such hermeneutics were but an aspect of an approach to performance that generated its own sensory experiences. The approach hinged on a transhumanist relationship with instruments and the meta-histrionics of “acting like herself.”

From the beginning of Moorman’s career as an avant-garde performer, she gravitated toward works that played off her identity as a cellist or exaggerated her ability to thoroughly embody technique. Explaining the idiosyncrasy of Moorman’s interpretations, the musician,

Gisela Gronemeyer writes,

because Moorman considered herself to be an independent performer, and because it was

expected that she would put her personal stamp on a piece, composers were advised not

to simply compose a piece for the cello, rather to make a piece for Charlotte Moorman.

Because when Moorman took on an existing composition, she would most often shape it

to her own ideas, and would take liberties with the score.90

To Gronemeyer, her liberties always redirected the performance to a situation in which

“Moorman played herself.”91 “Moorman’s personal style is as much a part of Paik’s work with her as Paik’s own ideas, so that if she did not exist, Paik would have to invent her to do these works,” Ingrid Wiegand reported for The Soho Weekly News.92 “Charlotte is always Charlotte

Moorman, whatever she plays,” Paik concurred, “if she plays [a composition] by John Cage, it is

Charlotte Moorman.”93 Yet this mode of self-presentation did not aim to express authentic

90 Gisela Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication: The American Avant-garde Cellist Charlotte Moorman,” in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

91 Ibid.

92 Ingrid Wiegand, “Great Paik and Little Fishes,” The Soho Weekly News (Thursday March 11, 1976).

93 Paik made this comment in "Topless Cellist" Charlotte Moorman, Howard Weinberg and Nam June Paik, 1995, 29 min, color, sound. 50 interiority or expose the true essence of her selfhood. Rather, Moorman’s interpretive style explored the paradox of “acting natural” within the highly constructed mise en scène of performance. In doing so, she transvalued compositional authorship while thwarting expectations for her body, persona, and labor to be eclipsed by sound.

Moorman debuted as a soloist performer of on April 15th, 1963. The concert included compositions such as ’s Composition 1960 #13 to Richard

Huelsenbeck (1960). Instructing the performer to “play anything you like,” it was considered an

“anti-teleological” composition in that it was void of explicit direction toward a presupposed end.94 In a solo cello concerto at Judson Hall later in 1963, Moorman again realized Young’s composition by playing Giovanni Battista Sammartini’s decidedly teleological adagio for solo cello. Although eager to engage with the new sounds of New Music, she took the score as an opportunity to experiment with the performance of self and therefore played the music most associated with a traditional cellist’s identity. Problematizing the distinction between traditional compositions and New Music, the selection effectively repositioned the adagio as part of a co- authored, open composition, beget by Moorman, Young, and Sammartini.

After the intermission, Moorman played the Fluxus artist, pianist, and composer, Philip

Corner’s, Solo with… (1963), the score of which includes instructions such as, “strike that soloist pose” and “in general, act like a soloist.”95 Winthrop Sargeant attended the concert because he was writing an article on anti-teleological music for The New Yorker. In Sargeant’s description,

94 I have also seen the instructions state that the performer should, “prepare any composition and then perform it as well as he can.” New Yorker reviewer Winthrop Sargeant borrows the term, “anti-teleological,” from Leonard B. Meyer’s division of aesthetics into teleological or goal-oriented work and anti-teleological, radical empiricist or aleatory aesthetics. According to Meyer, the latter carries no preconceptions, favors the observer’s perception, cannot communicate, and is immune to criticism. Winthrop Sargeant, “It Just Is—or Is It?” The New Yorker (September 15, 1963), 120-123.

95 Score for ’s Solo with… located in CMA. 51 Miss Moorman walked onto the stage with her cello, put it down, went back offstage,

reappeared with her , registered difficulty in finding her score on the music

stand, gave up, went away again, came back, and tuned up. Meanwhile, ominous

sounds—a little like something thought up by Edgar Varèse—issued from a loudspeaker,

and continued for the rest of the time she was onstage. There was more shuffling of sheet

music. Miss Moorman wiped her cello with a handkerchief, played a single pizzicato

note, and began to annotate her score with a pencil. This was followed by delighted

applause.96

Here too, in playing Solo with… Moorman played herself: a perpetually late, often disheveled, obsessively annotating cellist. In Corner’s recollection, Moorman’s performance exceeded his expectations by dramatizing the expectations that accompany live and recorded music. Because

Corner’s description so aptly describes Moorman’s clever manipulation of character and discipline, it is worth quoting at length:

There was one whole solo performance concert, and it was really a cello concerto. One

could say it was an orthodox concert. Of course, she played a new piece by Feldman.

After the concert, Feldman whispered to me: “Y’know, Corner,” he said, “you’re the only

composer who knows how to write for Charlotte.” On stage, there was a speaker, and

there was an empty chair. Well, there was supposed to be a speaker and an empty chair

on stage. But when the concert started, there was only the curtain, and it was definitely a

kind of interface between art and life because I was playing on the whole performance

situation, with what happens before and after the situation. Then Charlotte, just because

96 Sargeant, 120.

52 of the way she is, which made it even more so—well—the delay of the curtain rising

became part of the piece. So first you thought, “Why doesn’t it start already?” and then

you began accepting that that was part of the piece. Then the curtain went up, and then it

was still—no Charlotte—and that was what I intended, that it would be an empty stage,

and she doesn’t come out. But she really played that thing. She came out and sat

down—but she didn’t have a cello. So she went out again, and found a cello. She brings

the cello back. Then she goes out again to get the music—and Norman Seaman was

going crazy, you know, the manager backstage. “What did you forget, where is it?”

Then she came out, put the music on the stand, and it fell off. Then she picked up the

music, and looked for a hole in the floor, the way cellists do, and then finally—when the

music started… the music came out of a loudspeaker.97

What Feldman admired in Corner’s composition was how it cooperated with Moorman.

Accommodating her habit of inserting herself into realizations effectively illuminated the

“performance situation” along with the performer who situated it. Rather than pantomime an archetypical caricature or correlate recorded music with a faceless, “neutral” subject, Moorman could easily present herself as uniquely defined yet interchangeable with the musical apparatus.

In both Composition 1960 #13 and Solo with… Moorman shaped the formal and conceptual qualities of the work while dramatizing the association between learned techniques and a performer’s “natural” behavior. The ventriloquism of Solo with… also anticipated the inter-subjective, transhumanist relationship with instruments and sound technology that was a constant throughout her career. In fact, Moorman’s cello was “instrumental” to her interpretive

97 Philip Corner in conversation with Gisela Gronemeyer, , December 15, 1991. In Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

53 acts in all senses of the word. It was the object through which she performed musical labor and her partner in producing sound. It was the emblem that identified her role and a tool through which to navigate her discipline. As such, it was also Moorman’s personal synecdoche and a means for the meta-histrionics of “playing herself.”

The musician Gabriele Bonomo described Moorman’s relationship with her cello as an uncanny subversion of musical traditions in general and her appointed role above all:

One of her more substantial merits is having consciously reversed the traditional role of

the virtuoso performer on her own instrument, uncovering by this overturning one of the

most authentic keys for comprehending the aesthetics of experimental music. One can

attribute this particular significance to a performatory gesture whose extreme limits push

one even to consider that very ‘instrument,’ the cello, as an alter ego, a ‘double’ of the

‘body’ itself—confounding its own being with it and thus deliberately being subtracted

from the built-in functions of the instrument—to arrive in the end at the inversion of their

respective roles and to identify the ‘body’ itself as the only real ‘instrument’.98

Bonomo’s observation is reminiscent of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological study of social behavior and it accounts for the meta-histrionic complications Moorman triggered whenever

“playing herself” in a musical context. Mauss found that body techniques display an individual’s embodiment of “habitus.” Habitus entails a tripartite of biological, sociological, and psychological mediations, which preclude a “natural” way of behaving.99 Like Moorman’s adolescent musical education and subsequent re-education through Cage’s teachings, the

98 Gabriele Bonomo, “Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology” in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

99 Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, eds. Margaret M. Lock and Judith Farquhar. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 53-54.

54 techniques that reveal habitus are acquired through the “prestigious imitation” of authority.100

They train the body to have coordinated, conscious actions and to repress disorderly movement or emotional seizures. Because “the body is man’s first and most natural instrument,” technical object, and means, Mauss contends that technique does not require an outside object so long as it is an effective and traditional action that is felt mechanically, physically, and biochemically.101

Indeed, Moorman could be seen playing her instrument, rehearsing learned gestures and the values they impart, without a single note sounding from her cello. Likewise, she could be seen playing herself, “acting natural” simply by imitating poses sanctioned by musical authorities.

Both modes are at play in Moorman’s interpretation of 26’1.1499”, justifying Cage’s concerns that the spectacle of such actions prevented sound from arising as autonomous phenomena. Her annotations catalog the conflicting assemblage of learned gestures that registered symbolically in her consciousness. Didactic etiquette instructions (“I will obey mother and dad”) occur alongside Cage’s emancipatory truisms (“there is no such thing as silence”) and contemporary reminders of social injustice. The resulting body techniques culminate in Paik’s metamorphosis into an instrument. Yet the sequence can only suggest that the mechanization of a well-trained musician is the musician’s natural state through a disorderly, emotional breach in the composition’s authority over the musicians’ actions. It simultaneously

100 According to Mauss, techniques adapt the body and “are assembled by and for social authority” as a way to exert “domination of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness.” Ibid, 66, 67.

101 Ibid, 56. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, Foucault describes a practice that also bares striking resemblance to Moorman’s idiosyncratic intermingling of her life and her musical labor. He uses the term, “techniques of the self,” to explain “those reflective and voluntary practices by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make of their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” Also referred to as an “art of existence,” this approach runs contrary to the confessional techniques of biopower and the controlling pitfalls of the repressive hypothesis, which posits that recognizing and expressing a hidden, natural, and true self is an act of liberation. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 10-11.

55 demonstrates Moorman’s total embodiment of habitus and her defection from prestigious imitation.

Although preceded by earlier texts, Sigmund Freud’s essay, “Das Unheimlich,” (1919) cemented the uncanny into a psychological concept.102 Elaborations and critical amendments to his canonical text continue to recognize the recursiveness, uncertainty, and anxiety surrounding alarmingly familiar experiences and indiscernibly unfixed subjectivities.103 Such is the effect of the musicians’ corporeal and fanciful engagement with habitus. As an expression of musical discipline and a violation of musical law, the human cello sequence defines automatons through the uncanny impression that they are repressed things charged with the potential to revolt. For the musician’s body to be the real instrument while the cello is an alter-ego further suggests an uncanny configuration of subjectivity. To Freud, this type of redoubling threatens identity.

102 In his essay, Freud expands and disputes aspects of Ernst Jentsch 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” which analyses the inability to discern between humans and automatons in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “Der Sandmann.” See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, (London: Penguin Books, 2003). As I will further discuss in subsequent chapters, Freud’s theories had great baring on the postwar avant- garde. For example, despite ’ preference for comparing Fluxus to Dada, critics such as Robert Pincus-Witten contend that “Repression continued to be understood in the light cast by Freud’s description of social and personal dysfunction as a manifestation of infantile sexual repression. Surrealist references in the formulation of Fluxus value are paramount considering its acceptance of Freud.” Robert Pincus-Witten, “Fluxus and the Silvermans: An Introduction,” in Fluxus Codex, ed. Jon Hendricks. (, Mich: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in association with Abrams, 1995), 17.

103 Contemporary theorists frequently recognize that Freud’s analysis of the uncanny betrays an anxiety of his own. By replacing Jentsch’s focus on the female automaton with a discussion on how blindness signals castration anxiety, Nicholas Royle posits that Freud attempts “to reduce or eliminate the place and importance of women.” Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41. His conclusion follows similar discussions by Jane Marie Todd, and Kaja Silverman. See, for example Jane Marie Todd, “The Veiled Woman in Freud's "Das Unheimliche," Signs, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Spring, 1986) and Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Diane Jonte-Pace similarly finds Freud’s analysis androcentric in its framing of nearly all psychic, cultural, and religious experiences within the Oedipal paradigm. Rather than repressed castration fears, she posits the uncanny as arising from repressed fears about death (death within the living or life within the seemingly dead) and the female body. See Diane Jonte-Pace, Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok concur that The Sandman is coherent as a story about secrecy, hidden knowledge, and family deception, “without the idea of castration” that Freud imposes on the literature. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok, “The Sandman looks at ‘The Uncanny’: The Return of the Repressed or of the Secret; Hoffmann’s Question to Freud,” in Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture, eds. Michael Munchow and Sonu Shamdasani (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 187, 199.

56 According to Jacques Lacan’s elaboration on the uncanny as it relates to the mirror stage, it disrupts the representational subjectivity that could otherwise be the source of self.104 Through doubling, dividing, and interchanging the subject’s identity with another, the extraneous self becomes the self. Redoubled through the cello, Moorman problematized the fixity of who she was and where she stood within a slew of cultural constructs.

Maintaining a subjective position while at the same time forfeiting the monological ego psychologized interpretation in a manner unconducive to either essentialist or constructivist identities. It also contrasted with how found authenticity in individualistic expressions of interiority and how placed desubjectivization on the side of nature and “real life.” “It is impossible to think about the uncanny without this involving a sense of what is autobiographical, self-centered, based in one’s own experience,” writes literary critic

Nicholas Royle,

But it is also impossible to conceive of the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a

sense of strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self... The

uncanny is thus perhaps the most and least subjective experience, the most and least

autobiographical ‘event’.105

What was real about Moorman’s act haunted her interpretations of compositions meant to express a composer’s intentions as well as those aiming to access the reality of unscored sonic

104 The subject’s mirror reflection double becomes the ego identity that is the fundamental representation of the self but that splits the real self from the imaginary reflection. The uncanny can be understood as the threat of the reemergence of the real that haunts the space of the accepted and familiar reality. See Jacques Lacan and Alan Sheridan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI) (New York: Norton, 1981). Also see Mladen Dolar, “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October, Vol. 58 (Autumn, 1991).

105 Royle, 16.

57 continuums. Put in Lacanian terms, her interpretations enacted the Real of the symptom—the authenticity of apprehending her autobiography through estranging representations and symbols.

In addition to articulating the tension between her role and compositional law,

Moorman’s meta-histrionics suggest that uncanniness is at the core of all performances. It stages confrontations between symbolic demarcation and the din of life. It makes automatons of all performing bodies—Paik’s included. The performer and theorist, Ernst Fischer, claims that the temporality of performance is what renders it an uncanny art. He points to the uncertainty, paradox, and compromised vitality that arises from, in his words,

spaces and objects unlocatably suspended in a state of flux, of not yet—or any longer—

being either absent or present but, potentially, being both and also, and therefore to

performance, whose ‘being,’ to quote Peggy Phelan, ‘becomes itself through

disappearance,’ and, I would add, through (re)appearance in and out of the realm of lived

experience.106

Thwarting expectations of character identification and exaggerating the strange familiarity of everyday experience is precisely how many avant-garde artists turned the inherently uncanniness of performance into a political strategy.107 “The uncanny, then, is not merely an ‘aesthetic’ or

‘psychological’ matter (whatever that might mean),” explains Royle,

106 Ernst Fischer, “Writing Home: Post-Modern Melancholia and the Uncanny Space of Living Room Theatre,” in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Roytledge, 2001), 119.

107 Although Moorman and Paik operated through musical idioms and post-Cagean experimentalism, the way they muddle the agency, credibility, and constitution of performing bodies was reminiscent of Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie or Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect (A-effect). Brecht described the A-effect as “turning the object…from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected.” Bertolt Brecht and John Willett, eds., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), 143-4, 192. Also see Brecht and Eric Bentley, “On Chinese Acting,” The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961); and Brecht and Carl Richard Mueller, “On the Experimental Theater,” Ibid. Such an uncanny metamorphosis carried the potential to jolt audiences into political awareness and revolutionize the establishment from within. Reveling in a different quality of the uncanny, Antonin Artaud also saw revolutionary potential in using hidden reality as an aggressive and shocking bearer of truth. Rather than confronting the strangeness of emotional distance, Artaud hoped to destabilize symbolic orders by stirring internal impulses and 58 its critical elaboration is necessarily bound up with the analyzing, questioning and even

transforming what is called ‘everyday life.’ This applies not only in relation to issues of

sexuality, class, race, age, imperialism and colonialism—so many issues of potentially

uncanny ‘otherness’ already evident in the nineteenth century—but also, for example, in

relation to notions of automation, technology and programming.108

As an uncanny body, the human cello bares the twisted symptoms of social programing. It is a wildly real display of instrumentalization and a controlled representation of the symbols that reveal and conceal the musicians’ subjectivities.

The conceptual artist and musician Giuseppe Chiari also understood that only by playing the cello was Moorman able to play herself with all the social and psychological complexities that that entails. He portrays her approach to performance as a kind of philosophical authorship, one that pivoted around her instrument:

The first characteristic of Charlotte Moorman was the rigour [sic] of her repertory. It has

often been discussed whether or not Charlotte Moorman was an executor or an author.

The second of the two is the correct answer. All of Charlotte Moorman’s performance is

her work. The totality of her work is one work, and it is a work signed Charlotte. It

could be said that this holds true for any musician. But it is not the same thing with

celebrating instances in which the human exhibits a monstrous form. See Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (Grove Press, 1958). Artaudian doubling, conflation of art and life, violence, and symbolism similarly colored the collaborations between Moorman and Paik that engaged with uncontrollable, life-like but inhuman inner monsters.

108 Royle, 23. Mladen Dolar, however, posits that explaining uncanny experiences through ideological perspectives (such as the social issues that Royal alludes to) repressively explains away the uncertainty and ambiguity that constitutes the Modern experience as uncanny to begin with. Premodern power structures allowed space for the uncanny to exist in the symbolic sacred, a space that was lost with the Enlightenment. The uncanny took refuge in popular culture, such as the Gothic novel, ghost stories, and other tales of the undead, which reside outside social law and order. Dolar argues that at its core, is the psychoanalytic understanding and maintenance of the uncanny as fundamentally modern. Dolar, “I Shall Be with You,” 7.

59 Moorman. Charlotte Moorman’s repertory is the fruit of research. It is not a selection of

pieces. Her conception of music is one of discovery. Hers is a philosophical work.

Charlotte Moorman searches, writes, finds out, suggests and prays for theatrical pieces of

music. She lists them. She feels it is her responsibility to present them. The Cello is the

constant around which the World revolves.109

This was certainly the case with her interpretations of Chiari’s Per Arco (For the Bow) (1963), which she performed on numerous occasions. It begins with a tape recording of bombs and gunfire that the composer recorded during World War II. After a prolonged pause, the performer reacts to the sounds through twenty different, amplified interactions with the cello. The instructions ask the interpreter to think of herself as “a man who, after a destruction, finds himself with two objects. Cello and bow—survivors like him—and touches them almost unconsciously.” Crying and consoling herself upon the cello that hoovered around her lap,

Moorman’s performances recalled a pieta, rather than the lonely bewilderment of a war-weary soldier.

Characteristically, some of Moorman’s other interpretations strayed even more drastically from Chiari’s instructions. Her annotated score for Per Arco reveals that she scrawled numerous question marks by parts of the work that she found difficult to perform or relate to.110 Joan

Rothfuss contends that it struck observers of a 1963 performance in Palermo “less an antiwar statement than a highly sexualized encounter with her cello.”111 More frequently, Moorman

109 As quoted in Marisa Vescovo, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman Broadcast on All Channels,” in The Electronic Wizard, 48. Kathy O’Dell also writes of how Moorman treated the cello as a linked but distinct extension of her own body into the surrounding world. See O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice” in A Feast of Astonishments.

110 “The fact that he has previously suffered has disheartened him but he is conscious of having judged it negatively,” received such a questioning. Moorman’s annotated score of Per Arco located in CMA.

111 Rothfuss, 93.

60 interpreted the work through the lens of current events. In response to her 1965 performance of

Per Arco at the 24 Stunden (24 Hours) Happening in Wuppertal, West Germany, she wrote,

I am in the German country

that is bombing Italy in the tape

do you recognize your sound?

Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Mississippi!!!

i cannot keep from crying.112

Drawing parallels between World War II, the Vietnam War, and violence against civil rights activists, Moorman used Per Arco to collapse previous and current violence into a continuously tragic event. Such a conflation of geopolitical references turned it into an expression of her grief over the world’s unrelenting bellicosity. As Chiari observed, in this philosophical reflection of the world, her cello was anthropomorphized at the center of it.

Takehisa Kosugi was another composer who welcomed Moorman’s habitual re-rendering by composing works specifically for her cello-centric and uncontrollable interpretation. His compositions often erased the lines between Moorman and her instrument. For example,

Instrumental Music (dedicated to Miss Moorman) (1965) establishes an equivalency between the sound that comes from their symbiosis and an image in which they share a single contour. His instructions read,

The stoppage of the performance, the continuance of the stoppage, and the fixing or

showing of the shadow or outline of the figures which belong to the performer and her

instrument.113

112 Moorman, “Cello” in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

113 Program notes for ’s evening concert, “Tender Music” in Willi Bongard research files, Box 71, GRI. 61 In performance, Moorman is backlit behind a sheet of paper. A shadow cast by her body and her cello appears as a unified image where the two forms become one. Periodically, she stops playing and Kosugi traces her shadow, fixing the form before the cello sounds and movement resume. “This piece may be related to the relationships between substance and shadow, sound and silence, performer and her instruments… as an event,” Kosugi explained.114 Cage’s influence is clear in this statement but so too is Moorman’s uncanny identification with her cello—a relationship that attempted to defy material form and overwrite any other compositional intent.

II. The Boredom and Intensity Dialectic

Later in Moorman’s career, McWilliams similarly positioned her and her instrument as inseparable and like substances, often battling or immune to other natural elements. He harnessed her to helium balloons in Sky Kiss (1968) so that she rose into the sky like a saint carrying the cello as her earthly emblem. Alternately, she appeared as Icarus, whose escape from the concert hall was both technologically savvy and fatalistic. Again staged high above ground,

McWilliams’ Flying Cello (1974) was designed as a trapeze act where Moorman would strike a cello with a bow when the two met in mid-air. As with Sky Kiss, the reunification of her body with its other half was a physically risky spectacle. Other works were less sensational but equally sensuous and daring. For Ice Music (AKA Ice Cello, 1972), Moorman plays a cello- shaped block of ice in the nude. The performance ends when it melts away. She leaves the stage frostbitten by her instrument and the instrument leaves liquefied by her body. To Moorman, the

114 Brochure for a Moorman and Paik concert organized by Jim McWilliams called “The Avant-Garde in Philidelphia,” March 13, 1966 (Tames Auditorium) in Jean Brown Box 39, Folder 10, GRI.

62 slow duration of the melting ice “is how this beautiful, profound piece shows the impermanence of things.”115 Perhaps she counted herself among the impermanent things for in order to capture the amplified sound of her melting instrument, water dripped dangerously close to electric devices. While risking electrocution and indifferent to the pain of extreme temperature, she grasped on to the morphing cello—a part of herself that was becoming increasingly misshapen and lethal.

“What I do is treat her and her cello as a phenomenon, because they are joined, the personality of the cello and the personality of Charlotte are one phenomenon,” McWilliams explained, “it is something that builds up over many episodes, and it has this great life and spirit.”116 Yet the life in these pieces was frequently threatened and the spirit was interchangeable with an inanimate object. Even the lighthearted performance of McWilliams’

Chocolate Easter Bunny (1973) was shadowed in dangerous undertones. Moorman and her cello sat on a mound of fake grass, coated in chocolate icing and sprinkled with coconut flakes.

Tarred and feathered in a grotesque parody of calendar centerfolds, she appeared simultaneously as the object of vengeance and desire. Like many of her performances, recent personal events gave the work surplus meaning. Recovering from a cancer operation, Moorman was told not to eat chocolate. Here, she was mummified and nearly suffocating in the desert thought to kill her.

Indeed, the New York Hospital warned that she would asphyxiate unless the icing was kept off the soles of her feet, armpits, rear, and scalp.117

115 Sophie Forbat and Daniel Thomas, 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects (Botany, N.S.W.: Kaldor Public Art Projects, 2009), 118.

116 Bill Lewis, “World’s Best Avant Garde Cellist Comes Home,” Arkansas Gazette, Friday July 25, 1975.

117 Moorman performed Chocolate Easter Bunny in an exhibition titled, “Candy,” at the Clocktower. Howard Smith and Tracy Young, “Scenes” The Village Voice, May 3, 1973.

63 Real danger lurked behind Moorman’s fanciful performances with Paik as well. The curator and Fluxus historian John G. Hanhardt has characterized their dynamics as,

a playful interaction of control and submission…nonviolent and coy sexual scenarios…

in opposition to the graphic assaults of the Viennese action artists and of the avant-garde

movement Gutai in Japan, which featured the body in an aggressive engagement with

nature and industrial material culture.118

But while works such as 26’1.1499”, Opera Sextronique, and Robot Opera were not overtly aggressive, they too presented the body in opposition with nature—natural sounds or natural femininity—and in conflict with production demands. And while Moorman’s gestures were not as graphically assaulting as her Viennese and Gutai counterparts, she frequently occupied roles that were physically or legally risky and not the least bit coy.119 Take, for example, Cello Sonata

No. 1 for Adults Only (1965), which Moorman first performed at the New School in 1965. The work required Moorman to strip off articles of clothing between measures of the prelude to

Bach’s Third Cello Suite. It was essentially the same concept as Paik’s earlier Sonata quasi una fantasia (1962), in which Paik disrobed while playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. However, the threat of being imprisoned for nudity was much greater for Moorman in New York than it had been for Paik in Germany. Rather than a “playful” offense to high-culture, differences in geography and gender rendered Moorman’s performance both an allusion to and a real act of transgression. Their increasingly scandalous acts eventually led to her arrest for performing

Opera Sextronique bare-breasted.

118 John G. Hanhardt, , and Nam June Paik, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012), 55.

119 One should also note that Moorman frequently interacted with the Viennese artists and participated in some of their events. For example, while visiting in 1970, she performed nude in Herman Nitsch’s 36th Action and Otto Muehl’s Manopsychotic Ballet (Part 2). Rothfuss, 255.

64 Paik oscillated between regret and pride over the inequitable outcome of the ordeal, which punitively and art historically swung in his favor. “I consider my work necessary, her suffering important…surely I am corrupted,” he wrote to George Maciunas after Moorman was found guilty.120 Even some of the works that payed homage to his martyred partner were heedless of her suffering. For example, Paik made TV Bed (1972) so that Moorman could perform in a recumbent position while recovering from cancer surgery. Ironically, performance notes and documentation from the Kaldor Public Art Projects in Australia “indicate that

Moorman was required to wear protective clothing to shield her body from radiation during these performances.”121

Another example of physical risk can be found in Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns

(1964). The work required Moorman to submerge herself in a barrel of water half way through playing The Swan from Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux).

She would then complete the piece while dripping wet, her translucent garment clinging to her body.122 “Yes, I’ve been advised to seek therapy, and I’ve been called a menace to music. But

I’m serious, and I believe in doing the works of serious composers,” Moorman stated after injuring herself during a 1965 performance in Philadelphia.123 The following year, the duo staged it as a guerrilla addition to the . The audience gathered on a bridge

120 Nam June Paik letter to George Maciunas dated November 14, 1967. Maciunas Archive, Box 31, GRI.

121 Forbat and Thomas, 40 Years, 114. This text also indicates that for the over forty performances that Moorman and Paik presented as part of the Kaldor public arts project in Adelaide and Sydney, Australia in 1976, they received the most attention for Moorman’s acts of daring: performing “naked with a cello carved from ice, swinging from a 12-metre trapeze, smothered in 13 kilograms of chocolate fudge, and suspended from balloons drifting above the Sydney Opera House forecourt.” Ibid, 112.

122 Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964) premiered at Moorman’s third avant-garde festival. In subsequent performances, the costume alternated between performance and clear plastic.

123 James Felton, “Lady Cellist Splits Head in Modern Version of ‘Swan’,” The Evening Bulletin (Feb 27, 1965).

65 overlooking the extremely polluted Grand Canal, where Moorman and Paik performed in a gondola. For the finale, Moorman lowered herself into the waters. She was immediately rushed to a hospital for a typhoid shot but remained ill for weeks. Even when performed in more traditional event spaces, Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns was harsh on Moorman’s body.

In addition to exposing herself visually (and thus also to arrest), Moorman was exposed to the cold and—as with Ice Cello— risked splashing water on electrics. Electrocution was also a risk in performances where Moorman either wore or played Paik’s handmade electronics.

Photographs of TV Bra for Living Sculpture and TV Cello (1971) taken throughout the years show that Moorman often performed with fans trained on her to cool jumbles of jerry-rigged wires.

Observing the patterns in Moorman’s oeuvre, one might wonder why performing as oneself and over-identifying with an instrument would solicit danger with such regularity.

Asked to explain her motivation for performing the dare devil feats proposed by McWilliams or the illicit and potentially hazardous situations enacted with Paik, Moorman replied,

It seems perfectly logical and normal to be doing them. Since I’m in the Twentieth

Century, it seems the natural thing to do is to use Twentieth century materials, and

Twentieth century technology. I would be bored to tears just to sit there and play

repertoire a hundred years old. So for me it’s perfectly logical and perfectly normal, and

it doesn’t take any courage whatsoever.124

Moorman’s explanation carries two, striking implications that are key to understanding her collaborations, as well as how such works can be situated in relation to contemporaneous

124 Charlotte Moorman in conversation with Gisela Gronemeyer on a ride from Frankfurt to Cologne, September 23, 1980, reprinted in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

66 performances or events. First, for danger to be logical and normal suggests that it was a mundane type of extremity, an everyday aspect of a technological age marked by violent change.

Secondly, within this rationale, “boredom” does not describe an aesthetic quality, but rather a form of occupational fatigue. In fact, of all the compositions, theories, attitudes, and techniques through which Cage extended his influence, Moorman spoke most passionately of how “his music exploits the beauty of tediousness.”125 It was thus preferable to court danger in exceedingly long duration, almost inaudible compositions, void of punctuations, crescendo, or finale (e.g. Ice Music), than to experience alienation from rote labor. It was similarly preferable to risk arrest or derision than to be effaced by anachronistic cultural traditions.

The ostensible contradiction of turning away from repeating a boring repertoire only to perform compositions characterized by their tedium, was not unique to Moorman. To those pioneering phenomenological and immersive composition in the 1960s, tedium was ripe with possibility while entertainment had become an outmoded consequence of music.126 Meanwhile, qualities or correlations with danger arrived to facilitate the immersive experience. In an insightful 1966 essay titled, “Boredom and Danger,” Moorman’s friend, Dick Higgins, considers

125 This phrase concludes Moorman’s poem, “Cello,” which is one of the only documents in which Moorman attempted to articulate her approach to performance—the other being a text written in protest of the guilty verdict in People v. Charlotte Moorman. Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

126 For more on the aesthetic use of boredom in the 1960s, see Michael Nyman’s discussion of audience attention in “Seeing, Hearing: Fluxus” in Experimental Music (London: Studio Vista, 1974) and Ina Blom, “Boredom and Oblivion” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. (Chicester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998). To Blom, Higgins implicitly suggests that the boredom of Fluxus events help “disrupt boundaries and promote oblivion.” Also see Kenneth Rogers, “Perceived Time: Boredom and Temporality in and Video (1965-1975)” (PhD diss., , 2005). Rogers argues that avant-garde cinema, video art, and artists’ films in the 1960s and 70s contributed to the “phenomenological turn” in the visual arts. Along with temporality and pedagogy, he finds that boredom was central to the way in which the spectators became embodied participants in time-based media and other forms of art emerging from the expanded field.

67 “a dialectic between boredom and intensity” to be the defining logic of their generation’s “new mentality.”127 Like Moorman, Higgins names Cage as the catalyst.

Cage’s early work used chance techniques to bring attention to sonic orders that would be impossible to expect. He later developed indeterminacy (or the infinite potential ways to interpret a note) as a way for unlimited variation to be actualized by the performer.128 Opening compositions to unintended sounds made one aware of the differentiation traditionally ignored or dismissed as boring, unimportant, ambient noise. Just as sound and silence distinguish each other, boring sounds have the effect of intensifying the mundane, broadening one’s perception of the natural environment. Between 1956 and 1960, Cage taught these ideas in courses on

“Composition” and “Experimental Composition” at the New School for Social Research. Erik

Satie’s exaggerated beat repetition was regarded as an important precedent. Many of his students emulated Satie and Cage in experiments with audibility, potential action, and heightened awareness.129 From these experiments, Happenings and Fluxus art emerged, popularizing

“events” as perceptual incisions into the observable flow of life.

127 Dick Higgins, “Boredom and Danger” in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973, ed. by Larry Austin, Douglas Kahn and Nilendra Gurusinghe (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011), 182.

128 Cage posited sound as existing within an unlimited and heterogeneous field, “without qualitative differentiation but with multiplicity of differences.” Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961) in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 204–5. According to Branden W. Joseph, Cage’s use of the term “multiplicity” reminds us of the degree to which his chance techniques and methods of indeterminacy were influenced by the theories of Henri Bergson. See Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ed. by Julia Robinson (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 210-238.

129 Satie’s Vieux Sequins et Vieilles Cuirasses (1912 - 1915) and Vexations (c. 1893, 1958) repeated a beat three hundred and eighty times and eight hundred and forty times respectively. Higgins explains that within their Satie- inspired experiments, “boredom played a comparable role, in relation to intensity, that silence plays with sound, where each one heightens the other and frames it.” Higgins, “Boredom and Danger,” 179.

68 Higgins attended Cage’s 1958 summer composition class. He recalls that with Satie’s repetitious motifs in mind and with “a growing dissatisfaction with the conventional relationships between the spectator and the work,” he and his classmates came to understand that

in the context of work which attempts to involve the spectator, boredom often serves a

useful function: as an opposite to excitement and as a means of bringing emphasis to

what it interrupts, causing us to view both elements freshly. It is a necessary station on

the way to other experiences.130

Rather than exciting the spectator by distracting them from their actual conditions, repetition, distended time, seriality, and task-like actions could be used to make them recognize the everyday. Dispelling spectacle from art and dissolving art into the environment, challenged the audience to confront real time, real space, and their real selves within it all. “The intention,” he wrote, “is more to enrich the experiential world of our spectators, our co-conspirators, by enlarging the repertoire of their over-all experience.”131

In addition to the spectator’s didactic reorientation, the boredom and intensity dialectic challenged the musician to work on a micro-scale of distilled meaning, rather than with the grandiose or colossally expressive gestures that characterized Modern art. Consequently, the musician risked making work so facile it lacks meaning and thus fails to engender any perceptual reorientation whatsoever. To Higgins, the anticipation of failure gave boredom a dangerous edge. Danger signaled dysfunction. It derived from a deficiency within their revolutionary formula. As an ironic result, physical risk commonly safeguarded works that used the mundane to rewrite one’s sense of self. With escalations of the Vietnam War on the nightly news and

130 Ibid.

131 Ibid, 182.

69 attacks against Civil Rights activists occurring in the streets, physical risk was indeed everyday and it had the added effect of commanding attention. Hence, danger and dysfunction melded into an aggressive—and aggressively anti-spectatorial—strand of post-Cagean composition throughout the 1960s and 70s.

According to Allan Kaprow, danger and dysfunction were intrinsic to how Happenings blurred distinctions between art and life. In defining the genre, he emphasized that along with lack of plot, impermanence, and erasing audience divisions, chance "is a key term, for it implies risk and fear…. Artists who directly utilize chance hazard failure, the ‘failure’ of being less artistic and more lifelike."132 Illustrating the point, Kaprow’s A Spring Happening (1961) startled the audience with sensations such as a loudly revving lawnmower that assaulted them as they moved through his loft. It was designed to arouse actual fear, followed by a sense of liberation, both of which were uncontrollable emotional responses. Such teasing or abusing the audience was what Susan Sontag referred to as the “dramatic spine of the Happening.”133

Beyond rediscovering everyday materials, the Happening’s aggression toward the audience was a way to shock them out of convention and redirect their senses as the Surrealists had done before them. This tactic had begun with more subtlety, which perhaps made the audience’s discomfort more acute. Visitors to his seminal 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Ruben Gallery in

1959 were considered part of the work and given strict instructions on how to behave. For ninety minutes they witnessed performers numbly applying paint to canvases or reciting a string of disjointed single-syllabic words. They were conscious that other activities were simultaneously

132 Allan Kaprow, “Happenings” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 19.

133 Sontag, “Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, 265.

70 occurring in an area of the set that they could not see until relocated there for a different “part.”

This made them conscious of being a part of something they could never grasp in full. Whether apprehended as art or life, the experience was both dull and anxiety inducing.

Avant-garde dance partook of the boredom and intensity dialectic as well. The choreographic structures emerging from the workshops associated with Judson Church combined or oscillated between tedious, “normal” gestures and violent upsets of normality.134 Their task- based instructions honed in on the mechanics of the body, connoting a sense of corporeal alienation, and situating dance on a human rather than a mythic scale. But as Higgins observed, many Fluxus-affiliated works are better known for being situated within this oddly threatening paradigm. For example, George Brecht’s The Case (1959) invited visitors to remove items from a suitcase and handle them “in ways appropriate to their nature” and Flute Solo (1962) simply asks performers to assemble and disassemble a flute. Despite the mundane gestures and everyday materials, an element of danger could be found in the instrument’s deconstruction and the destructive potential of the case contents, which included matchbooks and twine as well as a subjective interpretation of what is appropriate or natural. Event-scores such as Brecht’s tended to have the more minimalist sensibility that was associated with boredom and aesthetic failure.

Several Fluxus works also emphasized their opposition to spectacle by staging aggressive encounters or imagining acts of ocular violence. Slippery Floor (1976) by the Fluxus ringleader,

George Maciunas, was conceived as a section of his Fluxlabyrinth where people would have to

134 For example, Sally Banes chronicles how by 1962, “repetition and improvisation emerged as two modes neither Cunningham nor the other influences on the group (except Ann Halprin) were accustomed to use. The movements themselves ranged from those generated from tasks or instructions, as in Carolee Schneemann’s Newspaper Event, to the even, quotidian jog of We Shall Run, to the violent, single-minded whacking with instruments of War (by Robert Huot and Robert Morris), to the pantomime of Paxon’s English, to the lyricism of Arlene Rothlein’s It Seemed to Me There Was Dust in the Garden and Grass in My Room.” Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1983), 85.

71 walk over black glass marbles. As with Kaprow’s A Spring Happening, the audience would confront a precarious environment in a space built to disorient. Daniel Spoerri’s Fluxobject,

Fakir’s Spectacles (1961) were eye- with pins glued to the inside so that the wearer would be blinded upon putting them on. As if providing an instruction manual for Spoerri’s readymade, Kosugi’s Music for a Revolution (1964) directs the performer to blind herself five years after the composition is realized.

Music for a Revolution is often cited as an example of “Danger Music,” which Paik helped establish as a Fluxus sub-genre. “Danger Music” was perhaps the most overt incorporation of danger into post-Cagean form. In a 1973 interview with Paul Cummings, Al

Hansen explained that the term simply means, “to perform music that would be dangerous, perhaps,” and he traces the origins of the term to Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, and “several more.”135 Some pieces created auditory annoyance with the possibility that the listener’s hearing could be damaged. This was certainly the effect of La Monte Young’s excruciatingly precise, loud, non-melodic, droning harmonic frequencies. These aggressively high-decibel, high- amplitude compositions increased the audibility of harmonics at the expense of the audience’s comfort. While intended to help the listener perceive sound in a direct, bodily manner, the audience would also, inevitably perceive their own discomfort. Higgins’ pithy, Danger Music event-scores gave equal attention to notions of spiritual or psychological realms of danger, leaving many of the insinuations open-ended. Whereas Danger Music No. 1 (April 1961) directs the reader to “Spontaneously catch hold of a hoist hook and be raised up at least three stories,”

Danger Music No. 2 (May 1961) ambiguously reads, “. Rags. Paper. Heave. Shave.” To

135 , “Oral history interview with Al Hansen, 1973 Nov. 6-13,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Transcripts published online http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-al- hansen-12668

72 perform Danger Music No. 17 (May 1961) the score instructs, “Scream! Scream! Scream!

Scream! Scream! Scream!” and photo-documentation shows Higgins doing so with wet eyes and a snarled lip.136 The less realizable, Danger Music No. 9 (for Nam June Paik) (February 1962) asks his friend to “Volunteer to have your spine removed.” Paik’s Danger Music for Dick

Higgins (1962) provocatively responded, “Creep into the vagina of a living whale.”137 His retort is one of many indications that to Paik, carnal fantasies and prurient suggestions posed the biggest danger to the musical domain. He also made pieces such as One for Violin Solo (1961) and Violin with String (violin to be dragged on the street) (1961), which introduced listeners to novel violin sounds through the object’s destruction. However, the effort to reorient spectatorship toward a sensory intensification of the mundane world, was just as often superseded by an intensified corporeality. Violence and eroticism psychologized his gestures in a manner that competed with or distracted from phenomenological awareness.

Although a volatile performer who evoked fantasy and a splashy form of shock, Paik’s work still carried traces of the minimalist instincts and quotidian materials that gave the dialectic its boring side. The epigrammatic style of his event-scores and the restrained actions that they called for are often discussed as evidence of his interest in Cage-inflected Zen. Yet to Paik, boredom went beyond the aesthetic manifestations of an alternative to western philosophy. Just as Moorman thought of boredom as an occupational hazard, Paik understood it as inextricably linked to the labor of their profession.

136 Hansen recalls, “Now, Higgins is a very big guy. And when he screams as loud as he can, he squirts his throat and gargles with lemon juice for an afternoon before, and he prepares for it the way Carlos [phonetic] or Marilyn Horn [phonetic] does….And Higgins screaming 17 times doing this piece, if you can get a bottle of vodka or wine in him first, is really something to see. That was - one of the first danger , I think, was the screaming piece. And there were several more.” Ibid.

137 Cage contended that both he and Higgins considered the work to be completely free of danger. Cage, “Nam June Paik: A Diary,” Nam June Paik: Electronic Art (New York, NY: Galeria Bonino, Ltd. 1965).

73

III. Boredom, Entertainment, and Class

To the leisured concert-goer, classical music likely registers as a pleasurable sensation.

To the performer, it could trigger the undesirable “wandering mind” effect that made Moorman

“bored to tears.” Conversely, the performer of a radically minimalist event-score could be excited by the work’s novelty, process, and possibilities for co-authorship. A listener expecting to be entertained might experience discomfort when confronted by the same composition’s challengingly subtle form. Moorman and Paik’s shared interest in these dissimilar subject positions would play out in class-conscious self-references and psychologically charged displays of corporeality. Their relationship to the boredom and intensity dialectic thus diverged as much from their spectacle-hostile companions as from the composers they willfully misinterpreted.

“Toward more sensible boredom” was the title of an evening concert that Paik organized at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on April 21, 1966.138 Featuring work by Moorman, Kosugi,

Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell, and several others, the concert nominally proposed that boredom could attain better judgment or be sensed with more acuity. The following year, Paik would elaborate on the qualitative strata of boredom in an essay for Bulletin of the Institute of

Contemporary Art, entitled “Comparative Aesthetics—Cybernetics of Arts.” Summarizing the essay, Paik describes how boredom is experienced differently according to one’s class:

In 1967 I wrote a short histography about the aesthetics of boredom. Being an aristocrat

means being bored. Boredom and aristocracy have been correlative since medieval times

in the West and East. Acquisitiveness in money means buying a SoHo loft and saving

money. Acquisitiveness in time means loving only exciting stuff, a desire to be

138 Brochure located in Jean Brown Papers, Box 34 and 39, GRI.

74 entertained every second. If you give up acquisitiveness in money, you should not own

anything. If you give up acquisitiveness in time, you should be bored and enjoy

boredom.139

His histography applies financial logic to the evaluation of boredom and entertainment. Much like wages, they are measurements of time and money. The enjoyment of those states is expressed through consumption and depends on one’s relationship to capital, which is also measured by time and money. Sketching a genealogy for the “aesthetics of boredom,” Paik’s essay goes on to argue that class and nationality determine the purpose and style of boring music.

He classifies the styles according to three cultural traditions. The “Oriental tradition” aestheticizes boredom through rituals such as court music, tea ceremonies, and etiquette. Boring art in the “European tradition” is expressed as ennui. It surfaces in literature as well as in works by Wagner, Satie, and Yves Klein. Describing the “American Tradition” Paik lists, “Gertrude

Stein-Hemingway-Cage-Morris-Young-Dick Higgins-Fluxus-Jackson Maclow-Warhol-Primary

Structure. (including base ball, life insurance, stockmarket & drug).”140 Tellingly, this genealogy only includes the regional traditions to which he was exposed. Born in Korea, educated in Japan and Germany, and residing in the , Paik ignores the possibility of African or Latin

American influence. Doing so allows him to position his work in opposition to all three traditions and thus, the aristocracies contrapositive to his social standing.

Contrary to an “Oriental tradition” based on etiquette, Paik’s work aimed to shock and upset social niceties with lewd content. Disinterested in European ennui, it was temporally

139 Paik and Paul Schimmel, “Abstract Time,” Arts Magazine, December 1974, 53.

140 Paik, “Comparative Aesthetics—Cybernetics of Arts—Introduction,” vintage photocopy of typescript essay for Bulletin of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1967, reproduced in Nam June Paik: Global Visionary, 183.

75 acquisitive in themes that tend to invigorate: sex, violence, and technology. And while many of his pieces could be easily situated in relation to his American contemporaries or contained the pop and psychedelic signifiers that he references in parentheses, Paik could still not classify his aesthetic as boring. He discusses why in Calvin Tompkins’ 1975 New Yorker profile on the artist:

Oriental music was always for the aristocrat, was always rich man’s thing. Now America

has reached stage where most people are aristocrats. Much richer than Europeans,

anyway. Americans need not be entertained every second, because they are so rich. They

think art can be kind of extension of parties…America has in a way this very rich attitude

that makes boring, long music possible. But I’m not writing boring music that much.

The reason is that I come from a very poor country and I am poor. I have to entertain

people every second.141

Another reason Paik contended that he stood at the bottom of the social totem pole was because, like a clown, visual puns and slapstick factored into so many of his creations. While his work reinforced his social status, he also credited his social status as the creative impetus behind his work.142 "Perhaps my minority complex as an Asian or a Korean drives me to compose the very

141 Tomkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary (Nam June Paik),” New Yorker (May 5, 1975), 76-77. Michael Nyman quotes a letter that Paik wrote to Hugh Davies, dated May 6, 1967, in which he uses the exact same phrases to express the same sentiment: “Americans need not be entertained every second, because they are so rich. America has in a way this very rich attitude that makes boring, long music possible. But I’m not writing boring music that much. The reason is that I come from a very poor country and I am poor. I have to entertain people every second.” Nyman “Nam June Paik, Composer” in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelley (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), 173.

142 In the announcement for Paik’s October 1965 presentation of “Electronic Video Recorder” at Café Au Go Go, he explains, “I got this idea in Cologne Radio Station in 1961, when its price was as high as a half million dollars. I look back with a bitter grin of having paid 25 dollars for a fraud instruction “Build the Video Recorder Yourself” and of the desperate struggle to make it with Shuya Abe last year in Japan.” The announcement is in Miscellaneous papers relating to Fluxus from the Ellsworth Snyder Collection, ca. 1964-ca. 1987, Box 1, GRI.

76 complicated cybernetic arts," Paik jokingly suggested in conversation with .143 It is difficult to parse Paik’s serious opinion from the ironic generalizations he uses to satirize the knee-jerk reading of his work as “Oriental.” Yet the frequency in which he paired boredom or entertainment with class suggests that they were strongly associated in his practice and more on his mind than the relationship between boredom and phenomenology.

Along with the adage that Paik “humanized technology,” the narrative that interweaves his relative poverty with his opposition to capitalist values factors heavily into how the artist has been historicized. It is especially apparent in the catalog for his 1988 retrospective at the

Hayward Gallery. Throughout the text, Wulf Herzogenrath emphasizes how Paik spoke of his work as “poor art” and predicted that the electronic age “would be paralleled by the gradual freeing of the idea, the pure thought, from the material,” which in turn anticipated the ways in which arte povera, , and video art were thought to side-step traditional market- based notions of aesthetic value.144 Much less has been said on how Moorman’s concerns and style as a performer similarly arose from the confluence of boredom, danger, and labor issues.

For example, in “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” David Ross observes,

Charlotte was a perfect foil for your work because she was a pure believer. There was

not a cynical moment that she ever experienced in relation to your work. I don’t know if

it had something to do with being a Southerner, but it had to do with pure belief. And

your work had to do with the suspension of belief. A kind of pure cynicism of the poor

son of a rich family who is forced to be poor again in a rich country.145

143 Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” 22. Paik also joked that by Korean standards, his work garnered an especially low standing in society. “In Korea, being artist is bad enough… To be comedian is even worse.” Tomkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary (Nam June Paik),” 61.

144 Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” 23.

145 David Ross, “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 62. 77 Although Ross may be correct in deducing the source of Paik’s cynicism and Moorman’s unwavering advocacy of her partner’s art, his characterization precludes her equally critical engagement with the culture industry.146 He describes a relationship in which Moorman naively assists Paik’s work but is not recognized as contributing to—or even aware of—its political economics. (He labored to address serious economic issues while she provided emotional support, so the story goes.) Yet, as Joan Rothfuss has chronicled, Moorman’s biography is marked by money problems as well as antipodal positions vis-à-vis the cultural elite. Indeed, as a professional musician and the producer of fifteen Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York,

Moorman was acutely aware of the relationship between money, musical labor, and power. (“I wish Charlotte had been invited by President Ford to attend the economic summit meeting at the

White House,” Paik said in regard to her experience managing finances.147)

Moorman and Paik were also aware of the social hierarchy within the arts. As Paik explained to Tompkins, “we have expression ‘man of letters,’ same as here, and if a man of letters writes music or does painting, that’s O.K. But professional musician is nothing.”148 One can argue that a female musician in the 1960s was even less. Just as Paik’s “minority complex”

146 For Moorman’s part, “pure belief” was as much a belief in her own artistic labor as it was in the partner she deeply admired. In discussing the obstacles Moorman encountered trying to secure funding for her work, it is clear that she resented being excluded from classifications that allowed Paik to enjoy a successful career in the arts: “So I really didn’t fit into anything, and I was getting annoyed and offended and frustrated. Because if I’m doing something so important, why can’t [art institutions] find a name for it or a place for it or something… I’m not a painter, I’m not a sculptor. I wasn’t any of those things,” she complained. Transcripts for “A Panel on Funding and Alternative Performance Since 1960,” moderated by Michael Kirby found in the CMA. Ross’s interpretation of Paik’s “suspension of belief” is similarly off the mark. Although anarchistic and ironic, Paik was initially applauded precisely because he exhibited belief. “He performs with an amazing sincerity—as if it mattered that it, his will, be done,” wrote a reviewer for The Nation in response to Paik’s masochistic gestures in Moorman’s New York production of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mary Bauermeister’s Originale (1964). Faubion Bowers, “A Feast of Astonishments,” The Nation (September 28, 1964), 174.

147 Paik and Schimmel, “Abstract Time,” Arts Magazine (December 1974), 52.

148 Tomkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary (Nam June Paik),” 46.

78 may be used to account for both the type of work he made and its non-elitism, Moorman’s status can help us understand why she foregrounded the performing body to overwrite the men of letters. While recent literature has brought some attention to the economic factors influencing

Moorman’s methodology as a producer, her performance style remains under-analyzed in this regard.149 It is a crucial omission for, as I have argued, exploring the subjectivity of being a performer was key to how she radically interpreted compositions. Because being a performer is as much a vocation as it is a learned discipline or psychological state, acknowledging her economic reality helps account for how she arrived at such a style.

In 1983, Moorman was a panelist on “A Panel on Funding and Alternative Performance

Since 1960,” moderated by Michael Kirby.150 The transcripts make clear that—like Paik—

Moorman’s poverty and frustration with income inequality contributed to a cynical perception of the relationship between cultural production and money. Over the course of the conversation, she describes how lack of funding was a constant burden throughout her career. She begins by discussing how finding a performance space

is always a crisis for me and it still is today just as much as it was in 1963. If you’re

talking about my own performances with cello, tv cello, whatever… always crisis, always

difficult.

149 Recent literature on Moorman includes Piekut’s chapter on her adaptation of Cagean experimentalism, Rothfuss’ biography on the trajectory of her career, and the catalog accompanying A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

150 Other panelist included Simone Forti, Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann and Elaine Summers. The panel was “Part III” of an event organized by Daryl Chin. “The Future of Illusionism: a Proto-Didactic Multimedia theater-piece.” Part I was comprised of five scenes taken from American plays written between 1900 and 1950. Part II was a “performance sampler” of dance, film, video, and a Fluxus performance, and Part IV was an “Autocritique” between eighteen speakers. Panel transcripts found in CMA.

79 Even after securing event spaces, her labor was usually uncompensated. Moorman blamed this hardship on the fact that institutions were either “horrified” and “terrified” by her music or, more detrimentally, did not consider it to be art. Throughout her career, she was ineligible for grants because “,” “video art,” “festivals,” and art in “Public Spaces” simply did not exist as qualifying categories. According to Moorman, being perceived as lower class also made it difficult for her to find spaces and funding for the Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York.

Before either trailing off or being interrupted, she states, “The places I want are gigantic and wonderful, and those people are used to dealing with money and they can’t imagine my kind of…”151 The implication is that her projects were shocking to bourgeois sensibility not only in form but also because—rather than staying underground—they sought public prominence on a grand scale.

Although hindered by class-based aesthetic segregation, Moorman was a savvy networker who cultivated many alliances and stretched a tight budget to extraordinary lengths.

Only through barters and backchannels was Moorman able to produce such large and multi- faceted events. This usually entailed getting friends to let her use their office facilities without the company’s knowledge. “So you show me a businessman that can get those kind of things accomplished,” Moorman boasted,

I think we get so much done on very little money, and no businessman in their right mind

would begin to go ahead with something they didn’t have a little money for... I think we

are the greatest, what Elaine [Summers] says, the greatest business people in the world.

Can you imagine a poor, helpless businessman printing up twenty thousand posters for

151 While artists, printers, and friends were willing to work for free, the city often asked for up to sixty thousand dollars to use public spaces.

80 my Festival like I do without having a penny to mail them out? They would never do

that. But I have to: I’ve got to.152

Moorman’s description of herself and her mission is different from how, for example, the Art

Workers’ Coalition (AWC) labeled themselves and organized as workers during the same time period in New York. As Julia Bryan-Wilson makes clear in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the

Vietnam War Era, the social movements of the 1960s inspired a variety of artists to redefine themselves in relation to their artistic labor.153 Although their identification as art workers was at times contradictory, gender-biased, or oblivious of concurrent class struggles, it resulted in labor- conscious aesthetic practices and important gestures of political activism. Rather than invoking

Marxist rhetoric or analyzing her deeds within a larger social history à la Paik and members of the AWC, Moorman assumed the identity of a comedic scamp, outwitting a system that otherwise disfavored her gender, class, and aesthetic category:

While the printer has agreed to print the posters for free, I have to get them printed, and

then I go out and worry and, sure enough, Metropolitan Life and, sure enough, the Port

Authority let me sneak a few thousand into their machine and their meters. And some

other people, I can’t mention, because they’re sitting here and they’re involved with some

foundations, they let me sneak a few thousand of the posters through their mailing

machines: they don’t know they helped us, but they did: thank you. One year… oh.

152 Panel transcripts found in CMA.

153 Bryan-Wilson explores how members of the Art Workers’ Coalition (such as Carl Andre, Robert Morris, , and Lucy Lippard) were specifically invested in enacting a worker’s identity as a way to align with Socialist politics against the Vietnam War and the elitist art market. She also considers how such an identification effected their minimalist, , feminist, and conceptual practices. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

81 magazine doesn’t know it, but one year Newsweek magazine helped to pay our

mailing.154

These minor attacks against corporate entities and government bureaucracies contributed to the deceivingly wide-eyed and ultimately anti-authoritarian persona that seized and skirted responsibility for wrongful behavior in works such as 26’1.1499” and Opera Sextronique. A different role than that of a Socialist Party worker, it shared a thoroughly class-conscious understanding of artistic labor.

Evident in a practice that both adapted to and critiqued changing labor standards,

Moorman’s engagement with power entailed a complicated admixture of perpetration, victimization, martyrdom, and immunity. Artist and critic Jill Johnston’s obituary for Moorman describes some of the forces she was up against:

The symphony people told her she could continue with them only if she renounced the

avant-garde. Economic hardship followed, as she supported herself working late shifts at

a telephone answering service or playing in a balalaika orchestra. But there was a more

insidious, more dangerous price to pay for her choice. During the ‘60s, as the so-called

consumed our society and before the feminist movement had gained

any momentum, women were an easy mark for exploitation.155

Although the implication that Moorman was exploited ignores her contribution to collaborations, her agency as a rebellious interpreter, and the tremendous influence she had as a preeminent New

York producer, Johnston is correct in reminding us that working in the avant-garde was neither

154 Panel transcripts found in CMA.

155 Jill Johnston, “Remembering Charlotte Moorman,” Voice (December 10, 1991), 41.

82 lucrative nor fair to women.156 It is equally important to remember that the new way women were profiteered by counterculture occurred in tandem with the emergence of a new economic paradigm. In the 1960s, women reentered the workforce at the same time communication and computational technologies ushered the economy into the information age. Art and the marketplace both demanded administrative, creative, immaterial laborers who could readily adapt to new skills and services. In stride with these “occupational outlooks,” Moorman took on the role of a multi-skilled, freelance art worker, which was more precarious and less prestigious than her steadily advancing career in classical music. Neither career path treated women equitably. Resituated as a producer and interpreter of avant-garde compositions, Moorman was especially dispossessed, poorly valued, and seldom compensated.157 And yet, from these

156 Remembering what the critic, Michael Kaufman, described as Moorman’s ability to “disarm [sic] the powerful,” further helps dispel the misconception that she was manipulated by her partners. Kaufman spoke admiringly about Moorman’s insidious problem-solving as well: “She is a country girl in a big city who disarms the powerful with her sincerity and her obvious devotion to her art and her artists. Just as she maneuvered Con Edison into giving her trucks and generators, so she has beguiled mayors and commissioners, without money and without political influence…There were always obstacles, lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits. There was never any money, except for that shelled out by the artists themselves.” Michael T. Kaufman, In Their Own Good Time (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 192.

157 Moorman lost her steady symphony work after her court case and had financial difficulty throughout the rest of her life. “That case cost $100 for every square inch of bareness,” she joked. “Naked Art Form,” The Observer Review (September 29, 1968). As her cancer progressed, she solicited aid from friends and benefactors. John Cage and Yoko Ono were particularly generous with their financial support. Miscellaneous checks and thank you letters for various forms of support can be found in the CMA. Moorman and her friends also put together many benefit shows and fundraising campaigns, including “Multiples for Moorman,” which was an “art-by-mail” fundraiser for Moorman’s medical bills and living expenses. Robert Watts papers, Box 58, GRI. On July 1, 1979, Carolee Schneemann, Joe Jones, and Anna-Christa Funk sent letters to their contacts, soliciting financial assistance for Moorman in exchange for an original signed performance poster. See Carolee Schneemann papers, Box 38, GRI. On the suggestion of Jeanne-Claude, Moorman began making art objects in the early 1980s, which were collected by patrons and sold at auction. Videotaped interview in Weinberg and Paik, “Topless Cellist.” Her sculptures included Syringe Cello: Shadow of My Cello (1988), Cello with Child (1988-89), Omaggio a Nam June Paik (1981), and Bomb Cellos (Performance Bomb for John Cage Piece 26’1.1499 for string player) (1965, 1984, 1990). She also began selling arrangements of smashed instruments from performances of Paik’s One for Violin. Like Warhol’s later prints, these objects were akin to printing money. But they also express Moorman’s corporeal identification with her cello, avant-garde iconoclasm, and interest in transfiguring between musical performance and sculpture. Considering Moorman’s instrumental symbiosis, it is difficult to overlook their resemblance to her own, broken body and its quiet reconstitution as an object. They also remind us of her friendship with Paik and the role she played promoting his work. While most of Moorman’s sculptures were purchased by friends and benefactors as fundraising for her medical bills, they were also considered serious works of art. For example, in 1997, two pieces were included in Lea Vergine’s “Trash. From Junk to Art” exhibition at the Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. Moorman’s Bomb for Cage (1961-82) is a bomb affixed to the luggage rack of a red, Volkswagen 83 circumstances, Moorman developed a technique that was as contemporary in form as it was in its critical vantage.

In addition to learning how to read avant-garde notation and recondition her body to respond accordingly, Moorman redefined her occupation and re-marketed her services. As Paik made clear about his own work, entertaining was how she leveraged against financial peril. In addition to staging the New York Avant Garde Festivals in free, public venues, she performed her own work on television talk shows and spoke of her work in ways that made it accessible for a general audience. To be an “interpreter” now designated a co-author, musician, impresario, and media personality. To make “multimedia art” now meant to appear in concert halls, galleries, museums, television, and public spaces. This flexibility is characteristic of creative sectors in our current economy, where laborers are asked to assume many jobs rather than specialize in a single, traditional discipline. Dependency on a series of performance fees rather than a steady paycheck from a single institution is also characteristic of the “perma-lancing” through which so many creative workers currently eke out a living. Where a traditional musical profession rewarded the programmed repetition of mechanical gestures with stability and certainty, these new working conditions are thought to reward entrepreneurial risk (such as producing exceedingly tedious compositions) with a shot at gaining more visibility than a faceless symphony member. This trend recalls the boredom-intensity dialectic, in which tedious labor and risk increase the parameters of experience.

Beetle. Above Moorman’s signature on the bomb, she wrote “This bomb was performed by me 1961-1982 throughout the world in 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player by John Cage.” For Syringe Shadow Cello (1989), Moorman assembled dozens of black and clear syringes within the contour of a cello inscribed in a rectangular, Plexiglas box. The syringes give definition to the bridge, strings, and tailpiece and stab out of the contour line in imitation of cello movement or the pain shooting through her body. The piece was borrowed from the Luigi Bonotto collection. See Lea Vergine, Trash, from Junk to Art (Milan: Electa; Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko Press, 1997), 85, 145.

84

IV. Conventional Theatricality and Skill as a Working Class or Capitalist Virtue

Moorman and Paik’s class-conscious motivation to innovate and entertain may also account for the ambivalent attitude that they had toward skill. In the early 1960s, deskilling was a trademark of conceptually rigorous and socially conscious aesthetics, whereas displays of skill seemed to reinforce exclusionary practices through the logic of hierarchy. Rather than exhibitions of coordination, charisma, or technical ability, avant-garde performances were organized around more ostensibly egalitarian actions. David Tudor’s 1952 premier of Cage’s

4’33” (1952) is perhaps the best-known example of a celebrated musician publically shirking his virtuosity. Without proving to the audience his ability to read and realize complex notation,

Tudor simply followed the cues of a stopwatch to open and close a piano lid, thus demarcating the three movements of Cage’s noteless composition. The mundane gesture of opening and closing the lid appeared to democratize and decenter performed action just as aleatory techniques and mundane sounds democratized and decentered acts of composition and listening. It was quickly understood that commonplace, boring gestures and the task-like manipulation of objects were effective means to rid art of its individualism, misleading illusionism, and romanticization of artistic genius. Thus we see practiced painters and art school graduates, such as Alison

Knowles, make work like #2 Proposition (1962) with the feasible imperative, “Make a salad.”

Trained musicians, such as Takehisa Kosugi, composed pieces such as Theatre Music (1963), which simply instructs the reader to “Keep walking intently.” In dance, Simone Forti’s See-Saw

(1960), Lucinda Childs’ Egg Deal (1963), and Joan Baker’s Ritual (1963) are examples of how

85 focusing on the tactile manipulation of objects similarly elevated the rudiments of practically anyone’s moving body.158

Deskilled gestures were posited as ideologically progressive in content as well as form.

As acknowledged in my discussion of 26’1.1499”, repeating, isolating, de-contextualizing, or exaggerating quotidian routines reflected the absurd tedium of everyday life. In addition to satirizing regulatory behavior or celebrating overlooked minutia, it was a way to reject disciplinary training and the traditions, biases, and restraints that came with it. With skill removed, there was less occasion for subjective expression or the stratification between performing bodies. Works became more self-reflexive as a result and groups such as Judson

Dance Theater and the Living Theater were able to include members with no previous professional training. Replacing the gestures deemed valuable by cultural traditions with quotidian gestures suggested that the everyday activities of ordinary people were also full of intelligence, grace, and creativity. Yet there is something deeply melancholic in the campaign to deskill performance. In the service of a higher politic, deskilling asks the performer to alienate herself from a certain range of creative thoughts or capabilities. As with efforts to eschew subjectivity, it evens the playing field by sacrificing an arena in which one can exercise volition, agency, and reclamations of one’s identity.

158 These performing artists rejected virtuosity at the same time that many painters and sculptors sought to disengage from the capitalist art market by dematerializing their art. Ironically, new dance tactics such as the task-like manipulation of objects resulted in an increased production of objects and a focus on the materiality of bodies. Shannon Jackson observes that the difference in the artists’ relationship to materiality stemmed from two different interpretations of virtuosity. She explains, “Just as 20th-century actors and dancers and musicians were moving away from the lay definition of virtuosity to make work like John Cage’s 4’33”, Judson Dance Theater’s task-based dances, or the Living Theatre’s nonmatrixed performances, visual artists were moving towards the virtuosity that [Paolo] Virno encodes, developing virtuosic practices whose experiential and immaterial relationality provided a counter to the object-producing conventions of a visual art sphere.” To Virno, within performance, the artist is self- fulfilling yet needs an audience and “can deliver mediocre performance and still be a virtuoso” because it is about immateriality rather than exceptionalism. Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 56, No. 4 (T216) (Winter, 2012), 17.

86 Where in the arts, skill was associated with the stale ideology of and elite traditions, in other social sectors, skill and discipline remained important working class values.

Rather than reinforcing hierarchy, they are historically understood as tools for implementing positive social transformation. To Rosa Luxemburg, self-discipline and “the knowledge and skills necessary to direct socialist enterprises” were “socialist civic virtues” on which society’s moral foundation should be based.159 Even outside of Marxist rationale, civil society tends to associate disciplined skill with empowerment. Activists and aggregates of non-governmental organizations persistently manifest the interest and wills of citizens by creating training opportunities and nurturing a disciplined resistance to oppression. “The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously stated. In addition to its social benefits, disciplined skill is an expression of capability through which the under-privileged can gain recognition and experience self-respect unanswerable to one’s social standing. “One should radically reject the notion that discipline (from self-control to bodily training) is a ‘proto-Fascist’ feature,” Slavoj Žižek writes in his afterword to The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Rancière,

“Spontaneity and the ‘let it go’ attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it—those who have nothing have only their discipline.”160 By rejecting discipline and the skill through which it announces itself, artists attempted to free the performing body from the power that seeks to regulate it. But if discipline is how power forms subjects and conditions society, redirecting it toward the formation of empowered individuals and resistant

159 Dick Howard, Selected Political Writings, Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 369.

160 Žižek argues that disciplinary training is crucial to the “working class ideology of youngsters” in western inner- cities. “Afterword by Slavoj Žižek” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: A&C Black, 2006), 78.

87 collectives is also a stance against traditional power structures. This approach favors strategic tactics and immediate benefits over the ideal of absolute freedom.

Moorman refused to fully abdicate the skill she worked so hard to obtain. Rather than deskilling, she reskilled her classical technique to meet the demands of a conceptually and physically rigorous avant-garde practice. Just as Moorman was unable and unwilling to relinquish subjectivity, she valued the technical ability required to read complex scores and perform them with proficiency. Despite quotidian references, many of the pieces that Moorman performed included difficult maneuvers such as the rapid instrument changes of 26’1.1499” or the exceedingly slow gestures of Kosugi’s Instrumental Music (1965). In one version of

Instrumental Music, the performer takes two minutes to reach for the bow. As Moorman recalled, the action

requires an extreme control and that’s where my background Julliard School of Music

came in very handy, because I have an excellent bow-arm. I have got a complete

traditional career, and my good bow-arm makes it possible for me to make that

movement last two minutes.161

Playing compositions by La Monte Young and Yoko Ono similarly demanded the body control and internal clock of a professional. As Rothfuss comments on Moorman’s October 1962 performance of Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7, “Moorman quickly realized that the piece required virtuoso technique,” such as exact and inaudible bow changes and holding a perfect fifth, B and F sharp for an entire hour.162 The patient, unswayable position she held in

161 Quote taken from Paik and Moorman, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman” New York, 1974 interview in Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, 1968-2008, ed. Oliva A. Bonito (Milano: Skira, 2010), 135.

162 Rothfuss, 58-59.

88 performances of Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) similarly exhibit the resolute self-control of a well- trained performer.

Rather than advertising the aspects of avant-garde composition that could do without skill, Moorman touted its highly conceptual, effort-requiring technique. Whether the score called for everyday movements or extraordinary sequences, her captivating execution of tasks appeared mundane only insofar as they were basic job requirements. Even her laxness with

Cage’s time structure was not intended to repudiate the skill that 26’1.1499” required. Rather, the time structure was violated to better demonstrate her skill as a performative interpreter. This type of skill required flexibility, improvisation, virtuosity, physical dexterity, stylistic range, familiarity with contemporary issues, and technological knowhow.

Moorman’s conviction in the skill necessary to perform the works factored into how she promoted the avant-garde and its practitioners. Yet while maintaining the exceptionalism of the works, she eschewed the notion that advanced art could only be appreciated by a rarified audience. In fact, both she and Paik were fully committed to increasing access to the arts. Paik hoped to democratize media through interactive or participatory electronics. Moorman exposed the avant-garde to a wide and diverse audience through television appearances and by staging festivals in large, free, and accessible public spaces. In later years, her festivals also included virtually anyone who wished to be included. In fact, a common critique was that, by withholding curatorial judgement and letting less accomplished artists appear beside avant-garde superstars such as Cage, Ono, Morton Feldman, and the like, the festivals were inconsistent and cluttered with mediocre art.

Audience outreach notwithstanding, compared to many of their contemporaries,

Moorman and Paik preserved the technical, temporal, and divertive values of the music

89 discipline. Tomkins’ New Yorker profile on Paik acknowledges how his training taught him to manipulate time in the service of entertainment. “Visual artists—painters and sculptors—are accustomed to filling up space; they do not always understand how to use time… Paik was trained as a musician, however, and, no matter what else may be said of his performance pieces and videotapes, hardly anyone finds them tedious,” he wrote.163 This is not to say that the duo devoutly preserved music tradition or upheld its values. Their approach could be compared to

Merce Cunningham’s in that Cunningham incorporated chance techniques into his choreography but maintained body positions specific to modern dance and ballet. Many of Moorman and

Paik’s performances also operated between classical and avant-garde idioms, using musical traditions to radicalize musical culture. This is in keeping with the way opera revived the mythic past as it met demands for novelty throughout history. As Dolar explains,

on one hand, it presents a fabulous past transcending time, beyond time, a past raised to

the temporality of the fantasy; on the other hand, it invents new forms by means of which

the myth can find a dramatic realization and a corresponding new social function and

hence, in its very above-time nature, introduce new temporality.164

In the majority of Moorman and Paik’s collaborations, the past is irreverently reimagined for a conflicted counterculture. They aesthetically mined the past, simultaneously yearning for a romanticism pre-dating their era’s bureaucratic regime while trying to instigate revolutions in politics and technology. Against bourgeois materialism and prudishness, classical signifiers such as performance gowns, instruments, and quotations from standard repertory, are positioned interchangeably as satirical or reverent material. Regardless of such iconoclastic and sexualized

163 Tomkins, 46.

164 Žižek and Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, 6.

90 subversions of the musical past, they strived for the rigor, acumen, and complexity of traditional technique.

Moorman and Paik’s interest in meta-histrionics, entertainment, and skill gave their work a particularly theatrical panache that did not go unnoticed. In fact, in “Boredom and Danger,”

Higgins acknowledges that after leaving Fluxus, Paik redirected the principles of the dialectic into more “conventional” theatrical performances. He writes,

Most of the early Fluxus pieces could, conceivably, have been executed as absolutely

conventional music or theater, simply by ignoring the more extreme possibilities of the

structure and by filling in very conventional materials. One of the former Fluxus artists,

Nam June Paik, the composer, has been doing the latter in recent years, with very

interesting results.165

In the years between Paik’s 1964 disassociation from Fluxus and the 1966 publication of

“Boredom and Danger,” Paik’s most notorious performances were in collaboration with

Moorman. As we have seen, boredom and intensity remained as qualities of their work yet qualities that registered the occupational hazards of being an instrument for labor. Together, the duo drifted further from the mundane everyday, toward a personal and fantastical everyday, justifying the allegations of theatricality that distinguished their work from Fluxus

165 Higgins, “Boredom and Danger,” 180. Although Jon Hendricks included Paik in his Fluxus Codex of Fluxus artists, scholars such as John G. Hanhardt no longer define Paik through that affiliation. Just as working in West Germany was a developmentally crucial pit stop on Paik’s way from Korea and Japan to the United States, “today we see that Fluxus appears to have been the “junction box” through which Paik pivoted from the East to the West.” Hanhardt, Hakuta, and Paik, Nam June Paik: Global Visionary, 56. With Paik in mind, Higgins is careful to explain that while the boredom-intensity dialectic is most implicit in early Fluxus performances, it resonated with other 1960s artists and continued after Fluxus became most focused on Maciunas’ publication of art editions. Owen Smith explains that by the end of 1964, there was a great divide between Maciunas and “several original members of the Fluxus group, including Dick Higgins, , La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Wolf Vostell, , and Nam June Paik,” marking the reorientation of Fluxus from performance to publications and artists’ multiples. Owen Smith, Fluxus: the History of an Attitude (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 163.

91 phenomenology. Their presentation of authentically acted, transhuman performers also ran contrary to Happening’s treatment of expression as a readymade collage element and subjectivity as something unknowably mediated.166 This was by no means accidental: “Our work is definitively theatrical,” Moorman pointedly remarked.167

Despite praising Paik’s results as interesting, Higgins is disparaging when he speaks of

“conventional” theater as he is when voicing “dissatisfaction with the conventional relationships between the spectator and the work.” As opposed to Cagean theater, which seeks to holistically reunite music with the other senses, conventional theater entails the expressive, dramaturgical spectacle that the postwar avant-garde hoped to circumvent. It is also distinct from the avant- garde dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, who were aligned with an ideological disdain for mimesis, tradition, spectatorial passivity, and hierarchical power structures.168 Anti- theatrical discourse commonly speaks of spectacle and artifice as obstacles to an artwork’s

166 Judith Rodenbeck explains the similarities and differences between Happenings and avant-garde dramaturgy thusly: “The Kaprow happenings were composed through the logic of collage, that is, a logic of juxtaposition derived from advanced practices in the visual and musical arts. But their logic also drew from the theatrical models of Brechtian marking and quotation as well as Artaudian fragmentation and objectification. Where the producer of happenings differed from his theatrical colleagues was in the assimilation of these materials: the rhetoric engaged by the happening evinced a preoccupation with the status of affect (or expression) not as it was registered in the ‘unhappy performative’ of the theater, or even as it was ‘pretended,’ but rather as a blank token. The fundamentally mediated, split, antiempathic, and inaccessible subjectivity that produced, and was produced in, the happening was utterly counter to the “authenticity” of both charismatic acting and unmediated experience. …Though happenings were distanced from theater, they later wound up equally distanced from performance art, as the latter, in normalizing the performance situation itself, returned to a relatively unproblematized model of empathetic discretion between performers and audiences.” Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 173.

167 Quote taken from Paik and Moorman, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman” in Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, 1968-2008, 132.

168 Rodenbeck explains how synthesizing the analytic secularism of Brecht and mythopoetic of Artaud provided an alternative to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s predominant, naturalistic, Method Acting, which involved stimulation of “affective memory,” to generate the look or representation of the character’s felt emotion, extreme identification, and empathy. Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” Grey Room, No. 13 (Autumn, 2003), 63, 66. Indeed, by thwarting dramatic identification to ensure criticality, the dialectic between boredom and intensity resembles Brechtian estrangement. It also operates much like Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” which dissolved boundaries and ruptured one’s sense of self so that the terror of reality would become palpable.

92 political agency. As Jacques Rancière argues in The Emancipated Spectator, such a preoccupation with mimesis derives from a series of Platonic binaries that draw “equivalences between theatrical audience and community, gaze and passivity, exteriority and separation, mediation and simulacrum; oppositions between the collective and the individual, the image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-ownership and alienation.”169 While it might have begun with Plato’s condemnation of artifice, the social prerogatives that made performance- based artists seek distance from theater derived from many, interrelated sets of associations.

Shannon Jackson lists the following negative connotations in Social Works: Performing Art,

Supporting Publics:

Sometimes theater is about duration, an engagement with temporality that violates the

juxtapositive simultaneity of visual art forms. Sometimes theatre is about referentiality

or, worse, literality, a pursuit that compromises the goals of modernist abstraction.

Sometimes theatre is about spectacle, a discourse that supports fragile delineations

between a consumptive society of the spectacle and presumably anti-consumptive forms

of image-making. Sometimes theater is about situatedness and the spectatorial encounter,

an extended spatiality that unsettles the circumscribed spatiality of the autonomous art

form. Sometimes theatre is about mixture, an art of the in-betweens that violates

modernism’s “medium purity.”170

169 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 7.

170 Discussing the ambivalence over using the term, “theater,” Jackson writes, “upon encountering experimental works that re-use the fundamental registers of theater—duration, embodiment, spectacle, ensemble, text, sound, gesture, situated space, re-enactment of an elusive originals—it sometimes seems strange to find that “theatre” is still often the thing that such works actively seek not to be.” Along with the art and performance historian Patricia Falguières, Jackson suggests that even the unveiling gestures of the art known as “institutional critique” were theatrical at the core. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 20.

93 The escapist constructions with musical performances were rejected on similar grounds. As

Brandon LaBelle observes, Fluxus performances often avoided musical reference even while retaining the signifiers of a musical event, such as the stage, score, or instrument.171 Indeed,

Fluxus and Happenings artists such as George Maciunas, , and Jean-Jacques Lebel would distinguish their work from theater by emphasizing its predilection for actualities, truth, and real scenarios.172 Ephemeral propositions and exceedingly long durations were common strategies for subverting expectations and coordinating postwar art with the pace of lived experience. Rather than indulging in artificiality, illusionism, and imitation, their exaltation of the concrete was thought to disrupt cultural convention, offset the artist’s ego, and empower the spectator.

“Faced with the hyper-theatre that wants to transform representation into presence and passivity into activity,” Rancière reminds us that artists can alternately use theatrics to research

171 For a more thorough study of Fluxus’ relationship to music tradition, see Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International, 2006).

172 Happenings, Fluxus, and Nouveau Réalisme frequently disavowed the theatricality of their events by tracing their genealogies to Duchamp’s ready-mades, the surreal action behind Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings, the intermedia experiments of Black Mountain College, or the radically “natural” compositional strategies advocated by Cage. See, for example, Maciunas’ 1962 manifesto, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art,” which characterizes the artists affiliated with Fluxus (and their siblings in the ‘Neo-Dada’ family) as intent on showing events unfold in real time and actual space. The distaste for illusion also surfaces in Ben Vautier idea for “anti-theater,” which he developed in an essay titled, 18 proposals for the Stage. Published on November 24, 1962, Vautier’s proposal advocates for audience participation and “the discovery and application of the pure and true theatrical impact, that is to say the communication of a message or an idea through its true and real action and not a simulation.” Quoted in A Theater Without Theater, eds. Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Bernard Blistène, and Yann Chateigné (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007), 126. In Fluxus Théâtre written two years later, he continued to promote anti- theater, emphasizing that such a form should consist of actions contrary to the audience’s expectations. Artists like Jean-Jacques Lebel were careful to define Happenings by the ways in which they contradict theater: they have no score, are unrepeatable, and give a painterly treatment to materials, participants, and the environment. Arguing that they were the outcome of Surrealist alter-dimensionality stirred to life by action, he states, “Let’s be clear, the happening is not an “offshoot” of theater. It came more from Action Painting and from the legacy of Roberto Matta, who gravitated in New York around Peggy Guggenheim, herself counseled by Duchamp and André Breton… And this moment is of capital importance, since what it calls for, as a matter of fact, is an overcoming of aesthetic styles and categories but also because it projects us, both literally and figuratively, into another dimension, that of space and time, so that one might appropriate social space. “What’s Happening, Man? Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel by Bernard Blistène” in A Theater Without Theater, 37.

94 and stage possible, new visions of equality “where the manifestation and effect of their skills are exhibited, rendered uncertain in the terms of the new idiom that conveys a new intellectual adventure.”173 It was precisely this construction of a theatrical realm that separated Moorman and Paik from their friends who were driven to replace illusion with communal experience.

Rather than deploying tedium and intensity to augment the beholder’s perception of the real, experiential world around them, Moorman and Paik allegorized those very qualities.

Unconcerned with the stultification of spectacle, their fantastical performance of musical labor pantomimed conditions of immaterial production and exchange.174 If the rote memorization of traditional compositions created a disembodied experience akin to the alienation of industrial labor, danger was their way to reclaim the body, redirecting attention to its physical limitations, social prohibitions, and psychic impulses. Boredom was less a method of sharpening perception to see beyond the illusion, than a disruption in the professional entertainer’s production of affect.

173 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 22.

174 ’s Maintenance Art series (c. 1969) and ’s Trademarks (1970) are examples of contemporaneous works that similarly gave the laboring artistic body visible tangibility. Some 1960s event scores and Minimalist dance pieces were also reminders of the extreme physicality demanded by everyday tasks. Demonstrations of physical fatiguing vernacular gestures surface in the dance instructions Simone Forti composed while studying with Robert Dunn in 1960-61. While not pointing directly to domestic chores or occupational responsibilities, works such as Instructions for Dance and Three Telephone Events show the body engaged with the psychologically or physically taxing work of a post-industrial society. See Sally Banes Terpischore in : Post Modern Dance (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987) and Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater,1962-1964 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). See also Liz Kotz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetic and the “Event Score,” October, Vol. 95, (Winter, 2001). Other explorations of the economic values bolstering art production can be found in George Maciunas’ business model for Fluxus, entrepreneurial projects such as Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961-64), Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Gooden’s conceptual restaurant, FOOD (1972), and feminist artists, such as Laderman Ukeles, Mary Kelly, and Martha Rosler, whose practices created strong parallels between art and other forms of (often gendered) labor, service, or work. Like the services that workers would increasingly perform, process-based art in the 1960s also anticipated the post-Fordist working conditions that replaced older systems of capital, or object-production. Shannon Jackson even argues, “the history of theatrical labor has shadowed the precarious emergence of performance both as an interdisciplinary field of study and as the central scaffolding of a service economy.” Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” 12.

95 Thus, what most distinguishes the Moorman / Paik collaborations from popular anti-theater strategies was the telos of their technique and the regime of power that would presuppose.

While the adaptation of the boredom and intensity dialectic was recognizably contemporary, the extravagance of their performances was not—at least not to the avant-garde.

Judith Rodenbeck suggests that the wariness toward such theatrical displays in the 1960s had less to do with divisions between art and drama than with how works were positioned vis-à- vis modernity. For example, “the Living Theatre, in its struggle for authenticity, operated in a modernist, humanist, and epiphanic mode while the happenings, in their strategies of fragmentation and depersonalization and, most important, in their self-understanding, hailed their participants into the postmodern.”175 Moorman and Paik’s automatons performed a campy exaggeration of the fractured, mediated, and distant subjectivities seen in Happenings. Rather than an impersonal, interchangeable readymade, they would reoccur as an uncanny double—a part of themselves dangerously unhinged from who they are. By Rodenbeck’s standards, their collaborations carry neither the ideal, essential truth of modernism nor the participatory, depersonalization of postmodernism. Or we could say, they carry both the personalization of modernism and the self-aware “situatedness” of postmodernism, dipping into strategies from both paradigms to address contemporary issues, subjectivities, and aesthetic forms.

Opera has been described as similarly displaced from both the epoch that formed it and the epoch it would herald. Even as a product so correlated with the Baroque, it is argued that

175 Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” 60. Ironically, modernism was also what justified the denigration of theater within the visual arts. This position would be best articulated in Michael Fried’s infamous diatribe against Minimalist sculpture. Written in 1967, “Art and Objecthood” uses medium-specificity to justify his critique of visual art that triggers a theatrical, literalist recognition of the beholder’s temporal situation. Borrowing from Greenberg, Fried rightly (albeit fearfully) claimed that including “actual circumstances” in the aesthetic encounter blocked access to the profound, instantaneous ideal realm offered by abstract, modernist painting. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993).

96 opera was always stubbornly out of synch with history. Writing in their introduction to Opera’s

Second Death, Žižek and Dolar assert, “from its very beginning, opera was dead, a stillborn child of musical art…opera never was in accord with its time—from the very beginnings, it was perceived as something outdated, as a retroactive solution to a certain inherent crisis in music and as an impure art.”176 With a parallel interest in theatrical mixed-media and music’s self- reflexivity, Moorman and Paik appear anomalous to their era. And yet, their self-references and surreal scenarios were particularly responsive to a latent economic order. “What we’re doing is not ‘avant-garde’,” Moorman insisted, “our work is of this time. It’s not ahead of the time.

Therefore we’re not ‘avant-garde.”177 But to be of this time in the 1960s, was to bestride paradigms. Only by falling out of step could contemporaneity—full of new products and perennial inequalities—appear in its real, ambiguous, and uncanny state.

176 Žižek and Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, viii.

177 Interview with Fred Sterne, “Charlotte Moorman and the New York Avant Garde.” This conceit is repeated in Michael T. Kaufman’s explanation, “Charlotte wants a better word but hasn’t found one. Avant-garde, she says, means ahead of our time, ‘but how can things that are actually done be ahead of our time? Once they are done, they are of our time.” Kaufman, In Their Own Good Time, 190. Moorman made these statements after already naming her festivals the “Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York,” a name she chose to help manage the audience’s expectations. Critics Howard Smith and Brian Van Der Horst explain that she only used the term “to warn people they weren’t going to hear Mozart.” Howard Smith and Brian Van Der Horst, “The 12th Year,” Village Voice (Sept 15 1975): 40. She contended that in order to produce such large, public her festivals, “I have to label it for the press and communication and the general public, I have to categorize what we are doing.” Paik and Moorman, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman” in Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, 1968-2008, 132. Despite Moorman’s protest, artists such as Carolee Schneemann considered “avant-garde” a useful term to describe Moorman’s contribution. In a condolence letter to Moorman’s husband, Frank Pileggi, Carolee Schneemann wrote, “Thinking of you and Charlotte… that the Avant-garde is US and will always be US… the force field of exchange risk adventure situated by Charlotte’s unique will vision and grace merged with your own. After US – post avant- garde, post-modern………. where ever our group’s work takes focus and influence, Charlotte’s life will be central. I will miss her in the flesh; her Southern clarion call, insisting that we join together and shape events as time. Her absolute determination and clarity of purpose admitted chaos, uncertainty, inspiration and the co-mingling of group process which anticipates the only meaningfull [sic] direction for the future.” Carolee Schneemann papers, Box 38, GRI.

97 Chapter Three

THE FIRST NON-HUMAN ACTION ARTIST

I. Originale All Over Again

Moorman and Paik began their collaboration while Moorman was producing Karlheinz

Stockhausen’s Originale [Originals, or Real People] (1961) for her 1964 New York Avant

Garde Festival. She was relatively new at producing but well established as a wayward cellist who explored what I have referred to as the meta-histrionics of simultaneously being and being tasked to act like a professional performer. Undoubtedly, Moorman was attracted to how the roles in Originale are based on performers cast to play themselves. Combining the spontaneity of Happenings with the precision of serial music, Stockhausen’s score organizes their actions into “timepoints” or “timeboxes,” which are then read as notation.178 “Separated in time and space,” he wrote, “people’s actions and life events (nothing acts ‘as if’ [nothing is pretended], nothing is meant, everything is composed, everything means)—gathered in one room, in one time: the theater.”179 Performed three years prior at the Theater am Dom in Cologne, the 1964 iteration was to be its New York premiere as well as the crown jewel of Moorman’s festival. To restage the work, Moorman proposed New York counterparts for the twenty-one “originals” of its 1961 Cologne premiere. She substituted the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, for Hans G.

178 The composer, Jonathan Harvey, details the structure as follows: "It consists of eighteen scenes in the form of instructions for the dramatis personae carefully placed in timeboxes. Each character’s actions, in other words, must take a specified number of seconds or minutes [hence the frequent appearances of the clock in Peter Moore’s film]. These scenes are grouped into seven ‘structures’ which may be performed successively as ‘normal’, or simultaneously (up to three at once), or both." Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

179 Quoted in Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown, N.Y.: Barrytown, Ltd, 1998), 29.

98 Helms and replaced the stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, with the Happenings progenitor, Allan

Kaprow. But for the role of “Action Composer,” Stockhausen insisted that only Nam June Paik would suffice. “What’s a Paik?” was Moorman’s apocryphal response, betokening the humorous mix-ups between people and things in so many of their collaborations to come.

Paik’s performances had been referred to as “action music” since 1959, the year he violently tipped over a piano in Hommage à John Cage (1959). In Étude for Pianoforte (1959-

60), he infamously cut Cage’s , doused Cage and David Tudor with shampoo, and shouted menacingly at Stockhausen. Concluding the piece, he stormed out of the building and called Mary Baumeister from a payphone to notify the petrified audience that the performance was over. In the more minimalist One for Violin Solo (1961), Paik slowly smashed a violin with one concentrated gesture. Other Fluxus-affiliated artists also made work that fell under the rather nebulous action music category.180 Often indiscernible from event scores, their concrete, non-representational gestures and minimalist, open-ended forms carried a specifically and antagonistically anti-musical quality. Ay-O’s Rainbow No. 1 for Orchestra (date unknown), which uses instruments to blow soap bubbles and Robert Bozzi’s Choice 1 (1966), in which a performer hits themself with a cream pie have been considered examples. Young’s

Compositions 1960 series were centered on actions such as building a fire (#2) or releasing a butterfly into the performance space (#5). Composition 1960 #3 (May 14, 1960) gently and theatrically expanded upon Cage’s 4’33” (1952) by announcing “that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition,” which was otherwise void of sound-making. If

Cage’s three movements of silence provided an opportunity for free, undirected sounds to be heard, this action-based composition extended freedom to the listener, allowing human behavior

180 For more on the relationship between action music and event scores see Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1998). 99 to be as unstructured as the persistent and unpredictable aural terrain. However, Young’s excruciatingly loud minimalist works were too musical to be deemed action music, whereas

Paik’s unique blend of compositional freedom and aggression made him action music’s poster child.

Referencing all the damage Paik did to musical instruments, art critic Calvin Tomkins observed that, “in the pieces that Paik began to compose after 1958, there was often an element of violence, which was entirely foreign to anything in Cage.”181 The observation was shared by

Cage, who was often the object of Paik’s erratic violence. “It is hard to describe why his performances are so terrifying,” Cage commented in 1975, “You get the feeling very clearly that anything can happen, even physically dangerous things.”182 Seven years later, Cage was able to describe Paik’s work through his own exploration of non-western traditions:

In the course of my studies of Indian philosophy, I had become aware of the nine

permanent emotions of aesthetic tradition. The rasas. The four black: sorrow, fear,

anger, disgust. The four white: the heroic, the wondrous, mirth, and the erotic. Finally,

the one without color, in the center, toward which any work of art should conduce,

tranquility. The Étude for Pianoforte was definitely black, a mixing of sorrow, anger and

fear, and these three separate from tranquility.183

To Cage, the rasas distinguished Paik’s action music from his own attempts to compose actions void of self-expression. By contrast, they were black with angst and white with eroticism.

181 Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary (Nam June Paik),” The New Yorker (May 5, 1975), 48.

182 Ibid.

183 John Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space ed. Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 22. This text also appears as “More on Paik (1982)” in John Cage and Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, Writer: Selected Texts (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 155.

100 Although Paik’s eight minute, silent film of transparent film leader, Zen for Film (1962), accomplished the tempered emotional tranquility reminiscent of Cage’s 4’33”, in performance, he aimed to disquiet.184

Pathos aside, Paik’s food-flinging outbursts, scissor cut to Cage’s tie, and iconoclastic rage against fine European instruments redirected senses to the nonrepeatable sounds that arise when objects are acted upon in an unpredictable manner. His gestures during the original production of Originale were emblematic of both a black rasa iconoclasm and his interest in the indeterminate sounds that would result. He tossed beans into the air and onto the audience, very slowly unrolled a ream of paper that was covering his face and used it to wipe his tears before screaming and throwing the paper at the audience. He played tapes of recorded music spliced with screams and radio programs, covered himself in shaving cream and rice, plunged into a tub of water and then sat at a piano, playing for several minutes before banging the keys with his head. But Paik took a hiatus from action music after Originale’s score delimited his “authentic” acts to set and repeatable timepoints. If even head-banging piano keys and pelting the audience with beans could be contained by compositional order, the disposition proved exhaustible.

Though audiences still felt rattled, his actions no longer fulfilled what he believed was an essential “yearning or angst for the nonrepeatable.”185 As an alternative, Paik turned his attention in two directions: reconfiguring electronics and formulating a strain of Happenings where sounds would surprise people on the street.

184 “My 4’33’’, the silent piece, is Nam June’s Zen for Film,” Cage wrote. Ibid.

185 Arata Isozaki, “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 125.

101 Because Paik became known as one of video art’s founding fathers, his pivot toward electronics tends to eclipse his less etiological sustained interest in performance. In his 1986 recollection, the shift was as precipitous as it was techno-centric:

March 1963. While I was devoting myself to research on video, I lost my interest in

action in music to a certain extent. After twelve performances of Karlheinz

Stockhausen’s “Originale,” I started a new life from November 1961. By starting a new

life I mean that I stocked my whole library except those on TV technique into storage and

locked it up. I read and practiced only on electronics. In other words, I went back to the

spartan life of pre-college days… only physics and electronics.186

In the electronic-based work to come, action migrated away from his performing body. It now occurred through the gallery-goer’s participation or acts of iconoclasm directed toward objects prior to their display. Paik’s Objet Sonores (Sound Objects), Prepared Toy Pianos, and

Prepared TV Sets were inspired by Cage’s prepared pianos but appeared more sculptural, often adorned with , protruding with phallic shapes, or charged with electricity. More than neutral vessels to receive chance sounds, they recall the highly symbolic, obliquely political, and fetishistic attributes of Surrealist objet trouvé, such as Salvador Dali’s Gala’s (1931).

Erinnerung an das 20. Jahrhundert: Marilyn Monroe (1962), for example, is a dingy phonograph cabinet with smashed records and torn up magazines articles on Monroe’s barbiturate overdose. Rather than an attempt to expand the range of musical sounds, the piece speaks to pop culture’s mediation of sex, drugs, and violence. Equally laden with symbolism,

Klavier Integral (1958-63) was a mostly intact, prepared piano adorned with broken toys,

186 Quote reprinted in The Worlds of Nam June Paik, 34. In a letter dated November 14, 1967, Paik explains that his “action music” had become unplayable because his “physiognomy and psychology” had changed since moving to New York. Maciunas Archive, Box 31, GRI.

102 eggshells, a bra, barbed wires, nails and other sharp objects.187 In addition to denigrating the instrument through which classical German masterworks were composed, by wrapping it in barbed wire, Paik alludes to the concentration camps that postwar German culture was trying to see beyond.188

Paik made the more minimalist Zen for TV (1963) by placing a broken television on its side so that it displayed a single line of vertical light. For Rembrandt Automatic (1963), he placed a television face down, hiding the flat image it broadcast while drawing attention to its status as a light-emitting, three dimensional box. Participation TV (1963) and Kuba TV (1963) allowed visitors to adjust the televisuals by turning knobs and switches. In works such as

Random Access (1963) and Random Access (Schallplatten-Schaschlik) (1963), indeterminate sounds arose by inviting interactions with deconstructed sound technology. The former allowed visitors to generate sound by rubbing a magnetic tape player across strips of audiotape affixed to a wall. In the later, the audience could play a stack of records by manipulating a movable pickup arm.

Paik’s rough repurposing of objects should not be mistaken as mere anti-art or nihilistic destructivism. On the contrary, like so many assemblage artists of the 1950s and 60s, he redeemed the use value of broken things by bringing them into an expanded aesthetic domain.

187 Although this was not the direction for prepared pianos that Cage had intended, Cage eventually thought that prepared instruments were valuable precisely because they thwarted the possibility of intention, ultimately leading him “to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be.” John Cage, “How the Piano Came to be Prepared,” in Empty Words: Writings ’73-’78 by John Cage, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 8. Also see Julia Robinson’s discussion of Cage’s deskilling, unmanning, and disempowering techniques in “John Cage and Investiture: Unmanning the System” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage & Experimental Art (Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona [MACBA], 2009).

188 Wolf Vostell similarly used barbed wire to confront the Holocaust in early 1960s compositions. Installed at “An Afternoon of Happenings, Dance, and Music,” Yam Festival in South Brunswick, New Jersey, his TV-De-Collage (1963) was the result of smashing a whipped cream pie onto a television set, breaking its screen, wrapping it in barbed wire and then placing a magazine with an erased cover on a music stand so that the two objects faced one another.

103 Because “his pianos, incidentally, were old and irreparable, and his television consoles are caste- off derelicts from Canal Street, which will also play normally,” Allan Kaprow found Paik’s predilection toward destruction to be “philosophical rather than truly destructive.”189 Paik similarly contended that altering “the superficial forms of pianos and neck-tie of John Cage with various carpenter tools in 1959 and 60” constructed as it destroyed.191 He argued that because people treat expensive-looking things as sacred objects, they misinterpret different ways of handling them as a form of profanity.192 “I’m not ashamed to destroy the piano,” he explained,

I’m ashamed of the people who say that it is destruction. I want to give life to the piano,

once life is gone you can have a new one. I am just not natural.193

If it was “natural” to follow the market’s determination of an object’s value and lifespan, Paik’s rewired or deconstructed objects were uncanny. With the rasas that colored his previous actions, he killed the sanctity of classical and commercial products so they could return as art.

Although claiming to read and practice “only on electronics,” Paik was also actively envisaging how to transcend music’s current state. In addition to awakening the unrealized instrumentality of electronics and destroying the instruments of the elite, he sought to reincarnate music in its entirety. Evident in his retirement from action music, he was tired of compositions

189 Allan Kaprow, “Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space, 79. The article originally appeared in Electronic Art II, 4/17-5/11. 1968, No. 32. Galeria Bonino Ltd., New York. It was written while Paik was conducting research as an artist-in-residence on a Rockefeller grant at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, which Allan Kaprow arranged for him after his visa was jeopardized due to his arrest during Moorman’s performance of Opera Sextronique.

191 Letter dated November 14, 1967, Maciunas Archive, Box 31, GRI.

192 In Tomkins’ profile on the artist, he claims he “was not thinking about destruction at all” and that the misconception arose because “people have idea that piano is very expensive, very sacred.” Tomkins, New Yorker, 51.

193 Paik and Moorman, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman” New York, 1974 interview in Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, 1968-2008, ed. Oliva A. Bonito (Milano: Skira, 2010), 130.

104 that merely rearranged the traditional components of music without accomplishing what he referred to as an “ontological” revolution in the discipline. While Fluxus provided a platform for such a revolution, Paik saw potential in a theatrical structure more reminiscent of Happenings.

He explained his dissatisfaction and attempts to reorganize musical form in a manifesto titled

“New Ontology of Music,” and published in George Maciunas’ 1963 project, Postmusic.

“The beauty of moving theater,” as he called his new ontology, “lies in this ‘surprise a priori’, because almost all of the audience is uninvited, not knowing what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer.”194 As with Moorman’s burgeoning interpretation style, this attempt to “renew the ontological form of music” confused professional roles and identities to dramatic effect. Thus, when beckoned to play himself in Originale all over again, Paik brought an animatronic doppelganger, Robot K-456, the culmination of his post-action music efforts. He had just finished assembling it out of junk parts with assistance from the artist and engineer,

Shuya Abe. Now dubbed “the first non-human action artist,” the robot served as Paik’s sandwich board, understudy, and accomplice.

II. An Avatar of Fear and Failure

It was not rare to see automatons in 1960s Happenings. Consider “the sandwich man” in

Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Pat Oldenburg’s benumbed expression as she

194 Nam June Paik, “New Ontology of Music” in Postmusic, The Monthly Review of the University for Avant-garde Hinduism. edited by N.J.Paik, FLUXUS a publication, 1963, reprinted in Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, and Caitlin Jones. Global Groove 2004 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004), insert not page numbered. “Post” of “Postmusic” was a play on words. This Fluxus project used the postal system to distribute material that often referenced the body or politics. Because these objects were conceived of as sound scores, “post” also connotes an attempt to move beyond traditional musical forms as well as a system of redistribution, communication, rules, delay, and travel. Ina Blom considers Postmusic to be related to Danger Music. She writes, “if anything it invests indeterminacy with significance and emotion, trace and memory, all modified by possibilities of oblivion, failure and actual displacement.” Blom, “Boredom and Oblivion” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chicester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 77.

105 is manipulated by Lucas Samaras in Claes Oldenburg's Voyages I at the Ray Gun Manufacturing

Company (1962), Carolee Schneemann’s appearance as a nude sculpture posed like Manet’s

Olympia alongside Robert Morris in Site (1964), or the living doll in Marta Minujín’s La Poupée

(The Doll) (c.1963). As early as 1962, Susan Sontag observed how the genre was populated by

“anesthetized persons” and people treated like objects. Absurdly enacting “meaningless mechanized situations of disrelation,” these automatons made Happenings “a demonic comedy”

à la Artaud.195 “You giggle because you’re afraid,” Kaprow explained.196 Fear came from not knowing what would ‘happen’ during such opaque and confrontational events. More frightening than the threat of violence was that the genre’s unpredictable and mechanically executed processes could “hazard failure, the “failure” of being less artistic and more lifelike.”197

Moorman and Paik thus developed their partnership around an avatar of fear and failure.

Treated like a living member of their ensemble and frequently malfunctioning, Robot K-456 elicited nervous laughter while befogging distinctions between performed, programmed, and

195 Sontag deduces that treating people like objects came from a painterly preoccupation with material and disinterest in character while the desire to shake the audience through Surrealistic terror found affinity in Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Although the visions of somnolence were to be the catalyst of an Artaudian awakening, she detected a fundamentally satirical edge to such shock tactics. Describing how their actions appeared absurdly ceremonious and ineffective, Sontag writes, “at this point the Surrealist arts of terror link up with the deepest meaning of comedy: the assertion of invulnerability.” Susan Sontag, “Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York, N.Y: Picador U.S.A, 2001), 273. Other artists and historians have also cited Artaud as influencing Happenings. For example, Paik’s Hommage à John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano (1959) includes quotes from Artaud as well as the proto-Surrealist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. For his part, Cage credited Artaud as inspiring Theater Piece No. 1 (also known as Event), often considered the inaugural Happening. See Cage’s interview with Mary Emma Harris, in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 104, quoted in Rodenbeck, “Madness,” 66; Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2015) and Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence, 231, note 83. Douglas Kahn also finds that Artaud’s desire to free actions from the script and introduce non-linguistic sounds (such as primal screams) inspired Cage and by extension, the post-Cagean generation of Happenings and Fluxus artists. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1999).

196 Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” (1961) in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, eds. Allan Kaprow and Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 16.

197 Ibid, 19.

106 natural behavior. Commonly described as “skeletal” or with reference to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, its exposed electronics belonged to the démodé and lowly wastelands of camp and mass consumption. As with his earlier electronic sculptures, the discarded material gave Robot K-456 a nostalgic and disorienting quality. In postwar art that aimed for a closer proximity to life, such defunct, decrepit objects frequently stood for the contemporary human condition. Like automatons, the designation created an eerie coincidence of the lifelike with the lifeless. “I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary,” Oldenburg wrote regarding the Artaudian ambition of his gritty assemblages built out of New York detritus.199 The junk material in Kaprow’s early work has also been described as possessing a specifically human quality. As art historian William Kaizen astutely explains,

Kaprow temporarily revalues the throwaway commodity in his environments to create a

space where everyday life as planned obsolescence is brought under the control of the

artist. He creates a momentary space of anti-entropy in the life of the commodity, where

it is temporarily reinvested with value, only to be disposed of once the environment is

destroyed… What is "most human" in Kaprow's art, as he defines it, is its reflection of

this throwaway culture. This is governed not by Cagean chance but by planned

obsolescence, with its endless renewal of more of the same.200

Such interventions show culture to be nothing more than a pattern of consumption that runs across generations of fleeting commodities. At the same time, they suggest that the cycle of

199 Quote taken from Roni Feinstein’s essay in The "Junk" Aesthetic: Assemblage of the 1950s and Early 1960s (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), n.p. Oldenburg defined the “vulgar” quality of this aesthetic to “mean proletarian, ordinary, tasteless, but also instinctive (life affirming).” http://wp.moma.org/collection/works/37744?locale=en

200 William Kaizen, “Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting,” Grey Room, No. 13 (Autumn, 2003), 94.

107 possession and dispossession is precisely what makes us human and that to be human is to be sorely alienated from life.

To aestheticize junk in this manner was in keeping with the “not natural” resurrection that

Paik practiced when destroying instruments. But just as the junk parts would seem to have acquired new life, they would break down as if succumbing to entropy once again. Leaving the robot in a decrepitly cadaverous state extended the references to death and obsolescence even further. Jack Burnham provides a particularly macabre description of the robot, writing, “if the reader remembers the flayed arm of the cadaver in Rembrandt's Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson, the greenish-whitish illumination of the corpse, more real than the healthy observers surrounding the dissection table, then he will have some feeling for the electronic fragility of K456.”201 If to

Kaprow, refuse is the “most human” reflection of culture, this animated, electronic junk would naturally appear “more real” than the depiction of living humans.

Initially, Paik was not focused on the robot’s human dimensions. He thought of it as “a

Happening tool,” implying it would shape an art of both shock and disrelation. “I thought it should meet people in the street and give one second of surprise. Like a quick shower,” Paik explained, “I wanted it to kick you and then go on. It was a street-music piece.”202 To be kicked by Robot K-456 was to be incorporated into the performance. As historians such as Kaizen and

Judith Rodenbeck have argued, to be incorporated was to assume the status of a — one among others comprising the work of art. Being within the art and indistinct from its defining substance has a compromising effect on the autonomy of participants, much like how

201 Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, (New York: George Braziller; London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1968), 351.

202 A Conversation: , Douglas Davis, and Nam June Paik, videotaped by , black and white, sound, 34 minutes (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1974).

108 the autonomy of art would diminish if made equivalent to life.203 Rodenbeck suggests this parallel collapse into less autonomous equivalencies was announced in the very label given to these works:

The word happening, a gerund, suggests what Michael Fried might grudgingly allow as

"presentness," but it also implies a kind of passivity—"it is happening to me"; in this

respect, it implies, too, an interesting desubjectification: the presence at an event of an

objectified person. Indeed, one of the characteristics of happenings was their use of

people—audience and participants—as objects.204

Objectification was thus the unintended yet socially critical consequence of work that sought to replace passive spectatorship with active, embodied experience. Brought out to initiate an experience between an anthropomorphized thing and a reified participant, Robot K-456 was as much a Happenings tool as the performer who programmed its circuitry. Not just a portrait of the audience’s position, it was increasingly understood within the context of Paik’s ensemble.

Neither the street nor chance encounters proved necessary for initiating the uncanny pas de deux of object-figures. Encounters that Paik more pointedly staged for Moorman’s festival desubjectified and brought to life with equally infectious and unsettling pageantry. The robot’s

203 As Kaizen explains, “in [Kaprow’s] environment autonomy collapsed into participation based on the reification of the subject as an obsolete material temporally composited into the work. While Kaprow certainly intended to include his observers in the work, he could do so only by turning them into objects rather than active subjects.” Kaizen, “Framed Space,” 96. Rodenbeck has a similar analysis. When Kaprow wrote "[As] the 'found object' implies the found word, noise, or action, it also demands the found environment," he might as well have added "found people,” she writes. Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” 60.

204 Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allen Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings, 164-165. See also Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” 59. Rodenbeck concludes that although the participants were unified with indiscernible subjectivities within the Happenings’ collage, each person still brought individual and unpredictable form, motion, and perspective to the work of art. This allowed Happenings to explore the differences and similarities of collective and individual experiences.

109 solo act was titled, Robot Opera (1964), but the title was thrown around loosely.205 Between

1964 and 1965, a specific performance with Moorman, a concert of works by multiple composers or just Paik, and several street theater promenades all carried that name. What Robot

Opera more clearly designates is the operatic and Sci-Fi inflected style that both artists brought to their collaboration when the robot worked as much as when it failed.

From Monteverdi’s early Baroque L’Orfeo (Orpheus, 1609) to Mozart’s Classical Die

Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791), there is a long tradition of musicians playing musicians in opera. Like Orpheus and Tamino, they are figures who move between the sensible world and the invisible noumena that govern them, using music as a source of agency. Music doesn’t just express wrath in opera; it strikes the characters. It doesn’t express longing so much as it issues pleas.206 Not unlike action music, it is a sonic performative that self-reflectively displays its own effect. In so doing, opera reflects relationships between prevailing conceptions of power and subjectivity. As mentioned in my introduction, musicologists commonly posit that the tragically absolutist opera seria and democratically comedic opera buffa paradigmatically negotiate these relationships through role-reversal. Beginning with Robot Opera and the human cello in

26’1.1499” and continuing in works such as Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964),

Opera Sextronique (1967), Mixed-Media Opera (1968), and TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969),

Moorman and Paik interchanged with automatons and instruments as they too considered music’s performance of subjectivity and its fantastical staging of power relations. And yet, all accounts of Robot Opera have looked past opera to extol Paik’s aesthetic use of cybernetics.

205 Robot Opera is designated as having its world premiere on Sunday, August 30, 1964 in the full program for the Second Annual New York Festival of the Avant Garde. Program located in Box 19, Folder 12, Nam June Paik Papers, Nam June Paik Archive, (SAAM).

206 See Theo Van Leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. 1999).

110 They parrot his quip that Robot K-456 “humanized technology” as if it was a winning point in the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” (July 24, 1959), which measured the happiness and prosperity of citizens by their countries’ proliferation of newfangled appliances.207 I argue that while the machine’s kinesis demonstrated the commodifiable marvels of modern science, operatic motifs mocked the instrumentalizing effect of the Cold War’s proxy contests.

To claim Robot K-456 “humanized technology” supports Paik’s nomination as the progenitor of electronic media art. It shifts attention from the multiple, meaningful events that constitute the work of art to the single, accession-numbered artifact. Robot K-456’s actions go unanalyzed, which in turn glazes over the work’s social satire, bypasses the theories and traditions that occupied the artists’ thoughts, and grants Moorman as little agency as the non- living figure she played beside.208 This is a strange fate for a thing made to move not just

207 In addition to myriad articles on Paik, this catch phrase is used in the exhibition literature that has canonized Robot K-456 as the prototype for Paik’s subsequent series of robot-shaped sculptures. For example, in the catalogue for Paik’s 1988 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Wulf Herzogenrath states that the robot symbolized “the question of the human dimension of technology.” Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” in Nam June Paik Video Works 1963-88 (London: Hayward Gallery, 1988). Paik scholar John G. Hanhardt contends that Robot K-456 “emblemized Paik’s effort to humanize and foster an understanding of technology and the instruments of culture.” The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 37. Henry Martin wrote, “K 456 is a portrait of the soul of the new electronic man,” made “to contribute to a burgeoning flow of vitality that will one day lead to a humanization of video and satellite technology.” Henry Martin, “Nam June Paik: Video is Boring” in “Nam June Paik: Video is Boring,” The Electronic Wizard: Nam June Paik and the Invention of Videoart (Torino: Hopefulmonster Editore, 2003), 12.

208 Here we should recall that “K-456” refers to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-flat major, or more specifically, the number assigned to the concerto in the definitive Köchel-Verzeichnis or Köchel Catalogue (1862) of works by Mozart. The Köchel Catalogue was the first rigorous taxonomy used to catalogue an oeuvre that was fundamentally unstable, responsive to its social environment, indeterminate, and collaborative. Because it is organized chronologically, it draws attention to Mozart’s precocious and prodigious youth, precludes the possibility of smoothly incorporating amendment, and replaces the history of labor with the myth of effortless creative genius. In actuality, Mozart frequently changed pieces over time, site-specifically adapted works to meet the needs of certain concert venues, and worked in conjunction with his father, friends, students, and librettists. Works often remained unfinished on the night of their premier and included minuets that were given to him for carnival. Despite the collaboration and heterogeneity behind Robot Opera, it has similarly been misunderstood as a singular, static work of art, attributed solely to Paik and teleologically situated as a prototype for his later, electronic sculptures. It thus has more in common with the effect of The Köchel Catalogue than with its 456th concerto. For more on The Köchel Catalogue see James F. Penrose, “Mozart's Linnaeus,” The New Criterion (October 2007) and Sarah Zaslaw, “K is for Köchel: The Story Behind Those Mozart Numbers,” PRX Georgia Public Broadcasting, first broadcast January 27, 2006 over the Georgia Public Broadcasting network and rebroadcast in December. http://www.prx.org/pieces/12724-k-is-for-koechel-the-story-behind-those-mozart-nu 111 through space but through the fluid genres of Happenings, street music, and opera. It is a strange catchphrase to describe reification, resurrection, and transhumanist role-playing. Attending to what was operatic about the Robot Operas resituates their collaborations within an interdisciplinary aesthetic and geopolitical history that others have ignored. This operatic perspective reminds us that experiments with art and technology were often wary of its militaristic, capitalist, and otherwise dehumanizing deployment, even as they reveled in the baroque spectacle of new power sources.

To the extent that “humanizing technology” derives from Paik’s well-known (and

Moorman’s slightly less known) interest in cybernetics, it should be read as a duplicitous statement.209 Later in his career, Paik would even append it with the disclaimer, “I make technology ridiculous.”210 The same conclusion could be reached by considering what he called

209 While Moorman participated in many events that bridged art and technology, and notoriously worked with Bell Laboratories and Con Edison engineers on her festivals, her discussion of specific media theory is rather scarce. In 1967, Moorman and Paik both appeared in This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, which was the first episode of NBC’s “Experiment in Television” program. Moorman wrote McLuhan a note, thanking him for the invitation: “I am very honored that you included me in THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE (p. 96). I have been a fan of yours for years and hope someday to have the honor of meeting you and visiting with you.” The letter is held in the CMA. Moorman became interested in popular media in the early 1960s. The message was scrawled on an announcement of her June 12, 1967 performance on The Merv Griffin Show, with the times it would be broadcast in Canada inked in at the bottom. The same year, Moorman composed “An Artist in the Courtroom (People vs. Moorman),” which is the document that most explicitly explains the ideas behind her aesthetic process. In it, she accredits her work to McLuhan by stating, “this mixed-media is McLuhan itself.” Toward the end of the document, she quotes a long passage from McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p. The extent to which Moorman discussed electronics and equipment in correspondence and performance notes confirms her involvement in the technical details of her performances. She also experimented with electronics on her own, leading the musicologist, Benjamin Piekut to argue, “Moorman’s portable phonograph, tape recorder, contact microphones, mixer, amplifier, and small, homemade sampler indicate that Moorman was just as invested in the melding of art and technology in the 1960s as Paik and Cage were.” Piekut, Experimental Otherwise, 155.

210 The irony and ambivalence of the artists’ attitude toward technology is best captured in a made-for-TV interview with Russell Connor and Calvin Tompkins. Pointing to the surrounding televisions hung all around Paik’s studio, Tompkins asks, “This is all part of the process of humanizing technology, right?” to which Paik replies, “Yeah, I make technology ridiculous.” Following Paik’s reasoning, Conner rhetorically asks, “isn’t there the chance that we’ll be turned into machines?” The interview, which would go on to substantiate Tompkins’ profile on Paik for The New Yorker magazine, is captured in a 1975 television segment titled, “Nam June Paik: Edited for Television,” produced by the public television station WNET/Thirteen, hosted by Connor.

112 “the common denominators” between Norbert Weiner, Marshall McLuhan, and Cage. In addition to mixed-media, indeterminism, and the “simulation or comparison of electronics and physiology,” Paik considered Henri Bergson’s “conception of TIME” to be an important link within “the relationship of aesthetics and cybernetics.”211 Contrary to mechanistic perceptions, this is time conceived as a vital continuum. It is lived duration, wherein disorder is merely an order that one did not expect, much like indeterminism, entropy, and failure. For this reason,

Bergson (like Sontag) considered automatism to be the essential wellspring of comedy and a biting form of social critique.

In “Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” Bergson concludes that “it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh.”212 Published in 1900, “Laughter” bolsters

Bergson’s better-known theories on the "vital impetus" motivating evolution [Creative Evolution

(1907)] and how time is intuitively perceived through duration [Time and Free Will (1889)]. By exploring comic processes in relation to social structures and the collective imagination, his essay analyses the human response to elements that contrast the supple and plastic nature of life.

Whether mechanical impositions on fluid temporality, involuntary changes to rigid actions or ideas, or the appearance of puppets and replicas, “the attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine,”

211 Nam June Paik, “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” The ICA Bulletin (Bulletin of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London) No. 172/3 (1967): 8. Under the title, “Comparative Aesthetics—Cybernetics of Arts— Introduction,” a vintage photocopy of the typescript essay is reproduced in Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012), 183. Paik’s claim that “for Wiener indeterminism was entropy, a classical terminology of statistics, and for McLuhan indeterminism was the ‘cool media with low definition’” that are high in audience participation” is illustrated by how Robot K-456’s entropic malfunctioning and the unpredictability of human interaction gave Robot Opera its indeterminate form.

212 Henri Bergson, “Laughter” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), 71. Reminiscent of how Happenings are commonly described, it also discusses how the comic “oscillates between life and art” and that “the general relation that art bears to life” is enacted through comedy. Ibid, 74.

113 Bergson wrote.213 Far from reconciling humans and their inventions, “humanizing technology” functioned like role-reversal in opera buffa. As cultural theorist Mladen Dolar explains in

Opera’s Second Death, it is a fantasy that opposes the status quo by presenting a new subjectivity within a new temporality. “Its weapon,” he writes, “is to ridicule… those who do not prove worthy of participating in the common humanity.”214

III. Instrumental Substitutions

Like a candidate on the campaign trail, Robot K-456 stiffly waved, bowed, tipped its hat, and “spoke” by playing audio tape recordings of speeches, most notably, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. It could also twirl its breasts, gyrate its pelvis, and “defecate” a smattering of dried, white beans akin to those Paik often tossed on stage. Before bringing it to New York, Paik removed its sandpaper and flint penis, inspiring inside jokes all the more.215 Writing, “the

Robot’s shit is white in shapes suggesting vitamins, deodorants and the droppings of deer; the penis is the shadow of a finger; the vagina that of a whale,” John Cage understood the robot through nature and drugstore metaphors, along with metonymies for Paik’s entire body of work.216 (The shadow calls to mind Richard Moore’s iconic photograph of Zen for Film [1962-

64] while the whale’s vagina evokes the instructions for Danger Music for Dick Higgins [1962].)

In other words, Robot K-456 was both a biologically and culturally concocted figure, an avatar of

213 The emphasis is his. Ibid, 74.

214 Žižek and Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6; 27.

215 Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” 21.

216 This statement appears in the forward to the Galeria Bonino, Ltd. exhibition, “Nam June Paik: Electronic Art.” John Cage, “Nam June Paik: A Diary,” Nam June Paik: Electronic Art (New York, NY: Galeria Bonino, Ltd. 1965), n.p.

114 the artist himself. Because Paik threw beans at the audience during Originale and instructs the performer to do the same in Simple (1962), Wulf Herzogenrath contends that the robot’s excretion of beans suggested that it was taking over Paik’s job.217 Indeed, Paik had hoped it would.

Jokes about workers replaced by their tools or made robotic tapped an anxiety circulating since the dawn of industrialization. The rapid and round-the-clock demands of insatiable productivity had long required conformity to the mechanical movements of industrial machines while new technologies threatened replacing laborers altogether. In the 1960s, computational machines presented similar ultimatums. Concurrently, an influx of minority and women workers

(not unlike Paik and Moorman) pressurized the job market while reigniting a Marxist discourse on how capitalism objectifies. But where production was seen as the agent of transfiguration between humans and objects under capitalist economics, malfunction was the agent of transfiguration within the Robot Operas. Emerging from a “renewed ontology” where “surprise a priori” un-identifies participants, Robot K-456 was all but designed to stop working and it contributed to the confusion of roles desired by Moorman and Paik when it did.

The robot was scheduled to play a duet of Stockhausen’s notoriously complex Plus-

Minus (1963) with Moorman during an Originale timepoint.218 Depending on the realization of the polyvalent process composition, notes proliferate, pass into undifferentiated sound, or cease.

Paik adapted the ideogrammatic score for cello, aiming for “glissandos and pizzicatos of every

217 Herzogenrath, “The Robot K-456, 1963/64,” 21.

218 To clarify, Plus-Minus is a composition autonomous from Originale that Moorman played during a single timepoint in fulfillment of her role as the string player in Originale. Stockhausen’s (1958-60) is the electronic and instrumental piece performed by several musicians that threads throughout the simultaneous activities and competing sounds comprising Originale.

115 variety and velocity,” the former played by Moorman and the later by the robot.219 Although the duet was successfully executed when performed at the Philadelphia College of Art the following year, Robot K-456 broke down the night before it was to appear in Originale and was replaced by Paik on piano. “Stage fright” was the explanation printed in reviews.220

Substitutions and transfigurations continued throughout their European tour the following spring. Somewhere along the road, Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns became a piece in which Moorman sat on a kneeling man, draped in a transparent plastic , with the endpin of her cello in the mouth of a man lying face up on his back.221 Mid-way through playing The Swan from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, Moorman would turn from acting like her cellist self to portraying the swan, submerging herself in a barrel of water and returning to complete the composition dripping wet. Whenever Robot K-456 appeared alongside Moorman, this piece was referred to as Robot Opera. For example, Moorman’s early press material states “in ‘ROBOT

OPERA’, Ms. Moorman sits on the back of a man (a human chair), playing her cello, while

‘ROBOT K-456’ (a 20-channel radio control, 10-chanel recorder, 6-foot tall Robot) leads the

219 This explanation of Paik’s realization appears in detailed program notes for a concert at the Philadelphia College of Art on Friday, February 26, 1965 located in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, Series Folder I993, The .

220 “Friends of the creator, Nam June Paik, a life-blood member of the avant-garde festival as manipulator, composer, performer and presence, would ask how “she” was. “Is she well again?” one said in reference to a breakdown the night before during which Mr. Paik had bemoaned, “She’s all right at home…” and friends had suggested stage fright as the reason for her balking in public.” This review of Robot Opera’s August 30th premiere is from the September 28, 1964 issue of The Nation. Newspaper clipping in and Jean Brown papers, Box 265, GRI and reprinted in the flyer issued for the World Premiere of Paik’s Robot Opera (1964), New York City; in Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p. Also see Leighton Kerner, “Buzz, Buzz,” Village Voice (September 3, 1964), 15.

221 The Fluxus affiliated avant-garde musician and intermedia artist, Joe Jones, often volunteered to be the man on his back. According to Moorman, the incongruity of the classical music and absurdist, sexual gestures was Paik’s way of demonstrating that “sex and spirituality don’t mix.” Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p. Later in life, she would dispute that position, stating, “that was his philosophy and I think he’s totally wrong.” Audio recording M33 in CMA.

116 procession with Mr. Paik operating the Robot’s remote controls.”222 Similarly, in the forward to the Sotheby’s catalogue for Moorman’s estate sale, Pierre Restany remembers meeting Moorman when she “was still recovering from her latest challenge of having performed Robot Opéra [sic] by Paik draped only in transparent plastic which hid none of her charms, having left her costume at home.”223 Here, “Robot Opéra” is used in reference to the first time Moorman performed

Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns in a transparent garment. While her costume was left behind, her role as a musician was as pronounced as ever. She plays the music until she becomes the music. Meanwhile, an art object jerks to life and takes the lead.

In addition to this arrangement of human seat, human endpin stopper, swan human, and robot musician, they were to perform Moorman’s increasingly radical interpretation of

26’1.1499” at “24 Stunden” (also referred to as “24 Hour Happening” or “24 Hours”), a Fluxus

Happening lasting that long at Rolf Jährlings’ Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, June 5th through the

6th.224 As we have seen, playing Paik as a “human cello” was one of Moorman’s earliest and most presumptuous annotations to the score, which Cage accurately disparaged favored “actions rather than sound events in time.”225 Indeed, by seizing indeterminacy as an opportunity to

222 Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p. Other publicity material displays a similarly synonymical treatment of the two works. Photo-documentation taken at Judson Hall during the Second Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York shows Moorman performing seated on a man on his hands and knees, with no robot in sight. Nor does it appear in Peter Moore’s August 17, 1964 photographs of a rehearsal in Paik’s 359 Canal Street loft and where she is rehearsing Robot Opera with Robot K-456, Moorman is seated on a wooden chair rather than a human.

223 Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Including Property from the Charlotte Moorman Estate, London Thursday 24th June 1993, 113.

224 Other participants included Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock, Ute Klophaus, Eckart Rahn, Tomas Schmit, and Wolf Vostell. Moorman would later use the concept for a day-long performance program in her fifth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. The festival was held on the John F Kennedy ferry boat and Whitehall terminal and was advertised as “24 hour performances” from Sept 29, 11:30 pm through September 30, 11:30pm 1967. See festival ephemera in Jean Brown papers, Box 35, GRI.

225 Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” 24. In this essay, Cage assumes that the sequence was Paik’s idea. For more on what Moorman considered “a political message and definitely a social message” within her interpretation of 26’1.1499”, see “Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?” Source: Music of the Avant Garde 3, no.2 (6) (July 1969): 90, and reprinted in Piekut, Experimentalism, 165. Also see Larry Miller, Charlotte Resounding, 117 amplify the political resonance of objects, Moorman favored the agency that music has in opera and questioned whether performers (always marked by gender, class, and ethnicity) could ever actualize sound events from a position of detached neutrality.

During “24 Stunden,” actions reshuffled even more roles and instruments than

Moorman’s annotated score intended. As Gisela Gronemeyer recalls,

Nam June Paik’s body, as a human cello, was an important part of Moorman’s

interpretation of the piece. As part of their first European tour, the duo participated in the

famous twenty-four hour Fluxus Artists event at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. But

when the time came for Cage’s piece to be performed, Moorman was fast asleep—she

had taken tranquilizers to calm her nerves. And when she woke up at 2 a.m., she

performed the piece without Paik.226

According to Paik, a Midsummer Night’s Dream type series of role-reversals turned the performance into a satire of their own affinities:

Charlotte and I wanted to play a piece by John Cage, but shortly before we were due to

begin, Charlotte fell into a sleep from which she was reluctant to awake, no matter how

much I shouted and shook her. At my wit's end, I pretended to sleep while playing La

Monte Young's piano pieces. Charlotte woke up at 2 in the morning, and they tell me she

delivered a wonderful performance.227

color, sound, 40 minutes (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1998) and Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014), 114.

226 “Seriousness and Dedication. The American Avant-garde Cellist Charlotte Moorman,” Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology, n.p.

227 Quoted in “24-Hour Happenings,” credited to Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archive Sohm, Stuttgart, Medien Kunst Netz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/24-h-happening/, (May 3, 2013).

118 Consider the operatic logic: Paik is supposed to perform as Moorman’s instrument but she breaks down, psychologically and then physically. Paik proceeds to imitate Moorman by pretending to sleep. At the same time, he is staging the musical effect of Minimalist compositions, which were perceived as so powerfully boring, they could even put the musician to sleep. When Moorman wakes, Paik is absent (perhaps really sleeping) and so she substitutes his human body for the real instrument. As in opera buffa, these transpositions make fun of cultural expectations while modeling the possibility of more equitably unfixed and interchangeable subjectivities. And much like Robot K-456’s earlier bout of stage fright, the performers’ internal indeterminacy rebels against the protocols of production.

In both Plus-Minus and “24 Stunden,” role-reversal occurs when a body is no longer able to function according to program. The substitutions suggest that bodies are both expendable and internally powered by a force that is contrary to that which governs its performance. These attributes are characteristic of what the musicologist Gary Tomlinson refers to as

“postmetaphysical opera” and contends was a development that delivered the operatic tradition into the modern age. In such psychologically charged performances, subjects interact “within a flux of forces that determine and dissolve bodies. It is an opera that stages not the invisible soul and its myths, but the subject’s embodiment of its most basic, forceful drives,” he writes.228

Although still aligned with fantasy and the scrim of confusion that dreams drape over scenarios, sleep in Moorman and Paik’s postmetaphysical operas is not a devise to vindicate the otherworldliness of the supersensible. Rather, in keeping with Tomlinson’s nomenclature, it is

228 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999), 126.

119 grounded in the intersubjectivity, non-universalist psychology, and political sociology of the mundane—and it proves to be an important actor within everyday power struggles.

Amidst global trends toward round-the-clock consumerism, increased working hours, constant surveillance, and interminable control, art critic Jonathan Crary, has recently argued that

In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in

production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the

demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed

from a morass of simulated needs, subsist as one of the great human affronts to the

voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.229

The economic history supporting Crary’s conclusion chronicles the forces of corporeal dissolution that postmetaphysical opera takes as its plot. He explains that when industrialization first replaced artisanal, craft labor, workers could derive a sense of personal accomplishment from operating machinery despite the increase in tedium and repetition. Because their satisfaction diminished with the dawn of large factories, modern cultural values encouraged workers to identify with machines and receive “individual gratification from emulating the impervious rhythms, efficiency, and dynamism of mechanization.”230 The machine identification in Moorman and Paik’s work is a grotesque illustration of this effort. But by imagining the machine to be recklessly unreliable and personified with subconscious desires, such identification does not guarantee a more instrumentalized work force. Rather than dutifully industrious, the subjectivity they assume is uncanny, unconscious, and dreaming. As Crary’s argument makes clear, therein lies kernels of resistance. “Paradoxically, sleep is a figure for a

229 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 10.

230 Ibid, 57.

120 subjectivity on which power can operate with the least political resistance and a condition that finally cannot be instrumentalized or controlled externally—that evades or frustrates the demands of global consumer society,” he writes.231 Against capitalist objectives, sleepers cannot be fixed in binary that erect impermeable divisions between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, or, one can infer, the subject and the instrument.

At their breaking point, the roles within Robot Opera dissolve into one, rendering the workers and their machine utterly interchangeable. By performing and then failing to perform tedious tasks, the artists and the robot incorporated the boredom and intensity dialectic into their own bodily systems. As in Fluxus compositions that are so boring they risk meaninglessness, here the musician and the machine become aesthetic precisely because they threaten to make nothing happen. Rather than intensifying the mundane environment, these gestures draw attention to capitalism’s demand for high productivity performance. But how evasive or disruptive were the artists’ failures to perform when indeterminate surprises and redistributed roles are what constitute music’s renewed ontology? “They thought it was a great Minimal piece,” joked Paik, acknowledging the impossibility of failing to produce art within the

Happening’s round-the-clock conflation of art and life.232

The satisfying resolution to these unpredicted calamities confirmed Kaprow’s maxim that

“when something goes ‘wrong,’” in Happenings, “something far more ‘right,’ more revelatory, has many times emerged.”233 This type of resolution reveals absolutism in opera seria because

231 Ibid, 24.

232 Interview recording M35 in CMA.

233 Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” (1961), 20.

121 the power structure remains in place despite role-reversals.234 For example, exchanges of deific acts by humans for humane acts by gods or kings ultimately reinforce the ruler’s supreme power.

The role-reversals in “24 Stunden” similarly revealed an inescapable governing system, suggesting that the contemporary paradigm is comparably absolutist. Yet the disruptive,

Bergsonian humor also mocked the system’s rigidly mechanistic temporality, turning tragedy into a punch line.

It is not only the content of ridicule that makes it transgressive. It also attacks social norms by dislocating what is considered the everyday. According to Bergson, “comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams,” in that it seeks “a pretext for realizing its imaginations” and allows “the strange fusion that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only one and yet remain distinct.”235 His reasoning recalls opera buffa’s mode of staging its own power as well as the transmutations it initiates between characters. To experience its humor is to recognize how social laws are contrived, inconsistent, and breakable. Moreover, humor—like the Platonists’ understanding of spectacle—has a contaminating effect. It triggers an involuntary response in the audience that mirrors the mechanical comic fodder. As we laugh at the out-of-sync object or artificial attempts to control life, we reveal our own mechanical

234 According to Dolar, only when a human subject acts selflessly deific will a god-like character (such as a deity, king, or other ruler) respond to their appeal with human mercy. In order to forgive, the ruler bends the very laws it devised, demonstrating supreme power by being impervious to its own rules, and at the same time acting human or humanly. “By putting its own power and its effect musically on the stage, it becomes apparent how it exceeds beyond social and rational structures. It structures the nonstructurable and represents the nonrepresentable,” he writes. Žižek and Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, 10; 20.

235 Bergson, 180, 183. Interestingly, Sontag spoke of dreams to describe the temporality of Happenings: “The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation; this is the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Dreams have no sense of time. Neither do the Happenings. Lacking a plot and continuous rational discourse, they have no past. As the name itself suggests, Happenings are always in the present tense.” Sontag, “Happenings,” 266.

122 impulses. Yet in doing so, our laughter “indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life,”

Bergson claimed.236

The same conclusion was reached by Sigmund Freud, who Moorman and Paik lauded most directly in their more pointedly scandalous opera, Opera Sextronique. To Freud, jokes publicize the natural affinity between social transgression and the unconscious mind. Like

Bergson, he believed that absurd juxtapositions, visual puns, and performative gags breach social prohibitions, but are not funny onto themselves. Rather, it is the automatic process that is funny and that triggers laughter while the conscious is distracted from its restrictive habits.237 With conscious rational absent from the funny thing and the receiver of the joke, humor betrays the mechanical nature of the human psyche and seeks pleasure in defiance of external rules.

To Jean-Jacques Lebel, the conflict between pleasure and rigidity in Robot Opera was what made it most like a subgroup of 1960s Happenings. He lists it among work such as

Tetsumi Kudo’s Philosophy of Impotence (1962), Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964),

Daniel Pommereulle’s Kiss Me (1964), and and ’s Spaghetti

Sandwich (1971) in which capitalism thwarts desire:

This set of contradictory and heteroclite events could have given the impression of being

motivated by shared concerns. But which ones? In very different modes and in barely

compatible languages, this is, perhaps, the question of the autonomy of desire and of the

236 Bergson, 190.

237 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 187. In addition to its subversiveness, humor was another way that Moorman and Paik could demonstrate their skill. According to Freud, a joke is not funny as an object to contemplate, but as a cunning and well-performed procedure. In other words, the unconscious mind that revels in subversion also appreciates technique.

123 impossibility of its fulfillment within the context of capitalist society which has not

ceased to be posed.238

Indeed, Moorman incorporated humor into her interpretations precisely because it allowed counter-culture to interlope into larger social milieus. “Humor is wonderful,” she stated, “many laugh when they have not been exposed to this music.”239 Signaling what was to Bergson “a special lack of adaptability to society,” laughter was one of the ways the work she performed positioned the body in opposition to sociality.240 Visions of rigid movement or animation devoid of life registered as funny because they resembled a familiar modern predicament.241 Whether we laugh at the inelasticity of human nature or its submission to automatism, either extreme appears as a threat to the social order. The former reminds us of fundamentalism, the later of

238 “Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel by Bernard Blistène” in A Theater Without Theater, ed. Manuel J. Borja- Villel et al. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 43.

239 John P. Corr, “Pistol-Totin’ Cellist Waters Down Crowd at ‘Smashing’ Concert,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (Sat Feb 27, 1965): 15. Moorman enjoyed the humor and seriousness of her work even when the audience did not. “If I feel I’ve done it well, then that’s enough for me regardless of the public’s reaction. I do take myself seriously but I never lose my sense of humor,” she stated. Julie Levy Naxos, “Moorman Gives Violoncello Innovative Treatment,” The Daily Journal (Wed April 9, 1975): 17.

240 Bergson, 146.

241 According to Bergson, disinterest or the absence of feeling is what turns drama into comedy and gives it its intellectual, social utility. Ibid, 153-154. Photography is also understood to reveal incompatibility between Modern technology and life as we know it. For example, the film scholar, Tom Gunning, relates the absurdity of humans acting like machines to the manner in which instantaneous snapshots are comically separated from the flow of time. He writes, “What appears in the suspension of motion was not the action of bodies, but the interruption of action supplied by the machine, whose very improbability triggers the impulse to laugh…Thus the absurdity of a body in an instantaneous photograph testifies to the way the suspension of time and movement into a [sic] immobile image partakes of the machine, not the human and that in fact the recognition of the humor involved in such images, on the popular level at least, testifies to an intuitive grasp of Bergson’s conception of movement.” Tom Gunning. “The “Arrested” Instant: Between Stillness and Motion,” in Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon. Between Still and Moving Images (New Barnet, Herts, UK: John Libbey Pub. Ltd, 2012), 26. Similarly, Roland Barthes famously claims that death permeates the photographic medium, arresting a person’s animation within a static depiction. As in the comic compulsion to laugh, photography is imbued with rebellion for it stops brutal, industrial chronology in its tracks. Of course, to Barthes, photography would mainly present us with a dark comedy and its morbidity is also correlated with performative elements: theater’s taboo associations with death masks and reviving the dead as characters. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

124 thoughtless habits. As an agent of irrational disorder, humor is a form of social critique, allowing us to escape social regulation, if only in our dreams.

IV. The Technological View of Boredom and Intensity

Another comically thwarted disruption occurred during the performance of Robot Opera at Galerie René Block’s Sixth Soirée in Berlin on June 14th. This iteration combined “moving theater” with Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns. After The Swan was played, Robot K-456 lead a procession toward the Berlin Wall and attempted to enter East Berlin through the

Brandenburg Gate.242 “Oh god, we had such trouble here!” Moorman recalled,

We were at Brandenburg Gate and we nearly got put in the Russian prison. The

Russians, English, and the Germans all control this… The Robot took a walk and I

played cello and god did they come out with their machine guns after us!243

A British news report was as unamused as the authorities who aimed machine guns at the artists:

Pop Art in Berlin. A robot, broadcasting what is pompously described as ‘instructions to

humanity.’ Can we be so lacking as we need a machine to give us guidance? Anyway,

the robot needed a bit of guidance itself.244

These “instructions to humanity” were but one of Moorman and Paik’s campy winks to science fiction.245 Cagean scores performed cacophonously with souped-up instruments resembled the

242 Henry Martin, “Nam June Paik: Video is Boring,” 11.

243 Interview recording M35 in CMA.

244 “There’s a Message There Somewhere,” June 24, 1965 in The British Movietone Digital Newsreel Archive, http://www.movietone.com/N_search.cfm.

245 Sci-Fi was an especially enticing genre of popular culture to the Pop artists associated with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Royal College of Art in the 1950s and 60s. Examples of robotic figures and technological fantasies can be found in Eduardo Paolozzi’s City of the Circle and the Square (1963) and Tortured Life (1965) and Joe Tilson’s Space Trophy (1962) and Astronaut Puzzle (1963) among many other space-age 125 complicated yet ascetic charts and inscrutable machines signifying advanced knowledge in movies about warring worlds, body-snatchers, humanoids, and puppet people.246 And in Sci-Fi as in Robot Opera, anxiety about the instrumentalizing effects of modern life was coupled with anticipation of our collective extinction. Sontag makes this claim for Sci-Fi in “The Imagination of Disaster,” written the year Robot K-456 debuted. In it, she fleetingly compares the genre with

Happenings on the grounds that both are “concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess.”247 Although her comparison ends there, the rest of her analysis describes how the most popular form of cinematic terror balances reminders of nuclear catastrophe with indications that the threat is so present, it has become mundane—while the monotony of life has begun to terrify. This diametric could again be positioned beside Happenings for it bears striking resemblance to the boredom and intensity dialectic that Higgins saw in post-Cagean performances.

In Sontag’s analysis, Sci-Fi’s “technological view” of destruction values and empowers scientific invention over people.248 Typically, scientific inventions (terrestrial or from another planet) either cause catastrophe or save the day. Whether or not the enemies of civilization resemble human figures, they are depicted as impersonal, rigid, and lacking in what Bergson would call, “life’s supple nature.” Where previous horror stories made metaphor of transformations that unleashed the animal bloodlust inside us, postwar horror showed people

inflected work garnering attention in England. In this context, the British reporter’s description of Robot Opera as “Pop Art” could speak to its position as an unwanted, cultural import; a low-art sensibility that had infiltrated the British art scene in the mid-1950s and was still met with disapproval.

246 Here, I am referring to The War of the Worlds (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Attack of the Puppet People (1958), and The Creation of the Humanoids (1964).

247 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, 213.

248 Ibid, 221.

126 transformed into machine-like and obedient technocrats or characterless, “automatized servants

[sic].”249 These narratives normalize “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror,” while moralizing the “humane” use of science.250 The persistent cry that Robot Opera “humanized technology,” echoes the genre’s pop ethics and similarly looks past human agency to the power of things. If “24 Stunden” presented a technological view of workaday tedium and the Sixth

Soirée glimpsed the provocation of catastrophe, what then, was the moral behind this shibboleth?

Here let us recall that Robot-K456’s “instructions” most frequently took the form of

Kennedy’s inaugural address, oration that performatively enacted a regime change, a “new endeavor, not a new balance of power” befitting a self-reflective, renewed musical ontology.251

Its objective was to stay tensions with the Soviet Union by requesting peace while evoking the absolute supremacy of American technology and the impossibility of peacefully opting out of capitalist democracy.252 Intended for a world audience, it spoke of cultural-commercial innovation and the arms race as the two sides of America’s ambivalent sword. Deterrence would only work if its spectacle of power was in no way mistaken as illusion. With that its aria, Robot

249 “The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine,” she writes. Ibid, 222.

250 Ibid, 216.

251 The full passage reads, “We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning—signifying renewal, as well as change… that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans… let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.” John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/Inaugural- Address.aspx, (December 10, 2013).

252 In Kennedy’s words, “To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed…Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.” Ibid.

127 K-456 accordingly displayed its own power in a manner that was both theatrically spectacular and an expository display of real technology. However, contrary to Kennedy’s vision of art as the alternative to mutual destruction, Paik asserted that artists were drawn to technology because

“technology can bring disaster. That is, technology can fail.”253 Of course, so could a purely technocratic foreign policy and so Kennedy’s “ask not” concluded the speech with a call for the self-sacrificial, deific behavior that a humane god rewards with peace and prosperity in opera seria.254

By reciting Kennedy’s address, Robot K-456 fulfils the duty of the supreme ruler who completes the entreaty transaction by sounding human-like. But rather than reinforcing the King of Camelot’s sentiment, the mindlessly parroted rhetoric undermined both the affect and verbal signification of his famous intonation. In this sense, it harkened back to Erik Satie’s Vieux

Sequins et Vieilles Cuirasses (1912 - 1915), which Higgins cited as inspiring his generation’s boredom and intensity dialectic. By calling for the concluding eight-beat passage to be played three hundred and eighty times, Vieux Sequins et Vieilles Cuirasses mocked nationalist military marches on the brink of World War I. Refurbished in the new ontological form of a

253 For example, Paik thought that the 1967 EAT Festival was "a great success” precisely because so many of the carefully engineered equipment failed. “John Cage and Nam June Paik in Conversation” University of California San Diego, circa 1985, Ubu Sound.

254 As in opera seria, America’s first Catholic president concluded his speech with the notion that salvation requires sacrifice. The famous passage reads, “Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe…. Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself… And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” Kennedy, “Inaugural Address of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961.” This famous phrase was a reiteration of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech delivered at the Democratic Conventions where he stated, “the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.” Thurston Clarke, Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2004), 76.

128 malfunctioning robotic accompaniment, Robot Opera was a similar gibe at the bellicose deployment of cultural production.

The last time Kennedy’s voice had been heard outside the Berlin Wall, he called it an

“offense against humanity” that evinced “the failures of the Communist system.”255 Now heard again, the president had been dead for over a year. The U.S. had just begun sustained bombing of North Vietnam and invaded the Dominican Republic. Representing the forces powering both the animatronics and global politics, Robot K-456’s human voice was technology’s achievement alone, antagonistically broadcast as it advanced drone-like toward the iron curtain. Here was our deus ex machina, come to resolve the Cold War’s tragic plot. Here was the “surprise a priori” of a hazardous attempt to save humanity.

255 These are quotations from what is known as Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, delivered on June 26, 1963.

129 Chapter Four

A LIVE GREEK FEMALE TORSO

I. The Offense: Sex and Indeterminacy

In April of 1967, Moorman was tried for indecent exposure. Penal Law section 1140 specifically prohibited the willful and lewd display of private parts in public spaces and in the state of New York, it was violated all the time. But Moorman’s case was without precedent.

Never before had a New York Criminal Court interpreted private parts to include breasts, nor hear the defendant seek First Amendment protection for exposing them at a private performance.256 The case also became sui generis, or unique in kind, for between the time of

Moorman’s arrest and her trial, new legislation passed that would exempt topless performers from criminal charges. Regardless, Judge Milton Shalleck ruled according to the statute as it stood on February 9, 1967, the night Moorman performed Paik’s Opera Sextronique with electric propellers pasted to her nipples.257 Innocence was thus contingent on proving the “redeeming social value” of a composition that professed not to redeem, but to escape such values altogether.

The invitation to Opera Sextronique was evidence of Moorman and Paik’s subversive intentions. In the background is a photograph of Moorman in bra and underwear, steadying herself with her cello as she bends in mid-gesture toward crumpled garments on the floor.

Below the event details is a statement written in the style of avant-garde manifestos. It reads:

256 Judge Milton Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman,” New York Law Journal (May 11, 1967): 18.

257 Shalleck, 19. Also see Norman Seaman, press release for Moorman and Paik’s June 10, 1967 Town Hall performance of Mixed Media Opera benefit to raise funds for their legal expenses in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (CMA), McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

130 After three emancipations in 20th century music, (serial-indeterministic, actional)… I

have found that there is still one more chain to lose… that is…

PRE-FREUDIAN HYPOCRISY

Why is sex a predominant theme in art and literature prohibited ONLY in music?

How long can New Music afford to be sixty years behind the times and still claim to be a

serious art?

The purge of sex under the excuse of being “serious” exactly undermines the so-called

“seriousness” of music as a classical art, ranking with literature and painting.

Music history needs its D.H. Lawrence its Sigmund Freud.258

Using compositional techniques developed by John Cage to satiate this need, each of the performance’s four arias overlaid classical sheet music with a handwritten score of non-musical notation. The later indicated performative gestures and when to don costumes, such as grotesquely distorting masks, an electric light bulb , or the infamous propeller pasties. The score also left room for indeterminate sounds to arise either extemporaneously or probabilistically through a computer program. Relinquishing compositional control and mixing media followed Cage’s teachings on experimental music. But where Cage predicted that music would progress “towards theater” because it is more natural to engage all the senses, Moorman described her theatrics as depicting “contrasts and combinations of the real and unreal, true and false, and natural and unnatural.”259 And where Cage developed indeterminacy as a space where

258 Ellipses appear in original document. Flyer for Opera Sextronique in Barbara Moore, ed., The World of Charlotte Moorman Archive Catalog (Bound & Unbound, 2000).

259 Charlotte Moorman, “An Artist in the Courtroom (People vs. Moorman),” unpublished typescript reprinted in Charlotte Moorman, Malcolm Goldstein, and Gabriele Bonomo, Charlotte Moorman: Cello Anthology (Italy: Alga Marghen, 2006), n.p. In Cage’s lectures on experimental music, he asks, “Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them… Relevant action is theatrical (music [imaginary separation of hearing from the other senses] does not exist)” John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961), 12; 14. For more on 131 sounds could be free of a composer’s subjective desire, Moorman and Paik treated it as a gap in musical order where it was desire that went free.

Beyond mere license for erotic pageantry, peppering experimental music with Freudian rational provided the artists with a critical strategy previously utilized by the historical avant- garde. Its aim was to corrode bourgeois sensibility by rousing the unheimlich, or disturbing ambiguity of uncanny experiences. The uncanny supplied the logic behind Dada juxtaposition, avant-garde dramaturgy, and what Hal Foster explains as the Surrealist’s “concern with events in which repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order.”260 Opera Sextronique’s palliative eroticism, misuse of objects, and oblique references to current events revised these culture-shock tactics to claim that consumerism, military action, and the music establishment’s sublimation of the body were cognates within a unified culture of repression. The police raid that interrupted Opera Sextronique before the third act and swiftly imprisoned Moorman was thought to serve as confirmation.

II. Shock and Arrest

Opera Sextronique began in the dark. After several minutes of silence, Moorman emerged to the recorded sound of Buddhist gongs and walked across the stage to her cello and chair. She was wearing the electric bikini, made of forty-five, six-volt light bulbs arranged like triangular grape clusters over each breast and her pubic area. In rhythm to the gongs, Paik used a remote control to turn the costume on and off, illuminating Moorman’s shoulders, armpits, and

Cage’s interest in theater, see William Fetterman, John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood, 1996). For a thorough analysis of Moorman’s divergence from Cage, see Benjamin Piekut, “Murder by Cello: Charlotte Moorman meets John Cage” in Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: UC Press, 2011).

260 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), xvii. 132 thighs in brief, white flashes. Concluding the first aria, he joined Moorman at the piano and together they played Jules Massenet's slow, sad Élégie (1872), while Takehisa Kosugi operated the remote control.

The second aria continued intermixing classical forms with cutting-edge technology. In

“An Artist in the Courtroom (People vs. Moorman)”—a rejoinder that Moorman wrote after her trial—she describes its “four basic elements:”

1) computer music “INTERNATIONAL LULLABY”, by Max Matthews of Bell

Laboratories, in which a computer analyzes two lullabies (Japanese and Schubert) and

changes from one to the other with the probabilistic progressis rule; 2) live Greek female

torso sitting at a cello, semi-nude in a long, formal black ; 3) masks, four kinds of

prepared bows, and propellors [sic] (attached to my breasts in the last phrase) which

symbolized “American pop art”; 4) the well-known Brahms “Lullaby”, arranged into

variations for cello and piano by Paik.261

While Matthews’ aleatory computer music played, Moorman wore an olive green army hat and then a series of face coverings including plastic Halloween masks, protective visors, and an army-issue gas mask. The prepared bows ranged from a plank of wood and a bouquet of flowers to a violin that was moved to play the cello rather than be played upon. Each repurposed object made the cello strings resonate with sounds quite foreign to Brahms, suggesting discord within the “Greek female” figure.

If opera reflects prevailing concepts of subjectivity, these arias reflected the fractured self that characterizes the modern, psychological subject. As an idealized bust with mortal breasts, the automaton Moorman played was split between an image frozen in time and a music-maker

261 Moorman, n.p.

133 live on stage. Fracture could also be found in their collision of classical and pop aesthetics, somber formality and absurd eroticism, antiquity and the tech industry, overtly political and inscrutably cryptic signifiers, music and theater. As in opera buffa, the sexual content was a form of ridicule, here targeted against the 1960s musical establishment. It mocked the pomp of its old-fashioned traditions along with the social roles organized in relation to cultural rituals.

Because the “female torso” was a figure both fixed and active, it suggested that established social stations were capable of movement, that perhaps a woman, a minority, or a worker could advance and a ruler could topple. Role-reversal was also performed through gender-bending costumes. Had Moorman been allowed to complete the performance, she would have played

Bach in the third aria, costumed only in a football jersey, , and shoulder pads.

Music in opera displays its own power and in Opera Sextronique, power was on clear display. The forth aria was to combine music by The Beatles with Moorman playing her electric-stringed Air Force “bomb cello” in the nude.262 Both the instruments and the musician who previously appeared draped in bulbs and wires, were seen powered by the same electrical currents as signifiers of a new world order: computers, sophisticated weaponry, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Despite the work’s many gibes and escalating sexual imagery, documentation shows Moorman and Paik carrying themselves with the stoic comportment of classical performers. The artists are intently focused, sedate, and affectively distanced from the erotic content. Far from a bawdy burlesque striptease, it is as if they are following a laborious and gravely serious technical

262 Larry Miller, Charlotte Resounding, 1998, 40 min, color, sound. Moorman created 2 Bomb Cellos (Performance Bomb for John Cage Piece 26’1.1499 for string player) circa 1965 and 1990 and produced an edition of ten Bomb Cellos in 1984. See Lot 76 of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Including Property from the Charlotte Moorman Estate, London Thursday 24th June 1993, 123. For a poignant analysis of how Moorman used the bomb cello as a body reference, see Kathy O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice: Charlotte Moorman and the Metaphysics of Extension” in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa G. Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016).

134 procedure. Paik solemnly helps affix the propellers to Moorman’s breasts and Moorman methodically consults the score before reaching for her props. The disconnect between visceral scenarios and a deadpan delivery made the performers appear robotic, life-like but inhuman.

Influential critics such as Susan Sontag and Michael Kirby considered such comportment typical of 1960s Happenings and an indication that they worked within a Surrealist tradition.

Claiming that impersonal exchanges between people, radical juxtapositions, and spectacular assaults answered Antonin Artaud’s call for a shocking “Theater of Cruelty,” Sontag wrote,

this art form which is designed to stir the modern audience from its cozy emotional

anesthesia operates with images of anesthetized persons, acting in a kind of slow-motion

disjunction with each other, and gives us an image of action characterized above all by

ceremoniousness and ineffectuality.263

Kirby concurred as did the myriad artists who acknowledged Artaud and other Surrealists as inspiration for work meant to phenomenologically—and then politically—awaken audiences.264

Artaud’s influence on Paik first manifested in his “action music” of the late 1950s, which capitalized on how shock ruptures reason along with the cultural mandates that reason

263 Susan Sontag, “Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York, N.Y: Picador U.S.A, 2001), 273.

264 See Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Dutton, 1965) and Mildred L. Glimcher’s discussion of Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, and Allan Kaprow in Happenings: New York, 1958-1963 (Pace Gallery, New York: Exhibition Catalogues, 2012). This rough genealogy comes with caveats and conflicting perspectives. To many, Happenings extended the performative action of , but not its psychoanalytic exploration of collective unconsciousness and authentic expression. They maintained the psychoanalytic logic of shocking the bourgeois through juxtaposition and anesthetized interactions (à la Artaud), but avoided proscenium arrangements and other associations with theater. See for example, “What’s Happening, Man? Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel by Bernard Blistène” in A Theater Without Theater, eds. Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Bernard Blistène, and Yann Chateigné (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007), 37. However, Judith Rodenbeck reminds us that there was more affinity between happenings and avant-garde theater, such as the Living Theater, than generally acknowledged. The difference, she states, was that “the Living Theatre, in its struggle for authenticity, operated in a modernist, humanist, and epiphanic mode while the happenings, in their strategies of fragmentation and depersonalization and, most important, in their self-understanding, hailed their participants into the postmodern.” Judith Rodenbeck, “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” Grey Room, No. 13 (Autumn, 2003), 60.

135 legitimizes.265 Shock continued in his Fluxus projects and later collaborations with Moorman.266

According to Dorothée Brill, it gave his work a fundamentally psychological edge, even as

Fluxus, Happenings, and their avant-garde antecedents rejected European traditions and

Modernism’s expressive incorporation of psychoanalytic inquiries.267 She quotes Paik as

265 Paik’s Hommage à John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano (1959) includes quotes from Artaud as well as the proto-Surrealist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. For his part, Cage credited Artaud as inspiring Theater Piece No. 1 (also known as Untitled Event), often considered the inaugural Happening. See Cage’s interview with Mary Emma Harris, in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 104, quoted in Rodenbeck, “Madness,” 66; Eva Díaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2015) and Branden W. Joseph, “Chance, Indeterminacy, Multiplicity,” in The Anarchy of Silence, 231, note 83. Douglas Kahn also finds that Artaud’s desire to free actions from the script and introduce non-linguistic sounds (such as primal screams) inspired Cage and by extension, the post-Cagean generation of Happenings and Fluxus artists. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1999).

266 Moorman and Paik were problematic from the perspective of both Happenings and Fluxus, associating with both networks and failing to epitomize either. Maciunas blacklisted Moorman because he thought her Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York competed with his Fluxus events. See Owen Smith, Fluxus: the History of an Attitude (San Diego, CA: San Diego State UP, 1998), Nam June Paik, “2 x Mini-Giants,” reprinted in Nam June Paik, Toni Stooss, and Thomas Kellein, Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), and Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2014). Moorman’s erotic modes of self-presentation were also met with disapproval from members of the Fluxus community. See for example, Gunter Berghaus, “Tomas Schmit: A Fluxus Farewell to Perfection: An Interview,” TDR, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994), Ben Vautier, “Text on Fluxus” self-published, 1997, reprinted in Gascia Ouzounian, “Sound Art and Spatial Practices: Situating Sound Since 1958” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008), and Allison Knowles’ remarks in Gisela Gronemeyer, “Serious and Dedication: The American Avant-Garde Cellist Charlotte Moorman,” in Charlotte Moorman, n.p. On the gender bias within Fluxus more generally, see Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: Forty Years of International Art Actions,” in Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 (Los Angeles, Calif: MoCA, 1998), Kathy O'Dell, “Fluxus Feminus,” TDR, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), and Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997). Without such definitive ex-communication, the duo may have developed in tighter correspondence with the Fluxus ethos, which was not de-facto opposed to the psychoanalytics of shock and sexual liberation touted whole-heartedly by Moorman and Paik.

267 Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, N.H: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 3- 4. For more on avant-garde shock tactics, see Sianne Ngai, “Stuplimity: Boredom and Shock in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture, Vol. 10, No 2 (January 2000), n.p. Despite considerable overlap between Surrealism and Dada, the former tends to be (inaccurately) associated with expressivity and the literal depiction of fantasies while the later is associated with anti-art, anti-commercialism. Maciunas understood Fluxus strictly as a continuation of Dada. However, as Dick Higgins explains, “Dada works we admired, but the negative side of it its rejections and the social dynamic of its members, splitting and feuding -we did not wish to emulate. Surrealism had, perhaps, minimal influence on us so far as form, style and content were concerned, but its group dynamic seemed suitable for our use, subject only to the limitations on Maciunas' authority which lay in our nature as having already been a group with some aspects of our work in common before Maciunas ever arrived in the scene.” Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and Reception” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman, (Chicester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 220. For more on how Fluxus defined itself, see , Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone; Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis: , 1993), and Smith, Fluxus.

136 evidence that post-Cagean performances engaged with psychoanalytics as they promoted social and sensory awareness:

People who come to my concerts or see my objects need to be transferred into another

state of consciousness. They have to be high. And in order to put them into this state of

highness, a little shock is required.268

By invoking Freud and eroticizing the intellectually genteel domain of concert music, the agenda behind Opera Sextronique was just as calculatingly shocking. In fact, Freud’s writing on Eros was precisely what Paik had in mind when setting out to expand his audience’s consciousness beyond culture’s traditional prohibitions. Considering it the vital yin to the destructive yang of his iconoclasm, Paik cited specific books by Freud as guides to his practice.

I am happy to be called a destruction artist, you know. It’s fine, fine.The thing is that

my approach is this. [... ] Freud’s last work, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,

was written in London. Freud wrote two books about the entire field of psychoanalysis,

this one and an earlier work. Introduction to Psychoanalysis—that one was written in

Vienna. Pretty big—two volumes, and all that. Near the end of his life he wrote yet

another treatise about psychoanalysis in general. The second book. He called it A

General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. He wrote about two things. Ultimately, there

are only two things in the world. One is Eros, that’s construction, you know; the other is

destruction, death. Eros and the death wish have the same magnitude. In [Freud’s] first

book, the death wish is not as big. There is something similar in Asian thought. In

268 This comment was made with regards to the severed cow’s head that greeted visitors to his 1963 exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television. Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus, 131. Brill also reminds us that Paik considered Opera Sextronique “advanced american [sic] avantgarde art.” Ibid, 111.

137 China, it’s called yin and yang.269

If both ancient and modern philosophy distilled the known and unknown world down to these extremities, the music establishment’s prohibitions were as futile as they were repressive.

Through sex and antagonism, Paik’s work heeded and harnessed the duality common to Taoism and psychoanalysis alike. In doing so, he hoped to replace reigning cultural values with ones derived from more timeless and universal principles.

Despite their cavalier proclamations against repressive social norms and the prudishness of classical music, Moorman and Paik were intimidated by recent police crackdowns on transgressive art.270 The first people to see Opera Sextronique were not the select recipients of private invitations, but members of the New York City Police Department. They attended rehearsals at the Film-Makers Cinemathèque because the venue had been designated a raided premise after the 1963 screening of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures, which was confiscated and deemed obscene. Paik was in America on a visa and Moorman was employed through the

New York City Department of Education. Neither wanted to jeopardize their situation by attracting attention from the authorities. Moorman consulted a lawyer who assured them they

269 “Interview in a Station Restaurant: Nam June Paik in conversation with Justin Hoffmann Wiesbaden, May 22,1989,” Nam June Paik and Susanne Neuburger, Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music: Electronic Television: Revisited (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 86-87.

270 In his New Yorker profile on Paik, Calvin Tomkins describes the artists’ trepidation, writing, “Paik had been a little nervous about doing this piece in New York. He and Miss Moorman had performed it without incident in Aachen the preceding July, and then in January at the Philadelphia College of Art, but New York was at that time in the grip of one of its rare public-morality seizures, and the police were abnormally alert to vice.” Calvin Tomkins, “Video Visionary,” New Yorker (May 5, 1975): 64. Moorman’s Annual Avant Garde Festivals were already on the NYPD’s radar. They were nearly arrested during her 1964 New York production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale and during Carolee Schneemann’s realization of a Kaprow Happening entitled, Push-Pull (1965) that was part of the following year’s festival. Afterwards, Moorman had to vow never to “provoke a disturbance in the audience” or allow their participation. Paik and Moorman, “Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman” New York, 1974 interview in Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, 1968-2008, ed. Oliva A. Bonito (Milano: Skira, 2010), 127.

138 were within their “artistic rights.” 271 But in fact, the absence of uniformed police on opening night indicated a sting. Eventually, incognito law enforcers emerged from the crowd to declare,

272 “It’s a raid. You’re under arrest.”

According to the artists, Moorman and Paik received radically different treatment at the police precinct. Although Moorman’s nudity was impermissible at the theatre, she was ordered to undress in front of the other inmates so that the police could search her anus and vagina for drugs. Paik was given a sandwich, orange juice, and coffee, while Moorman was given nothing to eat.273 After a night in jail, they were both released on parole. Charges against Paik were quickly dropped because, as Calvin Tompkins explains, their defense attorney, “[Ernst]

Rosenberger had no difficulty persuading the court that under no law could a composer of music be arrested for obscenity, but Miss Moorman was less fortunate.”274 While the press dubbed

271 Moorman turned to her friend, Billy Klüver (a Bell Labs engineer and the founder of Experiments in Art and Technology [E.A.T.]), for advice. Klüver put them in touch with Jerry Ordover who, as Moorman recounted, “advised us to go ahead, stating that we were within out artistic rights, and cited the totally nude dance “Waterman Switch” by Yvonne Rainer and Bob Morris on March 25, 1965 at (NY Times, Mar. 26 ’65 and Life Magazine); semi-nude (topless) strip tease of Silvia in Salvador Dali’s “Happening”, February 23, 1966 at Philharmonic Hall (NY Times Feb. 24 ’66, Time Magazine, NY Herald Tribune, etc.); a totally nude girl in Tony Holder’s ballet at Bridge Theatre, March, 1966—police attended, but made no arrests (Village Voice) and Les Ballets Africains at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre Nov. – Dec. ’66 for whom Mayor Lyndsay [sic] granted permission to dance “Topless” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 17, ’66), to say nothing of the bare topped and bare bottomed (backside) performances that are staged every day at New York’s burlesque houses.” Moorman, Charlotte Moorman, n.p.

272 As Michael T. Kaufman recounted, before the performance began, “Paik appeared. Peering into the spotlights, he said, ‘Mr. Policeman, Mr. Policeman, we know you out there. This is art. Okay? This is very serious art. Okay? You not interrupt.” The police said nothing and the first act proceeded as planned. After it concluded, “the curtain came down and again Paik addressed the invisible police. ‘See, it is art. Now you leave us alone.’… A police voice from the back shouted, ‘Cover up!’ Charlotte kept playing, stopping only to put different on her head. The police shouted, ‘Cover up!’ again: ‘Put on pasties.’ Someone in the audience shouted, ‘Pasties are obscene and not breasts.” Michael T. Kaufman, In Their Own Good Time (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 208-209.

273 Audio recording M32 in CMA.

274 Tomkins, 66. Rosenberger had previously represented Lenny Bruce in a 1964 obscenity trial and assisted the defense of the "Freedom Riders" arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961.

139 Moorman “The Topless Cellist,” to Edgard Varèse she was “The Jeanne d’Arc of New

Music.”275

III. Defending the Uncanny

As in previous collaborations, Moorman’s interpretation of Opera Sextronique was as indelible as Paik’s notation. But because Moorman alone faced criminal charges, her defense attempted to deflect responsibility by characterizing the score as a set of absolute instructions.276

A contradiction emerged where the very aleatory measures and provocative signifiers that stood for physiological emancipation were also said to dictate Moorman’s actions. Bikini-clad, she was literally bound to the non-musical notation, representing elements of the score, rather than acting from her own “center” as one would in a Cage piece.277 Thus, while the image of a topless cellist playing Brahms in a gas mask was patently designed to disturb, Moorman and

Paik’s most uncanny juxtaposition was the conflation of sexual and notational liberation. The

275 Reference to this nickname appears throughout the correspondence and performance reviews in archives including CMA, GRI, and SAAM.

276 Initially identifying as an interpreter, Moorman did not claim co-authorship until found legally responsible for its content. “Why doesn’t music have sex?” Moorman rhetorically asked in an interview less than five months after her trial, “Sex has come to all the other arts, I guess. Sex in painting, drama, literature—so I figured it was high time sex was brought to music, too. That’s why I don’t wear any top when I play the cello… Nudity is part of my art form. I want to show the beauty of womanhood. I wear a gas mask when I’m naked to show the contrast of beauty and war.” “Naked Art Form,” The Observer Review, Sept 29, 1968. More explicitly, she later stated, “All of these pieces are half-mine. That’s what the world has finally realized now. In performance, these are not Nam June Paik pieces, but Nam June Paik/Charlotte Moorman pieces. They are all collaborations.” Moorman in conversation with Gronemeyer, September 23, 1980, in Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication” in Charlotte Moorman, n.p. Paik also referred to the work as a shared endeavor. In a letter to Moorman dated June 14, 1968, he wrote, “We achieved an important goal.. to put the sex, the most important fact of our life and death,, into music, which lacked this element even in the music of John Cage, who tried to be “as natural as possible” … I think, we widened the Cagean concept considerably… Although you paid bitterly, it is a fortune, that a 30 years old performer became to a music- historical symbol. D.H. Lawrence and Freud also suffered bitterly.” Paik’s flattering words prefaced a harsh blow: that he was ending their collaboration to focus on piano compositions. Nam June Paik folder in CMA.

277 For Cage’s explanation of the correlation between being off-centered, dualistic relationships, and the creation of objects, see Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence, 38.

140 paradox illustrated Cage’s warning that a composition that is indeterminate in structure but not method, “is an object more inhuman than human, since chance operations brought it into being.”278 In such creations, Cage glimpsed the uncanny, or to use his words, “the alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster.”

The notion that chance elements beget an inhuman form can be traced to Aristotle, who calls the chance that applies to objects, automaton, and distinguishes it from tyche, or luck, which appears related to human agency but is also beyond human will.279 Jacques Lacan extends the Aristotelian touché to describe a subject’s encounter with the Real, while automaton is like a machine run on symbolic relationships, forever returning us to a place of fantasy where the unbearable (often sexual) Real is kept at bay. Through the automaton, we see the subject as

“governed by the pleasure principle,” determined by the return of signs signifying desire.280

Similarly, in Opera Sextronique, we see notational symbols and chance elements compromise

278 Cage’s observation is in reference to his early aleatory compositions such as The Music of Changes. He reasons that using chance as a method to determine notation in an indeterminate structure forces performers to identify with the written score rather than “act from their own centers.” Cage continues, “This situation is of course characteristic of Western music, the masterpieces of which are its most frightening examples, which when concerned with humane communication only move over from Frankenstein monster to Dictator.” Cage, “Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy,” in Silence, 36. Piekut surmises that Cage voiced “ambivalence about his earlier chance-based works” because those scores “had worked their way free of his control, only to turn the tables on their human creator.” Piekut, 147. Shalleck proved to be a surprising interlocutor on the subject, lamenting that “what began simply enough as aleatory music has now transcended this humble start” by leading to unruly concepts such as indeterminacy and Happenings. He also recognized the Frankensteinian nature of Opera Sextronique’s indeterminacy writing, “Not all of the actions were precisely noted. There was an area of inventiveness on the artist’s part” yet “the and props were all provided for in the script. She was bound by it. She obeyed it... If the defendant’s performance was circumscribed by the script, as some of the experts have stated (while at the same time admitting there was room for self expression of the artist where the “creator” was not so adamant in his instructions) would the defendant have been bound to jump from a dangerous height which might have been intended to “mock” or “scorn” our present day dependence on mechanized flight, if the script called for it? Or would have that script instruction, by the anticipation of a broken leg as a deterrent, have been altered? For the difference between that hazard and the hazard of flaunting the law—Another phase of the same activity—is one of aspect only.” Shalleck, 18, 19.

279 See Aristotle’s Physics.

280 Jacques Lacan and Alan Sheridan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI) (New York: Norton, 1981), 54-65.

141 the performer’s self-determination. In both cases, the subject is compelled by external and internal impulses to stay within the confines of illusion.

Moorman’s ensnarement within the particular symbolic system that led to her arrest discloses the male monopoly on the production of illusions. In The Explicit Body in

Performance, Rebecca Schneider argues that within capitalism’s system of representation, women are positioned as products rather than controlling producers. As such, they cannot be considered “real” and are only recognized in relation to representation. So long as male culture constructs what is natural, claims to female nature will appear contrary to the laws of nature and thus, criminal. As Schneider explains,

The effect of inscribing women as “other” with a nature which cancels nature is to exile

women to the paradoxical realm of a reality which is always already fantastical, a really

unreal—or, a reality which cancels a woman’s status as “real” in favor of her service to

performativity, masquerade, representation. This is the situation explicated by Lacan in

his analysis of women’s foreclosure from the Symbolic only to return “in the Real of the

symptom”—the symptomatic realm of representation.281

Schneider contends that the symptom’s mechanics are tripped by performances in which women represent themselves outside of purely natural or helplessly constructed binaries. Indeed,

Moorman’s loose but guiding grip on the reins of production and her bare-naked abstention from expressing an “authentic self” drove the performance in and out of symbolic conscription.

Unconcerned with encountering the Real, Opera Sextronique positions the performer like an automaton to demonstrate how strangely the Real is skimmed and skirted.

281 Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 50.

142 In an attempt to validate Opera Sextronique as a form of intermedia art, a witness for the defense also spoke of automatons by referring to Moorman as a ‘living statue.’ “I note again, of course, that the thing was being presented to me as an art object, was again a human being, a young woman in a partial state of interesting attire, but no farther than that,” testified Jack Kroll, senior editor of Newsweek magazine.282 “She was a kind of living statue, a kind of human plastic presentation,” he continued. Kroll’s testimony matched the “live Greek female torso sitting at a cello” that Moorman listed as an important element of the second aria. It became an important element of her defense as well. Greek statuary has an obvious, elevated place in art history. As a reference, it points to the classical era, the great pillar of Western civilization and the reasoned values it presumes to support. If the ancients tolerated nudity, he argued, so too should modern society.

The problem was that the statue in Opera Sextronique was not a model for eternal, rational, and beautiful ideals. It moved through time, clashing with the objects it encountered, and was accompanied by the disharmony of computer-generated sounds. To Moorman, therein lay the social and aesthetic merit of her performance. Although she had trouble articulating this point on the stand, her post-trial rejoinder frames Opera Sextronique as a necessary critique of the contemporary psyche:

our work is greatly influenced by the magnificent yet paradoxical age we were born into.

As strong as the great beauty of nature affects us, so does the assassination of President

Kennedy. We cannot be calloused to our surroundings. In the words of Marshall

McLuhan “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into

282 See Jack Kroll’s testimony in People vs. Moorman, April 20, 1967, 101-107. Trial transcript located in the CMA and Nam June Paik Papers, Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

143 the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-Land… Innumerable confusions and

[feelings] of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural

transitions. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job

with yesterday’s tools—with yesterday’s concepts.283

The purpose of art such as Opera Sextronique was to reflect (and thus repeat) the trauma that compels people to surround themselves with the commercial simulacra that the source of social anxiety. In addition to exposing life’s everyday paradoxes, it added fresh concepts to society’s cultural toolbox. That it continued artistic traditions while rejecting “yesterday’s tools” validated its aesthetic merit all the more:

Its intended meaning: an historic function of art –that of bringing something better and

more honest for society—satirizing that which is sham and hypocritical. “This

juxtaposition of ironies is important to the new approach.” The tensions between these

points of irony create a valid artistic tension—ART.284

Witnesses for the defense supported the notion that incongruities, breaches in logic, and self- negating illusions were precisely what gave the performance social and thus aesthetic value. As testified by the art critic and editor of Life Magazine, David Bourdon, “the irony of Miss

Moorman” evident in “the selection of masks and hats that she put on to disguise herself within the normal” made Opera Sextronique an excellent example of modern composition.285 But

283 Moorman, n.p. The McLuhan quote is taken from Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (New York, London, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1967), 75. Moorman had been interested in media since the early 1960s. On March 19, 1967, (approximately one month after her hearing and one month before her trial commenced,) she and Paik appeared on This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, which was the first episode of NBC’s “Experiment in Television” program. Moorman later wrote McLuhan, expressing her appreciation for his work and announcing when her June 12, 1967 performance on The Merv Griffin Show would be broadcast in Canada. The letter is held in the CMA.

284 Moorman, n.p.

285 People vs. Moorman, 33. 144 although the avant-garde sustains ironies such as disguised normalcy, proscribed indeterminacy, and the tradition of breaking traditions, the writ of law was less amiable to contradiction.

IV. The Social Uniform Code

Cultural historians such as Lynda Nead find that female bodies are considered obscene unless presented as static objects.286 Upholding this injunction against movement, Judge Milton

Shalleck reasoned that a “living statue” exhibits neither immobility nor adherence to tradition— the essential elements that distinguish nudity in art from nudity as a criminal activity. With an argument that recalls the medium specific essentialism of Modernist critics such as Clement

Greenberg, he disregarded the possibility of aesthetic heterogeneity. “Was it a musical performance or was it a tableau? If it were musical, there is little to convince that the extraneous non-dress helped the performance,” the judge deliberated in his opinion,

If it were a tableau, what was the function of the cello? It was hardly a picturesque

grouping of persons or objects or a representation of a picture by a person suitably

costumed and posed as we are attuned to know it. Nor, finally, could it be a “happening”

for it was surely not a series of discontinuous events involving audience participation or

interaction between the audience and the performer. It was unilateral only.287

286 Nead claims that their movement disrupts the viewer’s detached contemplation and makes it difficult to regulate corporeal knowledge, gender, sexuality, and thus, a populace. See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992).

287 Shalleck, 19. The judge referred to Pablo Casals as the quintessential cellist to whom Moorman could not be more different. Casals was aware of the comparison and more sympathetic than Shalleck, although he too staunchly defended the norms of his discipline. When asked about his opinion of Moorman’s performances, he commented, “Experimentation is fine. But they should not call it music. They should call it something else.” This quote appears on p. 46 of a Sunday, August 1973 clipping from the that media theorist Gene Youngblood sent Paik. Nam June Paik Papers, Nam June Paik Archive, SAAM.

145 Of course, Moorman was not strictly a Happenings artist and Happenings were not always bilateral affairs. Although some solicited reaction or interaction, many reinforced the audience’s passivity or treated them like ready-made objects within the totalizing work of art.288 Judge

Shalleck’s definition of Happenings came from misreading Kirby, who he cites in his footnotes.

Rather than delimiting the genre, Kirby championed unsettling ambiguities and “the symbolical or oblique treatment of sexual material.”289 In Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, he lists the uncanny attributes of Happenings alongside those of their Surrealist predecessors:

Ernst’s plants assume the forms of birds and men. Dali fuses man and object. Arp gives

stone and wood vitality of organisms. The “ball girls” in [Robert] Whitman’s Flower

have been transferred from the human to the botanical. A cardboard box comes alive in

[Allan] Kaprow’s A Spring Happening. The men encased in burlap sacks who wrestle in

[Claus] Oldenburg’s Gayety are vital but impersonal.290

Dismissing Kirby’s claim that, “in Happenings as in Surrealism we find a frequent blending, metamorphosis and interpenetration of the animate and the inanimate,” the judge considered

Opera Sextronique neither a cello concert nor a picturesque nude, which depicts the useful and

“pristine beauty of human female breasts.”291

288 In Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings, Rodenbeck states that Happenings drew from “the theatrical models of Brechtian marking and quotation as well as Artaudian fragmentation and objectification” even as it operated through the logic of collage and inaccessible subjectivities. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 173.

289 Shalleck cites Kirby’s Tulane Drama Review (Winter, 1965) Vol. 10, No. 2 (pp. 25, 28, 38), which was actually “The Fluxus Issue.” Shalleck, note 34.

290 Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 38-39. Dick Higgins credited Kirby’s Happenings with offering the most accurate definition of Happenings to date. Dick Higgins, “The Origin of Happening,” American Speech, Vol. 51, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1976), 268-271. Glimcher calls the book a “vital record” of the art form because “Kirby, a professor, writer, theater director, and friend of most of the artists, attended the Happenings and interviewed the artists shortly after the events, publishing scrupulous and insightful descriptions.” Glimcher, 8.

291 Shalleck, 18. 146 Unable to secure First Amendment protection, the defense shifted strategies, arguing that, as an obedient interpreter of compositions, Moorman was not responsible for her nudity. The score was of no help to Rosenberger’s argument. “The funny thing is that the score became famous because the police asked for it and we gave [it to] them and they ridiculed it,” Moorman recalled, “The district attorney thought that this was a very silly score. It didn’t look like a score to him, it was just Paik’s scribbling with a few notes and they didn’t even consider it real.”292

Taking the score seriously would have helped dispel criminal intent. But had the district attorney been able to decipher Paik’s scribbling, he also would have seen all the places where indeterminacy allowed Moorman to act on her own volition and thus assume culpability.

In the end, The People v. Charlotte Moorman became a prima facie case based on

Moorman’s attire. Because she was not “suitably costumed and posed as we are attuned to know it,” the judge concluded that her intent was to arouse men for economic gain.293 That

Moorman’s exhibitionism also misrepresented the social significance of breasts was a tragedy he blamed on cultural “contagions,” namely, Yves St. Laurent who “mock women by their design of garment which make women look like they are not women.”294 He contrasted Moorman’s nudity to the “native portrayal” of African dancers in Les Ballet Africains. While it was socially acceptable to look at naked, African bodies, an American cellist must dress in the costume of her trade.

292 Paik and Moorman, Encyclopaedia of the Word, 127.

293 The judge argued that understanding the monetary value of displaying their bodies “has given rise to all kinds of female efforts to show them off at the least provocation.” Shalleck, 18.

294 Ibid, 19.

147 A section of the judge’s verbose opinion is written in the style of Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth century comic novel Tristram Shandy. Feigning levity and shirking jurisprudence, he disparages those

who live in ‘independence’ in the Village and other ‘out’ places… sack-clothed, open-toe

sandaled, draft-card burning ‘long hairs…’ the bearded, bathless ‘Beats’ whose cranial

hirsute talents challenge the femininity of a lady’s fall and whose life may yet cause

historians to label their generation as the ‘scared age.’295

The conservative politics underlying Judge Shalleck’s sartorial concerns did not go unnoticed in the press. If “art out of costume is indecent,” reasoned Russell Baker reporting for The New

York Times, then Moorman’s “crime was greater than indecent exposure. She violated the Social

Uniform Code.”296 Baker’s analysis recognized the larger cultural politics that fashion implicated in the 1960s. Concurrently, conservative figures such as George Wallace, J. Edgar

Hoover, and Ronald Reagan were voicing concerns similar to the judge’s. By refusing to dress in a way that designates gender roles, social rank, and military allegiance, the upsurging baby- boomers were expressing opposition to the established social order.

Like indeterminacy and intermedia, dressing in the wrong uniform upset what Jacques

Rancière refers to as le partage du sensible. The “distribution of the sensible” manifests as a

295 Ibid, 18. The judge displayed a similar lack of seriousness during the trial. Although the ostensible purpose of the trial was to uphold moral standards and punish lewd behavior, he seemed to encourage off-color jokes at Moorman’s expense. For example, after Moorman broke down in tears, the judge attempted to lighten the mood by joking that the brand name of the propellers (exhibit F) was “Top Flight.” An unnamed reporter then obscenely joked, “I’ll bet the batteries were hidden in her box.” Carmen Moore, “A Critic in Court: The People v. Moorman,” The Village Voice (April 27, 1967): 28. Witnesses for the prosecution also mixed sexual innuendoes into their testimony. For example, during the hearing on February 17, 1967, Officer Michael Mandillo described the bikini as “winking” rather than blinking. Hearing transcripts located in Box 5, Folder 3, Nam June Paik Papers, Nam June Paik Archive, SAAM.

296 Russell Baker, “Observer: Seated One Day at the Cello: Dress Is Irrelevant At a Cello Concert? In the Same Boat,” New York Times (May 14, 1967): E10.

148 governing system that establishes what perceptions, actions, and thoughts are possible. It was first proposed by Plato, who reasoned that a well-ordered society partitions degrees of community participation or exclusion into several specific regimes wherein “each person only does one thing that they were destined to do by their ‘nature.’”297 A cellist, for example, should neither comment on social policy nor decide how a score is performed. Yet since antiquity, the mimesis of artists have threatened divisions of labor by imagining more possibilities. “The mimetician brings confusion to this distribution,” Rancière explains, “he is a man of duplication, a worker who does two things at once.298 Just as Plato’s artists were guilty of more than cluttering the world with simulacra, Moorman’s “crime was greater than indecent exposure.”

Appearing as both a musician and a cultural critic, a nude statue and a grotesque collage, an image and an actor, Moorman redistributed professional norms, ‘natural’ order, and thus the rule of law. Along with draft-card burning long-hairs and infectiously gender-bending designers, her uncanny duplicity suggested workers could do other than fulfill their prescribed roles. Policing the definition of art and enforcing social was Judge Shalleck’s way to maintain medium specificity in the arts and specific roles for women, or as called it, an “ordered community.”

Although he lamented, “it is not a satisfying result for a court to be compelled to condemn anyone who has been weak enough thoughtlessly to succumb to ill-considered influences,”

Moorman was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.299

As Cage portended, monstrous things occur when composers and performers fail to empty themselves of subjective desire. While sounds could be free of conscription, Moorman’s

297 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 42-43.

298 Ibid, 40.

299 Shalleck, 19. On May 9, 1967, Moorman was given a suspended sentence.

149 body was neither free of the score nor the social script indited in the “laws governing behavior.”

Like an automaton who is stuck in a recursive system and at the mercy of her own forbidden program, her actions were deemed willful yet thoughtless, responsible for the non-musical notation written in a score she did not author, and lewd because she exposed anatomy while obscuring her gendered identity. And as an automaton, she would soon return to a place where repressed content is accessed through fantasy, screens, and symbols.

150 Chapter Five

THE AUTOMATON’S RETURN

I. Cybernated Life

Debuted during the Howard Wise Gallery’s 1969 “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition,

Moorman and Paik’s next major collaboration TV Bra for Living Sculpture revisited the erotic disturbance and confusion between animation and inanimation that had previously placed them in jeopardy. Again, the costume was an integral aspect of the composition, linking new music theory with a psychoanalytic strategy to subvert social norms. But where the costume in Opera

Sextronique represented the score’s non-musical notation, here the costume registered sound as non-notated effect. Paik wired Moorman’s cello so that sound waves became electrical interference while she played, abstracting television programs that were broadcast on two monitors adorning her otherwise bare breasts. Consisting entirely of right angles with its

Plexiglas “cups” inverted to support manufactured televisions, the TV Bra was ill-fitted for a cellist’s posture. Harnessed to her body, the heavy monitors straddled the cello’s neck and rested on its belly at odd angles. Wires streamed from around her ribs into foot pedal controllers, further entangling Moorman while enabling her to manipulate the display. Such an awkward jumble of technology appeared in stark contrast to the long black skirt worn in reference to traditional orchestral attire.

Positioned off-stage during the performance, Paik mixed the televisuals with live footage of Moorman improvising before a harshly lit audience. At times her torso appeared as a television image within her TV Bra. Each monitor then became a mise en abyme of images

151 within images, recursively resending as long as the resolution would allow. The feedback established continuity between the Moormans as well as their uncanny discord: outside the screens, Moorman was responsive and returned the audience’s gaze. Inside, the representations were blind and distorted by the live artists’ actions. Her inability to see what played across her chest and Paik’s inability to predict her gestures insured that the performance was indeterminate and co-created.300

Activating the TV Bra reversed the compositional process. Whereas traditional scores are comprised of signs indicating body gestures and sounds for the performer to make, Moorman’s actions and the sounds she generated became the a priori of their visual index. In ironic compliance with law, it proved she was an artist by positioning a permissible article of clothing as that which broadcasts her artistic labor. At the same time, the TV Bra facilitated Moorman’s radically idiosyncratic interpretive style. That Moorman always “played herself” in performances was by now a common refrain. With the TV Bra reinforcing her professional identity as an instrument for artistic production, she appears as a figure who has merged with her cello alter-ego and quite literally “plays herself.”

The audience reveled in how TV Bra for Living Sculpture made similes of human and mechanized production and treated the human as an objet d’art. “Miss Moorman—an avant guardist with a genius for attracting attention—is part of the exhibit,” John Gruen reported, “She is, in fact, the “Living Sculpture” in Nam June Paik’s witty contribution to the show titled TV

Bra for Living Sculpture.”301 What struck Gruen as the funniest was the title’s appellation,

300 Paik insisted, “there is a lot of Charlotte Moorman in TV Bra, a lot of her creation and interpretation, a lot of her personality is in it…If I had made the TV Bra with any other person, it could not be the same. Charlotte’s charisma is strongly involved in it.” Paik and Moorman, Encyclopaedia of the Word, 127.

301 John Gruen, "Art in New York," New York Vol. 2, No. 23 (June 9, 1969): 57.

152 which aimed “to ‘humanize electronics,’ and to demonstrate the ‘human use of technology.’”

That made the work an inside joke: not only was Moorman an art object, she was a readymade.

A similarly amused reception greeted Moorman when she re-performed TV Bra for Living

Sculpture the following year at the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition in Washington, D.C.302

Writing for , Mary Wiegers concluded her review by quoting a visitor’s wisecrack on Moorman’s machine-like labor:

Some of the machines weren’t working. “Except for Miss Moorman,” Ambassador

Freeman said, “She’s working very hard.”303

While Moorman out-performed the technological innovations surrounding her, John Seery’s TV

Time Capsule (1969) acted like a worker collapsing from exhaustion. Wrapped in clear plastic, a television played until it burnt itself out, which it did twice during the exhibition’s run. It functioned like a performance that would end when the performing TV stopped working, much like how TV Bra for Living Sculpture ended once Moorman was finished doing her job. By involving television in a transpositive process that turned something “live” into sculpture and then used its temporality to turn sculpture into a performative art, both works shifted emphasis from television’s manufactured objecthood to the labor it performed.

A nervous humor resulted. To Freud, humor is a device akin to the uncanny. So long as the technique is not too “mechanized,” so long as a human element remains, “something familiar

302 Curated by Jasia Reichardt, “Cybernetic Serendipity” was originally exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, in May, 1968 and did not include TV Bra for Living Sculpture. However, the work was included when the exhibition traveled to the Corcoran Gallery in July, 1969.

303 Mary Wiegers, “Topless And Tuned In: On Exhibit,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (July 16, 1969): B1. In her review of “Cybernetic Serendipity,” Grace Glueck also playfully compares Moorman to a robot named Albert in “3 Floors of ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’,” The New York Times, (July 18, 1969): 16.

153 is rediscovered, where we might instead have expected something new,” he claimed.304 The emphasis on Moorman’s breasts, objectified figuration, and indiscernible role within an intermedia performance would have been familiar to those aware of “The People v. Charlotte

Moorman.” Snickering at how the allure of her mechanics “worked” better than the less fleshy others made a mockery of the legal measures taken to prevent her from eroticizing music.

Humor also gave voice to shock—not just over seeing a partially naked woman, but over the discord between her nudity and normative displays of female sexuality. According to Freud, shock is what automatizes humor and unleashes the “liberated nonsense” that he alleged,

“shatters respect for institutions and truths in which the hearer once believed.”305 And according to Paik, technology is the ultimate avant-garde shock tactic, capable of engineering such a shattering. The year before the artists landed in legal trouble, he made this claim in a manifesto titled, “Cybernated Art.” In it, he posits:

if Pasteur and Robespierre are right that we can resist poison only through certain built-in

poison, then some specific frustrations caused by cybernated life, require accordingly

cybernated shock and catharsis. My everyday work with video tape and the cathode-ray

tube convinces me of this.306

He goes on to form an analogy between Happenings (the art of relationships) and cybernetics

(the science of relationships) to conclude that both engage in metempsychosis, or reincarnation according to Buddhist belief. These relationships, he argues, are not formed entities but the communicative space between entities, capable of transmigrating like a soul at the moment of

304 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 148.

305 Ibid, 163.

306 Reprinted in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, eds. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2001) 40. 154 death. To make “cybernated art,” as he would with TV Bra for Living Sculpture, was to vaccinate against the transmigration between humans and instruments characteristic of

“cybernated life.” Standing for both the restrictions against sexualized music and the instrumentalization of human laborers, the shocking appearance of an automaton thus ridiculed the social and compositional laws that lead to Moorman’s conviction.

II. Mechanisms of Humor

Perhaps Moorman played her part too well. While the automaton is an absurd figure, it was also congruous with deeply engrained perceptions of women and laborers in the 1960s.

Rather than considering how TV Bra for Living Sculpture complicated representations of gender and work, descriptions of this piece tend to position Moorman as a tool for demonstrating Paik’s brilliance. The most surprisingly unironic perception of Moorman qua instrument comes from

Martha Rosler, an artist whose oeuvre is celebrated for giving critical attention to women’s overlooked experiences. But in her 1985 essay, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” Rosler is so intent on dethroning Paik and debunking the utopian mythology surrounding video art that she overlooks the possibility of Moorman’s agency in their collaborations. With TV Bra for

Living Sculpture undoubtedly in mind, she sneers,

And—oh yes!—he is a man. The hero stands up for masculine mastery and bows to

patriarchy, if only in representation. The thread of his work includes the fetishization of

the female body as an instrument that plays itself, and the complementary thread homage

to other famous male artist-magicians or seers (quintessentially, Cage)... Paik’s playful

poetry pins the person in place.307

307 Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Sally J. Fifer and Doug Hall (New York, N.Y: Aperture, 1990), 45, 46. 155 Is Rosler not also pinning Moorman in place? Assuming Moorman must be a manipulated body image rather than an active and accomplished collaborator, does she not perpetuate the undue accreditation to Paik that she contests? While accusing Paik of merely aestheticising television

(Rosler wants it a “technology available to others”), Rosler effaces the woman whose activation of said technology challenged its status as a stable, singularly authored art object. Whether in service of male mastery or its opposing polemic, the woman in this equation can only be a subordinate who performs work for someone else.

Had Moorman called herself a composer, perhaps her contribution would have been easier to see. Despite admixing the arts and deploying indeterminate methods, it was common for 1960s performances to distinguish between intellectual and manual labor according to established class biases. As in the social economy, the performer’s labor was underrated because, as Kirby explains,

the choices are up to him, but he does not work to create anything. The creation was

done by the artist when he formulated the idea of the action. The performer merely

embodies and makes concrete the idea.308

This division of labor results in yet another distribution of the sensible. Those who perform the task are asynchronous and distinct from those who create the task that is to be done. For their bodies to “embody” the idea, they cannot simultaneously be its intellectual owner. Thus,

Richard Skidmore can speak of Moorman as “utilized” with such effacement that cello bowing occurs without a subject:

308 Kirby, 17.

156 Paik utilized, as “living sculpture”, infamous topless cellist Charlotte Moorman. He

modified her standard attire with two working 3-inch televisions strapped across her

chest. Bowing the cello caused distortions on the two screens.309

Similarly, Grace Glueck writes that the work was “created by Nam June Paik, [and] adorns cellist Charlotte Moorman, who can modulate its images simply by bowing her cello. Miss

Moorman (for two hours daily) is one of the exhibits in “TV as a Creative Medium.”310 Here,

Moorman is the art but not the artist. Cello bowing is her sole, “simple,” function and her physical labor is the mere embodiment of Paik’s idea.

The technophilic discourse surrounding “TV as Creative Medium” also deflected around labor issues. Indeed, a common critique of early TV and video art is that in promoting a rather

Modernist faith in technological progress, artists and audiences turned a blind eye to labor. In making this claim, Benjamin Buchloh points to Paik’s art as perpetuating the assumption “that media technology could induce changes inside a sociopolitical framework without addressing the specific interests and conditions of the individuals within the political and economic ordering system.”311 Modernism, in its preoccupation with composition and medium, is accused of

309 Richard Skidmore, "TV as Art" (1969) essay in Electronic Arts Intermix Articles and Reviews. Seeing Moorman as a contribution to the work’s visuals, rather than as the co-creator responsible for its sonority also occurs in Ben Portis, “The Fulcrum: TV as Creative Medium,” essay commissioned by Electronic Arts Intermix, http://www.eai.org/user_files/supporting_documents/portis_fulcrum_essay.pdf and Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Sally J. Fifer and Doug Hall (New York: Aperture, 1990), Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice (May 22, 1969) and Jud Yalkut, "Critique: TV as a Creative Medium," Arts Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 1 (September-October 1969): 18. Yalkut conflates TV Bra for Living Sculpture with Paik’s other contribution to the exhibition, Participation TV. Stephanie Harrington hesitates over what role to assign Paik: “And all of this—Miss Moorman, her cello, the Yankees, the two mini-television sets that transported them to Miss Moorman’s bosom, the vibrations and undulations—all were components of “TV Bra for Living Sculpture… Nam June Paik, the artist who—what? designed, engineered, co-created?—“TV Bra for Living Sculpture.” Stephanie Harrington, “Awaiting a Genius,” The Village Voice (May 29, 1969): 29.

310 Glueck, "Art Notes: T-Visionaries," The New York Times (May 25, 1969): D42.

311 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal (1985): 217. An ambivalent attitude toward corporate collaboration further compromised the anti-capitalist message behind “TV as a Creative Medium.” For a discussion of TV and video art’s social politics, see David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G. Hanhardt 157 similar neglect. By classifying television art as a medium onto itself, “TV as a Creative

Medium” aligned itself with formalist values even as many of the works straddled sculptural and performative logics and approached television as a complex, social network. Feedback, interactivity, and psychotropic imagery were considered counter-cultural interventions for seeming to break the spectatorial binary associated with passive television consumption.312

Labor hierarchies and the gender politics of representation, however, remained invisible and in place.

As a haunting echo of Opera Sextronique, TV Bra for Living Sculpture cannot be understood through the exhibition’s medium specific premise alone. Of much greater relevance was the exhibition’s predication on television’s domestic ubiquity. Wise described the roster of artists as those “who were “brought up” on TV,” and in a culture where “Marshall McLuhan has become a household name.”313 In German, heimlich means belonging to the house. It refers to the intimate, familiar, non-public, and thus also the concealed: a deed committed behind one’s back. The later connotation gives way to the definition of unheimlich as an eerie and gruesome thing that should have remained hidden but has come to light. Tracing this etymology, Freud bases his analysis of the uncanny on the inherent ambivalence of the term.314 Uncanny

(Layton: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), Vito Acconci, “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View” and Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video, and David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

312 Works such as Frank Gillette and ’s Wipe Cycle (1969), Paul Ryan’s Everyman’s Moebius Strip (1969), and Paik’s Participation TV (1969) were invested in the mirroring effect of feedback to disrupt the mono- directional flow of information from the power-source to the receiving viewer. Rather than being fed images from afar, viewers were confronted with dislocating images of themselves in the act of viewing or interacting with the very work in which they appeared. Other pieces looked inward. For example, Thomas Tadlock’s The Archetron (1969), Eric Siegal’s Psychedelevision in Color (1969), and Joe Weintraub’s AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television) (1969) repurposed television to facilitate therapeutic or pseudo-psychedelic experiences.

313 Howard Wise, “TV as a Creative Medium” brochure, Howard Wise Gallery, 1969.

314 See Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

158 experiences, he concludes, arise from the point at which heimlich is identical to unheimlich, so that the two words are opposite but not contradictory: the familiar and the hidden. The prefix

“un” is a token of repression. It foreshadows a return, which will arrive in an ambiguous form that is beyond reason.

Just as unheimlich signifies both the intimate and the alien, the visible and concealed, TV

Bra for Living Sculpture used television’s strange familiarity to stage several inversions. “By using TV as bra…the most intimate belonging of human being,” Paik declared, “we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.”315 Engineering the apparatus to respond to physiology in this “humanistic way,” clearly referenced Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics, which spoke of how machines can increase our creative capacities.316 Yet the device only humanized technology by instrumentalizing a human body. Only by performing as a grotesquely feminized cyborg, was

Moorman’s humanistic, artistic agency made visible. Ambiguous wording also makes it unclear whether the apparatus is for a sculpturesque Moorman or Moorman is the object for the inert television audience. Either reading problematizes the assumption that broadening television’s capabilities and involving spectators in the programming of spectacle is a viable stance against its psychic control. Doubt continues through the statement’s refusal to specify whether it is the bra or the TV that is “most intimate,” or why this sexually and electrically charged objet trouvé belongs not to a human, but to a “Living Sculpture,” which is to say, an automaton.

315 Nam June Paik’s statement in “TV as a Creative Medium” brochure. (Ellipsis appears in original document.)

316 See Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Avon Books, 1967). Wiener—who Paik referred to throughout his career—also saw the danger of machine idolatry and in subordinating people by using technology as a tool for profit.

159 To Lacan, intimacy is a threshold much like television and mediates between the body and the symbolic realm much like a bra. Elaborating on Freud’s unheimlich through yet another conflation of seemingly incompatible positions, Lacan’s neologism, extimité, or "extimacy," describes the exterior quality of what is most intimate and deeply within the subject. The cultural theorist Mladen Dolar provides a particularly lucid explanation of extimité. It is “the point where the real immediately coincides with the symbolic to be put into the service of the imaginary,” he explains, “So what is uncanny is again the recuperation of the loss: the lost part destroys reality instead of completing it.”317 As an interface between public broadcast and private reception, television models the “extimate” codification of live events into subject forming representations. In TV Bra for Living Sculpture, the television translates even the nonrepresentational and indeterminate sounds of a cello into contained images and it doubles to form the shape of another exterior symbol of intimacy. Covering Moorman’s breasts repeats the familiar act of censorship, so what is “most intimate” is her position as a subject before the law.

III. On Bras and Mediation

In the 1960s, television was becoming America’s primary source for news and entertainment, the arena where political representations clashed and competed for airtime. In the interim between Moorman’s trial and the Wise exhibition, the New York Radical Women

(NYRW)’s “No More ” protest disrupted the September 7, 1968 Miss America

317 According to Dolar, the uncanny “is located there where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety… and it is this very dimension beyond the division into “psychic” and “real” that deserves to be called the real in the Lacanian sense…The source of the uncanny is the reappearance of a part that was necessarily lost with the emergence of the subject—the intersection between the “psychic” and the “real,” the interior and the exterior, the “word” and the “object,” the symbol and the symbolized.” Mladen Dolar, “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October, Vol. 58 (Autumn, 1991): 6, 15.

160 pageant precisely because they recognized how subjectivities are disseminated through televisual representation. Like Moorman and Paik’s collaborations, their political performance demonstrated how reality and appearances are cyclically covered and uncovered by the symbolism of intimate apparel. Fighting spectacle with spectacle, the NYRW held eye-catching posters, crowned a live sheep Miss America, and ceremoniously threw objects such as dishcloths, steno pads, Ladies Home Journals, , and cosmetics into a “Freedom Trash

Can.” These gestures were explained in ’s ten point “No More Miss America!” manifesto, which enumerated the pageant’s chauvinist agenda. It discussed the subhuman, archetypal “roles we are all forced to play as women” and the social imperatives that position appearance—rather than professional skill—as the apogee of a woman’s success.318 The manifesto specifically denounced law enforcers and the media as agents of an oppressive regime.

It extended the protest beyond the beauty contest to a larger system of social injustice, which the

NYRW understood through a Marxist reading of Immanuel Kant’s theory of objectification.

According to Kant, humanity is characterized by a capacity for making rational choices in pursuit of what one values. Such a capacity dignifies humans and distinguishes them from animals, unknown things, and inanimate objects. Objects can never be considered free because they are representations in our ego’s consciousness that do not exercise free choice.319 To the

318 “No More Miss America!” manifesto issued by the New York Radical Women (NYRW) organizer, Robin Morgan on September 7, 1968, reprinted in K. L. Lerner, Brenda W. Lerner, and Adrienne W. Lerner, eds., Government, Politics, and Protest: Essential Primary Sources (Detroit, Mich: Thomson Gale, 2006), 195.

319 Kant posits, “one may dispose of things that have no freedom, but not of a being that itself has free choice. If a man does that, he turns himself into a thing, and then anyone may treat him as they please, because he has thrown his person away; as with sexual inclinations, where people make themselves an object of enjoyment, and hence into a thing. There is thus also a degradation of humanity in it.” Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans Peter Heath (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127. Similarly, the NYRW argued that images of idealized women advertise the system that produced them, soliciting others to use women as objects that can be rated, exchanged, and discarded. “No More Miss America!” manifesto, Government, Politics, and Protest, 195.

161 NYRW, Miss America and the pageant sponsors epitomized the everyday reification of women into sexual and domestic objects. Although focused on women, the protestors opposed the entire capitalist culture that made its business out of turning people into expendable tools. They were particularly outraged by the way soldiers were treated as programmable and disposable killing machines, racist acts of dehumanization, and slippages between humans and commodities.320

In language anagrammatic to TV Bra for Living Sculpture, the third statement of

Morgan’s manifesto describes Miss America contestants as walking commercials for statuary consumers and as a “Living Bra” for “the Dead Soldier” in Vietnam.321 Within the context of their critique, the bra signified a fetishizing costume. Much like the slang term “skirt,” it was used as a sartorial synecdoche for women in general, illustrating the difference through which hierarchy is maintained. Morgan also evoked the bra to argue that women were being used to decorate the ugly brutality of the Vietnam War. But the bra proved to be an unstable signifier.

Mythic accounts of witchy, hysterical bra-burners quickly spread to delegitimize their message, warning that the irrationality of radicalized women threatened social stability.

320 Here it should be noted that there were actually two demonstrations against the Miss America pageant in 1968. Although the organizers included racial prejudice in their critique, “No More Miss America” was associated with the white, middle class women’s liberation movement. Broadcast one day prior to the contest, a contemporaneous protest took the form of a “Miss Black America” crowning of an NAACP and Black Awareness Movement member. It was organized by J. Morris Anderson, a male member of the NAACP who was less concerned with the objectification of women than with the pageant’s racial bias. If the rhetoric of either protest seems like a disproportionate response to a rather kitsch and goofy contest, it is important to remember that this major cultural institution was plagued by a slue of sexist, racist, and classist practices. For example, Beth Kreydatus reminds us that ethnic and racial minorities were excluded from certain events and “candidates who had any un-chaperoned contact with men or a trace of a sexual past risked disqualification.” Beth Kreydatus, “Confronting the "Bra- Burners:" Teaching Radical Feminism with a Case Study,” The History Teacher, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Aug., 2008): 491, 494.

321 “3. Miss America as Military Death Mascot. The highlight of her reign each year is a cheerleader-tour of American troops abroad—last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit. She personifies the “unstained patriotic American womanhood our boys are fighting for.” The Living Bra and the Dead Soldier. We refuse to be used as Mascots for Murder.” “No More Miss America!” manifesto in Government, Politics, and Protest, 195. began advertising their “Living Bras” on television in the early 1950s. It is likely that Morgan was parodying their marketing campaigns.

162 Bras had been tossed into the Freedom Trash Can but none were actually burned. The bra-burning myth spread from an article published in The New York Post. In it, reporter Lindsy

Van Gelder compared the NYRW to the flag and draft-card burners who committed a federal offence in their demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Even to leftists, the feminists’ symbolic act of defiance seemed frivolous by comparison. Thus, while receiving national media coverage for the first time in Second Wave Feminist history, the protest did not correct pejorative representations of women or even disrupt the pageant’s impenetrable program. With steadfast fidelity to the previously scripted stream of events, the broadcast excluded everything that occurred outside its frame.322 The story of what transpired on the boardwalk was immediately misconstrued in a manner that maintained the pageant’s fixation on women’s breasts and their attire. Although tossed in the Freedom Trash Can and engulfed in fictional flames, the bra clung to the women, replacing their capacities and corporeality with signification intelligible to a patriarchal order.

What Moorman refers to in her rejoinder as “the so-called sexual revolution” diluted the cogency of women’s liberation even further. Through the lens of this co-opted, faux-freedom movement, bralessness was seen as a sign of sexual availability and pathological self-display.

Whether reporting on political activity or the arts, the media discourse on bras belied the work women were doing in the same way. Compare responses to “No More Miss America” with how

Moorman was characterized in a Life magazine article titled, “Nudity in Public.” The author,

Paul O’Neil, concludes his self-described “somewhat scandalized report on the growing urge of

322 Bonnie J. Dow recounts how even the protestors’ most disruptive gestures (chanting, hanging a banner over the balcony, releasing stink bombs, and getting arrested) were not captured by the network’s cameras. The subsequent Life and New York Times Magazine cover stories on the emerging women’s liberation movement also discredited the NYRW by styling the story as an attack on Miss America herself. Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2003): 133, 137.

163 more and more Americans to appear without any clothes on” by assessing “The Topless Cellist.”

She is at once a strawman for his argument and a fetish object for his mild scandal:

the new nudity seems mostly prompted by the same stimuli which prompted the old:

exhibitionism, narcissism, copycatism, the lust for a buck, a hope of returning to

“nature”…and no doubt sincere desire for artistic expression…half the world’s strippers

are convinced that they, too, harbor this vital force.323

“Nudity in Public” was published the year Life won the National Magazine Award for reports on

Southeast Asia that are credited with dissuading public support for the Vietnam War. The article confirmed that nudity required public discourse as well, for as Judge Shalleck made clear, clothing is a matter of law and order. It both defines and obscures the gendered body. Bare- breasted and distanced from “nature,” the women O’Neil discusses unthinkingly respond to stimuli, which gives them the false illusion of possessing a “vital force.” In other words, they are automatons. While there is utility in “Living Bras,” radicalized women were automatons gone amuck.

Less than a year after the first truly contested crowning of Miss America, a TV bra-clad

Moorman—herself a former beauty queen, media spectacle, and object of institutional control— sat among the art objects at Howard Wise Gallery, improvising on her cello. Her bra, like the ones the NYRW did not burn, was an interface between an actual body and its representation. It too mediated between a live performance protesting repression and the persistence of distorting signifiers. An ambivalent object, the bra provided the necessary “coverage” or concealment of her body as well as the “coverage” or broadcast of her transgression.324 The cover-up drew

323 Paul O’Neil, “Nudity in Public,” Life, Vol. 63, No. 15 (October 13, 1967): 116.

324 Lucio Cabutti finds a relationship between concealment and eroticism running through Paik’s work. He contends that Paik “looked at the ritual coverings and uncoverings of the Dada-surrealists, their connubial iconography which 164 attention to something real that had been concealed, revealing the uncontrollable return of a familiar repression.

IV. The Machine is Us

The automaton has always been an ambiguous icon, oscillating between that which society controls and that which harbors unimaginable rebellion. Anxiety comes from the uncanny manner in which automata elicit affect, conceal their inner workings, and resemble our own programmatic yet impulsive behavior. A mysterious part of them resides beyond what can be controlled by reason and a mysterious part of the rational mind empathizes with objects or anticipates their mobilization. In the later part of the twentieth century, feminist artists and theorists began recognizing the transgressive potential of automata. Most famously, Donna

Haraway’s 1985 polemic, “Cyborg Manifesto,” presents the cyborg as “a possible allegory for feminist scientific and political knowledge,” outside of patriarchal, essentialist paradigms that attempt to define the “natural” woman.325 She argues that because cyborgs are simultaneously skilled, desirous, organic and cybernetic, they can intercede between totalizing and partial definitions of gender. The cyborg, she writes,

is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence…The machine is not an it to

be animated, worshiped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of

rediscovered the original meaning of the Latin word nubes in a metaphor of concealment, veiling, and cloud.” He cites Paik and Moorman’s performance of Instrumental Music as a prime example, although the piece was composed for Moorman by Takehisa Kosugi in 1965 and usually performed as a solo by Moorman alone. Lucio Cabutti, “The Magnetic Television Camera and Video-Alchemist Nam June Paik,” in The Electronic Wizard, 104- 105.

325 Donna Haraway, “Introduction” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2-3. Here it should be noted that Haraway was critical of how psychoanalysis conceives of women as the Other, as well as its emphasis on family structures and individuation.

165 our embodiment….There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an

intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction.326

As such, they present an alternative identity to the “US Eurocentric socialist-feminism” of the

1970s—a movement that was often confused by Moorman’s confrontation with intimate boundaries, both real and symbolic.327

While Moorman and Paik invoked aspects of a psychoanalytic logic that Haraway would dismiss tout court, their collaboration prefigured the collision of advanced technology with radical body politics that fueled her essay. And while Moorman's performance as an electronic sculpture was not considered a feminist gesture by 1960s standards, similarly cyborgian representations significantly factored into the renegotiation of gendered subjectivities a generation later. In the 1980s and 90s, technologically synthesized beings were understood to articulate how the female body is always already mediated. In Body Art/Performing the Subject,

Amelia Jones uses the term “technophenomenological body” to describe the complexly rendered and dispersed automatons enacted by artists such as Maureen Connor and .328

This type of body art disavows “natural” femininity along with the representations that men engineer. Like Moorman, the women integrate with technology, act like objects, and author their own roles. To Jones, such a portrayal decenters Modernism’s Cartesian subject, replacing it with the intersubjectivity and cultural reassessments that mark postmodernism.

326 Haraway, “: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," reprinted in Ibid, 151.

327 Haraway, “Introduction,” 2-3. Artists such as Allison Knowles, Jill Johnson, Martha Rosler, and Andrea Dworkin considered Moorman an exhibitionist who was manipulated by her male collaborators. For more on Moorman’s fraught relationship with feminism, see Laura Wertheim Joseph, “Messy Bodies and Frilly Valentines: Charlotte Moorman’s Opera Sextronique” in A Feast of Astonishments.

328 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

166 Like the “technophenomenological bodies” to come, the automaton of TV Bra for Living

Sculpture provides an alternative to the essentializing paradigms of art criticism. It returns to the juridical discourse surrounding Opera Sextronique but it does not offer a rebuttal to Judge

Shalleck’s criminalization of mixed-media or assign responsibility for the work. It does not reconcile the conflicting freedoms proposed through indeterminacy and libidinal liberation. Nor does it concede to the techno-utopianism through which the Howard Wise exhibition sought social change. Just as in the courtroom, such attempts to decode or assuage its uncanny mechanics would only reinscribe it in a regulatory order.329 But there are histories, attitudes, and effects that are necessarily unsettling and unsettled. Theatrically a living statue, musically a

Frankenstein monster, televisually between an object and an outlaw, Moorman left the uncanny to our imagination.

329 As Dolar reminds us, “the criticism of ideology helplessly repeats the modernist gesture—the reduction of the uncanny to its “secular basis” through the very logic that actually produced the uncanny in the first place as the object remainder.” Dolar, 19. 167 Epilogue

Like Robot Opera, TV Bra for Living Sculpture would go on to denominate more than one aesthetic experience. As part of the “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition, it was conjoined to other works that used television technology for formal exploration or to intervene with the mediation of public and private life. Moorman later performed TV Bra for Living Sculpture in exhibitions, festivals, and performance programs associated with Fluxus, Happenings, cybernetic art, or avant-garde music, in countries far and wide, with and without Paik’s assistance. Playing up the tensions between creating, being, and owning the work of art, Moorman would place a card beside her with the type of caption information typically included in gallery wall labels or checklists: her and Paik’s names, the title of the work, and an indication of belonging in the

Howard Wise Gallery collection.330 But despite Moorman insisting, “I am a sculpture and not a concert,” proscenium arrangements or the bracketed duration of her appearances signaled otherwise.331 “‘TV Bra for Living Sculpture’ would really be an interesting experience if presented the way it was meant to be shown,” Julie Levy Naxos wrote in The Daily Journal, “In this work, Miss Moorman was meant to be part of the museum’s objects d’art like any other

330 Although outside the scope of this project, there is a striking invariable linking TV Bra for Living Sculpture to contemporaneous performances that used similar terminology and triggered a similar criticality. For example, Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1957), Piero Manzoni’s Live Sculpture series of 1961 [an idea he purportedly borrowed from Ben Vautier—see Ken Friedman, The Fluxus Reader (Chichester West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1999), 185], Yves Klein’s early 1960s Anthropometrie performances, Pi Lind’s Living Sculpture (1967-68), Oscar Bony’s The Worker’s Family (1968), Gilbert & George’s Underneath the Arches (1969), The Bruce McLean’s Nice Style Pose Band (1970-75), and Terry Fox’s self-published, undated “Rent-A-Artist (artist statement)” all explored the aesthetic reification of live bodies from the perspective of class, labor, or sex.

331 Sophie Forbat and Daniel Thomas, 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects (Botany, N.S.W.: Kaldor Public Art Projects, 2009), 111.

168 sculpture which people would stop to for a while and then walk away.”332 Distanced from the preceding court case, original curatorial context, and Paik’s co-manipulation, Moorman looked less like an object than an avant-garde performer in a flashy costume. The role she played appeared too animate and not statuesque enough.

In the end, it was not Moorman but the TV Bra that was accessioned as sculpture in a museum collection. TV Bra for Living Sculpture has become synonymous with this now inoperative object. It is a work by Nam June Paik, owned by The Walker Art Center, explicitly composed of videotubes, televisions, Plexiglass, boxes, vinyl straps, rheostat, foot switches, cables, copper wire, and cello.333 In lieu of a pedestal, contemporary viewers will most likely see it atop an empty chair. As with Robot K-456 (one version which belongs to the Friedrich

Christian Flick Collection, another to the Smithsonian American Art Museum), the technology is no longer conjoined to the human.

But to Paik, the work was incomplete without Moorman. Like a parasite or a soul awaiting reincarnation, it could only exist with her body as its host:

I consider [Moorman] to be a great video artist. Video art is not just a TV screen and

tape—it is a whole life, a new way of life. The TV screen on her body is literally the

embodyment [sic] of life video art… TV CELLO and TV BRA are interesting because

Charlotte did it. If any other lady cellist did it, it would have been just a gimmick.

Charlotte’s renown breast symbolizes agony and achievement of the avant-garde for the

332 Julie Levy Naxos, “Moorman Gives Violoncello Innovative Treatment,” The Daily Journal, Wed April 9, 1975, 17.

333 Replicas of the TV Bra costume receive the elongated performance title as well. For example, the checklist for the Whitney Museum’s 1994 exhibition, “The Howard Wise Gallery: TV as a Creative Medium, 1969” reads, “TV Bra for Living Sculpture (Replica), 1992, 2 video monitors, plastic, laserdisc player, laserdisc, dimensions variable, Collection of Nam June Paik.”

169 past ten years…Here the role of video artists as the pioneer-experimenters in tele-

communication-transportation trade-off is great. Charlotte Moorman showed us this

impending conversion in the most elegant way, by adorning herself with TV Bra and

Train Bra.334

Many branches of postwar art positioned themselves akin to life. Paik’s definition of video art speaks of an existence that is not fully human. By pointing to Moorman’s body, agony, and expanded role, he explains it as a physiological, psychological, and occupational fusion with the mechanisms—the TV and the bra— that manage the life’s representation. Because Moorman already co-existed with instruments, interpreted works according to her lived experiences, and redrew her professional and social roles despite strong enforcement of their traditional outlines, she could incarnate the medium as few others could.

Moorman and Paik’s collaborations took place amidst emphatic efforts to pinpoint the ontology of video art and place it within a demarcated taxonomy. Recognizing the

“psychological situation” conditioning the medium, Rosalind Krauss would famously define it through its narcissism.335 Her argument is that video is incapable of obtaining Modernist reflexivity and instead serves as a mirror for the artist’s self-reflection, generating misrecognition rather than the truth of the medium’s condition.336 She describes the symmetrical feedback between the camera and the monitor as a trap that so thoroughly ensnares the ego, there is no

334 Paik and Paul Schimmel, “Abstract Time,” Arts Magazine (December 1974), 52.

335 Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (Spring 1976), 57.

336 Krauss argues that reflexivity exposes the asymmetry between the image’s internal, compositional figure/ ground relationship on the one hand, and the image as a figure on an external support that is the ground, on the other. She claims that video art is only successful when it acknowledges its narcissistic condition by following three criteria: exploit and criticize the medium, disrupt the narcissism through representing physical intervention, or create an installation in which the video is “a sub-species of painting or sculpture.” Ibid, 59.

170 room to account for sociality or the essence of the work’s subjectivity and separate objectivity.

Paik’s implicit definition of video art does not dispute the medium’s propensity for self- reflection. It simply points to Moorman’s practice as proof that sociality is not antithetical to self-reflection, nor to misrecognition.337 Rather, the mistaken identity that comes from recursive representations of the self is an aspect of video’s operatic condition, primed to critique power accordingly. After all, narcissism is circumscribed within the imaginary order whereas video is touched by the real, nonsense of ambient soundwaves as well.338

Paik’s claims are too playfully hyperbolic and over-determined to serve as a new ontology. Moreover, experimental video emerged from too many wildly diverse practices and too complex an interplay of art histories, media theories, political intentions, and technological experiments, to be epitomized by Moorman and Paik’s early collaborations.339 Yet by celebrating Moorman as “a great video artist,” Paik discloses the extent of Moorman’s influence on his thinking and in turn, on the history of video art. Her transhumanism replaces the narcissist with an uncanny subjectivity, not trapped in technology but grappling with its labor

337 Ina Blom’s recent media-archaeological approach to video history is also interested in the agency of its reflective subjectivity. Rather than focusing on artists or the crisis of images, she concentrates on how individuation is reflected in technology and time. “There has been a tendency toward a too-rapid humanization of video, reducing its effects to familiar images and narratives at the expense of its technical-scientific properties. Attention to video agency therefore brings out a more broadly oriented capacity for connection and association across the spectrum of nonhuman and human phenomena, and its animist leanings demand a more pragmatic approach,” she writes. Ina Blom, The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016), 18-19.

338 For more on the relationship between media technology and psychic processes, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006).

339 To curator and historian David Ross, video art is more like “a set of tools,” than a distinct, aesthetic medium or stylistically coherent movement that encompasses its own set of specific problems. David A. Ross, “The History Remains Provisional,” in Video Art: The Castello De Rivoli Collection, eds. Ida Gianelli and Marcella Beccaria (Milano: Skira, 2005), For further discussion of the medium’s political and formal heterogeneity, also see David Antin “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G. Hanhardt (Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986) and Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008).

171 politics. Uninterested in revealing the natural world or the essential conditions of people and media, her meta-histrionics made futuristic fantasies of alien bodies in alienating working conditions. “Duplicating the senses has never been limited to what we would call natural science,” Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman argue in Instruments and the Imagination,

it inevitably spills out into all forms of discourse, both artistic and practical. It also holds

out the possibility—enticing for some, but horrifying to others—that through the

knowledge of automata we may come to know ourselves.340

By playing herself, Moorman’s role was indeed far bigger than her individual biography.

Whether received as sculpture, performance, or video, her uncanny hybridity allowed for the simultaneous self-reflection and role-reversal through which opera announces that “a new way of life” is impending. Thus, without soldering a single circuit, Moorman could stand for “the pioneer-experimenters in tele-communication-transportation” that more typically describes her partner. Unbound from the notes on a score, she could reinterpret the composition of ourselves.

340 Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 220. 172 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ARCHIVES

Charlotte Moorman Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, New York.

Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

VIDEOS, FILMS, DOCUMENTARY FOOTAGE

26’ 1.1499” for a String Player. Video, directed by Jud Yalkut. New York: Electric Arts Intermix, 1973.

4th & 7th Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals. 29:25 min, color, sound, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1966-1972.

4th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. 26:38 min, color, sound, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1966-1972.

7th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. 2:47 min, color, silent, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1969.

A Tribute to John Cage. 29:02 min, color, sound, directed by Nam June Paik, 1973, re-edited 1976.

Charlotte Moorman and the New York Avant Garde. Color, sound, directed by Fred Stern. The National Endowment for the Arts: 1980.

Charlotte Resounding. 40 min, color, sound, directed by Larry Miller. New York: Electric Arts Intermix, 1998.

Global Groove. 28:30 min, color, sound, directed by Nam June Paik and John Godfrey, 1973.

Guadalcanal Requiem. 28:33 min, color, sound, directed by Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman, 1977, re-edited 1979.

189 Opera Sextronique. 5:10 min, color and b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1967.

Rare Performance Documents 1961-1994 Volume 2. 18:37 min, b&w and color, sound, directed by Nam June Paik, 1961-94, compiled 2000.

Stockhausen’s Originale: Doubletakes. 30:05 min, b&w, sound DVD, directed by Peter Moore. New York: Electric Arts Intermix, 1964.

The Strange Music of Nam June Paik. 27 min, color, sound. Camera Three: 1975.

Television as a Creative Medium. 6 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on video, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1972.

The Chocolate Cello. 30 min, b&w, sound, directed by Jud Yalkut, 1973.

The Misfits - 30 Years of Fluxus. 80 min, color, sound, directed by Lars Movin, 1993.

There’s a Message There Somewhere. The British Movietone Digital Newsreel Archive. 24 June 1965. Accessed 4 October 2012. http://www.movietone.com/N_search.cfm.

"Topless Cellist" Charlotte Moorman. 29 min, color, sound, directed by Howard Weinberg and Nam June Paik, 1995.

TV as a Creative Medium. 12:08 min, b&w, sound, directed by Ira Schneider, 1969-84.

TV Cello Premiere. 7:25 min, color, silent, directed by Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, 1971.

Video Synthesizer and "TV Cello" Collectibles. 23:25 min, color, silent, directed by Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik, 1965-71.

Waiting for Commercials. 6:41 min, color, sound, directed by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1966-72, 1992.

190