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Art Journal

ISSN: 0004-3249 (Print) 2325-5307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaj20

“A Lunatic of the Sacred”: The Life and Work of

Nicole L. Woods

To cite this article: Nicole L. Woods (2017) “A Lunatic of the Sacred”: The Life and Work of Charlotte Moorman, Art Journal, 76:3-4, 129-133, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2017.1418519

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2017.1418519

Published online: 30 Jan 2018.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcaj20 resent the perspective of an animal, insect, Nicole L. Woods On a cold January afternoon in machine, or other inanimate matter.” Are the the packed Pick-Staiger Concert Hall at humans in New Engineering constructing the “A Lunatic of the Sacred”: Northwestern University, Schneemann world, or is the world in various nonhuman The Life and Work of and Knowles, pioneers of the American forms—tsunami to meltdown—also very Charlotte Moorman avant-garde in their own right and frequent much constructing us? Moorman collaborators, were joined by other A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte aesthetic allies of the “topless cellist”—Jim Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: Moorman and the Avant-Garde, McWilliams (graphic designer), Sandra A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, 1960s–1980s. Exhibition organized by Binion (video artist and performer), and NC: Duke University Press, 2010) Lisa G. Corrin, Corinne Granof, Scott Kraft, Andrew Gurian (filmmaker)—for a discus- Many still believe that humans are distinct in Michelle Puetz, Joan Rothfuss, and Laura sion moderated by the art historian Hannah having minds and not just brains. Sure, ani- Wertheim Joseph. Mary and Leigh Block Higgins. The panel marked the occasion of mals (as etymology suggests) are animated Museum of Art, Northwestern University Moorman’s first career retrospective, A Feast of compared to nonliving matter, but both lack Library, Evanston, IL, January 16–July 17, Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, meaningful motivation. The political scientist 2016; Grey Art Gallery, University, 1960s–1980s. In addition to the panel, exhibi- Jane Bennett, however, explores the pos- September 8–December 10, 2016; Museum tion programming included two lectures by sibilities of matter exerting its own potent der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, March 4– Joan Rothfuss and Barbara Moore, as well as agency. Through her lens of “vibrant matter” June 18, 2017 several compelling student of the questions of “we”—its membership, its Lisa G. Corrin and Corinne Granof, musical compositions framing Moorman’s politics, and its ecologies—become more eds. A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte own artistic evolution and influences; among expansive and complicated: “It is difcult Moorman and the Avant-Garde, them were ’s Chamber Music . . . for a public convened by environmental- 1960s–1980s. Exh. cat. With texts by Corrin, (1962) and ’s Cello Etude Boreales, no. 1 ism to include animals, vegetables, or miner- Ryan Dohoney, Granof, Hannah B. Higgins, (1978), performed by Drake Driscoll; Morton als as bona fide members, for nonhumans Rachel Jans, Laura Wertheim Joseph, Scott Feldman’s Projection One for Cello (1950), per- are already named as a passive environment. Kraft, Kathy O’Dell, Jason Rosenholtz-Witt, formed by Riana Anthony; and Nam June . . . A more materialist public would need to Joan Rothfuss, and . Evanston, Paik’s One for Violin (1962), performed by include more earthlings.” Through examples IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 224 Myrtil Mitanga. spanning power grids, garbage, and stem pp., 150 b/w and color ills. $40 paper Rothfuss, an independent curator cells, Bennett makes a compelling case for and author of the indispensable biogra- imagining the vastly distributed nature of “A lunatic of the sacred.” “A magician.” “A phy Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Nature. Her chapter on food, for example, proto-feminist.” “The artist who brought Moorman (2014), expertly shed light on the expands kaleidoscopically on ideas that women into .” These portrayals, show-woman’s byzantine presence in the Berger raises on the socioeconomics of eat- ofered by the artists 1960s experimental performance circuit by ing. Heavy on the heavies of Western phi- and at a roundtable event weaving “three stories of Charlotte” for the losophy, many of her ideas link to concepts honoring the life and work of Charlotte audience. The first, the “traditional” tale, as explored by speculative realism, object-ori- Moorman, the Juilliard-trained cellist, per- Rothfuss characterized it, is truncated and ented ontology, and other new materialisms formance artist, and festival organizer of the problematic—an overly simplified narrative popular in contemporary art now. Bennett’s post–World War II avant-garde, announce the that squarely situates Moorman as the guile- vibrant proposal for a more inclusive and particular—and yes, even astonishing—influ- less muse of her frequent collaborator Paik, participatory notion of us expands the circle ence of Moorman’s practice in the 1960s lacking any personal agency or artistic will beyond modernist human to animal through to and beyond. They also obliquely address the of her own. The second, a “riches-to-rags” things, and all the forms of we in between. In complicated ways in which we remember spin of the first tale, positions Moorman not the end, possibility aesthetics is not simply and reevaluate in retrospective. just as a muse but as the “tragic” muse of about what happens tomorrow as much as In terms of historical reception, the clever, Paik. Her seminude or performances reconceiving who matters today. indeterminate nature of Moorman’s oeuvre in now-legendary Paik pieces like Opera Sextronique (1967) and TV Bra for Living Sculpture Andrew Yang is an artist and educator working has often sufered a double exclusion: first, across the naturalcultural. His projects have been because of the probing, elusive, and dura- (1969) amounted to a sacrifice of her body exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, includ- tional character of the work; second, due to and reputation for his art—she was once ing the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015) and a solo Moorman’s marginalized relation to her male famously arrested for violating New York’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, peers and collaborators who have received indecency laws—and with it, the acquisition Chicago (2016). His writings appear in Leonardo, Biological Theory, Gastronomica, and Antennae, significantly greater recognition for their of a physically compromised and financially among others. He holds a PhD in biology and an experimental eforts. An urgent corrective to unstable existence. The third, the osten- MFA in , and is an associate professor at this delayed reception came in the form of a sible “success story,” gives an account of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. sprawling exhibition of Moorman’s diverse Moorman as a sprightly, efcacious admin- 1. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review activities as a musician, performer, and cura- istrator of music, dance, poetry, and film, 21 (May–June 2003): 65–79. tor, presented at venues in , New York, who invented a singular way of performing and Austria. by expanding and reshaping compositional

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CAA_AJ_FA-WN17_INTERIOR_FINAL_g.indd 129 12/28/17 9:06 AM scores written by others. Indeed, as Lisa who meticulously catalogued the raucous scholars and curators to closely track the Corrin, the director of the Block Museum performances staged over a two-week period artist’s career by following its ample paper and an organizer of the exhibition, asserts at Judson Hall on Fifty-Seventh Street in late trail. The special collections curator, Scott in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, summer 1964. In his critical assessment, Kraft, skillfully organized the archival “Moorman was the master of her own body, Bowers emphasized the cross-fertilizations materials on view, and in this space, one both as a raw material and as a vehicle for among the artists, including a recap of could spend hours poring over love letters, her creativity” (x). how each evening began, for example, with professional correspondence, and festival Following Rothfuss’s lecture, Barbara drafts, or listening on headset to various Moore underscored the historical recovery of telephone answering machine recordings. Moorman as a leading curator of the avant- The installation included displays in vitrines garde by extemporaneously chronicling and a monumentally scaled 1971 fish-eye the fifteen Annual New York Avant-Garde photograph of Moorman sitting among Festivals that Moorman organized from 1963 overcrowded boxes and papers in her stu- to 1980. Moore, a writer and associate of dio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West , presented a detailed retelling by shar- Side. Framed by two metal shelving units ing personal anecdotes from her experience stacked with brown file boxes, film canisters, working with Moorman, as well as a contex- domestic items, even toys, the objects and tual narration of the ubiquitous photographic the photograph were arranged as if await- work of Moore’s late husband, Peter, which ing our curious encounter. Two particularly faithfully documented nearly all the festival poignant moments provoked by the myriad performances. Indeed, nearly one hundred of objects and ephemera were Polaroid pho- Peter Moore’s photographs, many previously tographs of a smiling, though devastatingly unpublished, achieved a specific thematic emaciated Moorman— cancer and a mastec- of witnessing in the exhibition’s galleries. tomy had ravaged her body—and a Rolodex Barbara Moore’s recollections of the Annual card of John Lennon’s New York address, New York Avant-Garde Festival summoned an ’s Entrance/Exit Music realized which Moorman had lightly crossed out in impressive roster of visionary artists man- via electronic tape by or Paik’s pencil, with a small note indicating his date aged by Moorman through creative contacts Robot Opera. He thus communicated an invalu- of death. Other papers documenting her and business partners.1 able, on-the-scene beholding of the events, illness included journal entries recording The conceptual fluidity that Moorman including one Christian Wolf performance daily morphine injections, doctor’s missives, insisted on as an organizing principle facili- of “utterly disparate, dissociated instruments letters to friends with updates on her prog- tated an aesthetic porousness among per- whose spurts of sonorities cohered in such ress, and even a desperate note imploring formers that remarkably unified each year’s unlikely directions and clusters that a unique her neighbors to ignore any double-parking disparate oferings. The festivals took place sweetness developed.”2 This characterization infractions incurred by vehicles ferrying across notable New York locales, including of discordancy also remarkably described her to and from the hospital. If the main Central Park, Shea Stadium, Grand Central one’s experience at the Block Museum. The galleries manifested the vocal, almost stub- Station, the decks of the Staten Island Ferry, whack of musical sounds, films, overheard born presence of Moorman via multifarious Floyd Bennett Field, and the World Trade interviews and commentary, crackling and recordings through the loudspeaker system, Center. As the cocurator Corinne Granof clanging recorded audio, and more, greeted this small room, apart from the larger show, rightly notes, in overseeing such a complex each viewer at high volume when one walked allowed viewers to ponder the archive as network of practitioners and city bureau- through the museum’s glass doors.3 We heard an intimate space inhabited by professional cracies, “Moorman brought new art to the Moorman’s disembodied voice throughout accomplishment and personal pain. As Kraft widest possible audience, creating a truly the galleries—an insistent recorded pres- details in his essay, it was Frank Pileggi, the democratic area for experimentation” (11). ence with a slight Southern drawl. Moorman artist’s beloved and bereft husband, who first This egalitarian fusion of the visual and per- was also there in the exuberant curatorial tried to suss out the scholarly and artistic forming arts in the public sphere marked a choices; she had been joyfully and noisily value of the hordes of boxes left behind in turning point in the reception of the avant- resurrected for us to reassess her role within their loft.4 Moorman instructed him, in no garde by larger audiences. a paradoxical avant-garde canon. uncertain terms, “don’t throw anything out.” Moorman presents a unique challenge One of the more moving aspects of The foyer of the exhibition consisted of to the periodization of her brand of avant- Moorman’s rediscovery was located in an wall text and an enlarged press photograph gardism, which is cleverly hinted at in the adjacent gallery, which the Block Museum by Moore depicting artists associated with title that defines the singularly archival-based dedicated to her personal archive. The the third Annual New York Avant-Garde exhibition. The phrase A Feast of Astonishments Charles Deering McCormick Library of Festival at Judson Hall in 1965. The wall texts is appropriated from a review of the second Special Collections at Northwestern pre- were framed by Paik’s seven-foot portrait- Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival by sciently acquired the Charlotte Moorman sculpture Charlotte Moorman II (1995): a musi- the critic for The Nation, Faubion Bowers, Archive in 2001, making it possible for cal cyborg formed by nine antique cabinets

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CAA_AJ_FA-WN17_INTERIOR_FINAL_g.indd 130 12/28/17 9:07 AM containing several working color televisions, Charlotte Moorman and the avant-garde— event were detailed wall labels and placards, a cello that formed the trunk of the body and underscored the degree to which Moorman’s which crucially conveyed the multifaceted was flanked by two small monitors, a viola activities instantiated an embrace of other positions of aesthetic preferences and per- that visually mimicked an arm with electri- artists’ ideas, other musicians’ composi- sonal politics in the New York avant-garde. cal guts spilling out, a two-channel original tions, and other aesthetic sensibilities out- An underlying thematic that sustained Paik video of Moorman performances, and side her own classical training. Moorman’s the exhibition’s focus was the mobiliza- a head topped with stringy wires signify- determined fostering of a viable artistic tion of the concept and practice of the ing long brown hair. Across the room from community, whose roster of players was repertoire. In musical terms, we are familiar the sculpture, which served efectively as an ever-shifting, demonstrated a willingness to with the basic contours: a complete list, anchor piece, stood a vitrine with materials not only engage in the most rigorous experi- stock, or index of pieces that a performer related to Moorman’s early life: biographi- mentations of her time but also to create the or company is accustomed to playing. In the cal information, a photograph of her debut conditions in which a wider public might case of Moorman, her repertoire included recital as a classical cellist with the pianist participate in its explorations. multiple realizations of not only Cage’s 26’ in New York in 1963, and a Indeed, the Block Museum galleries gave 1.1499” but also Paik’s Concerto for TV Cello and black-and-white image of “Miss Charlotte viewers ample opportunity to investigate this Videotapes (1971) and McWilliams’s Sky Kiss Moorman” riding atop a parade car as spirit of inventiveness, most notably in the and Ice Music (1972)—performances that “Little Rock’s Miss City Beautiful” in 1952. sections devoted to the Annual Avant-Garde entailed Moorman playing cello strings over Moorman, who was born in Little Rock, Festivals, which first began in small concert televisions, with an unaltered cello hitched , in 1933, earned a bachelor’s degree halls and eventually moved to iconic public to gigantic balloons over the Sydney Opera in music at Centenary College in Shreveport, spaces. Treating museumgoers to a wealth House, and strumming a cello made of ice , and later studied cello at the of acoustic and visual materials, A Feast of while naked. The exhibition also recounted University of Texas in Austin and at Juilliard Astonishments revived original film footage, the events surrounding Moorman’s infa- in Manhattan. A member of the American photographs, audio recordings, and media mous arrest in 1967 at the Cinematheque Symphony Orchestra under Leopold receptions from the festival proceedings. in Manhattan while performing Paik’s Opera Stokowski, she grew restless with the clas- In the main gallery, viewers immediately Sextronique in the nude, as the score dictated. sical music scene, left her first husband, encountered Moore’s 16mm documentary Paik was not formally charged, but Moorman Thomas Coleman, and shifted her attention film on Stockhausen’s controversial piece was tried and convicted for partial nudity, to the creative work of the emerging New , which was elaborately performed with the sentence later suspended. In one York–based avant-garde. Deemed the “Jeanne in eighteen scenes at the second festival at long gallery, vitrines exhibited copies of d’Arc of New Music” by the French-born Judson Hall in 1964. Contextualizing the the ofcial judgment in her trial, as well Edgard Varèse, Moorman was fallout from Stockhausen’s inclusion in the as letters attesting to her character by Allan uniquely suited to embrace the new tenor Kaprow, , and others. As of musical experimentation with her aural Laura Wertheim Joseph crucially explains sharpness and attention to instrumental in her essay, the point of Paik’s composi- quirks. The exhibition’s presentation of key tion, as Moorman interpreted it, was not musical notations by Moorman established “to flaunt disregard for society’s mores” but her absorption of the dizzying range of rather to “satirize that which is sham and operations evidenced in, for hypocritical” (57). At the Block Museum, example, the early Fluxus performances and, this scandalous event and others related to more critically, the diverse vanguard scores her performance repertoire were efectively by Cage, , Feldman, Giuseppe presented as visual pivots, in archival pho- Chiari, and . In the tographs, diagrams, performance objects, galleries, viewers experienced by proxy her and audio recordings, so the experience of rather unorthodox interpretations of many wandering through the show was one of ’ works. Monitors showed loop- frequently turning here to watch this, there ing videos of her various performances of to read that, and then back again to listen. Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player (1955) for One clear takeaway from all this move- the Merv Grifth and Mike Douglas television ment was that Moorman’s catalogue of per- shows, and we observed Moorman’s spirited formances demonstrates the degree to which expansion of the original composition by the she was conceptually wedded to the “open addition of extraneous material objects and score” format. A small gallery was thus everyday actions—the efect of which Cage rightly dedicated to displaying Moorman’s once coldly derided as having “murdered” Charlotte Moorman performing on Nam numerous dynamic performances—counted June Paik’s TV Cello wearing TV Glasses, his score.5 in the hundreds—of ’s charged Bonino Gallery, , 1971 (artworks The emphasis on collaboration in the © Estate of ; photograph © event-score Cut Piece (1964–66). This area exhibition’s overarching theme and title— Takahiko Iimura) featured chromogenic color prints of

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CAA_AJ_FA-WN17_INTERIOR_FINAL_g.indd 131 12/28/17 9:07 AM Moorman’s performances with general audi- shufing tin can lids with their feet. Another to the visual delights ofered throughout the ences or the artist’s friends, with framed sound-activated work was tucked under the galleries. In the short introduction to the remnants of satin dresses long ago cut and staircase on the first floor of the museum. catalogue, Rothfuss relates that McWilliams torn hanging on the wall. Viewers could sit Created specifically for the 1975 festival at the never received payment from Moorman for on a wooden bench and watch an emotion- Gateway National Recreational Area/Floyd his poster designs, and that he used his con- ally intense video projection of Moorman Bennett Field in Brooklyn, Knowles’s Bean nections in the design world to print the performing Cut Piece on the garden rooftop Garden is now part of her own repertoire of posters for free. of her Pearl Street apartment; she perched works. At the Block Museum, willing visitors Unlike other prolifically eccentric among her closet interlocutors, some of were instructed to take of their shoes and impresarios of the 1960s and 1970s avant- whom gingerly or playfully cut away her walk, drag, or lightly kick a floor of dried garde, including the self-declared Fluxus clothes. Ono directed the video of the per- beans. The vibrations generated by the sound chairman , who perceived formance, and the accompanying wall text garden—the raised platform had micro- Moorman as an adversary, the dimensions of stated that Moorman’s cancer had by that phones placed underneath—nicely comple- Moorman’s administrative work went largely point aggressively returned and metastasized mented the experimental energies viewers unexplored until this exhibition.8 In organiz- throughout her body—a fatal progression confronted in the main galleries, and all the ing her wide-ranging festivals, Moorman that had remained undiagnosed for nine while a large black box screened films docu- was among the first of her era to usher in months while she helped Paik prepare for his menting Moorman’s performances abroad. the artist-as-manager occupational role that 1982 retrospective at the Guggenheim.6 In addition to electrified cellos and noise has become a mainstay in various contem- To highlight the participatory nature of instruments, film programs, and personal porary art practices of the past forty years. the works on hand, the exhibition ofered and reported accounts, viewers got a sense of Within this more compelling narrative and ample opportunities to engage—beyond how deeply involved Moorman was in every its conceptual buttress for the retrospective, looking and reading—with certain pieces. part of the process of producing the festivals the curators and catalogue writers examin- To be sure, the acoustic component was and in actively supporting the work of fel- ing Moorman’s legacy rightfully re-present consistently heard throughout, especially in low artists. She spent countless hours on the her to the public as a performance artist in pieces like Schneemann’s Noise Bodies (1965), telephone negotiating the tricky logistics her own right: a discerning talent scout, a in which the percussive costume clanged of venues and procuring necessary equip- hardscrabble business manager, an indefati- and clamored in audio from the third ment for performers. Moorman fashioned gable promoter, and a centripetal force in Annual Avant-Garde Festival, but also in Max the earliest publicity materials in simple the Euro-American artist communities of Neuhaus’s Lid from American Can, presented at columnar formats, with one visually striking the mid- to late twentieth-century. Several the fourth festival in 1966. In the gallery, the addition that departed from conventional writers directly address Moorman’s impact audience was encouraged to play music by musical handbills: the composers’ original on what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu signatures were printed down the middle, a design element that continued into the 1970s. In her catalogue essay, Higgins notes that this “autographic element presents each performer and composer as unique” despite their shared space on the page and stage. As such, we might read Moorman’s organizing work as committed both to the collective nature of the festivals and to the individuality of each participant.7 The festivals continued to grow - nentially, and by 1966 Moorman turned over the duties of creating promotional materials to McWilliams. The vibrantly colorful posters he designed until 1980 have a less conven- tional format than Moorman’s earlier ones— many are chaotically superimposed with densely arranged texts and graphic images, with a running list of performers and infor- mation that is often difcult to ascertain at a glance. Around the corner from the displays Charlotte Moorman performing Jim of Moorman’s repertoire, the Block Museum Charlotte Moorman performing Nam McWilliams, Ice Music for Sydney, 1972, Art reserved a prominent wall for McWilliams’s June Paik, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969, Gallery of New South Wales, 1976 (photogra- on the roof or her loft, 62 Pearl St., New York, pher unknown; photograph provided by Kaldor posters, which befittingly revealed the elabo- July 30, 1982 (artwork © Estate of Nam June Public Art Projects) rately staged nature of the festivals and added Paik; photograph © Vin Grabill)

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CAA_AJ_FA-WN17_INTERIOR_FINAL_g.indd 132 12/28/17 9:07 AM calls the field of cultural production, includ- 4. The Charlotte Moorman Archive (CMA) Robert Slifkin ing the shift to an increasingly globalized contains a treasure trove of materials and, importantly, complements two other corpuses at network of art, film, and music among the Ladytron Northwestern: the John Cage Collection and the transatlantic avant-garde (Higgins, Rachel Archive. In his catalogue essay, Kraft : Civic Radar. Jans), the fusion of feminist ideals and lib- itemizes the CMA: “2,100 printed books and Exhibition curated by Peter Weibel and eration politics (Joseph, Kristine Stiles, Kathy pamphlets, several hundred periodical issues, 120 Andreas Beitin. ZKM / Center for Art and O’Dell), and the experimental notational vinyl LPs, 500 printed music scores, 800 oversize posters, 31 motion picture films, 393 audiotape Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, December 13, and conceptual practices of a plethora of recordings (including eleven years of Moorman’s 2014–April 6, 2015; Falckenberg Collection, contemporary genres (Ryan Dohoney, Jason incoming answering machine messages), 90 video- Hamburg, Germany, June 14–November Rosenholtz-Witt). In doing so, the catalogue tape recordings (both original and commercial), 15, 2015; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, richly elucidates the manifold ways that one 24,000 photographs, and printed documentation San Francisco, February 10–May 21, 2017. (flyers, handbills, etc.), for about 2,100 events can approach, or re-approach, Moorman’s (concerts, etc.)” (191). Organized for Yerba Buena Center by Lucía complex body of work. 5. See Benjamin Piekut, “Murder by Cello: Sanromán By asking us to regard Moorman as a Charlotte Moorman Meets John Cage,” in constitutive force in the 1960s avant-garde, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant- Peter Weibel, ed. Lynn Hershman A Feast of Accomplishments was a revelation on Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of Leeson: Civic Radar. Exh. cat. With texts California Press, 2011), 143. Piekut’s astute analysis many fronts. The galleries produced a kind of of Moorman in the context of a burgeoning by Andreas Beitin, Hou Hanru and Laura awe in viewers and listeners, owing to one’s avant-garde scene in the early 1960s is essential Poitras, Pamela Lee, Peggy Phelan, Ruby reeducation not only in Moorman’s experi- reading for any scholar reexamining her legacy Rich, Jefrey Schnapp, Kyle Stephan, Kristine mental activities but also, more crucially, in in relation to larger cultural and musical forces in Stiles, Tilda Swinton, and Weibel. Ostfildern: New York City. the sheer capacity and scope of those activi- Hatje Cantz, 2016. 384 pp., 430 color ills., 62 6. For an account of Moorman’s struggles with ties. The Block Museum embraced the chaos her health, her complicated relationship with Paik, b/w. $70 of her music and art, and in doing so, dem- and her all-encompassing artistic activities, see onstrated the tenaciously collaborative way the following exhibition catalogue essays: Kathy In our current age of digital avatars, techno- in which she lived and worked—a mode of O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice: Charlotte Moorman logical surveillance, and turbulent identity and the Metaphysics of Extension” (153–67); and labor with its own gendered politics. A Feast Kristine Stiles, “‘Necessity’s Other’: Charlotte politics, few artists seem as relevant—and of Astonishments left little doubt: Moorman was Moorman and the Plasticity of Denial and arguably as oracular—as Lynn Hershman a transformational figure in the advancement Consent,” (169–83). Leeson. For more than fifty years, the art- and promotion of the avant-garde in the late 7. For more on the festivals, see ’s ist has explored the ways in which a self is “Live Art in the Eternal Network: The Annual twentieth-century, and we should all be eager constructed, controlled, and exteriorized New York Avant-Garde Festivals” in the exhibi- to learn more. tion catalogue (61–91). through various forms of mediation. The 8. An important exception is Rothfuss’s recent recent exhibition Civic Radar, organized by the Nicole L. Woods is an assistant professor of book; its compelling account of Moorman’s life Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (ZKM), modern and contemporary art at the University is the foundation on which the exhibition is built. and which traveled to Hamburg and the Yerba of Notre Dame. In fall 2017 she holds the Ailsa See Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Press, 2014). For more on Maciunas’s antipathy along with its richly illustrated and com- National Gallery of Art. She is currently complet- toward Moorman, including his blacklisting of her, prehensive catalogue, provide a valuable and ing the first scholarly monograph on the Fluxus see Granof ’s introductory text in the catalogue unprecedented opportunity to recognize artist Alison Knowles. (9). and appreciate Hershman Leeson’s sustained 1. Over the ensuing decades, Moorman’s creative investigation of what of Marshall McLuhan interlocutors included the free jazz saxophonist described as “the pattern of sex, technology, ; pianist Cecil Taylor; the musi- and death” that has fueled the imagination, cal forerunner of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra; German kinetic artist ; composers John Cage, if not the material evolution, of modern Philip Corner, Meredith Monk, and James Tenney; humanity.1 Civic Radar efectively positions her poets and Allen Ginsberg; danc- works as a crucial and progenitive instance of ers Yvonne Rainer and Elaine Summers; engineer a tradition of techno-feminism that reaches Billy Klüver; and a host of Fluxus artists, including from McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride (1951) to Knowles, Paik, Dick Higgins, Geofrey Hendricks, Yoko Ono, and Ay-O, among others. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1984) 2. Faubion Bowers, “A Feast of Astonishments,” and has arguably flourished most efectively The Nation, September 28, 1964, 172–75. in more popular iterations such as films like 3. The Grey Gallery’s presentation was a notably Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and Her quieter afair, with audio playing throughout the show at lower levels. This is an interesting curato- (2013), not to mention Hershman Leeson’s rial choice, as it appears to privilege the mate- trilogy of sci-fi-inflected movies, Conceiving rial production and display of objects over the Ada (1997), Teknolust (2002), and Strange Culture chaotic sonorous activities of Moorman’s musical (2007), which all, notably, feature the actor preferences. Tilda Swinton.

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