Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S

"If You're in the Avant Garde, You're in the Wrong War": Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s

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Citation Schmid, Caitlin Rose. 2019. "If You're in the Avant Garde, You're in the Wrong War": Charlotte Moorman's New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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“If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War”: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s

A dissertation presented by

Caitlin Rose Schmid

The Department of Music

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Music

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

April, 2019

Professor Carol J. Oja, Advisor Caitlin Rose Schmid

“If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War”: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s

Abstract

“‘If You’re in the Avant Garde, You’re in the Wrong War’: Charlotte Moorman’s New

York Avant Garde Festival, Experimentalism, and U.S. Politics of the 1960s” is the first book- length study to spotlight Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festivals (1963-80) and their sensational events, understated Happenings, chamber music, action music, and mixed media of every kind. Drawing on newly available materials from the Charlotte Moorman

Archive at Northwestern University, interviews with art world members and scholars, and embodied knowledge procured from my recreation of an avant-garde festival, I emphasize sound and its producers within an intermedial framework in order to reinstate Moorman’s annual event as one critical epicenter of a multifaceted “1960s avant-garde”—an unstable roster of people, ideas, things, pieces, allegiances, and values. The sum of fifteen years of Festival production and practice becomes a lens through which to view the larger art world’s internal negotiations over its responsibility to social justice and political activism during a period of countercultural upheaval in the United States.

This work further contributes to the study of musical avant-gardes by constructing a model for experimental writing that seeks to mirror the ethos of the subject matter within the context of a humanities dissertation. Grounded in a distinctive methodology that incorporates elements of Actor-Network Theory, intersectional feminist musicology, and art world theory, each chapter takes the form of an “Assemblage” made up of discrete non-linear units of text.

Individual units follow human and non-human actors, and track networks of activity and

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influence linking 1960s American experimental festivals to contemporary notions of race, gender, education, activism, and citizenship. When juxtaposed, the collective Assemblages allow for narratives that intertwine, contradict, and celebrate the New York Avant Garde Festival’s radical resistance to the scholarly gaze. The implications of my methodology are as significant as my topical findings: this project is also about the possibilities inherent in scholarship as a creative and experimental act.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

Assemblage: Festival 24 Balloon Ascension: Festival 26 Component 1: Festival / fes•ti•val / ˈfestəvəl / 29 Component 2: YAM Festival, Tudorfest, Here2 Festival 45 Component 3: Another Kind of Festival: FluxFest Kit 2 59 Component 4: A Quiet Revolution, or A Festival of Learning 66 Component 5: In the Spirit of the Avant-Garde 78

Assemblage: Island 83 Balloon Ascension: Island 85 Component 1: Through an Archival Lens 88 Component 2: “Things Did Not Go Swimmingly”: Race, Ethnicity, and the 100 Seventh Festival Component 3: Ward’s Island 112 Component 4: The Avant-Garde and Social Justice 121 Component 5: The Day the Music Died, or The New York Pop Festival (1970) 131 Component 6: No Nudity or Heavy Politics 146 Component 7: The Museumification of the Avant-Garde 154

Assemblage: Cello 160 Balloon Ascension: Cello 162 Component 1: The Many Cellos of Charlotte Moorman 164 Component 2: On Trial: Gendered Understandings of Moorman and Her Music 176 Component 3: The Avant-Garde as Music? 186 Component 4: Notations (1969) 203 Component 5: The Death of the Avant-Garde: The 15th Annual Avant Garde 215 Festival of New York Component 6: The Rebirth of Charlotte Moorman 224

Conclusion 232

Bibliography 248

Acknowledgements

Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds centers the group of people who contribute time, labor, resources, and energy to producing the kind of art an art world is known for. This dissertation, at its core, is about an art world; I would like to begin by thanking my own. My advisor, Carol Oja, and my committee, Brigid Cohen, Sindhu Revuluri, and Anne

Shreffler have shown me only trust and encouragement as I pursued this topic that, my students assure me, is not music. I am more grateful than I can say for your collective mentorship: you have taught me to be a discerning and generous scholar. My thanks as well to the faculty of the

Harvard Music Department who led seminars, provided feedback, and supported me at every turn. Kate van Orden, Carolyn Abbate, Kay Shelemay, Ingrid Monson, Emily Dolan: every day brings a new realization of my scholarly debts. David Crook, my thesis advisor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Nikki Melville, my advisor at Carleton College, are the reasons I’m a musicologist today.

The Harvard Music Department community has consistently impressed me with its kindness and engagement. The members of the American Music and Music and Politics dissertation groups have made my work better not only through their thoughtful critiques of my writing, but because they allowed me to read and learn from their own; thank you to Katie

Callam, Lucy Caplan, Alex Cowan, Monica Hershberger, Felipe Ledesma-Núñez, Emily

MacGregor, David Miller, Isi Miranda, Sam Parler, Annie Searcy, Henry Stoll, Michael Uy, and

Micah Wittmer. Thank you to the many, many graduate students, faculty, and staff who, in the name of Fluxus, have chopped vegetables, thrown croutons, eaten salad off tables, painted oranges white, sewed oranges to umbrellas, eaten oranges whole, smashed crackers, smashed piñatas, smashed violins, painted faces silver, attached rubber gloves to trumpets, blended

newspaper articles, stripped down to underwear, waited for babies, blown bubbles, and held ice cubes. One thousand thank yous to FluxFest 2016 performers Katie Callam, Grace Edgar,

Walker Evans, John Gabriel, Monica Hershberger, Kelly Hiser, Krystal Klingenberg, Olivia

Lucas, Sam Parler, Matt Leslie Santana, Tom Scahill, and Dan Tramte. The conclusion of my dissertation is a thinly-veiled ode to your friendship. I am also grateful for the Department’s amazing staff: Lesley Bannatyne, Chris Danforth, Kaye Denny, Karen Rynne, and Charles

Stillman. Eva Kim and Nancy Shafman: you run the best scholarly salon in Boston.

This dissertation was made possible by the generosity of librarians and archivists. My particular thanks to Scott Krafft and Sigrid Perry at the Charles Deering McCormick Special

Collections Library at Northwestern University, and to Kerry Masteller and Liza Vick at Loeb

Music Library at Harvard University. I am also grateful for the financial support of the Harvard

University Music Department, the Charles Warren Center for American Studies, and the John

Cage Research Grant from Northwestern University; this work is immeasurably better for the time I was given to spend discovering, contemplating, and processing the far reaches of the experimentalists’ archives.

Finally, all my gratitude and love to the most supportive family a graduate student could ask for. To my parents, Tom and Sharon, and my brother Jake—my first line for advice, affirmation, and the feeling of home. To Maureen Burns, Bethany Kasper, Haven Leeming: you’re my family, too. To the women of my extended cohort who inspire me daily: I could not have done this without Monica Hershberger, Krystal Klingenberg, Steffi Probst, Emily

MacGregor, and Lucy Caplan. To Rose and Tom, Alicia and Cox, John and Mal, and Elly, who are always willing to share their holidays with my writing sessions. And, of course, to Tom: this dissertation is for you.

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List of Figures

Figure 1: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 1 Balloon Ascension,” Balloon, 1969.

Figure 2: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 26 Balloon Ascension,” Festival, 1969.

Figure 3: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 85 Balloon Ascension,” Island, 1969.

Figure 4: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s 162 Balloon Ascension,” Cello, 1969.

Figure 5: “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” Color 232 slide, 1969.

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Introduction

Fig. 1: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois.

A helicopter circled over Ward’s Island in the East River on September 28, 1969: the first day of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival organized by cellist, mixed-media artist, and impresario Charlotte Moorman. Look up! Hot dogs rained down from the sky. Live improvisations competed with taped electronics vied with aleatoric compositions interrupted by a

symphony on wheels: a musical bike veered its way between artworks. A dance workshop ran its course just past the dead fish tied to the tree. Down near the water, an evening film festival looped its offerings on a ragged screen made out of torn bedsheets. Sculptures floated out to sea; contrails formed a sky poem that provided the backdrop for poetry recited on land; artists encouraged audiences to pick up trash in “Garbage Piece.” A cello in a hot air balloon—an island ringed in rat traps—a ritual burying of barbed wire—an amplified bath tub—a cloud of dry ice—jazz clarinet—electric tide—picnic scene—red tape—all of it happening all at once in a whirl of controlled chaos.1

With more than a hundred participating artists and free admission for audience members, the Seventh Festival seemed to embody its organizers’ ideals of easy-access to experimental music and art that straddled disciplinary boundaries—that defied categorization. Just beneath the surface of its success, however, roiled the spectres of national, local, and identity politics. The

Festival’s whimsy read at odds with the horrors of the Vietnam War and the protests by civil rights and feminist activists. Its planning involved the takeover by the largely white experimentalists of an island space usually used by immigrants. The gendered transgressions of the Festival organizer complicated her status within the experimental art world she supported. “If you’re in the avant garde you’re in the wrong war,” someone wrote in chalk on Festival grounds.2

1 Correspondence from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois. As of 2019, the archivists of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University are in the process of re-numbering the boxes and folders included in the Charlotte Moorman Archive, and have specifically requested the above style of citation. Hereafter, citations in footnotes will refer to the archive in abbreviated form as “Charlotte Moorman Archive.”

2 Peter Moore, [contact sheet], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive.

This dissertation is the first book-length study to spotlight Charlotte Moorman’s fifteen

New York Avant Garde Festivals (1963-80). Caught between the disciplinary interests and tools of musicology and art history, these Festivals and their impresario have been understudied by both disciplines. Drawing on newly-available materials from the Charlotte Moorman Archive at

Northwestern University, interviews with art world members and scholars, and embodied knowledge procured from my own recreation of an avant-garde festival, my research emphasizes sound and its producers within an intermedial framework in order to reinstate Moorman’s annual event as one critical epicenter of a multifaceted “1960s avant-garde”—an unstable roster of people, ideas, things, pieces, allegiances, and values.3 In my reading, the sum of fifteen years of

Festival production and practice becomes a lens through which to view the larger art world’s internal negotiations over its responsibility to social justice during a period of countercultural upheaval in the United States. Despite contemporary knee-jerk attributions of “leftist politics” to outsider art worlds in general and avant-garde movements in particular, this avant-garde had an ambivalent relationship to political activism. Moorman’s primary understanding of her Festival as a vehicle to “reach new people”—and the measures she took to ensure continued support by individuals and institutions towards that end—conflicted with the political ethics of certain

Festival contributors and audiences. This cultural history is both a historiographical and a discipline-driven repositioning of the 1960s avant-garde, the New York Avant Garde Festivals and, by extension, of Moorman herself.

My work further contributes to the study of musical avant-gardes by constructing a model for experimental writing that seeks to mirror the ethos of my subject matter within the context of

3 “Intermedia” is a term coined in the 1960s by Moorman’s friend and frequent Avant Garde Festival contributor Dick Higgins to describe art developed in the “uncharted land” between media. “Of course, a concept like this is very disturbing to those whose mentality is compartmentalized,” Higgins notes. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001), 50.

a humanities dissertation. In developing a distinctive methodology that incorporates elements of

Actor-Network Theory, intersectional feminist musicology, and Howard Becker’s sociological approach to art world theory, I seek to celebrate the act of discovery; acknowledge that all disciplines and all materials are relational; undo hierarchical power structures of both subject matter and written structure; privilege many voices and nontraditional sources in the telling of alternate histories; admit that there are many valid paths to and permutations of knowledge; take responsibility for the political implications of my work stemming from my scholarly choices; and, overarching all, enact each of these tenets through creative practices of writing in the pursuit of effective scholarship. Structurally, the dissertation is organized into three “Assemblages,” or groupings of short, discrete, non-linear essays (called “Components”) that concern themselves with a shifting constellation of interrelated themes. Each individual Component follows actors

(human and non-human) and tracks networks of activity and influence; when juxtaposed into

Assemblages, the collective Components create a larger narrative linking 1960s American avant- garde festivals to contemporary national and identity politics. The implications of my methodology are equally significant to my topical findings: my dissertation is also about the affordances of form and style in the act of writing to underscore my particular subject matter.

This scholarship is itself a creative and experimental act.

Assemblages

In the interest of legibility, I offer a short table of contents at the beginning of each

Assemblage: a word map detailing the small number of actors that are combined and recombined via interrelated histories, events, and queries both within and across the three Assemblages. In addition, I provide abstracts of individual Components that demonstrate the Assemblage’s

eschewal of perfect chronological and geospatial continuity in favor of thematic transformation.

Actors appear and disappear and reappear over the course of each Assemblage, taking on new meaning with the benefit of additional context. The last Components always land in the present day, gathering together a quorum of the Assemblage’s actors and re-presenting the major themes as they have been translated for modern audiences by scholars and curators.

The texts of all three Assemblages open with different readings of the same image from

October 5, 1969, the last day of the Seventh Festival on the southern edge of Ward’s Island:

Charlotte Moorman picked up her cello and stepped into the wicker basket of an enormous, brightly-colored hot air balloon poised to fly above the festival grounds in her performance of

Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension.4 It’s a simple image—almost a postcard image—and yet its meanings and valences change depending on whether I focus my attention on Moorman’s cello, the island location, or even (and more abstractly) the very concept of a festival. Moorman’s performance of Balloon Ascension links all of my chapters and insists on the performativity of networks constantly formed, broken, reformed, and reinterpreted by various actors.

4 Moorman advertised her festival from Sunday, September 28–Saturday, October 4, 1969 on Ward’s Island and the uninhabited, audience inaccessible Mill Rock Island (for works designed to be viewed from a distance). The Parks Department, however, was unable to provide electricity for the first four days of the Festival and agreed to extend the event by one day (Jud Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival,” from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive). Moorman’s performance of Balloon Ascension was further plagued by bad weather and inattentive photographers; after attempting the piece “every day,” she finally “got aloft Sunday afternoon”—in other words, on that last, bonus Sunday (Ron Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest: Art or Vandalism?” The Village Voice, October 9, 1969). According to Moorman, it was also true that “we couldn’t get all our things out to Mill Rock as we’d hoped, the same time as Wards Island” (Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival). The Seventh Festival was reprised from October 26 to October 31, 1969 for the sculptures and installations exhibited on Mill Rock Island only (Charlotte Moorman, “History of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York,” in Cello Anthology, ed. Gabriele Bonomo [Milan: Alga Marghen, 2006], [unpaginated]). Due to the nature of the Moorman archive— heavily weighted towards planning and organizational documents that look forward to the next festival, rather than after-the-fact summaries that look backwards at the last—it can be surprisingly difficult to uncover what actually happened and when. As a result, the Seventh Festival has been consistently misdated in press and scholarship alike.

Assemblage: Festival art/life • Berner • counterculture • education • festival • Maciunas • Moorman

“Assemblage: Festival” is built on the idea of the festival as actor. The free form and chaotic Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival was a model for one kind of American avant-garde festival, but there were others: the two-year-long miscellany that was the YAM

Festival, the concert hall-bound Tudorfest, the museum-sponsored Here2 Festival. George

Maciunas created DIY festival instructions with his art-posters, FluxFest Sale (1966) and

FluxFest Kit 2 (1970). Farther afield, avant-garde artist Jeff Berner and radical students from San

Francisco State College founded an Experimental College they trumpeted as “a festival of learning.” I argue that all of these varieties of festival were invested in education, and that both the content and form of that education allied the avant-garde with countercultural revolution

(itself entwined in youth culture and the politics of social reform). In recent years, the work of educating the public about the avant-garde has fallen to curators and art experts at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; I trace a direct line from the educational efforts of the 1960s to those of the 2010s.

Assemblage: Island archive • counterculture • festival • Hendricks • Moorman • museum • place • race • Toche

“Assemblage: Island,” begins with the land on which Moorman held her Seventh Annual

Avant Garde Festival, and over which she rose, cello in hand, in Isobe’s Balloon Ascension. I describe Ward’s Island’s long history as a space in which the city of New York hid evidence of the inhabitants it deemed “undesirable”—the poor, the sick, the troubled, the criminal—as well as a close association with the Puerto Rican residents of nearby East Harlem, who themselves had a long and fraught history with the city of New York. In close readings of two music

festivals that used Ward’s Island as their site (the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde

Festival in 1969, and the New York Pop Festival in 1970), I uncover the ways in which music and art were understood to be “political,” and the ways in which musicians and artists associated with the avant-garde art world chose to build up or tear down those associations through their art and their actions. It is not trivial that, in recent years, some of the artists most clearly invested in art as a commentary on national politics (Jon Hendricks, for example) have become the primary advocates for the museumification of 1960s experimentalism—despite the art world’s well- documented allergy to institutions (including museums) during its heyday fifty years earlier.

Assemblage: Cello archive • festival • genre • gender • instrument • Moorman • technology • witchcraft discourse

The cello Moorman held in her hand as she ascended in her hot air balloon at the Seventh

Festival provides the inspiration for “Assemblage: Cello.” I begin by exploring the relationship between Moorman and her instrument through the lens of U.S.-American witchcraft discourse.

This approach, embedded in multiple Components, positions Moorman within a long lineage of women put on trial for perceived transgressions, often consisting of a refusal to conform to gender norms or abide by the standard social scripts. I continue by turning to the experimentalists who self-identified as musicians and composers, and by tracing changes in the mainstream press’s generic labeling of these people and their works over time. As the insiders exploded notions of genre through their art and their writings (John Cage and Alison Knowles’s 1969

Notations among them), the outsiders (audience, press, scholars, and even judges) struggled to catch up: the 1967 Opera Sextronique trial, in which Moorman was arrested and convicted of public indecency (with a suspended sentence) is proof of that. As the Festivals went on (and on),

the press grumbled anew about the mismatch between labels and realization: When the Avant

Garde Festival celebrated its fifteenth iteration in 1980, was it really avant-garde? I argue that these confluences and contradictions of gender and genre contributed to Moorman’s erasure from the avant-garde narrative; only recently is she being reclaimed as an important historical figure in much the same way witches have been rehabilitated in popular culture and by feminist scholars.

Literature and Methodology

If explicitly listing actors at the beginning of each Assemblage provides a map of the future (of the chapter to follow), it also points to the past—to the primary and secondary literature drawn from musicology, art history, performance studies, gender studies, sociology, and science and technology studies that informed my thinking about the New York Avant Garde

Festival and its political implications. In this section, I group (and re-group) the actors introduced above in order to explore this secondary literature, define my methodology, and clarify its realization via the act of writing.

festival • Moorman

At the heart of this dissertation is Moorman’s Festival. As previously mentioned, few studies to date have taken the New York Avant Garde Festival as their primary subject. That state of affairs is due to both the place its intermedial offerings occupy between disciplines, but also to the availability of primary source materials. Northwestern University received the

Charlotte Moorman Collection—including its 60 boxes of Festival-related ephemera—in 2001.

In 2019, curators are still finalizing the catalogue, and the full extent of its archival holdings have only recently become public knowledge. My dissertation will build on work by art historian and

curator Joan Rothfuss, who weaves the New York Avant Garde Festivals in and out of her biography of Charlotte Moorman, Topless Cellist (2014); musicologist Benjamin Piekut, who examines the 1964 Festival in Experimentalism Otherwise (2011); and art historian Hannah

Higgins, who provides an overview of the Festival trajectory for the Feast of Astonishments exhibit catalogue (2016).5 In devoting this book-length study to positioning Moorman’s Festival as a significant force within the 1960s avant-garde, I also open space to examine the all-but- unstudied later iterations of the Festival, and to derive historical meaning out of the Festival’s broad scope: the achievements and challenges of individual years are situated alongside goals, successes, and shortcomings over the course of its fifteen year run—a block of time that simultaneously signaled a fundamental shift in the socio-cultural backdrop of the United States.

Lisa Jakelski’s Making New Music in Cold War Poland (2017) provides one of the best models for studying how festival organizers “mobilized resources and achieved organizational

5 Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014); Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Hannah Higgins, “Live Art in the Eternal Network: The Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals,” in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 60-91. All three of these sources have been instrumental in the scholarly recuperation of Moorman as a historical figure (see “Assemblage: Cello”). Northwestern University Block Museum of Art’s recent exhibit catalogue, A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s (2016) also includes essays by musicologists Ryan Dohoney and Jason Rosenholtz-Witt, and art historians Kristine Stiles, Laura Wertheim Joseph, Hannah Higgins, and Kathy O’Dell (among others). The Moorman literature has been further strengthened via recent dissertations by Laura Wertheim Joseph (“Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Feminized Labor in Postwar American Art” [Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2015]); Saisha Grayson (“Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman” [Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2018]); and Sophie Landres (“Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman’s Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik” [Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2017]). Although the latter two dissertations are currently still embargoed to the public pending publication as monographs, Landres has also published two articles about Moorman: “Indecent and Uncanny: The Case against Charlotte Moorman,” Art Journal 76, no. 1 (2017): 48-69; and “The First Non-Human Action Artist: Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik in Robot Opera,” PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art 40, no. 1 (2018): 11-25.

victories during a period of cultural, social, institutional, and political transformation,” even if the stakes of such victories differed in Poland in the 1950s and New York City in the 1960s and

‘70s.6 Jakelski’s work on the Warsaw Festival is one of several recent scholarly monographs and edited volumes making significant contributions to the study of post-1945 European avant-garde festivals, from David Tompkins’ Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold

War Poland and East Germany (2013) to Petra Stegmann’s The Lunatics are on the Loose…:

European Fluxus Festivals 1962-1977 (2012).7 These join a growing literature exploring the ways in which twentieth and twenty-first century popular music festivals make space for encounters with “cultural identities and lifestyle practices.”8 That encounter, I argue, is as true for festival practitioners as it is for audience members.

genre • instrument • technology

I take as foundational the idea that studying Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival through a musicological lens is valuable, and that the scholarly literature on musical experimentalism can provide the underpinnings for my interest in uncategorizable art with strong sonic components. Despite the contemporary distinction between European “avant-gardism” and

6 Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 5.

7 David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013); Petra Stegmann (ed), The Lunatics are on the Loose…: European Fluxus Festivals 1962-1977 ([Potsdam]: Down with Art!, [2012]).

8 Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor, and Ian Woodward, “Introduction,” in The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 1. See also: George McKay (ed). The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Chris Anderton, Music Festival in the UK: Beyond the Carnivalesque (London; New York: Routledge, 2019).

American “experimentalism”—a dichotomy scholars including George Lewis, Brigid Cohen,

Benjamin Piekut, and Eduardo Herrera have revealed to be freighted with raced and gendered implications—Moorman chose to name the event she stewarded for fifteen years “The New York

Avant Garde Festival,” knowing full well the power of its socially constituted definition.9 I recognize the work on 1960s experimentalism as essential to my study, but choose to follow

Moorman’s (among others) not-un-ironic use of “avant-garde” as an art world category.

Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (2014), an edited volume convened by Benjamin Piekut, contains the most concentrated repository of likeminded studies. “What could experimentalism be?” Piekut asks in his introduction. “What can we gain by looking beyond the conventional wisdom about the experimental and suspending judgment about what is or isn’t experimental?”10 Implicit in his work and explicit in mine is this extension: what could music be? What can we gain by suspending judgment about what is or isn’t music? In exactly that spirit, the authors of this volume avoid bogging themselves down with questions about what experimental music is. As a result, the collection itself touches on a wide range of topics: Elizabeth Ann Lindau’s “Goodbye 20th Century!: Sonic Youth Records

John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces’” rubs shoulders with Ryan Dohoney’s article on Cage and Julius

Eastman, which contrasts with Andrew C. McGraw’s “Balinese Experimentalism and the

9 George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspective,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91-122; Brigid Cohen, “Enigmas of the Third Space: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House, 1957,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 1 (2018): 155- 211; Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise; Eduardo Herrera, “‘That’s not something to show in a concert’: Experimentation and Legitimacy at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales,” in Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, eds. Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera and Alejandro L. Madrid (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10 Benjamin Piekut (ed), Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 1.

Intercultural Project.” Not many of these articles refer to my particular cast of characters, but their openness to content and methodology within the global frame of “experimental music” serves as a springboard for the way I balance the questions and insights of musicology alongside art history, American studies, performance studies, sociology, and gender studies. Particularly important for my purpose is George Lewis’s contribution to the collection, “Benjamin

Patterson’s Spiritual Exercises,” one of the few scholarly pieces that engages with issues of race in Fluxus and related artistic practices.

Robert Adlington’s edited collection Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the

Sixties (2009) is another valuable source, and one which takes as its premise that avant-garde musicians were aware of and actively participated in “the tumultuous cultural and political developments of the sixties.”11 Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton’s edited collection Music and

Protest in 1968 (2013) argues that the avant-garde (alongside classical performance culture, the early music movement, folk, pop, and jazz) was “not only affected by the climate of ‘1968’; [it was] infected and infiltrated by it.”12 These assertions are borne out during this time period on

European and American stages in meticulously researched articles and monographs by, among other musicologists, Adlington, Amy Beal, Brigid Cohen, Ryan Dohoney, Eric Drott, Eduardo

Herrera, George Lewis, and Benjamin Piekut.13 Collectively, these studies situate experimental

11 Robert Adlington, Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.

12 Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton, Music and Protest in 1968 (Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4.

13 Four examples that have proved particularly important to my work are: Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

music in the context of social change; explain the values and goals of particular experimentalists; and promote an understanding of experimentalism as a community that relied on itself to bring creative ideas to fruition.

art/life • counterculture • museum

Not everyone in Moorman’s community identified as a “musician,” however. The grouping of actors in this subheading implies the breadth of practitioners with strong ties to the

New York Avant Garde Festival, as well as the space they occupy within the academy: to date, branches of the 1960s avant-garde such as Fluxus, Happenings, intermedia, destruction art, and the like have found a home largely in the discipline of art history, and have been preserved largely under the purview of art museums. These overlapping communities, their values, and their art are defined as they appear in the text of the Assemblages. Their importance to this study lies not only in the bare fact of participation in the New York Avant Garde Festivals, but also in the tendency to richly document art and ideas through manifestoes, philosophical statements, and essays—a type of writing in which Moorman rarely engaged. Musicians and artists have retrospectively created a treasure trove of exhibition catalogs and anthologies—a kind of best-of- the-archives that handily documents the insiders’ evaluation of what should be considered historically significant.14 The scholarly perspectives of art historians Hannah Higgins, Andreas

14 This category of sources is extensive. Several of the sources most important to my work include: Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993); Geoffrey Hendricks (ed), Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Jon Hendricks, Fluxus, etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Bloomfield Hills, Mich: The Museum, 1981); Joan Marter, Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963 (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Barbara Moore (ed), The World of Charlotte Moorman: Archive Catalogue (New York: Bound & Unbound, 2000); H. Sohm, Happening & Fluxus: Materialien (Koelnischer Kunstverein, 1970).

Huyssen, Liz Kotz, Kathy O’Dell, and Kristine Stiles, musicologist Gascia Ouzonian, and historian of literature Mike Sell, have further informed my understanding of the relationship between the material, the textual, and the performative in the context of the avant-garde. My perspective, borne out of musicological training, knowledge, and interests, reclaims sound and its

(human and non-human) producers, while simultaneously complicating current musicological formulations of media and intermedia.

These scholars invested in critical vanguard studies also theorize the relationship between

“the avant-garde” and its political exigencies, acknowledging the historical avant-garde’s participation in racialized and gendered systems of oppression.15 Though I do not read

Moorman’s avant-garde as “conservative,” its scope was such that participants’ goals, identities, and worldviews were far from homogenous—and far from homogenously liberal or leftist. In my study, the Festival lens exposes this avant-garde’s racism and sexism, even while it provides examples of individual people (and associated networks of art, ideas, and materials) pushing back against these systems and advocating—not always successfully—for social transformation via the Festival medium.

art/life • festival • gender • instrument • place • race • witchcraft

My search for a methodology capable of celebrating the eclecticism—and contradictions—of avant-garde artists, artworks, sounds, materials, ideas, and philosophies began

15 Attempts to theorize the mid-century avant-garde and its relationship to politics can be traced back to influential monographs by Renato Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962); and Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974) among others. For more on the historiography of the avant-garde, see Mike Sell, The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (London; New York: Seagull Books, 2011). Sell’s introduction is a concise and useful introduction to scholars writing revisionary histories of the avant-garde, from Fred Moten to Rosalind Krauss.

with Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, a hybrid theory-method outlined in Reassembling the Social (2005) that insists on the constantly changing relationships that make up social forces.16 Like many of the critics I cite below, however, I am wary of the tendency of ANT- driven studies to flatten power dynamics and disregard issues of gender and race. My intervention is to (1) explore the space where Latour’s ideas meet both intersectional feminist musicology and Howard Becker’s sociological analysis of “art worlds,” and (2) engage with the possibilities inherent in unorthodox, non-linear writing systems to better vitalize prose about the chaotic, unpredictable, carnivalesque events that were the New York Avant Garde Festivals.

Historians of science and technology Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and

Annemarie Mol concerned themselves with far-reaching, paradigm-shifting questions: What is a fact? they wanted to know. And how did it become one? In the mid-1980s, Latour argued that sociologists had come to take too much for granted, that culturally constructed words and ideas—Society, Culture, Nation—had become unassailable black boxes. In response to this perceived failure of the “sociology of the social,” Latour introduced the idea of networks—or assemblages—constantly formed, broken, reformed and reinterpreted by various actors.17 These networks are inherently performative, banking on connections across time and space without a clear point of beginning or end; in this, Actor-Network Theory resembles Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari’s rhizomes. Where ANT makes a distinctive mark, however, is in its contention that the performance of networks is enacted by both humans and non-humans, or in Latourian terms, by any “actor.” In the context of ANT, the term “actor” is devoid of intentionality. An

16 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

17 See also, Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Milton Keynes; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1987).

actor is simply “what is made to act”—not the source of the action, but something or someone that transforms or modifies meaning.

Though ANT has been used by scholars in other fields since the 1980s, musicology has relatively recently begun to explore its possibilities in relation to music and music history.

Benjamin Piekut’s Twentieth-Century Music article “Actor-Networks in Music History:

Clarifications and Critiques” (2014) and Emily Dolan’s article for Representations, “Musicology in the Garden,” present the most extensive surveys and critiques, but a number of musicological writings—including Piekut’s own Experimentalism Otherwise (2011)—reinforce these theoretical offerings with concrete examples of ANT as method.18 Eric Drott’s Journal of Music

Theory article “The End(s) of Genre” (2013), for example, begins by deconstructing a pre- defined concept that has too often been taken for granted. Drott focuses on “genre,” or more specifically, the idea that genre has declined in relevance under modernism. On the contrary,

Drott argues, genres are never fixed; they are performative, “a dynamic ensemble of correlations linked together by a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources.” 19 In short, they are networked. Not only does Drott engage with a concept deeply embedded in musicological historiography and musical thought more generally, he also grounds his findings in a specific genre (spectralism) and a specific piece of music (Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques). The end result effectively advocates for ANT’s use value within musicology.

18 Benjamin Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014); Emily Dolan, “Musicology in the Garden,” Representations 132, no. 1 (Fall, 2015): 88-94. See also, Will Robin, “A Scene Without a Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2016); Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature,” Cultural Critique 84 (Spring, 2013).

19 Eric Drott, “The end(s) of genre,” Journal of Music Theory 57, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 9.

Feminist scholars have been among the most vocal critics of Latour’s ANT for its perceived inability to adequately treat issues of power and power structures. In 2000, Judy

Wajcman called out ANT studies for its neglect of the processes of gender interests or identities:

“Despite the emphasis on the way innovations are socially shaped, it has been largely incumbent on feminists to demonstrate that this ‘social’ is also a matter of gender relations,” she argues.20

Not only do I agree with Wajcman, I would add that historically ANT studies have been equally neglectful of race relations. Continuing on a theme, scholars including Susan Leigh Star and

Vicky Singleton contend that if everything is connected, ANT-driven studies run the risk of crafting a grand ahistorical narrative or buying into the idea that they have the right to speak for everything.21 These criticisms are valid and, as I outline below, I shape my approach in order to ethically address gender, race, and power in my research.22

In its most recent incarnation, post-ANT (a term particularly associated with the work of

John Law and Vicky Singleton) is less a theory than an attitude, a way of approaching scholarship that must be redesigned and reevaluated for each individual project. Rather than a checklist of steps, ANT has become a set of interests that include (1) a skepticism towards theories or concepts that are pre-defined; (2) an attention to processes of circulation and

20 Judy Wajcman, “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies: In What State is the Art?” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 3 (June 2000): 451.

21 See Vicky Singleton, “Feminism, sociology of scientific knowledge and postmodernism: Politics, theory and me,” Social Studies of Science 26 (1996): 445-468; Susan Leigh Star, “Power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions,” in A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1996), 26-56; Judy Wajcman, TechoFeminism (Malden: Polity Press, 2004).

22 I am not the first scholar to attempt to reconcile ANT and feminist scholarship, though my strategy to do so through the act of writing is, to my knowledge, unique. See Andrea Quinlan, “Imagining a Feminist Actor-Network Theory,” International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation 4, no. 2 (2012).

translation; (3) an interest in humans, non-humans and how they relate; (4) an appreciation for uncertainty, diversity, and heterogeneity; and (5) a mandate to acknowledge that our choices and biases as scholars are political. In my reading, these interests dovetail neatly with those of a specifically feminist musicology as exemplified by the pioneering scholarship of Marcia Citron,

Suzanne Cusick, and Susan McClary, as well as more recent intersectional feminist work by

(among others) Naomi André, William Cheng, Bonnie Gordon, Monica Hershberger, Ellie

Hisama, Tammy Kernodle, Elizabeth LeGuin, Tamara Levitz, and Sindhumathi Revuluri. I contend that the nexus of ANT and intersectional feminist thought encourages scholars to center underrepresented subjects, to underscore materiality and bodies, to promote multiple or alternative understandings of a given topic, to take an imaginative approach to historical documents, and to experiment with voice and style.

“Art world,” the third panel in my methodological triptych, is a concept first used by sociologist Howard S. Becker in his book Art Worlds (1982) to mean “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that the art world is noted for.”23 Art world theory upholds the relationships between people—composers and performers, but also donors, audiences, and the person who is called upon to deliver a speaker during a last minute performance emergency.24 In so doing, it lends itself to the study of the interdisciplinary, collaborative, of-its-

23 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), x.

24 Charlotte Moorman organized her New York Avant Garde Festival fifteen years running; Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks, friends of Moorman’s, performed in that Festival year after year; much later, Hendricks became a curator who amassed a Fluxus collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, while Jeff Berner’s Fluxus collection went to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; George Maciunas invited Berner and Hendricks to become members of Fluxus in the first place, though he never did invite Moorman or convey much enthusiasm for her Festival. That is an art world in action.

time, and often ephemeral aesthetic of the avant-garde in general, and the avant-garde festival medium in particular.25 There are, of course, many art worlds operating simultaneously, and no

“absolute center” to any one of them. I deliberately designate Moorman’s New York Avant

Garde Festival as the “center” of an extended art world to show the ways in which musicians and artists with many social, cultural, and geospatial affiliations worked together to produce the annual event; in my work, the term functions as a Venn diagram of the avant-garde, a reminder of friendships, friendships once removed (friends of friends), and shifting allegiances. Under this rubric, the art world that enabled the New York Avant Garde Festival overlaps—but is not perfectly aligned—with the art world that enabled Fluxus, musical experimentalism, or the San

Francisco Tape Music Center, to name only a few related communities of avant-garde artists.

Placing art world theory in dialogue with ANT also begins to address feminist critiques of the latter. Given that art world members who produced the Festivals derived their own meaning out of the events’ relationship to contemporary national and identity politics, an acknowledgement of the resulting negotiations by people—individuals and collectives—reinstates questions of ethics and morality to a study equally indebted to ANT.

archive • art/life • education • festival • genre

Translating music into writing has never been straightforward; add a healthy dose of genre-defying experimentalism, and the topic itself invites—almost requires—a methodology and a written expression that transcend the expected. How can I embed the notion that art is life and life is art within my scholarship? In what ways can a festival serve as an underlying

25 Lisa Jakelski also draws on Becker’s art world theory in her study of the Warsaw Festival, Making New Music in Cold War Poland.

metaphor for a dissertation? From the beginning of this project, I have chosen to write in a manner that reflects my subject (the 1960s avant-garde, the festivals it produced, and the politics it negotiated) and my methodology (a hybrid approach combining the interests and values of

ANT, feminist musicology, and art worlds) via the structural form I am calling “Assemblages.”26

I argue (through writing) that, first, my research highlights the process so important to

ANT as a method by positioning my experience as representative in the act of uncovering history. Second, my Assemblage structure allows for ambivalence, works through conflicting ideas within a single chapter, and embraces historical and theoretical tangents that become significant as each Component builds upon the last. Not only do these contradictions and digressions exemplify an art world with many histories and agendas (not all of which align), they also embody both ANT and feminist musicology’s insistence on uncertainty—even humility—in the construction of history. Finally, I attempt to enact Moorman’s Festivals through text: these chapters are representations of the fragmented-but-coherent Festival format in which many discrete events are performed simultaneously and in close proximity. Ultimately, the Festivals are assemblages of actors that, broken into their smallest components and rearranged into sympathetic groupings, outline the values of the avant-garde. My methodological intervention both is and is realized though the act of writing.

Although there are not as yet codified criteria that bind together creative writing and scholarship, my exposure to available examples of the “genre” has required me to draw my own conclusions about what works, what doesn’t, and why. My search for viable models has taken me from Current Musicology’s special issue, “Experimental Writing About Music” (2013); to

26 For more on the differences between ANT’s “assemblages” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblage theory” (further developed by philosopher Manuel DeLanda), see Martin Müller and Carolin Schurr, “Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41 no. 3 (2016): 217-229.

Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (2010); to the poetry and fiction of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that followed their foundational work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); to Elaine Barkin’s late-1970s poetic meditations in the journal Perspectives of New Music.27 Together, this literature illustrates that the chosen experimental medium cannot be arbitrary or enacted solely for the sake of writing experimentally; form, structure, and style must actively complement both the topic and the methodology.28 In this sense, experimental writing becomes a type of written performance that establishes a set of rules and carries them out over time and in print.

archive • Berner • festival • Hendricks • museum

In order to realize my written assemblages, then, my work aspires to be fundamentally interdisciplinary, as wide-ranging in sources—represented by the grouping of actors in this subheading—as in subject matter. I augment the secondary literature mentioned above with extensive archival research pieced together from a “master archive” I developed to reconcile the ephemeral nature of my subject with the gaps and idiosyncrasies of each individual collection.

The most concentrated repository of materials related to the New York Avant Garde Festival is found within the Charlotte Moorman Collection at Northwestern University. The Walker Art

Center is home to Jeff Berner’s Fluxus collection, amassed over time and through the beneficence of friends rather than curated to represent a particular movement or point of view.

27 David Gutkin (ed), Current Musicology (Special Issue: Experimental Writing About Music) 95 (Spring, 2013); Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (New York: New Directions, 2010); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

28 I chose to limit stylistic experimentation in order to maximize the effectiveness of my experiment in form: the Assemblages are made legible by academic prose, though light on jargon and with a Festival- inspired whimsy.

The Getty Center contains individual archives for artists including Dick Higgins, Robert Watts,

Carolee Schneemann, Alan Kaprow, and David Tudor; the New York Public Library has begun to amass materials on behalf of Pauline Oliveros; and Northwestern University also houses the

John Cage Archive. My treasure hunts through these collections always turned up a few invitations, posters, or letters related to the Avant Garde Festivals, and many more materials related to actions of and perceptions about the larger art world. Finally, Electronic Arts Intermix, headquartered in New York, possesses rare video footage of a few 1960s experimental music festivals, as well as footage of individual pieces on the New York Avant Garde Festival program

(though not in the context of that Festival) and non-Festival pieces performed by Festival contributors. I have also conducted interviews with Joan Rothfuss, a scholar of the 1960s avant- garde, and Jon Hendricks, Jeff Berner, and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, members of the art world proper.

***

Each Assemblage could stand alone, but they are most effective as a collective; the performative form of the dissertation takes shape in the accumulation of its whole. In my

Conclusion, I write a first-hand account of my experience recreating a Fluxus festival on April

16, 2016 guided by Maciunas’s FluxFest Kit 2. Producing a festival bypasses the problems of relying solely on reified recordings, but it is also an attempt to understand on my own terms the ins and outs of organizing a festival—an embodied, phenomenological knowledge of my subject that allows me entrance into this story as a full (if minor) actor. In the process, I circumscribe certain ideas and themes that emerge out of these chapters: the way the archives have shaped our understanding of the 1960s avant-garde and its politics; the role of museums and concert halls in

current understandings of the once-unbounded and now-historicized art world; the absence of sound in archives and museums; and the place where experimentalism meets ethics.

ASSEMBLAGE: Festival art/life • Berner • counterculture • education • festival • Maciunas • Moorman

Balloon Ascension: Festival

Component 1: Festival / fes•ti•val / ˈfestəvəl / The concept of a “festival” provided Moorman, her art world, and the public with a semantic blueprint for an annual event that defied categorization. For Moorman, the purpose of the New York Avant Garde Festival was to “reach new people”—to educate the public about the avant- garde. In my reading, Moorman worked towards this goal through the deliberate marshaling of one concept that ties all of her festivals together: scale, informed by the hint of a superlative. art/life • education • festival • Moorman

Component 2: YAM Festival, Tudorfest, Here2 Festival Though Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival was the longest running American festival devoted to experimentalism, it was by no means the only festival model available to members of the art world, and New York was not the only American city home to avant-garde festivals. This section surveys three contemporaneous avant-garde festivals: the YAM Festival in New Jersey (1963); Tudorfest in San Francisco (1964); and the Here2 Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1965). art/life • festival

Component 3: FluxFest Kit 2 In 1966, Fluxus founder George Maciunas printed a large broadsheet-style poster titled FluxFest Sale that was revised and reprinted as FluxFest Kit 2 in 1970. FluxFest Sale and FluxFest Kit 2 presented a do-it-yourself guide to experimental festivals built on the premise that anyone can make art in any setting—proof of the porous boundary between art and life. Not only have I discovered evidence of festivals based on FluxFest Sale/FluxFest Kit 2, I have also unearthed a festival so immersed in the Fluxus ethos—so committed to the mingling of art and life—that the need for an instructional guide became moot: Jeff Berner’s FluxFest at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco (1967) inadvertently followed Maciunas’s recipe with a few West Coast twists. art/life • Berner • festival • Maciunas

Component 4: A Quiet Revolution, or A Festival of Learning What else could an experimental Festival sound like, look like, act like? Jeff Berner signed on as a founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at a student-run experimental college—one of a handful of experimental approaches to higher education that embraced the counterculture and reassessed the political status quo. In the promotional materials he wrote during the Fall 1967 semester, Berner argued that “the Experimental College of San Francisco State College may be seen as a festival of learning.” Berner • counterculture • education • festival

Component 5: In the Spirit of the Avant-Garde When the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis decided to expand its collection of 1960s avant- garde and experimental art, the first collection they purchased was none other than Jeff Berner’s. The museumification of the avant-garde—at first glance, a contradictory endeavor— can be read as an extension of both Moorman’s call to educate the public through exposure, and the counterculture’s interest in education as evidenced by the mushrooming of Free and Experimental Universities. These museum exhibits are the latest incarnation of the tradition of avant-garde education as a means of processing and questioning our own political moment. art/life • Berner • counterculture • education • festival • Maciunas • Moorman

Balloon Ascension: Festival

Fig. 2: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois.

Volunteers postered the town with long, thin, yellow-green notices that barely accommodated all the signatures of the artists involved in the event. “7th annual new york avant garde festival on two islands,” the fliers read in enormous block letters impossible to miss.29

29 Poster, [1969], from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive.

Interest piqued by the ideal of an “avant-garde Festival,” the audience made its way to Ward’s

Island from September 28th to October 5th, 1969.30 Expectations ran high, reality didn’t disappoint: the Seventh Festival featured dozens of musicians and artists; events and sculptures and music and dance and video and everything in between; lights and color and sound and no small amount of chaos. Audience members strolled from artwork to artwork and sometimes answered the performers’ calls to participate. For one week, the island transformed into an experimental haven, an alternate reality where whimsy and audacity were valued as highly as form or function. Art reigned supreme. Ralph Ortiz’s rat traps ringed the perimeter of Festival grounds. Jon Hendricks performed “Dirt Work,” a piece in which he buried a section of barbed wire, while Ray Johnson dropped foot-long hot dogs from a helicopter in Fetting Meeting. In the week’s grand finale on Sunday, October 5, Festival organizer and noted mixed media artist

Charlotte Moorman performed architect and composer Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension: she clutched her cello to her chest and stepped into the basket of an enormous red, white, and blue striped hot air balloon that slowly filled up, left the ground, and presided over the festivities below.

Posters, audience, performers, composers, events, expectations. The sum total of this network of people, things, and ideas reflects the primary goal of the New York Avant Garde

Festival: to reach and educate “new people” (in Moorman’s words) about the products and practices of contemporary experimental mixed media. Although it would make my narrative

30 Although the Festival was originally advertised from Sunday, September 28 to Saturday, October 4, the Parks Department allowed Moorman to remain on Ward’s Island an extra day after failing to provide electricity during the first four days of the event. Festival artworks designed to be viewed from a distance on Mill Rock Island (accessible only by private boat) were also re-scheduled to October 26-October 31, 1969 after a series of transportation mishaps. See “Introduction,” fn. 4 for more information about the difficulty of accurately dating the Seventh Festival.

neater to claim that Moorman conceived of public education via the Festival medium as a political act, there is little evidence for such an explicit agenda. Nonetheless, Moorman’s avant- garde, experimentalism writ large, art that rejected (or was rejected by) the art establishment— this was the artistic counterculture. Moorman’s urge to educate about countercultural art (to reach new people) finds a useful parallel in the “political” counterculture’s abiding interest in education, as evidenced by the mushrooming of Free and Experimental Universities. It is not simply a coincidence that art world member Jeff Berner chose to teach classes on avant-gardism at the San Francisco State College Experimental College: the values of the two are sympathetic.

Moorman was not an Abie Hoffman, she was not a political radical; but her deep belief in the ideals of the avant-garde was inherently a commentary on the state of mainstream art and the state of culture in America.31 In this Assemblage, I show how the New York Avant Garde

Festival itself served as a non-human actor that translated ideas, institutions, creators, and creative activity to the general public. It was the festival medium as much as the festival content that enacted Moorman’s educational goals.

31 Moorman’s ideals did not always align with the lived experience of musicians, performers, and audiences who participated in or attended the New York Avant Garde Festivals. “Assemblage: Island” and “Assemblage: Cello” explore how the Festival functioned in relation to racial and gender exclusions and hierarchies within the experimental scenes.

Component 1 Festival / fes•ti•val / ˈfestəvəl /

In 1963, Charlotte Moorman co-produced the first of fifteen annual avant-garde festivals that would define her career and garner international recognition. Before that came to pass, in the planning stages when the event was still a one-off celebration of new music, Moorman kept a piece of scrap paper with a list of possible names for the festivities: “Conceptual and Non-

Conceptual Music,” one entry reads. “Music of Today.” “The Afterbirth of Music.” “A Festival of Music of Today.” “New York International Festival of Experimental Music 1963.”

“Miscarriage of Some Clusters.” “Festival of New Sounds.” “Potting Shed.” “Music of Today

International Festival.”32 The prosaic and the fanciful rubbed shoulders as Moorman brainstormed titles to set a tone, to entice an audience.

Her choice, in the end, was simple: “6 Concerts ’63.” Perhaps too simple; for the event’s second iteration, Moorman modified the name in response to a (possibly apocryphal) piece of audience feedback from the first set of concerts. As the story goes, an attendee reacted so strongly to John Cage’s performance of Variation III (in which he drank a cup of water with a microphone at his throat, amplifying his swallow to uncomfortably loud levels) that she sued the concert organizers.33 It all came to nothing, but the following year Moorman zeroed in on another option from her list, “Festival of the Avant Gard” (sic), as a warning to Bach- and

Beethoven-loving audience members that something different was afoot.34

32 Charlotte Moorman, [Notes: List of Possible Festival Names], [1963], from “6 Concerts ‘63” in the Charlotte Moorman Archive.

33 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 69-70.

34 Moorman was a notoriously poor speller.

Words and their definitions were important to the experimentalists. “People ask me why I call some works Event and others not,” Yoko Ono wrote in a January 23, 1966 letter described as a “footnote” to a lecture she had given at Wesleyan a few weeks earlier. “They also ask me why I do not call my Events, Happenings.” She goes on to work through the differences: Happenings are “an assimilation of all the other arts,” while Events are “an extrication from the various sensory perceptions…a dealing with oneself” and without a script.35 Nor was Ono the only experimentalist concerned with generic delineation and semantics. Composer, artist, and founder of the Something Else Press Dick Higgins coined the word “intermedia” to describe art that defied traditional disciplinary categorization.36 In 1961, self-described provocateur George

Maciunas chose the moniker “Fluxus” for his planned avant-garde magazine project precisely because of the word’s seventeen dictionary definitions spanning nouns, verbs, and adjectives depending on context.37 That magazine soon evolved into festivals, newsletters, and a rotating roster of artists who affiliated themselves with Maciunas and his ideas—including art as anti- professional, art as inextricable from the everyday, and art as the foundation of cultural, social,

35 Yoko Ono, “To The Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting.),” January 23, 1966, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 8, Folder 10, Item 1, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

36 Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (February 2001): 50.

37 Clive Phillpot, “Manifesto I: Fluxus: Magazines, Manifestoes, Multum in Parvo,” George Maciunas Foundation Inc, accessed May 4, 2019, http://georgemaciunas.com/about/cv/manifesto-i/. In his 1963 Manifesto, Maciunas zeroed in on the meanings “purge” (taking particular pleasure in its connotation of voiding one’s bowels—the kind of physical humor for which Fluxus was known), “tide,” and “fuse.”

and political revolution.38 The word “Fluxus” became the “verbal packaging” by which

Maciunas kept track of his art world and promoted the collective.39

In short, Moorman’s decision to change the name of her event to “The New York Avant

Garde Festival” as a marker of its contents was in line with her art world’s insistence on the power of words. A large part of this signaling work is accomplished by the term “avant-garde” and its connotations of unorthodoxy: a necessary evil, according to Moorman. “The works I perform are of this time,” she said in an interview with Stephen Varble. “They’re performed in the present tense. How can they be ahead of their time? Whew!”40 The word “festival,” however, is less often remarked upon. Moorman could have chosen to rename “6 Concerts ’63,” “The New

York Avant Garde Concerts”—but she didn’t. Nearly one-third of the options on Moorman’s scrap paper list of names include the word “festival.” Far from coincidence, the semantics of

“festival” meant something specific (though, crucially, not codified) to both Moorman’s art world and the public it courted. When those meanings overlapped, the specificity of the word rebounded onto the very nature of the event, amplifying, evolving, reworking, and celebrating an understanding of what the avant-garde is and could be. This Component explores the festival ideal as it took shape in relation to the practices and production of Moorman’s New York Avant

Garde Festival and the art world it represented. I argue that for Moorman, the relationship

38 Many (although not all) affiliates of Fluxus also performed in the New York Avant Garde Festivals. Although Fluxus and the New York Avant Garde Festival are not perfectly aligned in terms of philosophy or personnel, the overlap was such that in the context of this dissertation they will be considered part of the same extended art world.

39 Phillpot, “Manifesto I.”

40 Stephen Varble, “Interview with Charlotte Moorman on the Avant-Garde Festivals,” in Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University 1958-1972, ed. Geoffrey Hendricks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 173.

between a generic “festival” and her own particular “Festival” turned on the notion of “scaling up”: her strategy for championing the avant-garde was to strive for more, bigger, and better.41

The art world of American experimentalists had a history with festivals by the early

1960s—but that history didn’t take place, by and large, on American soil. In her book New

Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to

Reunification (2006), Amy Beal explores how West German cultural institutions—propped up by the cultural arm of the U.S. government’s Marshall Plan, postwar reeducation efforts, and eventually the cultural Cold War—supported American experimental music and musicians. By the end of the 1950s, the “West German pipeline” brought American composers to Europe via invitations to appear on radio stations, in new music festivals, or a combination of the above, at which point they helped secure additional commissions and contacts.42

If, as Beal convincingly demonstrates, the American experimentalists understood their greatest support structures to be European radio and festival appearances (even if that support was secretly or not-so-secretly funneled through American sources)—then it only makes sense that the festival model would find its way to the United States. It was good enough as a platform for the controversies of John Cage; it was good enough to make David Tudor an international star. Beal’s history is littered with the names of American experimentalists: Robert Ashley,

David Behrman, Earle Brown, John Cage, Dick Higgins, Alan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low,

Gordon Mumma, Max Neuhaus, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Steve

41 Throughout this dissertation, I refer to Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival as the “Festival” (with a capital letter) in order to distinguish it from the generic category of “festivals.”

42 Beal, New Music, 102.

Reich, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, James Tenney, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, La Monte

Young. Each of these composers, performers, or composer-performers received an invitation to

Europe at one time or another to participate in a festival, and they were paid for their troubles.

Moorman, while not an integral figure in Beal’s history, also took part in any number of

European festivals.43 Joan Rothfuss specifically points to Rolf Jahrling’s “24 Hours,” Jean-

Jacques Lebel’s “Festival of Free Expression,” and Giuseppe Chiari’s “Gruppo ’70 Festival” as events that gave Moorman ideas, that presented one version of what was possible without exhausting the possibilities.44 Festivals were more than simply an established medium of musical exposure; they were the specific medium that allowed Cage and company—fathers (and mothers, but mostly fathers) of the next generation of experimentalists—to live by their art, and they were the medium that next generation studied and coveted.

Once Moorman committed to her Festival as an annual event, she began to explicitly cultivate an association between her American Festival and its European counterparts. In a draft of a typical form letter dated January 15, 1968—one of many letters over the years containing similar content—Moorman requested financial help for the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New

York by aligning her event with the success of major European festivals.

My goal is to bring before the public the newest and best experimental works, both American and International…. It is historically important that the avant garde [sic] get as fair a hearing as is possible in our culture. Only after the public has been exposed to it can it accept or reject it. The Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York is dedicated to this purpose and is fast becoming an equivalent in America to the Palermo Festival (Italy), the Warsaw Festival (Poland), the Sogetsu Art Center (Japan), Darmstadt (Germany), as it was before Dr. Steinicke’s death, the Daueneschenger Series (Germany) or the Zagreb Biannale (Yugoslavia).45

43 For more on Moorman’s historiographical recuperation, see “Assemblage: Cello.”

44 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 170.

45 [Charlotte Moorman], [Draft “regarding the possibility of obtaining financial help”], January 15, 1968, from the Sixth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. This same text

Her rhetoric claims an international provenance for her Avant Garde Festival, while simultaneously recognizing the distinct challenges of its American context.

Even setting aside historical precedent, however, Moorman understood the possibilities inherent in the semantics of the word “festival.” Scholars studying festivals in fields from music studies to anthropology to cultural studies to Early Modern studies tend to acknowledge a few generalized principles that span across time, geography, and type. One of these is the Bakhtinian concept of the festival as an event that renders space outside of everyday time. According to philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, festivals are the manifestation of the carnivalesque, a vehicle for semi-sanctioned dissent or eccentricity. They are “life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play”—a slogan that resonated with the avant-garde’s vision of art and life as perfect equals.46

But Moorman’s approach to organizing her Festival requires another theoretical apparatus that, I argue, is also applicable to festivals writ large: the consideration of scale.

Granted, a “festival” can exist in a variety of contexts brought about by highly incompatible goals and ideals. The category of “music festival”—or even more specifically the “20th century

American music festival”—encompasses the chasm between a relatively contained event like “6

Concerts ‘63” spread out over several weeks, a huge three-day exposition like the Monterey Pop

Festival, and a long-running classical institution like the Marlboro Music Festival. What all of these festivals have in common, however, is a tendency towards “scaling up”—whether via the

appears in a document titled “Eighth New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman, director” in the materials from the Eighth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

46 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c1984), 7.

number of performances, the number of nights over which it takes place, the number of years it intends to recur, the continuous length of its run time, the number of performers involved, the number of events occurring simultaneously, the number of audience members it attracts, or via more intangible attributes like the specificity of its raison d’etre, the ways in which it subverts expectations, the quirkiness of its repertoire, and so on. Though some of these characteristics are more easily quantified than others, there exists, buried just beneath the surface of our word, the hint of a superlative.

The trajectory of Moorman’s fifteen Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals (1963-

1980) is a story located at the intersection of the carnivalesque and the superlative.47 At its peak, the New York Avant Garde Festival featured the works of more than 650 artists and attracted an audience of thousands in locations including the John F. Kennedy Staten Island Ferryboat

(1967), the 67th Regiment Armory (1971), and even the Charles River in Cambridge, MA

(1980).48 Individual iterations lasted up to twelve or even twenty-four hours at a time.

Newspaper reviews frequently extolled it as “far out,” “wacky,” and “arty.”49 From hard numbers to soft intangibles, my contention that festivals capitalize on scale was more than simply a byproduct of the New York Avant Garde Festival’s status as an “avant-garde” event.50

47 The New York Avant Garde Festival did not take place in 1970, 1976, or 1979.

48 Moorman’s complete “History of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York” is available in Cello Anthology, ed. Gabriele Bonomo (Milan: Alga Marghen, 2006), [unpaginated].

49 See, for example, John Gruen, “Far Out Concert, Stupefying Boredom,” New York Herald Tribune, August 21, 1963; Frank Prial, “Originale a Wacky Show with Frenzied Story Line,” New York World Telegram & Sun, September 9, 1964; William Federici, “City Throws in Water Works for Arty Ferry Festival,” Daily News, September 28, 1967.

50 One byproduct of the enormity of these festivals was proof of Moorman’s commitment to the avant- garde cause. Going through the Festival folders at the Charlotte Moorman Archive is like digging through a backpack at the end of a schoolyear: there are handfuls and handfuls of crumpled envelopes and receipts and pieces of scrap paper filled with haphazard notes relevant to something at some point, but you’re not entirely sure what. Upon closer inspection, each piece of scrap paper contains names (underlined or

It was the actual mechanism by which Moorman achieved one specific, often-stated goal that measured her Festival’s success: she wanted to educate the public about the avant-garde, to

“reach new people.”

When Moorman retrospectively described the origins of her New York Avant Garde

Festival, she always called on the best of the best in experimental practice.

A friend of mine, Earle Brown—a very, very fine composer, you probably know him from the Time Record series—um, Earle had a friend come to America named Frederic Rzewski, and he called me and he said ‘Charlotte, can we present Frederic in a concert?’ So, I know Norman Seaman…and I just introduced Frederic. And we were standing there, and Frederic had this scrapbook of press releases, of course, and pictures, because his work is very photographic with all the different dolls and saws and things he uses on the piano. So Norman Seaman said, ‘Well, Charlotte, why don’t you repeat the concert you did two months ago with David Tudor?’ That was my first experience in the avant- garde. So I said, ‘Alright, I’ll call David’—he was in California. I called David and David says yes. John Cage says well, he would do a performance also. So then we had three performances: a whole night of John Cage, David Tudor and me playing, Frederic Rzewski playing piano. So then Earle said let’s call Edgard Varèse—so I called Edgard Varèse. This is all in just twenty minutes time. Varèse said yes, he’d be happy to assist us

outlined multiple times), addresses and phone numbers, to-do lists, prop and materials lists, nouns that serve as reminders, time-lines—all of it written in whatever ink was to hand, at the orientation the paper scrap appeared when Moorman pulled it into open air, in whatever blank space was available. She did, now and again, valiantly try her hand at an organizational system. The Sixth Festival archives, for example, feature a number of letter size sheets of paper with words written at the top in thick red marker: “Jean Toche,” “Electronic Music,” “Paik: Largest TV in the World.” Theoretically, each person, event, or work deemed important enough to be a keyword received its own sheet of paper ready for notes. In practice, some sheets remain blank, some are used for unrelated notes, those that seem on topic are nonetheless intimately tied to the particular consciousness of their creator, and for every red-markered header there also exists a document with nothing to indicate why it exists or how to interpret what it says. These palimpsests of notes seem as though they should reveal great secrets to any researcher tenacious enough to manage them, but the lack of context means they rarely do. Part of their value lies in corroborating the many recollections of Moorman as a person with the will to overcome her lack of conventional organizational skills. The idea that Moorman was both strong-willed and diplomatically- skilled comes up in nearly every article ever written about her and the Festival. “As is usual for a few days before Charlotte’s thing, it looks like it won’t come off, even though hundreds of artists have purportedly pledged their work,” one Village Voice article noted in 1969. “And as usual, it will come off, due to Charlotte’s crazy credulous drive.” (“Scenes,” The Village Voice, September 25, 1969.)

with an electronic music program. So in about twenty, twenty-five minutes, in that one interview, we had a festival started.51

In this short anecdote, Moorman not only engaged the superlative through strategic name- dropping—a gateway to legitimacy—she also emphasized the extraordinary ties of musicianship and friendship that bound her art world together, proof of a tight-knit community.52

Once set in motion, the first three iterations of Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant

Garde Festival (1963-1965) were unambiguously “new music festivals.”53 Held in a concert hall, each one featured the musical works of composers including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Toshi

Ichiyanagi, Frederic Rzewski, and Edgard Varèse, and received reviews by music critics of the city’s two most prominent newspapers, The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune.

By year four (1966), Moorman radically redesigned the format of her festival. Held over eighteen hours in Central Park, dozens of participants simultaneously performed the works of 77 artists from fourteen countries. Ed Summerlin and Don Heckman improvised a saxophone duet, wailing to each other from across the Children’s Pond; Joe Jones rode his Musical Bike; Jim

McWilliams staged Picnic (in which the point was to eat as many hot dogs and watermelon slices as possible—even if that meant regurgitating what you had already eaten in order to continue); Moorman realized Nam June Paik’s Zen Smiles in the form of “5,000 pennies, one to a customer, smiling the while”54; Dick Higgins, seated in a lawn-chair and dressed in a striped

51 “Charlotte Moorman interviewed by Harvey Matusow,” at BBC New York Studios, October 1969, Ubuweb, accessed May 4, 2019, http://www.ubu.com/sound/moorman.html.

52 For more on the friendships of the avant-garde art world, see Ryan Dohoney, “Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in Morton Feldman’s Music of the 1950s,” Modernism/modernity 2, no. 3 (2017), accessed May 4, 2019, https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/morton-feldman.

53 I explore critical responses to the early Festivals in “Assemblage: Cello.”

54 Douglas M. Davis, “What’s Happening in the Avant-Garde,” National Observer, September 19, 1966.

tunic, allowed his wife to apply shaving cream to his balding pate in a performance of Danger

Music No. 2. (“‘It’s music,’ Mr. Higgins said, ‘because I can hear it. To the audience, of course, it’s theater.’”55) This full-day event became the model for all of the following Festivals, even as they became larger, more outlandish, and more ambitious as time went on. Moorman’s strong vision allowed consistency without requiring coherence.

A photograph taken by Peter Moore on September 14, 1968 at the Sixth Annual New

York Avant Garde Festival reveals more about the relationship between Moorman’s vision and

Bakhtin’s carnivalesque.56 In the image, Moorman is in the midst of a performance of conceptual artist Jim McWilliams’ Sky Kiss. The Festival that year took the form of a parade down Central

Park West, a long line of people winding their way in and out of floats and makeshift stages.

Moorman is to the right of the pictorial composition, playing her cello while suspended in mid- air by a harness attached to dozens of strings—most pointing up to a flock of helium balloons just out of the frame, a few pointing down at a height convenient to her handlers on the ground.

Eventually, Sky Kiss would become one of Moorman’s most iconic repertoire pieces; she performed it many times in locations all over the world, in every state of health and financial stability.57 This, however, was its debut and trial run all at once, and the majestic height she had hoped to achieve was in reality only a few feet—enough to set her above the crowd, but not

55 Dan Sullivan and Richard F. Shepard, “The Avant-Garde Day in Park Goes On and On,” New York Times, September 10, 1966.

56 Peter Moore served as the Festival’s unofficial photographer. He and his wife Barbara Moore were good friends of Moorman’s and staunch supporters of the Festival, Fluxus, and other experimental endeavors. For a short biography, see “Peter Moore: Photographer of the Avant-Garde 1960s-1970s,” Carl Solway Gallery, accessed May 8, 2019, https://www.solwaygallery.com/Peter_Moore_exhibition.html.

57 Joan Rothfuss, “Sky Kiss,” in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 122-133.

enough to set her apart. So close that her audience would have had no trouble hearing the music

Moorman produced—a feat less likely accomplished if she had been as high in the air as originally anticipated. In any case, the photo shows Moorman in the midst of people—and though we don’t know who those people are (fellow artists? Audience members along for the ride?) or how they got to be there (by walking along the parade route? By staking out a viewing spot on the side of the street?), we can see that some of them have cameras and some are turned away, that some look delighted and some look irked, that some are puzzled and some are nonchalant. In short, this is life, shaped according to play—and in this scenario outside of regular time where cellists perform music from the air and audience members might just as easily be artists, all of these reactions are valid. Moorman’s Annual New York Avant Garde Festival did not adhere to any clearly defined concert etiquette. There is no road map for how to attend an event with one hundred simultaneous performances; no hush descends over the crowd as the lights never dim, no rows of seats prevent a hasty exit.58 There is no reason a Festival shouldn’t take the form of parade, or a float shouldn’t feature light sculptures, or a piece of sounding art shouldn’t consist of a mural printed on computer paper.59 In claiming the space between a concert presentation and a walk down Central Park West, Moorman’s Festival embodied her avant-garde’s insistence on the abolition of the boundary between art and life. Here was a

58 Classical music may be a strawman, but it’s Moorman’s strawman; her background as a classical cellist (and the festival’s beginnings as a “classical” new music festival out of European avant-garde tradition) encouraged her comparisons to a particular type of event.

59 The Fifth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival (1967) took the form of a parade down Central Park West and featured both Les Levine’s light sculpture made of neon tubes, Photon Two, and Ken Knowlton and A. Michael Noll’s thirteen-foot-long mural-via-computer-printout. Hannah Higgins, “Live in the Eternal Network: The Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals,” in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 77-78.

readymade medium—an “intermedial event,” in fact—that was both of the world and apart from it, that consisted of art and was itself a kind of art.

In Moorman’s view, the Festival as a medium could speak for itself: it acted as a tool to educate audiences about avant-garde values through their own lived experience. Above all else, she prioritized exposure—“reaching new people”—by leaning into the idea of her Festival as a

“scaled up” entity. Thanks in part to the aftermath of Woodstock, music festivals are usually studied in terms of commercialization and branding, but Moorman wasn’t interested in money— or if she was, she wasn’t any good at making it. She was interested in sponsorships and collaborations with government and corporate America only to the extent that they allowed her to realize her vision—and they, in turn, needed to take a single look at the previous year’s expense sheets to realize that their take would be goodwill rather than dollar bills.60 She wasn’t trying to build a perfect brand (even the name of the Festivals kept changing just slightly over the years); she wasn’t trying to foment a political revolution; and Joan Rothfuss, Moorman’s biographer, argues that she wasn’t interested in developing theoretical frameworks within which to situate the avant-garde.61

What Moorman wanted—the story that she told over and over again—was to reach new audiences. 1969: “…[W]e wanted for all these new people to see what we’re doing: it’s silly for us to play for all our friends, you know…So I like to go to these different places, so we’ll reach new people,” she stated in an interview with Harvey Matusow.62 1973: “I’m very bored with the

60 Having said that, her willingness to enter into corporate sponsorships became a major point of contention with leftist Festival participants like Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche; see “Assemblage: Island.”

61 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 211. In fact, even the name of the Festival changed just slightly over the years: the Annual New York Avant Garde Festival eventually became the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York.

62 “Charlotte Moorman interviewed by Harvey Matusow,” Ubuweb.

concept that art is for a few people—the chosen few. …I have a secret love for reaching people who don’t get to museums or concerts normally. …I’m very interested in fun and not making art such a snobbish, mysterious thing,” she told performance artist Stephen Varble.63 1979: “The

Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York may well be the largest and most varied event of its kind. Its aim is to put audiences in touch with the latest works of artists working in every contemporary art mode…,” she wrote in the opening lines of the press release for the 12th Annual

Avant Garde Festival of New York.64 “Reaching new people” was a constant in Moorman’s press patter.

Her plan to entice audiences began with boosting the number of participants, a measure of the Festival’s perceived significance to artists within the art world as well as outside of it. In

“History of the Annual New York Avant Garde Festival,” a document Moorman compiled early on and updated at the conclusion of each annual event, hundreds of performers are named alphabetically in a small-type page-long addendum to formal paragraphs detailing time, place, and major works. Thanks to the Festival’s scale of operations—large, and always striving for larger—Moorman encouraged anyone and everyone to participate; she simply asked that performers provide their names and titles ahead of time for publicity and logistics purposes.65

The Jean Brown Archives at the Getty Institute contains several folders dedicated to the Twelfth

Festival (1975) and crammed full of Xeroxed proposals scant on details: Lil Picard proposed

63 Varble, “Interview with Charlotte Moorman,” 179.

64 [Charlotte Moorman], Press release, [1975], from Twelfth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

65 Moorman’s pre-Festival requests for performance proposals and related material needs became more formalized over time, particularly for the last few Festivals when the event reached peak numbers of participants.

“Earwig Theatre: A Pamphletary Parody,” Kip Incheck and Robert Adsit offered a piece called

“Earthstar”, Franklin E. Morris created “Sequel to Syn City,” Geoffrey Hendricks provided

“Seeding,” and Anne Tardos submitted a piece of paper with her name and a hand-drawn pair of lips.66 These proposals included conceptual works alongside pieces easily realized; the interesting and innovative alongside the boring and prosaic. They were submitted by Festival veterans and by newcomers; by people with clout and people with none. Moorman accepted them all. For every virtually anonymous presenter, there was also a John Lennon, a Yoko Ono, a

John Cage, or a Carolee Schneemann who brought name recognition and star power. Together, the famous and the unknown allowed Moorman to trumpet numbers like the experimentalists had never seen: while the Sixth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival (1968) featured

“approximately 150 artists,” Moorman claimed approximately “650 artists from 25 countries

[who] presented their newest works to over 30,000 people” at the Fifteenth (1980).67

Moorman’s advertising campaign—her attempt to expose the public to avant-garde practices—relied on the press, and she successfully gambled that the Festival’s scale would compel interest and activity. Charged with writing about the it-events of city life, neither large nor small media outlets could very well ignore a gathering of 600 artists (though the pill went down easier with those reporters already sympathetic to the avant-garde’s cause). Moorman’s cultivation of the media began every year with a list of institutions and reporters who might be convinced to cover the New York Avant Garde Festivals.68 She sent out press releases, held

66 Charlotte Moorman, “11th-12th NY Avant Garde Festival, 1974-1975,” Series I: Artists’ files, Box: Oversize 27, Jean Brown Papers (1916-1995), Getty Research Institute.

67 Moorman, “History of the Annual Avant Garde Festival.”

68 As just one example, see Charlotte Moorman, “Notes: NY Times…,” [1968], from Sixth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

press conferences (or, occasionally, beer party/press conferences, as in the case of the Sixth

Festival69), wrote individual letters and invitations, produced memos. She made sure, in other words, that the superlative qualities of the New York Avant Garde Festival—number of consecutive years the event took place, number of artists involved, number of audience members expected to show, number of genres represented, names of prominent participants, kookiness of the proposed pieces—were obvious to New York’s media elite and their readers.

If numbers were the basis of her advertising campaign to the larger public, the numbers’ physical counterparts—the people they represented—became another means of enacting that campaign. The sheer number of performers involved in each Festival ensured ample volunteers to paper the town, to spread the news by word of mouth, and to give shout outs at their own shows and events. According to Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, a younger member of the art world,

Moorman’s particular gift was to encourage investment by making people feel included. In our interview in 2017, he recounted his first New York Avant Garde Festival at Grand Central

Station (1973): “There was no application. I mean, I wandered in.”70 Encouraged and emboldened, the next year he called the number listed at the bottom of an invitation to participate he received in the mail. As it turned out, that number was Moorman’s personal phone, and he spent the evening chatting pleasantly with the boss herself. Eventually he joined the organizational team:

Another year I started helping doing things like helping Charlotte fold posters and mail stuff, and I would go over to her place and we would just fold stuff. And again, I met people there that I didn’t meet until years later. Charles Morrow. And he apparently was in the apartment at the same time, folding, and we didn’t know each other—nobody knew each other. This guy’s folding posters too. It was so nonexclusive that it’s almost

69 Charlotte Moorman, “Memo to assignment desks, editors, reporters,” [1968], from Sixth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

70 Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, interview with author, March 16, 2015.

unimaginable today when there are genre groups and people who are part of ensembles that get locked into other ensembles and they don’t play anybody else’s music that’s not part of their age group or not part of their style.71

This is the definition of an art world: New York Avant Garde Festival producers, participants, and press provided time, labor, materials, and resources in order to constitute and reconstitute fifteen iterations of the annual event. This particular art world is distinguished by the depth of its commitment: organizers and artists alike performed these duties for free, internalizing Moorman’s rallying cry and ensuring the Festival received its due in New York

City and beyond. In return, participants gained opportunities for exposure to both the public and to other artists (with whom they formed their own relationships and lined up future opportunities—crucial yields for those working in genres and media without clear institutional sources of funding and acclaim). In other words, the art world necessary to make the Festival a reality was further fueled and tightened by the Festival itself. With each successive year,

Moorman attempted to top the last, to strive towards the superlative: the most participants, the most audience members, the most funding sources, the most reviews, the most talk about the most spectacular—even carnivalesque—pieces. The Festival’s scale guaranteed its worth as a cultural outlet for the art world and the general public alike.

71 Báthory-Kitsz, interview with author.

Component 2 YAM Festival, Tudorfest, Here2 Festival

Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival ran longer than any other

American avant-garde festival of the latter half of the twentieth century, and by virtue of its longevity alone played a major role in maintaining the relationships and philosophies embedded within the avant-garde art world. Having said that, it was not the only festival organized by art world members, and New York was not the only American city home to avant-garde festivals.

The sheer number of festivals-explicitly-named-as-“festivals”—not to mention their variations in personnel, time frame, location, presentation, and repertoire—points to the breadth of possibility inherent in the medium. In this Component, I examine three contemporaneous American avant- garde festivals held in New Jersey (1963), San Francisco (1964), and Minneapolis (1965). Not only do the YAM Festival, Tudorfest, and the Here2 Festival serve as models offered by

Moorman’s friends and colleagues just as the New York Avant Garde Festival found its footing, they also display the tight interrelation of people and materials necessary to make such events a reality: the art world in practice.

YAM Festival

Around 1961, Robert Watts and George Brecht first discussed the concept for their YAM

Festival over coffee and ice cream at their local Howard Johnson’s in New Brunswick, New

Jersey.72 By the time the event hit its highpoint in 1963, YAM made reference to the month in which the majority of performances would take place (YAM is “May” spelled backwards), as

72 Simon Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions: George Brecht and Robert Watts, 1953-1963,” in Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957-63, ed. Joan Marter (Newark N.J.: Newark Museum; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1999), 100.

well as to an earlier Watts collage featuring a lithographed label taken off of a crate of yams.73

The festival, Watts later stated, comprised a “loose format that would make it possible to combine or include an ever expanding universe of events.”74 In practice, this meant an “extended performance” that lasted—not a day, not a week, not a month, but in true “scaled up” festival fashion—two years: “The idea was…to keep things going,” Brecht said in an interview with

Fluxus artist Simon Anderson. “Everybody who wanted to could contribute.”75

If the open participation policy suggests shades of Moorman’s future Festival, so too does

Watts and Brecht’s insistence on exploring the work of experimental artists in every medium:

“all manner of immaterial, experimental, as yet unclassified forms of expression,” Brecht noted.76 Although not every planned event came to fruition, the YAM Festival in its umbrella existence included a mail art subscription event; a Delivery Event that promised to sell and deliver prosaic items for rock bottom prices; “Water Day,” “Box Day,” and “Clock Day”; a

YAM Festival Newspaper (“New SE PA pay ER”); distribution of a festival calendar; as well as parties, lectures, openings, concerts, performances, tournaments, and exhibits.77

73 Joan Marter, “The Forgotten Legacy: Happenings, Pop Art, and Fluxus at Rutgers University,” in Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde 1957-1963, ed. Joan Marter (Newark N.J.: Newark Museum; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1999), 41.

74 Marter, “The Forgotten Legacy,” 41.

75 Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions,” 100. To give a sense of just how “loose” and “extended” the YAM Festival really was: Simon Anderson notes that the Festival began in May, 1963 and lasted for about two years; Joan Marter believes that the Yam Festival refers to events that began in 1962 and culminated in May, 1963. Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions,” 101; Marter, “The Forgotten Legacy,” 41.

76 Julia Robinson (ed), George Brecht : events: eine Heterospektive, (Köln: Walter König, 2005), 68.

77 Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions,” 101-102.

Moorman was one of many art world members with a front row seat to the variety show of May 1963, when Watts and Brecht undertook the most concentrated period of performances during the YAM Festival’s tenure. Though the events are fascinating in their own right, they also reveal a core cast of characters, or what Anderson calls the “spectrum of the New York avant- garde.”78 From May 9 to May 11, for example, Alison Knowles organized the “Yam Hat Sale” featuring hats made by Ay-O, George Brecht, Lettie Eisenhauer, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Ray

Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Ben Patterson, Wolf Vostell, and Robert Watts (and others).79 In the

Smolin Gallery’s advertisement of the event, “Alison Knowles presents hats fantastical, fabulous, whimsical, fairylike of materials ranging from found objects to glass. Something to see; something to wear; something to use in your home as sculpture.”80 It was “one of the most fantastic shows I’ve ever seen,” Brecht said in an interview. “There must have been fifty hat people.”81

The end of Yam Hat Sale overlapped (for a few hours) with the next YAM Festival event. The Charlotte Moorman Archive contains early drafts of a program for what would eventually become Yam Day at the Hardware Poet’s Playhouse.82 Organized by Moorman, this twenty-four hour event starting on May 11 and continuing until the following morning featured

“an endless and continuous” program of music by composers including John Cage, Morton

78 Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions,” 101. For an extended listing of YAM Festival events, see “Chronology of Events,” in Off Limits, 171-172.

79 “Chronology of Events,” Off Limits, 171; “Timeline” in Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, ed. Geoffrey Hendricks, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 187.

80 “Smolin Gallery May Events,” [May, 1963], in Charlotte Moorman Archive.

81 Marter, “The Forgotten Legacy,” 41.

82 “Yam Festival May 11, 1963,” [n.d., c1963], in Charlotte Moorman Archive.

Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Philip Corner, and Dick Higgins. All told, the concert presented 140 works enacted by thirty-seven performers.83

On May 19, the YAM Festival traveled to George Segal’s farm in South Brunswick on the Rutgers campus. Smolin Gallery once again sponsored the event, even chartering a small fleet of buses to bring New Yorkers—including Moorman, Knowles, Corner, Eisenhauer, Lil

Picard, Al Hansen, and La Monte Young—to the New Jersey destination.84 A small number of artists and musicians received invitations to perform their work, and their work encompassed every type of performance. Yvonne Ranier presented A Dance (or, as the Village Voice called it, an “anti-dance along the roof of the interminable string of chicken coops spread across the farm”) and Charles Ginnever, A Sculpture Dance; La Monte Young programmed Music; Dick

Higgins opted for a piece titled Lots of Trouble; Wolf Vostell represented with Television De- collage, which consisted of “the burying of a television set after it had been defiled in various ways”; and Allan Kaprow put together Tree, a Happening involving many participants.85 Tree was, according to Kaprow, “a kind of war-game.”86 In this 1963 version of the Happening, La

Monte Young and his sopranino saxophone made music next to a tree planted on top of a stack of hay bales. On one side, he was sandwiched in by a formation of cars; on the other, an “army” of humans. The cars edged closer to the hay bales, the humans edged closer to the hay bales;

Kaprow, the Happenings auteur and self-proclaimed “tree man” at the front of the army, reached

83 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), 141. Banes notes that the event started at noon; multiple draft programs in the Charlotte Moorman Archive list 11:30pm.

84 Stiles, “Battle of the Yams,” 123.

85 Leonard Horowitz, “Art: A Day in the Country,” The Village Voice, May 23, 1963.

86 Horowitz, “A Day in the Country.”

Young, the musician, and took control of the summit, in the process cutting down the lone tree up top and dismissing the army back into the forest they came from.87 (It is certainly possible to read the death of the discrete musical genre—or, in fact, genre in general—into this Happening, but that doesn’t seem to have been Kaprow’s main message.)

According to Anderson in his article “Living in Multiple Dimensions” (1999), the goal of the two-year YAM Festival was to “deliberately but purposelessly erase [the] theoretical fracture” between art and life.88 Not only did this manifest in the kinds of events Watts and

Brecht (and their art world) organized—in the mundanity of Delivery Event, for example, or the

“endless” music at Hardware Poet’s Playhouse—it also is made visible via the length of the

Festival as a whole (two years, after all, is practically endless when you’re young and creative).

Tudorfest

In the spring of 1964—several months after “6 concerts ’63,” several months before the

Second Annual New York Avant Garde Festival—composer Pauline Oliveros organized a West

Coast festival in partnership with a new organization, The San Francisco Tape Music Center. Her inspiration for the event came in the form of David Tudor, celebrated pianist (and, not incidentally, a driving force in the realization of Moorman’s “6 concerts ’63). The six-concert festival—curated by Tudor, performed by Tudor, in celebration of Tudor—became (obviously, inevitably) known as the Tudorfest.89

87 Horowitz, “A Day in the Country.”

88 Anderson, “Living in Multiple Dimensions,” 102. If this sounds similar to a Fluxus goal: it was. The YAM Festival is often considered a proto-FluxFest, and Brecht and Watts are both considered integral members of Fluxus.

89 Oliveros: “I think that having David [Tudor] take such an interest in what we were doing and his willingness to perform was a great moment for us, and [I felt that] we should take advantage of it to

True to the reciprocal nature of the experimental art world, Tudor chose pieces by his friends and collaborators: John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Alvin Lucier, George Brecht, Oliveros herself. It was a hodgepodge of styles, a perfect representation of the sheer range of 1960s experimental music. Ichiyanagi’s Music for Piano #4, Electronic Version cuddled up to Cage’s

Music for Amplified Toy Piano; Lucier’s Action Music for Piano, Book I contrasted with

Brecht’s Card-Piece for Voice; and Tudor represented a variety of Cage compositions—Atlas

Eclipticalis, Winter Music, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Cartridge Music, and Music

Walk—on a single program.

For her part, Oliveros wrote a piece specifically for Tudorfest. Titled Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato, Oliveros and her accordion were positioned across from Tudor and his bandoneon on a giant see-saw that moved up and down, side to side, round and round. A cage containing a brown-black mynah bird named Ahmed dangled directly over the center of the see-saw. Though Oliveros originally conceived of the composition as a scored work, she and Tudor soon jettisoned any note-by-note instructions in favor of improvisational techniques, choreography by Elizabeth Harris, and an accompanying light show by Tony Martin.90 The result was a literal whirl of music and motion, a blur of performers and instruments up high and down low, a constantly shifting understanding of how

promote the work we were doing.” Pauline Oliveros interviewed by David W. Bernstein and Maggi Payne, “Pauline Oliveros,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David Bernstein, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 104.

90 Pauline Oliveros, “Memoir of a Community Enterprise,” in The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. David Bernstein, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 86-87.

sight and sound worked in space. The critics at the event noted that Ahmed the Mynah Bird was too quiet opening night.91

Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato was performed just twice at Tudorfest, and Tudorfest was only ever a one-off production. This was a much smaller operation than something like the New York Avant Garde Festival—which isn’t to say it didn’t attract the same sorts of interested audiences or the attentions of the press. Critics did attend the event, and they did write about those performances for their papers. Musicologist

David Bernstein even goes so far as to say that the Tudorfest reviews were a major factor in positioning the San Francisco Tape Music Center as a mover and shaker on the experimental music scene; in some ways, this was the festival that started it all.92

The Tudorfest review most often cited is Alfred Frankenstein’s coverage of Cage’s Atlas

Eclipticalis in the San Francisco Chronicle.93 In Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut chronicles a performance of the piece by the New York Philharmonic that took place two months earlier. In that case, half of the audience left before the eight-minute version of the piece had ended; the orchestra members themselves hissed onstage and legend has it that some smashed electronic equipment in protest.94 From his vantage point embedded within the Bay Area experimental scene, on the other hand, Frankenstein loved it.95 “I think the newness of [Atlas

91 Oliveros, “Memoir,” 87.

92 David Bernstein, [liner notes], Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1964, New World Records 80762-2, 2014, compact disc.

93 Alfred Frankenstein, “Music,” The San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 1964.

94 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 20-64.

95 Rita Mead’s Henry Cowell’s New Music 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981) details Frankenstein’s generous reviews, his

Eclipticalis] lies not so much in its compositional methods or its treatment of the instruments,” he said, “as in its substitution of measured clock time for recurrent metric pulsation…no music, not even Webern’s, turns every note into so important an event or plays so much on anticipation as a prime factor in the musical experience.”96 Perhaps critics attending a festival sponsored by the San Francisco Tape Music Center and performed by sympathetic musicians knew better what to expect of a Cage ensemble piece than the critics attending a concert headlined by the New

York Philharmonic. Certainly Alfred Frankenstein on the West coast was more sympathetic than his East Coast counterparts. Whatever the case, it wasn’t only the critics who seemed to enjoy the San Francisco show. The festival was sold out—so the public, too, was happy—and Oliveros remembers that Cage and Ichiyanagi (both of whom were alums of the previous year’s “6

Concerts ’63) were present in the audience.97

The Here2 Festival

Several of Oliveros’s compositions were performed at yet another experimental music festival that took place the following year in June of 1965, barely three months before the curtain rose on the Third Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. Martin Friedman, director of the

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 1961 to 1990, invited Robert Ashley and the

ONCE Group to perform in the Walker’s Here2 Festival. The ONCE Group was accustomed to participating in spectacles. In addition to its own annual festival in Ann Arbor (1961-1966), its

subscriptions to new music-related publications and endeavors, and his friendship with and advocacy on behalf of Cowell among other notable composers.

96 Frankenstein, “Music,” 1964.

97 Bernstein, The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 86.

members also frequently participated in festivals across the country: as just one salient example,

Ashley and Mumma performed at the Second Annual New York Avant Garde Festival in a concert dedicated to their compositional experiments with electronics and feedback.98 From

Moorman to Watts, Brecht, Oliveros, Ashley, and Mumma: the experimentalists planned their festivals locally, relying on a traveling circuit of avant-garde figures to fill in the personnel.

The Here2 Festival’s first incarnation took place without the ONCE Group, and without the Walker Art Center. In May of 1964, John M. Ludwig, the Walker’s Coordinator of

Performing Arts, wrote to Thomas Nee at the Minneapolis-based Unitarian Center to offer the use of the museum’s mailing lists and addressograph machine, a reception space, and fifty dollars towards becoming a guarantor of a fledgling series called the HERE Festival. “…We are highly interested in the kind of concert series you have created and are only sorry that we could not have gotten together sooner and planned the Festival for presentation in the Center itself. For future concerts,” Ludwig wrote, “we hope that we can cooperate to a greater extent.”99 When that possibility became a reality, Ludwig began soliciting performers for the second iteration of

HERE—what would become known as the Here2 Festival. “HERE IS HERE AGAIN AS

HERE2,” one press release read in all capital letters.100 In a letter to the Hart Chamber Players in

September 1964, Ludwig touted the event as “a series of concerts devoted to modern and unusual

98 The Second Annual Avant Garde Festival consisted of ten concerts between August 30 and September 13, 1964. The first five concerts were individually conceived; the last five were all performances of Stockhausen’s Originale.

99 John M. Ludwig to Thomas Nee, May 21, 1964, Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis MN.

100 “News Release,” May 27, 1965, Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

works.”101 At the same time, he got in touch with experimental filmmaker George Manupelli and experimental composers Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, all three members of the ONCE

Group known to Ludwig for their intermedia work “Space Theatre.”102

When all was said and done, the Here2 Festival consisted of four concerts the evenings of

June 14, 15, 16, and 18, 1965. A Walker staff memo described the June 14 event as “a rather conventional concert of un-conventional items.”103 The audience was treated to performances of compositions by Charles Ives, Stefan Wolfe, Pauline Oliveros, Martin Stocks, and a selection of

French court songs from the 14th century. The second concert (June 15) involved “a rather conventional presentation of films in the Lecture Gallery with an interlude played on unorthodox instruments”—or, more specifically, films by Stan van der Beek, George Manupelli, and others, as well as an interlude for accordion and apple-crate by Oliveros. The ONCE Group starred on

June 16 in a “CONCERT OF SPECTACULAR THEATRE MUSIC, events combining sounds, pops, projections and dance movement.” In a grand finale on June 18, the Here2 Festival delivered a “mobile-audience JAMBOREE” featuring a composition for solo percussion,

Baroque music on harpsichord and violin, dulcet tones of strolling musicians, and the ONCE

Group’s “holding forth.”104 The first three events concluded with an ice cream social, the last with a dance led by the Herb Pilhofer Trio. Tickets to individual events sold for $2.00 each, or a

101 John M. Ludwig to Hart Chamber Players, September 24, 1964, Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

102 John M. Ludwig to George Manupelli c/o Robert Ashley, November 16, 1964, Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

103 “Staff memo, from John to: Linda, Martin, Jan, Dean, Sue, Don, John, Nancy,” [n.d.], Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

104 “Staff memo,” Walker Art Center Archives.

series pass at the discounted price of $7.00. Citing their deliberate mix of contemporary music, early music, dance, films, and experimental forms, the Walker declared “a new, festival approach to the performing arts.”105

Though Robert Ashley served as Ludwig’s primary contact, the full traveling contingent of the ONCE Group consisted of nine performers and a stage manager, five men and five women.106 In preparation for their performances, Ashley requested loudspeakers, power amplifiers, a speaker’s rostrum, a ping-pong table, an extension ladder, four stepladders, four bowling balls, a grand piano, and several wooden planks of various lengths. Most of these props were earmarked for the Concert of Spectacular Theatre Music on June 16th, further explained in a news release as “a series of visual and auditory programs titled ‘Night Music for Wolfman and

Supersonics,” “Megaton for William Burroughs,” and ‘Kittyhawk.’” A version of all of these, the release was sure to note, had been performed the previous year at the XXXII Venice

Biennale, a prestigious and long-running European arts festival.107 The essence of Spectacular

Theatre Music shines through in a photograph taken that night during Kittyhawk (An Antigravity

Piece): in the foreground, a woman wearing a mod dress, ankle socks, and a blindfold negotiates her way across a series of wooden planks positioned across strategically staggered five-step ladders.108 In the background, another woman has been duct-taped to the wall. A male performer

105 “Here2 Ticket Sales Information,” [n.d.], Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

106 Annina Nosei, George Manupelli, Harold Borkin, Joseph Wehrer, Robert Ashley, Mary Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Caroline Cohen, Anne Wehrer; Ann Borkin, stage manager.

107 The Venice Biennale began as a fine arts festival in 1895, and added its contemporary music component in 1930. News Release: “Here is Here Again as Here2,” May 27, 1965, Folder: “Here2 Festival, June 14-18, 1965,” Walker Art Center Archives.

108Martin Friedman, “ONCE, Not Again,” Walker Art Center website, accessed May 4, 2019, http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2014/once-group-1965-minneapolis.

stands in front of her, reaching between the many strands of tape to remove individual articles of her clothing, rags, and plastic cups. Just outside of the photo’s frame, another man is poised to throw plastic golf balls at the performers standing nearby. (“I had neglected to discuss the evening’s contents with the museum’s insurance company,” Walker Director Martin Friedman wrote in a retrospective article. “My heart was in my mouth from beginning to end.”109)

Friedman wasn’t the only one with doubts about what he called the “daredevil events.”110

In Allan Holbert’s review “Final Here 2 Concert is Given at Walker” for the Minneapolis Star

Tribune, the reporter went so far as to call Kittyhawk “a dull hoax” and, poetically, “stupid.”

“First they handed out pieces of paper with lines on them,” Holbert wrote, “and an announcer gave instructions for folding it. While he talked: Two men put up a screen on the landing of the lobby and attached a woman to the wall behind it with masking tape.”111 And on and on, paragraph after paragraph, an extraordinarily dry recitation of events—right down to the last sentence put-down: “And to think I could have stayed home and watched the Twins on television. It was probably a more exciting loss.”112 Who can say whether the festival-goers agreed with him. The Walker’s management, however, was in sympathy: despite the ONCE

Group’s appeal to Friedman during his vacation at a cabin in northern Minnesota (complete with loudspeakers) a week later, the Walker declined to ask the ONCE Group back for a repeat performance.113 That marked the end of its affiliation with the Here2 Festival, but not the end of

109 Friedman, “ONCE.”

110 Friedman, “ONCE.”

111 Allan Holbert, “Final Here2 Concert is Given at Walker,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, [1965].

112 Holbert, “Final Here2 Concert.”

113 Friedman, “ONCE.”

its affiliation with festivals. At home again in Ann Arbor, the ONCE Group refocused its energies on the eponymous ONCE Festival—now with a dash of Here2 embedded within: in

1966, Oliveros contributed a reprise of her piece for apple crate.114 Even the short-lived festivals provided the art world with inspiration for future festivals.

The YAM Festival, Tudorfest, and the Here2 Festival represent three distinct conceptions of an “avant-garde festival”: New Jersey, San Francisco, Minneapolis; two years, two weeks, four nights; open call for participation, curated within the art world, anchored by traveling stars; shoestring budget, supported by a musical ensemble, affiliated with an art museum. Their differences are legion, but all three used the Festival medium to showcase and juxtapose (in

Brecht’s words) “as yet unclassified modes of expression.” Collectively, they illustrate the broad spectrum of this avant-garde art world—and, crucially, model its interconnectedness. The YAM

Festival’s organizers—Watts and Brecht—and many of its participants (represented either in person or via their artwork)—Knowles, Hansen, Vostell, Kaprow, Einsenhauer, Higgins, Jones,

Cage, Feldman, Corner, Stockhausen, Patterson, Picard, Corner, Rainier, and Young— contributed to at least one of Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festivals, and Moorman herself organized and attended YAM Festival events. Compositions by both Cage and Brecht also featured at Tudorfest. Tudorfest’s Tudor and Ichiyanagi signed up to perform at Moorman’s first New York Avant Garde Festival, while Oliveros contributed both compositions and drawings to later iterations. Ashley and Mumma, members of the ONCE Group, performed in a concert devoted to their own compositions during Moorman’s Second Festival, and they encouraged the Walker to program several works by Oliveros for the Here2 Festival. “Festival” is

114 Music from the ONCE Festival 1961-1966, New World Records 80567, 2003, compact disc.

where an endless program of music in a barn on the East Coast meets a West Coast see-saw piece on a concert hall stage meets a Concert of Spectacular Theatre Music in a Midwestern museum.

Component 3 Another Kind of Festival: FluxFest Kit 2

Say it again: words and their definitions were important to the experimentalists. The first cultural product to assume the “Fluxus” name—with all of the aspirations for the merging of art and life that would come to imply—arrived in the form of a festival. September 1962,

Wiesbaden, Germany: the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik.115 According to

Fluxus co-founder George Maciunas, festivals (indeed, concerts of all kinds) were useful because they took less effort than a publication, and because the event itself served as an advertisement

(or, in Maciunas’ words, “propaganda”) for both Fluxus as an art form, future FluxFests, and any potential Flux-publications.116

In 1966, Maciunas printed a large broadsheet-style poster titled Fluxfest Sale consisting of a long list of “approximately half” of the Fluxus catalogue organized by artist and divided into columns, as well as Maciunas’ “Expanded Arts Diagram”—a detailed map of artistic influence tracing a lineage for Fluxus back to Haiku and Marcel Duchamp, and forward to what he called

115 For a comparative overview of thirty-two European Fluxus performances, see Petra Stegmann (ed), The Lunatics are on the Loose: European Fluxus Festivals 1962-1977 ([Potsdam]: Down with Art!, [2012]).

116 Larry Miller, “Transcript of the videotaped interview with George Maciunas, March 24, 1978,” in Fluxus Etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection—Addenda 1 (New York: Ink &, 1983), 15. Though Maciunas liked festivals and Moorman produced festivals, Maciunas famously disliked Moorman and her festivals. In her article “Fluxus Feminus,” Kathy O’Dell quotes a letter from Maciunas to Fluxus archivist Harry Ruhé that puts Moorman on a “blacklist” (Kathy O’Dell, “Fluxus Feminus,” TDR 41, no. 1 [Spring 1997]: 44). It seems that Maciunas also placed Moorman’s festivals on a blacklist: “Composition 1971, by George Maciunas, dedicated to all the avant-garde artists who refused to participate in this affair. George Maciunas shall avoid all visual and oral contact with any of the participants in the so-called avant-garde festival until the next one comes along” (Hannah Higgins, “Live Art in the Eternal Network,” 85).

“independents” and “political-didactic anti-bourgeois popular art.”117 The text in the top left corner of FluxFest Sale lays out the terms of use for the information that follows:

Any of the Flux pieces can be performed anytime, anyplace and by anyone, without any payment to Fluxus provided the following conditions are met: 1. If flux-pieces outnumber numerically or exceed in duration other compositions in any concert, the whole concert must be called and advertised as FLUXCONCERT or FLUXEVENT. A series of such events must be called a FLUXFEST. 2. If flux-pieces do not exceed non-fluxpieces, each such fluxpiece must be identified as a FLUX-PIECE. 3. Such credits to Fluxus may be omitted at a cost of $50 for each piece announced or performed.118

Among the more than 200 works by sixteen artists included in FluxFest Sale are George

Brecht’s Dance Music (“Gunshot”); Joe Jones’ Duet for Brass Instruments (“Rubber glove is placed over bell and tucked inside. Air is blowed until glove emerges from bell and is inflated.

Variation: with inflatable leg.”); Maciunas’ Piece for Conductor, 1965 (“Conductor steps over podium and takes a conventional bow. He remains bowed while tying shoelaces, scratching ankles, rolling and unrolling legs of his trousers, etc. etc.”); Benjamin Patterson’s Variations for

Double Bass (“17 variations are performed such as: locating pin of bass over location of performance on a map, attaching clothespins on strings and rattling them, agitating strings with comb, corrugated board, feather duster or chain, eating edibles from peg box, posting a letter though the f hole, etc., etc., etc.); Chieko Shiomi’s Event for the Late Afternoon, 1963 (“Suspend a violin with a long rope.”); and Robert Watts’ C/T Trace, 1963 (“An object is fired from canon

117 George Maciunas, Fluxfest Sale, Walker Art Center Collections, accessed May 4, 2019, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/fluxfest-sale.

118 George Maciunas, FluxFest Kit 2, Walker Art Center Collections, accessed May 4, 2019, https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/flux-fest-kit-2-3. Inflation is real: in FluxFest Sale, Maciunas went on to note that “…entire fluxfests may be also arranged by the fluxus collective for a fee of $10 per performer per day” (plus conditions). By the time FluxFest Kit 2 went to press, that fee was listed at $40.

and cought [sic] in bell of tuba.”).119 Short, often humorous, easy to organize, open to multiple performance interpretations: these pieces encapsulate Fluxus philosophy and spirit.

The invitation to “do-it-yourself” became even more explicit in the title of a poster released by Maciunas four years later: FluxFest Kit 2 (1970). Opening with an identical set of instructions and caveats, FluxFest Kit 2 nixed the “Expanded Arts Diagram” included in

FluxFest Sale in favor of documenting new, longer, more involved formats. Rather than present catalogues of works for individual artists, Maciunas organized pieces under headings that foregrounded types of event. Shiomi’s Event for the Late Afternoon and Jones’ Duet for Brass

Instruments, for example, appear as part of a “Flux-Chamber Concert” program. Maciunas’

Piece for Conductor leads off the suggestions for the “Flux-Orchestra Concert,” and Brecht’s

Dance Music is deemed appropriate for an “Audience Flux-Concert.” Potential Flux-producers could also peruse categories including “Flux Foods and Drinks,” “Swimming Pool Events,”

“Mechanical Flux-Concert,” “Flux-Olympiad,” “Flux-Parade,” and “Flux-Mass of the Faithfull.”

Taken together, FluxFest Sale and FluxFest Kit 2 provided everything a person (art world member or not) would need to produce a festival of their own; they were festivals in object form, kits available for the low, low price of credit to Fluxus. In a stunning example of art meeting life,

Maciunas’s kits had takers. Jon Hendricks—a Fluxus member, scholar, and curator; someone who has both lived and studied this art—included multiple examples of DIY FluxFests produced with and without “official” Fluxus collaboration in his book about the Silverman Collection,

119 As Keitetsu Murai points out in “FluxFest Sale 2011,” Maciunas excerpted, paraphrased, or edited many of the works represented in FluxFest Sale. In other words, the result is as much a glimpse of Maciunas’ understanding of and aspirations for Fluxus as it is a faithful portrayal of Fluxus members’ intentions and achievements. Keitetsu Murai, “FluxFest Sale 2011,” in FluxFest Sale (Tokyo: Gallery 360°, 2011).

Fluxus Etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection—Addenda 1.120 Some of these festivals, he told me in our 2017 interview, used Fluxfest Sale as inspiration, while others inspired

FluxFest Kit 2 (though he couldn’t always remember which did which).121 Stony Brook State

University, for example, held a month-long FluxFest beginning on November 13, 1968 and organized by a team of Fluxus members and students.122 Audiences attended a Mechanical Flux-

Concert, an Audience Flux-Concert, a Slide-Film Flux Show, and a Flux-Parade led by Robert

Watts (of YAM Festival fame). The Flux-Orchestra and Flux-Chamber Music concerts programmed a number of pieces right out of the Fluxfest Sale’s greatest hits: Piece for

Conductor 1965, Duet for Brass Instruments, and C/T Trace 1963. At the Flux-Olympiad, you, too, could participate in a long jump on a very slippery floor, in combat boxing using gloves smeared with paint, in a cycling race for the slowest, or in a rousing game of baseball played with an egg.123

Not two weeks into the Stony Brook FluxFest’s run, another FluxFest Sale-inspired festival roared to life on the opposite side of the country. On November 26, 1968, Eugenia Butler

(a gallerist not affiliated with Fluxus) opened a FluxShow at her Gallery 669 in Los Angeles

120 Jon Hendricks (ed), Fluxus Etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection—Addenda 1 (New York: Ink &, 1983). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives is housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Jon Hendricks met Gilbert Silverman in the 1970s and proceeded to serve as an advisor for Silverman’s project to collect “as fully as possible, the entire history of Fluxus.” For more on the relationship between Hendricks and the Silvermans, see Julia Pelta Feldman, “The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives Finding Aid,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed May 4, 2019, https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/archives/finding-aids/Fluxusf.

121 Jon Hendricks, interview with author, August 8, 2017.

122 The Stony Brook FluxFest took place from November 13 to December 12, 1968. Hendricks, Fluxus etc. Addenda I, 216-230.

123 Hendricks, Fluxus etc. Addenda I, 216-230.

featuring “Street Events” by Milan Knížák and Tomas Schmit; “Vestibule Variations” by Ayo; a

Flux-clinic; a “Sports-Game Center” with a slow-speed bicycle race (slowest wins) and balloon javelins; “Sound Environments” by Richard Maxfield and Dick Higgins; “Sound Machines” and

Flux-music-boxes by Joe Jones; and a variety of Fluxus-related objects, posters, and newspapers to decorate the walls and surfaces of the gallery space.124 Butler followed the rules of the

FluxFest Sale to the letter: both the title of her festival and the pieces she chose acknowledge the

Fluxus collective.

Maciunas himself went out of his way to promote the potential of his festival kits. In a letter to Italian art critic and publisher Giancarlo Politi around 1969, Maciunas wrote about his life, his new ideas, something called the FluxPack 3 he was in the process of creating for Politi’s magazine Flash Art. Near the end, he addressed an upcoming event he called “the Roman exhibit.” “Another very easy item to arrange is the FluxClinic,” Maciunas told Politi, “which is fully described in the FLUXFESTKIT2, which I gave you. In fact: that paper is full of proposals, you should read it carefully and use any idea you like for the Rome exhibit.”125 In other words: take this manual and do it yourself. After priming Politi to the possibilities inherent in the

FluxFest Kit 2, Maciunas goes one step further: “I would be most happy if you could arrange a

Fluxfest in San Gimignano.”126

In short, Maciunas’s festival kits—an event potentiality, contained within physical, text- based objects—were not simply conceptual, and not simply reading material. Based on the offerings of the Flux Catalog, Maciunas’s goals for Fluxus writ large, as well as his experience

124 Hendricks, Fluxus etc. Addenda I, 192-193.

125 George Maciunas to Giancarlo Politi, [1969], in Fluxus etc, Addenda 1, Jon Hendricks (ed), (New York: Ink &, 1983), 233.

126 Maciunas to Politi, [1969], Fluxus etc. Addenda 1, 233.

curating FluxFests around the globe, FluxFest Sale and FluxFest Kit 2 provided practical instruction towards a re-conceptualization of the generic festival’s reliance on scale: they offered a manageable series of actions that could be achieved by anyone with or without special training.

In bringing the fact of a FluxFest closer to the foundational Fluxus notion of art as everyday life and everyday life as art, Maciunas effectively unhinged the Bakhtinian relationship of Festival to

“space out of time” and stripped it of much of the “scaled up,” superlative quality it had previously embodied.

Proof of Fluxus’ efforts in this regard came on March 31, 1967 at 8:30pm: the moment a need for a set of do-it-yourself festival instructions became obsolete. Jeff Berner, a member of the “FluxWest” California-based branch of Maciunas’ Fluxus family, presented a Fluxfest at

Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, not so very far from where Tudorfest had taken place three years earlier. Berner considers himself one of the first artists in the Western United States to engage actively with Fluxus events and ideas; George Maciunas officially invited him to join

Fluxus as a result of Berner’s San Francisco Chronicle column about the historical and current avant-garde, “Astronauts of Inner Space.” Despite his sanctioned membership—and the access to insider documents that it offered—Berner did not count the do-it-yourself “kit” as an influence on his San Francisco FluxFest when I spoke with him in 2017. In fact, he had no memory of either FluxFest Sale or FluxFest Kit 2, even though Maciunas included Berner’s name (along with a recent Fluxus offering) in a FluxCatalogue on the back side of FluxFest Kit 2.127

127 Jeff Berner, interview with author, September 7, 2017. Admittedly, FluxFest Kit 2 (1970) was published after Berner’s FluxFest at Longshoreman’s Hall (1967); nonetheless, his inclusion therein emphasizes his close relationship to the Fluxus scene despite his physical distance from Maciunas and New York City.

The result, in any case, was a FluxFest extraordinarily similar in both content and spirit to a Maciunas-sanctioned Fluxfest, with the addition of a few West Coast twists. For two dollars and fifty cents ($3.50 at the door), the audience of two thousand people experienced Happenings, films, music, and performance art: an intermedial extravaganza.128 Advertised as a festival in two parts, Berner invited local psychedelic bands and performing arts troupes including Retinal

Circus, Cosmic-Concrete, Happenings, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Wildflower, and

Quicksilver Messenger Service. Later, a tuxedoed man performed Nam June Paik’s “One for

Violin Solo”—the slow ascent of a violin held by its neck before smash! into pieces—and Anna

Halprin’s dance troupe licked a gallon of strawberry jam off of a brand new sports car in a performance of a piece by Allan Kaprow.129 “Experimental is not knowing what the results will be,” reads one of his publicity posters.130 In his telling, Berner learned about Fluxus on his own, far away from East Coast and European art centers; considered Maciunas’ ideas; and came to similar conclusions: festivals, properly introduced and executed, are a useful means of presenting

Fluxus philosophy to the public.

128 The number “2000” is Berner’s number. Berner, interview with author.

129 Jeff Berner, “FluxForum” [video], In the Spirit of Fluxus FluxSymposium, Feb 12, 1993, Walker Art Center Archives.

130 Jeff Berner, Fluxfest Poster, Walker Art Center Collection, accessed May 15, 2019, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/fluxfest-2.

Component 4 A Quiet Revolution, or A Festival of Learning

Jeff Berner, like Charlotte Moorman, was deeply invested in the education of the public—so much so that he signed on in 1967 as a founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at the student-run San Francisco State College Experimental College. In the name of deep commitment to cultural and social change, the radical students who started the Experimental College (or EC) created a space within the academy wherein the political interests of its students became central to its curriculum. The avant-garde was not only seamlessly integrated into this educational ecosystem as content, it also provided a conceptual frame: in promotional materials written for the Fall 1967 semester, Berner argued that “The Experimental College of San Francisco State

College may be seen as a festival of learning.”131

Berner wasn’t the only advocate of the experimental arts who infiltrated higher education. Many participants in the New York Avant Garde Festivals worked day jobs as professors, lecturers, or visiting faculty at colleges and universities across the country; academia has long been a source of income and security for gigging musicians and artists. While not every university was interested or progressive enough to support these programs, Rutgers University

(and its sister school, Douglass College), Mills College, the University of California San Diego, the University of Michigan, and the University of California Los Angeles (to name a few) all particularly welcomed experimental artists.

Even outside of classes and curricula, the appointment of these experimentally-connected professors created opportunities for students to attend events and festivals that they otherwise

131 My italics. Jeff Berner, “Introduction” in Descriptions, Impressions and Projections Experimental College, [1967], [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

might not have encountered. “George Maciunas (via Bob [Watts] and me) brought Rutgers students into Fluxus events...,” Geoff Hendricks wrote in the introduction to Critical Mass.

“Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festivals were always open to young artists coming out of the program.”132 (In fact, Bennington College’s Liz Phillips tuned electric spaghetti in one of the most documented works at the 9th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival on the Alexander

Hamilton steamboat.) There was precedent, then, for using the festival medium in the service of higher education. San Francisco State College’s Experimental College, however, was unique in its understanding of higher education as a kind of festival. The EC’s community of students,

Berner among them, drew on their own interests and ideals in pursuit of an educational utopia that, they believed, would contribute to measurable social change in the larger world; it was one manifestation of institutional change through political action.133

In the Fall of 1965, Cynthia Carlson, an upperclassman at San Francisco State College, designed and led two elective, non-credit seminars for freshmen and sophomores that drew on techniques drawn from group therapy in order to explore the broad scope of higher education, as well as students’ lived experiences in that setting. The classes gauged students’ reactions to a certain type of freedom as it applied to the learning process, and the results were explosive. 134 In

132 Geoffrey Hendricks, “Introduction,” Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, ed. Geoffrey Hendricks, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), x.

133 Russell Bess, James Nixon, Ian Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College,” October 1967, [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967, 18. Because this source “may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author,” I do not include quotations here.

134 This history of the EC is drawn from Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College,” and from Mike Powell, “Background on the Special College,” [1967], [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

the three weeks before Spring Semester 1966 began, a group of Carlson’s underclassmen conceived of an alternative model for general education built on the principles of relevancy to students’ lives, and the involvement of students in their own education. That same student cohort designed a number of seminars that integrated psychology, the humanities, social science, and physical education. After recruiting established professors as sponsors, they received permission from the administration to run the experimental curriculum.135 During its first Spring semester, the new, student-run program boasted 22 student organizers, 18 professors, 350 registered students, and 22 courses.136 Its popularity began to spill over into other areas of campus life: the student body elected candidates for student government (the Associated Students) who were also involved with the Experimental College by huge margins. The EC’s Coordinator, Jim Nixon, won President by at least twice as many votes as the next closest candidate.137 Campus politics and the politics of education became inextricably intertwined. By the Fall of 1967, the EC—an entity both of the college and run entirely separately from the administration proper—began the semester with 70 courses that could also be taken for credit from the “regular college” (as EC insiders liked to call San Francisco State), and around 1000 enrolled students.138

135 Powell, “Background on the Special College.”

136 These numbers may be found in Powell, “Background on the Special College.” A slightly different (smaller) set of numbers may be found in “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” co-written by the members of a graduate seminar studying the EC. Because “no part of the [working paper] may be reproduced by any means without permission from the author,” I do not include quotations here. [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

137 “Developmental Prospectus: Generating Mechanisms of Educational Innovation at San Francisco State College,” May 12, 1966, [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

138 By the end of the semester, enrollment had leveled out to approximately four hundred students. “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

Those are impressive numbers, but of course these students didn’t come to their conclusions in a vacuum; events and circumstances both external and internal to the College scene were crucial to the EC’s success. For one thing, in their document “Some Notes on the

Experimental College,” Russell Bess, James Nixon, and Ian Grand explicitly credit the Free

Speech Movement at Berkeley with proving the potential effectiveness of student action.139 A class of San Francisco State College graduate students in a research seminar studying the EC went one step further and argued that after years of watching leadership from afar and actively participating in activism on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement, students came to question their lack of input in the educational process and its relationship to their daily lives.140 Bess, Nixon, and Grand also pointed to the creation and success of numerous “Free Universities” across the

United States (though they are quick to point out that their own experiment differs in its amicability with the Regular College’s administration).141 The graduate student cohort, in turn, listed a series of “special” programs within universities (including the Harvard Freshmen

Seminars, Hofstra’s “New College,” and the University of California’s Tussman Program) that fostered independent inquiry, but only for a select group of students—precedent, but not a model broadly enough implemented, they seem to imply.142 Nowhere in any of these documents written in the mid-1960s do any of the founders or researchers specifically align their educational philosophy with the history of experimental schools like Black Mountain College, the

139 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

140 “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

141 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

142 “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

Highlander Folk School, or Bennington College. Nor do they credit educational movements like critical pedagogy (granted, Paulo Freire’s influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed wasn’t published until 1968 or translated in English until 1970).143 Even so, the resonance of those practices with the goals of the EC team are unmistakable.

The EC also drew on politics and programs internal to San Francisco State College to hone their philosophy and build their student base. The College as a whole already had a reputation for attracting and admitting radical students committed to political activism. In the early 1960s, a series of campus political parties including the Liberal Students League, the

Alliance Toward an Active Campus, and the Alliance Toward an Academic Community actively campaigned on platforms of anti-censorship, pro-civil rights and community involvement, and an insistence on student involvement in any major decisions made by San Francisco State

College—all of which, they argued, would improve the quality of the educational experience.144

One concrete outcome of these campaigns was the Tutorial Program begun in 1963, a one-to-one tutoring program for low income elementary students that was administered solely by university students; in the 1966-67 school year, it involved more than 300 student tutors.145 By 1965, students became voting members on the Academic Senate, and were granted access to “The

Group,” a body of representatives who convened to discuss university issues.146 Not only did this

143 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

144 “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

145 Karen Duncan, “The Experimental College at San Francisco State College, or What Makes the Revolution Quiet?” [1966], [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967; Berner, “Descriptions, Impressions, and Projections Experimental College.”

146 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

exposure give students a philosophical and rhetorical basis for their thoughts about education, it also gave them more regular access to faculty and administrators.147 Decisions made with students representing themselves, the thinking went, would be better than those made without.

The EC doubled down on the agency of students as full-fledged decision-makers.

Students conceived of classes, taught them, took them, and served as administration, publicists, and advocates—and sometimes all of the above. Berner (San Francisco State College student, avant-garde enthusiast, FluxFest organizer, occasional professor at the Berkeley Extension school) submitted a job description to the student coordinators of the EC, here quoted in full.148

I am responsible for developing the area of supplementary courses in ‘arts and letters.’ I am committed to creating and producing the EC catalog. I will conduct seven courses or seminars or series over the next academic year. I am going to contribute ideas and layouts for EC publicity…. I will be collecting information on some European ‘experimental college’ projects…. I will collect, edit and comment on the recent avant-garde activity in Eastern and Western Europe, for publication in 1967. I will be not only contacting and encouraging personnel for courses in EC, but will seek extraordinary outside people to do one-shot lectures and seminars. Beginning in September, I will be on campus conducting courses and holding regular office hours. I hope to be general advisor and tormentor to anyone who signs a special metaphysical list for such services. (This is to say that besides my explicit responsibilities, I would like to be peripherally involved in such things as media, publications, other areas for seminar investigation, etc.).149

The diversity of responsibilities, the focus on the micro (his own courses and interests) and macro (the EC at large), and the emphasis on both short-term and long-term plans and strategies

147 “An Evaluation of the Experimental College: A Working Paper,” San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

148 Many of the student volunteers submitted job descriptions, though they vary in length and attention to detail. [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

149 Jeff Berner, “Job Description,” [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

is echoed in many of the statements by the EC founders, and exemplifies the same attention to detail that produced and sustained fifteen years of the New York Avant Garde Festival.

Over the course of his time at the EC, Berner proposed a number of classes including

“Obscure Literature,” “The Physiology of Imagination,” and “Avant-Garde Films since 1885.”

He actually taught two: “Astronauts of Inner-Space (the European Avant-Garde 1885-1966)” and

“The New Forum: A Non-Verbal Seminar.” Unlike Geoff Hendricks and the other professor- practitioners who turned conventional class structure upside down and dragged it outside the classroom, Berner considered himself a traditional lecturer operating on charm and charisma enhanced by guest speakers, films, student-led presentations, and performances.150 Whatever the angle, Berner’s classes were popular—and in the world of the EC, popularity was crucial to retention rate, and retention rate was largely measured by applicability to students’ lives. “If a course works, it will maintain active membership and develop into a successful learning community. If the organizer is indifferent or insensitive to his students, or if the subject matter holds little general interest, the course will fold,” EC organizers wrote in 1967.151 By this metric, the popularity of “Astronauts of Inner Space” indicates its relevance, even in a curriculum packed with courses such as “Competition and Violence,” “Perspectives on Revolution,” “People and Peace,” “Black Nationalism,” “Non-Violence in a Violent World,” “Organizing,” and “The

New Left in America.”152 Berner’s classes may not have contained explicitly political content

150 Jeff Berner, “Comments on My Present Courses,” [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

151 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

152 Berner remembers the Arts/Philosophy wing of the EC and the “Political” wing of the EC as separate—but he was speaking as a member of the administration, knowing what he did about the people who took responsibility for each side and the way they worked together. The students who took the classes, however, were presented with an undifferentiated catalog and the overarching idea that all classes would be relevant to their lives. Berner, interview with author.

and they may not have been taught in a manner that made an obvious political statement about education, but their substance—the avant-garde—clearly made sense to the enrolled students of an Experimental College that championed (often political) classes relevant to students’ lives, that took (often political) actions towards bettering local and national community, and that understood students to be whole political agents capable of participating in and making decisions about their own educations and thus their lives.

Berner also put together an informational catalog titled “Descriptions, Impressions, and

Projections, Experimental College” that included short essays by several of the EC organizers.

“The concerned student is the concerned citizen,” Berner wrote in his introduction to the document. “…Experimental College believes that education must be both functional and designed to serve mankind’s highest need to understand life and its greatest possibilities.” And then he says the words we’ve all been waiting for: “The Experimental College of San Francisco

State College may be seen as a festival of learning.”153

To put this in perspective: a handful of Experimental College founders wrote up their own statements and manifestoes of educational policy, and they weren’t all in perfect agreement.

One of these statements argued that the goal of education (and thus the EC) was to create a world where all men are free in thought and action without fear, and where all men have the highest self-respect and universal love for man.154 Another believed the purpose of the EC should be to foster individual development, strive towards social and institutional change, and instill

153 Berner, “Descriptions, Impressions, and Projections Experimental College.”

154 Mike Powell, “A Plan to Begin,” June 8, 1966, [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

creativity.155 A third maintained that the EC’s ideals must center on personal responsibility, freedom, and “the development of a technically skilled humanist having an ecological viewpoint….”156 These disagreements and negotiations were crucial to the development of the

EC.

Jeff Berner had his own take on the purpose of higher education and the possibilities of the Experimental College. In his view, the EC was “a community where people can train to survive in the world at large, yet develop their most visionary attempts to understand overall human realities. We must all develop specialized skills and way of thinking,” he wrote, “but we must gain a great over-view of WHAT’S HAPPENING ON EARTH.” This, from the man who took it upon himself to teach the avant-garde. He continued: “In just a few years to come, the specialist who is only a specialist will be economically and socially frozen…This is saying that only men who know something of birth-control, architecture, electronics, aviation, literature, etc., in the Renaissance sense, will be able to see what’s going on. …The word interdisciplinary is pale compared to what we must make of EC.” Interdisciplinarity, intermedia, multi-media, mixed media; the New York Avant Garde Festival serves as an art-based prototype for the kind of world Berner envisioned. “There is something terribly non-experimental about the mood of most of us. Too few of us trust our flashes of insight and intuition,” he went on. “…By the time

October rolls around, we must let the city of San Francisco know that there’s an on-going festival taking place here.”

155 Andrew Gaines, [untitled], June 14, 1966, [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

156 Thomas Linney, Jr., “Thoughts,” June 13, 1966, [Experimental College, San Francisco State College; typescripts and ephemera], San Francisco State College Experimental College, 1966-1967.

That’s twice—in two separate documents advertising the Experimental College to the general public, and detailing his educational philosophy—that Berner called the Experimental

College a “festival.” “I used the word ‘festival’ because it inspired people to feel it was going to be fun,” he told me in an interview.157 He further argued that the format of his classes—lectures and discussions punctured with films, guest speakers, performances, poetry readings, happenings, and student projects—“wasn’t so structured as a class or a course; it was a festival.”158 (Festivals inside festivals.) Not only was all of this mixed-media fun designed to illuminate the relationship between the avant-garde and everyday (even and especially political) life, it also encouraged students to become teachers themselves. Ian J. Grand—who became the coordinator of the EC after Jim Nixon stepped down—took both of Berner’s classes in 1966 and credited the Fluxartist with inspiring him to organize his own course.159 Another of Berner’s students, Ken Friedman, also went on to teach his own courses at the Experimental College.

Eventually, the Experimental College met its match at the intersection of the politics it championed and the administration with which it tried to cooperate—all at a time when identity- focused interdisciplinary programs like Black Studies and Women’s Studies were being formed to address areas of lack and erasure in traditional curriculums across the country. A newly elected student government President hostile to the EC drastically reduced the EC’s budget.160

The coordinators began to look for outside funding and did, in fact, receive a seed grant in the

157 Berner, interview with author.

158 Berner, interview with author.

159 Ian J. Grand and Jim Bebout, “Passionate Discourse: The Experimental College at San Francisco State,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 21, no. 2 (Spring, 1981), 79-95.

160 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

spring of 1968 contingent upon ratification by the San Francisco State College President.161 But then there were the strikes: San Francisco State College was launched into the national spotlight when the Black Students Union (which had ties to both local activists and the Black Panthers) began negotiations with the administration about the creation of a Black Studies department. The administration dragged its feet, the BSU stood firm in its demands. In October 1968, students staged demonstrations outside the administration buildings in preparation for a series of general strikes planned for November. When San Francisco State’s President Smith offered to resign, the

College Board appointed an outspokenly conservative professor, S.I. Hayakawa, in his place.

Hayakawa promptly denounced the professors and students supporting the strike and called in the police. (He also, as you might imagine, declined to sign the Experimental College’s seed grant.) Almost-daily demonstrations took place on campus and entire classes disbanded against

Hayakawa’s express orders. Forces clashed: the students threw rocks at buildings and the police beat the students. The California legislature involved itself by proposing bill after bill to address the situation, including one extreme proposal that would have resulted in up to five-year prison sentences for any student who “disrupt[ed] normal campus activities.”162 By the end of the strikes in early 1969, the administration agreed to the creation of a Black Studies department and to a more diverse admissions process including a provision for substantial financial aid. On the other hand, the administration did not drop charges against the nearly 700 activists—student and faculty—who had been arrested over the course of the strikes, and went so far as to fire around two dozen faculty members who had participated in one form or another.163 It took some time to

161 Bess, Nixon, Grand, “Some Notes on the Experimental College.”

162 Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 298.

163 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 297-98.

tally up all of the peripheral consequences of the strikes: under Hayakawa’s direction, all

Associated Students funds were impounded—that meant no money for the student government, no money for clubs and organizations, no money for the tutoring program, and certainly no money for the Experimental College. According to Ian Grand (the last of the EC coordinators), the Experimental College—as a known liberal campus entity sympathetic to the BSU and student radicals—was further targeted when all of their phone lines were cut and their doors padlocked.

“There was nothing left by Spring 1969,” he said in an article for The Journal of Humanistic

Psychology. “That was the death of the program.”164

Berner’s “on-going festival” was harder to kill; his classes had a measurable, lasting impact on the history of the avant-garde. Berner’s student Ken Friedman, for example, became one of the founders of FluxWest and is now considered one of the most prolific second-wave

Fluxus members.165 Berner himself continued to write, teach, and lecture about the avant-garde and, as I will discuss in the next Component, began to formalize a collection of avant-garde artworks and ephemera given to him for the purposes of teaching. In that sense, then, Berner and

Moorman—though they never met in person—are linked through the kind of art they created, the people they knew in common, and their discrete decisions to use the word “festival” to promote the avant-garde.166 Each in their own way, the two impresarios made investments in the education of America’s youth via avant-garde practices, in the process opening networks of influence reaching across 1960s artistic countercultures and (counter)cultural revolution.

164 Grand and Bebout. “Passionate Discourse,” 91.

165 “Description,” Ken Friedman Collection, University of California San Diego, accessed May 4, 2019, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6b69p0tq/.

166 Berner, interview with author.

Component 5 In the Spirit of the Avant-Garde

The Walker Art Center has long been a supporter of avant-garde performance—the Here2

Festival was proof of that. The museum’s preservation efforts with regard to 1960s experimentalism, however, began in 1989 with the purchase of what would become its renowned

Fluxus collection. According to Joan Rothfuss, Moorman’s biographer and a curator at the

Walker, one of the museum’s librarians at the time admired Fluxus. When news of a personal collection on the market came to her attention, she convinced the director of the Walker to purchase everything still available.167 That collection for purchase? It was Jeff Berner’s collection. Whenever the Walker exhibits its poster advertising the Seventh Annual New York

Avant Garde Festival, it is addressed on the back side to Jeff Berner. The Fluxticket for Berner’s

FluxFest at Longshoreman’s Hall is Berner’s own ticket. The copy of FluxFest Kit 2 that I studied for this dissertation once belonged to Jeff Berner.168

“It’s more of an accumulation than a collection,” Jon Hendricks cautioned when we spoke.169 These, he said, were things Berner acquired on his travels, ephemera left over from events he was involved in, artworks he was sent, and—though Hendricks didn’t say this, we can assume—materials he collected for the classes he taught on avant-garde art.170 Berner himself offered confirmation:

What I had done when I was teaching for almost five years, and visiting Europe in ’66— when people learned I was doing that, they’d say: oh, have this, have that. They’d give

167 Joan Rothfuss, interview with author, July 14, 2017.

168 In fact, Berner’s collection had a previous history with museums; in 1967, he curated an exhibit titled “Aktual Art International” at the Stanford Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

169 Hendricks, interview with author.

170 “I will collect, edit and comment on the recent avant-garde activity in Eastern and Western Europe, for publication in 1967.” Berner, “Job Description.”

me posters, they’d give me letters from some other famous artist to them, or they would give, you know, it wasn’t exactly the art, it was art documentation. And they gave it to me so I could pass it into the room with my students. …I was getting two or three pieces a week for years and years.171

The collection is physical proof of the extended avant-garde art world’s interest in avant-garde education. Which brings us back to the idea of “accumulation” and the fact that Berner had no master plan in terms of what to collect or how to collect it. Hendricks’ comment about another

Fluxus collection—that of Barbara Moore, now at Harvard University—applies equally well to the Walker’s from Jeff Berner: “…there are some very special things and unique things in the collection, but there are some curious gaps.”172

For the Walker Art Center in 1989, this meant (practically speaking) that those gaps needed to be filled before the museum could stage its first planned major exhibit featuring the collection, In the Spirit of Fluxus, in 1993. Curators Joan Rothfuss, Liz Armstrong, and their team bought what they could, and in the process broadened the collection to include avant-garde or experimental works beyond the purview of Fluxus—Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman’s

TV Bra for Living Sculpture (acquired 1991) and TV Cello (acquired 1992), for example. They also gratefully accepted gifts and bequests, and borrowed the rest. “We got to partner with Jon

Hendricks and the Silvermans [donors of a Fluxus collection to the Museum of Modern Art in

New York City] because our collection wasn’t complete enough to do a full look at Fluxus,”

Rothfuss told me an interview.173 Hendricks remembers it too: “We loaned an awful lot of things to their show. So if we loaned it, it means they didn’t have it. I would say hundreds—maybe it

171 Berner, interview with author.

172 Hendricks, interview with author.

173 Rothfuss, interview with author.

wasn’t, but an awful lot of stuff to their show.”174 Jeff Berner’s Festival posters nestled next to borrowed photographs of the Festivals taken by Peter Moore; the FluxFest Kit 2 hung on the wall near a slew of Flux Multiples. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it: hundreds of like-minded objects gathered together from across the country for a limited amount of time to make a point about the avant-garde. It all sounds very familiar, like the echo of a Festival: the chaos of people and their performances distilled into the objects they left behind. 175

A certain cognitive dissonance arises from contemplating the reality of so many of these out-of-the-box works—multi- or intermedia, performative, conceptual, ephemeral, or political— as they increasingly intersect with a museum culture that has been historically focused on materiality and permanence. On the other hand, as Jon Hendricks reminded me in our interview, the fact is that people do come to museums; “It’s a pretty good place to catch them,” he said.176

He might just as well have said: “It’s a pretty good place to reach new people.”

The museums would hardly continue to put on Fluxus exhibits (and in such quantities) if they weren’t reaching people and making some kind of an impression. What that impression consists of is another question. What do people who weren’t a part of the art world in the 1960s think about Fluxus today?, I asked Jeff Berner. “Not a clue,” he told me.177 Joan Rothfuss puzzled over the question as well. “I don’t know how, for example, MoMA decides that their

174 Hendricks, interview with author.

175 In the Spirit of Fluxus was exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2/14/93-6/6/93); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (7/8/93-10/10/93); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (11/13/93-1/16/94); the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (2/18/94- 4/17/94); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (5/12/94-7/24/94); the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (8/20/94-10/16/94); and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, Spain (11/25/94-1/29/95).

176 Hendricks, interview with author.

177 Berner, interview with author.

audiences are connecting. I’m not sure how you find that out, except for doing polls and lots of people won’t bother to do that,” she told me. But then she told me about her experience shepherding groups of people through a recent Merce Cunningham exhibit at the Walker. “I think most of them, even those people who knew Merce Cunningham, are happy to see it, even though some of them are a little bit sad that the work has entered this new phase of being—of hanging on a wall instead of being out in the world, live,” she said.178 Jon Hendricks, curator at

MoMA, also spoke to me of his sense of present-day connections to the material, and the benefits of viewing audiences in the act of viewing exhibits.

There was some big show at the museum…and the exit from that show—if you made a sharp left when it ended, you could get out into the big atrium and so on. But if you didn’t do that—if you went straight—which, people normally go straight, you came into this show of scores [“There Will Never Be Silence,” 2013-14]. And we had such crowds! It was packed! And people would go on and they’d be looking and reading this stuff and spending a lot time with it, so somehow they got herded inadvertently—it wasn’t conscious, certainly the museum wasn’t trying to do that, but it just happened—and they were really engaged. I loved going there and just watching them. Really reading it! Reading scores, reading the pieces, you know. And I’m sure 90% of them, they’d never heard of the artists, so that was exciting to see.179

Moorman had no big data, no budget to hire someone to conduct marketing surveys.

“I’m not sure how Moorman had any sense of what non-art world people thought of the work she presented,” Joan Rothfuss told me in the interview.180 What she did have was a general sense of numbers (of both audience and participants) thanks to the time she spent watching and talking with people. I might also point to the fact that new (and young) artists continued to sign up to

178 Rothfuss, interview with author. According to Rothfuss, this particular exhibit included performances of Cunningham works that took place in the galleries-proper. She notes that in her experience, the museum curators are grappling with the issue of being as true the spirit of experimentalism as possible, while the infrastructure follows more slowly.

179 Hendricks, interview with author.

180 Rothfuss, interview with author.

participate in and work for the Festival year after year; her efforts bore tangible proof in the never-ending supply of new brains and bodies converted to the Festival cause.181 In short, she may not have had a good sense of what people thought of a particular work, but she almost certainly would have recognized that she was opening minds and changing opinions about the avant-garde. Moorman’s legacy, then, is not simply the Festivals themselves, but the way she used the Festivals as a tool to educate and in so doing provided one type of Festival model for the rest of her art world. The recreations of avant-garde Festivals and the exhibits in museums and galleries are a bid for a new lease on life for the 1960s avant-garde, but they’re also the most recent incarnation of the tradition of avant-garde education as a means of processing and questioning our own political moment.

181 Báthory-Kitsz, interview with author.

ASSEMBLAGE: ISLAND archive • counterculture • festival • Hendricks • Moorman • museum • place • race • Toche

Balloon Ascension: Island

Component 1: Through an Archival Lens Charlotte Moorman held her Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival (1969) on a corner of Ward’s Island, located in the middle of the East River between East Harlem and Queens. Newly available materials from the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University gives a sense of what that week was like: Ray Johnson performed a piece in which he dropped foot long hot dogs from a helicopter; Geoff Hendricks took an ax to a pair of rotten tree stumps; Jon Hendricks ritually buried a length of barbed wire. There was sculpture, chamber music, film, performance art; the audience was immersed a swirl of artistic chaos nearly anytime of the day or night. In Component 1, I reconstruct the Seventh Festival using materials from the Charlotte Moorman Archive. archive • festival • Moorman • place

Component 2: “Things Did Not Go Swimmingly”: Race, Ethnicity, and the Seventh Festival There are a few items in the Charlotte Moorman archive that give pause with respect to the success story it otherwise seems to tell. A New York Times newspaper column by Grace Glueck details a series of conflicts rooted in the Festival’s choice of location: Ward’s Island. The way Glueck so comfortably brands this space as “squalid” is related to the neighborhood closest to the island (East Harlem), the people who lived there (first generation and immigrant Puerto Ricans), and the fraught relationship and perception of these people to and by the city of New York. archive • festival • Moorman • place • race

Component 3: Ward’s Island The New York Avant Garde Festival is never mentioned in the histories of Ward’s or Randall’s Islands, two of New York City’s so-called “outer islands.” From their origins as Tenkenas and Minnehanonck Islands, to their 19th century incarnation as grounds for hospitals and asylums, to their 20th century participation in processes of “urban renewal”: a history of this space and its many uses centers the ongoing and inescapable processes of neo-colonial gentrification in which the Festival and its art world participated. place • race

Component 4: The Avant-Garde and Social Justice The Seventh Festival—its realization and its consequences—is one example of the larger art world’s ambivalence towards questions of social justice. Though certain participants—Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks among them—explicitly recognized the claims of Ward’s Island’s usual patrons, the extended art world was made up of individuals with many stakes in and

understandings of the nature of political action that did not always match public perception of this outsider art as inherently “countercultural,” “political,” or “leftist.” counterculture • Festival • Hendricks • place • race • Toche

Component 5: The Day the Music Died, or The New York Pop Festival (1970) In 1970—just one year after the Seventh Festival—another music festival featuring an entirely different realm of music-making was held on the Randall island, and the question of how politics and music should coexist with respect to this particular piece of land was once again brought to the foreground. The three-day New York Pop Festival was a disaster for its organizers: a coalition of leftist activists including RYP/OFF and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican nationalist group from East Harlem) made demands including free tickets and a portion of the profits returned to the community. As a result, gate-crashing was rampant; featured bands bowed out; the audience rioted. It’s all caught on tape. Bert Tenzer’s 1977 festival film The Day the Music Died combined documentary footage from the New York Pop Festival, dramatic scenes featuring actors, as well as documentary footage from other times and places in the 1960s carefully spliced in to create a single narrative that explores the concept of a music festival balanced on a fulcrum between the end of the political endeavors of the 1960s and the beginning of what felt even then like a new era. counterculture • festival • place • race

Component 6: No Nudity or Heavy Politics The collective impact of the New York Avant Garde Festival was never as politically oriented or motivated as many of its individual participants would have liked (including, perhaps, Moorman herself). The compromises and negotiations Moorman made with respect to the political possibilities of her event were part and parcel of the festival’s status as a quasi- institution endeavoring to maintain its annual production timeline. A process of political awakening—or, in some cases, the crystallizing of already-held political convictions— unfolded over multiple iterations of the Festival as participants took sides in the question of how to educate the public, and what the focus of that education should be. festival • Moorman • place • Toche • Hendricks

Component 7: The Museumification of the Avant-Garde The 1960s experimentalist aversion to museums is well-documented in interviews, essays, and manifestos. Even so, the larger art world is having a “moment” in twenty-first century museums as those institutions acquire and archive experimental artworks and ephemera from the 1960s. Interviews with art world members and museum curators explore the possibilities inherent in and compromises required of the presentation of these politically-sticky Festivals in static format. archive • counterculture • Festival • Hendricks • Moorman • museum • place • race

Balloon Ascension: Island

Fig. 3: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois.

Charlotte Moorman held her Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival (1969) on one corner of Ward’s Island and the adjacent Mill Rock Island, both located in the middle of the

East River between East Harlem and Queens.182 Given the many sculptures featured at the

Festival that year—not to mention the trouble and expense of getting artworks of all kinds to

182 Moorman’s brochures described it as “off 102nd Street in East Harlem”—a shorthand for the pedestrian bridge that was the island’s main access point.

such a minimally accessible location—Moorman stretched this Festival into more than a week of performances and viewings; the revelries were in full swing from 11am until 11pm from Sunday,

September 28 through Sunday, October 5, 1969.183 So it served as the week’s spectacular finale when, on October 5th mid-afternoon, Moorman and her cello (alongside composer and architect

Yukihisa Isobe and a licensed balloonist from Balloon Enterprises Inc.) stepped into the wicker basket of an enormous, boldly-striped red, white, and blue hot air balloon and rose high over the

Ward’s Island Festival grounds in her rendition of Isobe’s Balloon Ascension. The audience watched her from the land below.

That land, as it turns out, was contested space—both historically, and in 1969 when the largely white experimentalists gathered government permits to occupy—gentrify—the island’s parks usually used by the largely Puerto Rican residents of East Harlem. This Assemblage acknowledges the land as an actor that clarifies the art world’s attention to issues of social justice in the 1960s United States. Though public understandings of “the avant-garde” often invest these movements with leftist values, I draw on archival materials, interviews with art world members, and museum retrospectives to paint a more ambivalent picture of Moorman’s art world, particularly with respect to questions of race and ethnicity. “While imputations of racism would be simplistic and unwarranted,” George Lewis argues, “to pretend that issues of race do not invade historiographies and personal narratives of experimentalism would be needlessly (or

183 As Joan Rothfuss notes in the Festival Appendix in her book Topless Cellist, it is unlikely that these Festivals ran exactly to schedule, particularly given Moorman’s flexible relationship with time (Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 363). This is certainly true of the Seventh Festival, originally advertised from Sunday, September 28 through Saturday, October 4, 1969. The Festival was extended first by one day (after the Parks Department failed to provide electricity during the first four days of the event), and later by an extra week (between October 26 and October 31, 1969) for select artworks on Mill Rock Island only (after a series of transportation mishaps). See “Introduction,” fn. 4 for more information about the difficulty of accurately dating the Seventh Festival.

willfully) naïve, particularly given the general lack of attention to issues of race in scholarly histories of the avant-garde.”184 In my reading, the conversations and negotiations surrounding the New York Avant Garde Festival’s responsibility to political activism highlights the conflicting motivations and ideals of the organizers, participants, institutions, and audiences necessary to realize an event for so many years at such a grand scale.

184 George Lewis, “In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey,” in Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, eds. Valerie Cassel Oliver and Benjamin Patterson (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012), 119.

Component 1 Through an Archival Lens

I begin within another kind of contested space: the archive. Though the archive may feel comprehensive, it is never a complete picture. It is a record of what was saved, but not a record of what was never written down, what was missed, what was tossed, or why it was tossed. These questions, Kofi Agawu reminds us, are often predicated on who: whose materials are worth collecting, and who will have access to and interest in those collections.185 Nor is the archive in and of itself transparent about how it was put together—about who collected it, how it arrived at its host location, or how it was split up into boxes and folders. The first Component of this

Assemblage presents the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival and its relationship with Ward’s Island and Mill Rock Island as filtered through the archive.

The Charlotte Moorman Archive is housed at Northwestern University’s Special

Collections library in a reading room full of wooden tables and enormous windows, dusty books in stacks, busts and globes and paintings and plenty of green plants. It’s lovely to work in and lovely to look at; as eclectic as Moorman herself. Orderly grey boxes with flip-up lids—the kind found at archives the world over—reveal rows of folders, some containing a single piece of paper, some bursting at the seams: there are drafts of letters to possible artist contributors; lists of foundations and potential donors; page after page of notes about materials, set-ups, and troubleshooting for day-of events; even a few reviews and think-pieces found in publications from Japan and Mexico.

185 Kofi Agawu, “The Archive,” in Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23-53.

Moorman herself began consciously (albeit indiscriminately) collecting materials for an archive early on. A photo from the late 1980s taken by Peter Moore, a photographer specializing in avant-garde performance documentation, shows Moorman and her cello in the only sliver of clear space in the middle of a room filled with what she claimed was twenty thousand pounds of archival materials; on first glance, it looks like piles and stacks of junk.186 On the one hand,

Northwestern’s special collections curator Scott Krafft argues in his article, “Don’t Throw

Anything Out,” that Moorman appeared to consider her archive a work of art in and of itself:

“[S]he says [in a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation requesting funds] that Nam June Paik has titled [her] archive ‘Art as Information and Information as Art,’ thereby defining its collective entity as a work of art. Moorman writes in the letter that the title is ‘most appropriate,’” Krafft writes.187 On the other hand, the sheer number of archival materials mixed up in the same space in which Moorman lived and worked meant that someone needed “to separate the empty yogurt cups from the rainbow Ay-O prints” after her death of breast cancer in 1991.188 Her husband and

Festival Chair Frank Pileggi took the first crack; ultimately, friend and collector Barbara Moore was brought in to “make on-the-spot value decisions about what to keep and what to deal with in some other way.”189 R. Russell Maylone, former curator of the Special Collections at

Northwestern University, bought the archive in 2001—partly for its contents, partly for the way it created a super-resource in conjunction with Northwestern’s John Cage Collection and Dick

186 Scott Krafft, “‘Don’t Throw Anything Out’: Charlotte Moorman’s Archive,” in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980, eds. Lisa Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 189.

187 Krafft, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” 191-192.

188 Krafft, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” 188.

189 Krafft, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” 189.

Higgins Archive. When the archive arrived on the back of a cargo truck, the librarians unloaded

178 bankers’ boxes, 31 oversize boxes or flats, and 48 poster tubes; some were labeled (by subject, by material), many were not.190 Krafft took charge of the effort to catalog every last letter, score, application, print, passport, and news clipping—an effort that, while much farther along, is still in process as of 2019.

My own experience with the Charlotte Moorman Archive has evolved along with the catalog. On my first visit in 2011, only the boxes related to the first four New York Avant Garde

Festivals were available to view. On a visit in 2016, archivist Sigrid Perry emailed me a table of contents for the New York Avant Garde Festival series, followed in 2018 by an index to the complete Moorman archive—an in-process directory not yet available to the public on the internet or through the Northwestern University library system.191 Revisiting materials I had first seen seven years earlier, I was forced to reckon with yet another archival truth: in the face of so many boxes and pieces of paper, what a researcher chooses to focus on—the materials that catch the eye—depend on what I already know about a topic or a person or a thing or an idea, on what is recognizable or unrecognizable to me. It also depends on more intangible attributes like the time of day (the 2:00 p.m. slump, the rush towards closing) or location within a folder (twenty consecutive pages of scratch notes read very differently than one page alone). These variables compound with a collection as large and conceptually unusual as Moorman’s. Archival research is a collaboration; writing based on archival research is fundamentally a creative act. Through the lens of this archive—this specific body of materials collected by Moorman, curated by

Moore, catalogued by Krafft, and mined for information by scholars—we are given access to a

190 Krafft, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” 188.

191 The archival material related to the Festivals was the last part of the Charlotte Moorman collection sorted by the curators.

particular understanding of the Seventh Festival (and of Moorman’s festivals in general) that centers planning, organization, and the herculean efforts of its producer. Sometimes this diverges from “what actually happened on the day of the event”; always, this underrepresents the voices of those who did not have a hand in the archive building.

This, then, is what the archive tells us about the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde

Festival. In her original conception of the event, Moorman envisioned Ellis Island as the site of a

September 1969 “mini-world’s fair” featuring “pavilions” dedicated to artists from around the world.192 It was a calculated attempt to position the New York Avant Garde Festival as an explicitly U.S.-American product that nonetheless possessed international roots and reach.

“Because NYC is now the center of the art world, as Paris was in the 1920’s [sic], artists come from all over the world to participate in the Festival. It has achieved an indisputed [sic] position as one of the most significant and internationally acclaimed cultural events in the country,”

Moorman wrote in the form letter she sent to artists that year.193 Even as contemporary

“international acclaim” signaled legitimacy and prestige to mainstream cultural connoisseurs embedded in Euro-centric value systems, Ellis Island symbolized (unstated) tropes of American exceptionalism, generosity, and the dream of a “new life” outside of Europe that paralleled the avant-garde’s emphasis on the artistic “new.” Ellis Island was a goldmine of interpretive possibility; it was also mired in bureaucratic red tape, and eventually Moorman was forced to

192 Moorman never followed through on her proposed “pavilions.” She made use of the “world’s fair” tagline and advertised that many artists from many different countries planned to participate (even listing the countries in her promotional materials), but she did not build separate structures housing the works of artists organized by country.

193 Charlotte Moorman, [form letter to Festival participants], [1969], from the Seventh Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

turn her attention elsewhere.194 On August 14, 1969, Moorman wrote to Doris Freedman,

Director of Recreation and Cultural Affairs at the Department of Parks, to request assistance in securing two lesser-known representatives of New York’s outer islands, Ward’s Island and Mill

Rock Island.195 Though Freedman wrote back in the affirmative quickly and efficiently on

August 18, no exchange better represents Moorman’s seat-of-the-pants organizational style: site approval in mid-August for a September festival featuring 200 artists makes for an undeniably tight timeline. The necessity of pieces of paper—of permits and permissions—forced Moorman to throw out her original conception of the Festival and craft a new narrative in its place in short order. This dexterity is a key feature of Moorman’s talent for staging such events, and it marks the beginning of what must have been a near-frantic month of decisions and negotiations leading up to the Festival.

Site secured, Moorman still needed fifty-three separate permits from the Department of

Parks of the City of New York, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the United States Coast

Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Fire Department, the Commerce and Industrial

Development Department, the Department of Public Works, the Department of Ports and

Terminals, the Police Department, the Manhattan State Hospital, and the Air Pollution Bureau.196

194 “[T]he Vietnam War has made inaccessible the funds necessary to make Ellis Island usable again, with all its poison ivy like trees and a dock rotting away,” Moorman told Jud Yalkut (Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival”).

195 According to Moorman: “Because Mill Rock (500 to 1,000 feet form land) is accessible only by private boat, and the sculpture, etc. would have to be seen from afar, I agreed to do the Festival also on Wards Island in the park for the people to come up close. But my pet project was Mill Rock because we’d be the only one to have done anything with that island since the Second World War” (Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival”).

196 Moorman cites the number fifty-three in Yalkut’s “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival” and it is reprinted in Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 248. It is also worth noting that this specific list of institutions, as well as the quote that follows, may be found in a preview of the Festival run in the Village Voice on September 25, 1969 that is not included in the folders reserved for the Seventh Festival in the Charlotte Moorman archive.

“It’s the hardest thing to get an island,” Moorman said in a preview piece for the Village Voice before the Festival began. “Those people don’t know who Michaelangelo is, no less Allan

Kaprow.”197 Moorman was responsible for securing such mundane bits and pieces as propane, a cherry-picker, and a toilet company.198 She learned how to drive the boat she needed to transport materials to the island (“I think this is the reset position—if you have trouble at low speed fiddle with the white…” etc.);199 she contended with the liabilities of creating “man-made clouds” for a piece proposed by Charles Frazier that could potentially obstruct visibility and hinder the day-today operation of the shipping industry; 200 and in preparation for Balloon Ascension, she coached herself: “no vomiting.” 201

According to posters in the archive, the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival would take place over the course of one week in 1969 on a corner of Ward’s Island (where audiences could experience artworks up close and personal) and the adjacent Mill Rock Island

(which was accessible only by private boat and featured sculptures and installations designed to be viewed from a distance).202 The press for the event advertised many different genres and

197 [Music], The Village Voice, 25 September 1969.

198 [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten notes, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

199 “Boat: Start” [diagram drawn on back of envelope], [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

200 [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten notes, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

201 [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten notes, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

[Charlotte Moorman], Festival poster with annotations, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

202 As mentioned above, the projected Festival dates (September 28-October 4, 1969) expanded due to a series of mishaps during the event itself. In the end, the Festival ran from September 28-October 5, 1969,

styles of art in what Moorman called a “mini-world’s fair.” As discussed in “Assemblage:

Festival,” the core value of Moorman’s annual event was reaching and educating “new people.”

In practice, however, the Festival was chaotic, purposefully and delightfully incoherent, and the quality of its individual offerings varied.203 Its mandate was “scaled up” spectacle—although, the archive begins to make clear, only within reason. The Festival, according to Moorman in her requests for funding, was “non-profit and non-political. …The purpose of the Festival is to bring together artists of the Avant Garde and give them an opporinity [sic] to display their works to the public. The artists contribute their work and the public has flocked to see it.”204 While descriptions of the event in grant proposals, press releases, and reviews generally attempt to impose a linear narrative, the Festival itself was anything but linear. The archive documents dozens of pieces side by side by side by side; imagine the sounds and the lights and the movement.205

and in an abbreviated Mill Rock Island-only edition from October 26-October 31, 1969. While I will explore the reasons for these changes below, “Introduction,” fn. 4 also provides more information about the difficulty of accurately dating the Seventh Festival.

203 This last is a direct result of both Moorman’s yen for ever-larger numbers as a means of understanding and advertising the Festival’s success, and her commitment to lowering the barriers for participation. In 1975, Dick Higgins wrote a letter to Moorman pleading with her to “1. Make it small, like when it all began. 2. Make a common theme which each participant is asked to deal with in one way or another. …To avoid the Art Mart atmosphere which sometimes has happened.” Letter Higgins to Moorman, December 8, 1975, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

204 Letter Moorman to Jack McKerson, [n.d., 1969] from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. Moorman reused this text in form letters to many different potential funding entities.

205 It can be hard to know what actually happened at the Festivals due to last minute bureaucratic tie-ups, or artists getting sick or changing commitments, or even the license that art world friendships gave Moorman to use names and prestige to further her goals. As just one example: in the promotional materials for the Seventh Festival included in her archive, Moorman highlighted a piece by Allan Kaprow consisting of 640 ice cubes formed into a pavilion; in the correspondence, however, Kaprow makes clear that “the ice piece—even if you could afford $7,500 worth of ice—is not to be repeated.” (Letter Allan Kaprow to Charlotte Moorman, September 29, 1969, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde

The island location lent itself particularly well to site-specific sculpture, and Moorman and the artists made the most of it. Rutgers MFA student Jerry Vis created “Wind Pieces”

(sometimes called “Red Tape”), which featured a 100-foot long vinyl strip tied to the foot bridge leading to Ward’s Island.206 As the wind whipped this way and that, so too did the sculpture; audiences were encouraged to hold it in their hands, to feel the wind. Other sculptural highlights included future founder of the PlayArt movement Ernst Lurker’s Blooming Inflation (also listed as Balloon Inflation, but by either name a 90-ft tower of flame orbited by five 36-ft diameter balloons),207 a geodesic dome donated by noted American architect and futurist Bucky Fuller to house the television art display, and a piece by Arthur Corwin (head of Cooper Union’s Culture

Department) titled “Jelly Fish Balloon Pieces” (about which I simply have no more information than that).208 California-based artist Oliver Andrews created a 100-foot long strip of aluminized mylar that was towed into the river by toy speedboats; several days in, it was “taken from the

Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.) Did the piece Moorman listed actually occur? Was it a variation on the piece Kaprow mooted? Unless a first-hand account of the event explicitly mentions one or another piece, there is no way to know. What follow are a series of proposals and replies as I found them in the archive.

206 Typed note about Gerald Vis’ “Wind Pieces,” [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. “Sculptures for Seventh Avant Garde Festival at mill rock island,” [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten list of events, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

207 In the end, this event was not actually realized as scheduled during the first week of the Festival. The circumstances are explained in detail in Component 2, but in brief: Lurker’s backer pulled his funding after it seemed unlikely the sculpture would be built in time for opening day. Blooming Inflation did, however, take place during the short reprise of the Seventh Festival on Mill Rock Island from October 26 to October 31, 1969, and there are photographs in the archive to prove it.

208 Letter D.B.V. Travers to Bucky Fuller, September 16, 1969, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

ocean by the festival participants and carried into Harlem in the form of clothing and banners.”209

Felix Drury, Professor of Art and Architecture at Yale University, attempted to erect a series of

Foam Shelters made out of polyurethane sprayed over a fabric frame.210 Sculptor Tal Streeter created a “Floating Red Line” out of plywood and epoxy paint.211 Festival alum Gary Harris illuminated Mill Rock Island in “Electric Tide,” a piece predicated on flashing lights activated by random motions of tide and water movement.

There were “apparently simple, formal pieces” like Fluxus member and Rutgers professor

Geoff Hendricks’ “SKY: TREE (A RITUAL)”: and “SKY: GRASS: SQUARE.” “But are they so simple?” he asked in the materials he sent to Moorman. “And what are they: Happenings,

Earthworks? Meditation? Farming? You must see these.”212 Poppy Johnson, a performance- installation artist, made six “tree-fetishes” and hung them from trees in the park. YAM Festival organizer and Fluxus member George Brecht sent along a questionnaire for Festival participants to fill out that concerned the conceptual possibility of relocating the Isle of Wight as a pilot

209 Letter Oliver Andrews to Charlotte Moorman, January 20, 1970, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

210 To give a sense of the materials, capital, and clout needed to execute the Foam Shelters: Moorman wrote to Marion Merill at Union Carbide on September 8, 1969 to request urethane chemical, a local spray rig, and someone to spray it. Union Carbide agreed to provide the urethane, but Moorman had to write to Jack McKerson at Maine + Walter for the spray rig and sprayer. The Bemis Company of Norfolk, Virginia agreed to provide fabric for the bags required to make the shelters, as well as a “bag closing sewing machine.” Moorman also had to contact the US Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the City Parks Department of New York City for permissions, and ultimately was required to change the Festival dates so that the Foam Shelters could be erected. Though not every piece required such extensive planning, Drury’s Foam Shelters comprised just one of the pieces exhibited by more than 200 artists during the Festival week. See: materials related to Arthur Corwin, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

211 “Tal Streeter’s Floating Red Line off Ward Island East River NYC,” from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

212 Geoff Hendricks, proposal, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

project for the eventual translocation of the whole of England. Nam June Paik composed a

“Liberation Sonata for Fish.”213 Charles Frazier (an artist whose work, Moorman made sure to advertise, was concurrently showing at the Whitney Museum) created a cloud to cover Mill Rock

Island by “flying over Upper New York and Connecticut seeding the warm air currents with dry ice.”214 Bici Hendricks, who “concerns herself with the intersection of art and life,” provided a piece called “LITTERALE” that encouraged the audience to pick up garbage.215

There were musical offerings that read as such to even the least-informed audience member: Jimmy Guiffre’s jazz clarinet concert, for example.216 Ken Jacobs, an American experimental filmmaker who trained as a painter, orchestrated “Water Music,” a piece for one or two performers inside an amplified bath tub.217 In addition to the daytime events, frequent

Festival participant and noted experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut organized a film festival that

213 “[P]aik gave out letter envelopes with glassine windows, containing dried small fish, with the instructions on the envelope reading, ‘PLEASE, RETURN THE FISH (INSIDE) TO THE SEA’….” Jud Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival,” from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. Yalkut’s article was eventually translated into Japanese and published in Bijutsu Techou Shuppan-Sha Art Magazine, Tokyo, Japan; January 1970, 46-71. The Charlotte Moorman Archive retains one of these envelopes, though without the glassine window; imagine my surprise to discern by touch what did, yes, seem to be a fish in the archive. Nam June Paik, “Liberation Sonata for Fish,” from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

214 Letter Charles Frazier to Charlotte Moorman, September 29, 1969, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

215 Bici Hendricks, proposal, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

216 Guiffre performed his concert inside Drury’s Foam Shelter. Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.”

217 Ken Jacobs, proposal, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. “In ‘water music’ the composer Ken Jacobs, Nam Juen Paik and Charlotte Moorman will introduce the bathtub as a musical instrument,” reads one handwritten note in the archive. [Handwritten draft of press release describing artworks, pages 4-5], from Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

ran each night from sunset through 10pm.218 Audiences were treated to a series of short films run continuously (such that each film was presented for one or two viewings over the course of the festival) and projected onto a screen composed of torn sheets that Moorman convinced the New

York Hospital to donate to the festival cause.219

Finally, there were the pieces that served as headliners of the New York Avant Garde

Festival—the spectacular events. Ray Johnson, another Festival regular known for his mail art, chartered a helicopter to fly above Ward’s Island and drop 10,000 foot-long hot dogs on the crowd below in a piece titled Fetting Meeting. And Moorman herself performed Balloon

Ascension high over the Ward’s Island Festival grounds in a 100-ft in diameter hot air balloon.

Moorman invited Mayor John Lindsay of New York City to accompany her in the balloon flight, but he sent notable regrets: “Like all politicians, I am always glad to pay tribute to the power of hot air,” he wrote in a telegram.220

Taken together, the Seventh Festival correspondence and planning notes in the Charlotte

Moorman Archive convey an echo of the many moving parts that eventually coalesced into an imperfect machine. Challenges aside, the total picture created by the archival materials is one of competence and determination. The Seventh Festival pushed at the boundaries of media and not

218 “7th annual ny avant garde festival on two islands FILMS,” [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

219 Correspondence (draft) Charlotte Moorman to Dr. Plate, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. Advertised filmmakers included Bruce Baille, Scott Bartlett, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, David Brooks, Bruce Conner, Bob Cowan, Ed Emshwiller, Bob Giorgio, Victor Grauer, Dick Higgins, Matt Hoffman, Takahiko Iimura, Ken Jacobs, Larry Jordan, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, George and Mike Kuchar, George Landow, Francis Lee, Carl Linder, Laph Lundsten, Ivan Majdrakoff, Marie Menkin, Michael Mideke, Robert Nelson, Dick Preston, Charles Rotmiel, Mark Saden, John Schofill, Paul Shavits, Shiefl and Kama Prod, Michael Snow, Warren Sonbert, Stan Van DerBeek, Ben Van Meter, John Whitney, Joyce Wie Land, David Wise, and Jud Yalkut himself.

220 John Lindsay, telegram to Charlotte Moorman, [n.d.], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

only reached new audiences, but invited them into the action. By 1969, Moorman was certain enough of her annual event’s legacy that she had already started compiling notes for a “History of the New York Avant Garde Festival,” always leaving room for the next paragraph, the next year, the next great feat.221 In the glow provided by the materials from the archive, it’s hard not to conclude that the Festival was a great success and, in its success, begat more Festivals.

221 [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten draft of history of 6th and 7th Festivals, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive. The complete text of the final draft of Moorman’s “History” is available in Bonomo, Cello Anthology.

Component 2 “Things Did Not Go Swimmingly”: Race and Ethnicity in the Seventh Festival

The archive, however, is always incomplete, opaque, and subject to the agendas of creators and researchers. There are a small handful of items in the Charlotte Moorman Archive at

Northwestern—a newspaper review, a few letters, a translation of an article printed in a Japanese magazine—that give pause with respect to the history the rest of the materials seem to tell. With further research, it becomes clear that the Festival was plagued with problems both in and out of the organizers’ control. The weather was uncooperative, the electric company reneged on its agreement and the Festival was without power for the first four days, Mill Rock Island proved even more difficult to access than expected. Most seriously, however, the Festival took place on land that the Puerto Rican community of East Harlem (directly across the only pedestrian bridge leading to Ward’s Island) used as recreational space. The land had been “borrowed” for the

Festival from the New York City Parks Department via permit without that community’s knowledge or consent. “Things did not go swimmingly at the recent 7th Annual Avant Garde

Festival, organized by cellist Charlotte Moorman and held on Ward’s Island, in the river off seething East Harlem,” art critic Grace Glueck began in a four paragraph aside in “Art Notes,” a regular column in the Sunday New York Times (October 26, 1969).222 That last adjective— seething, with the unsavory implication that its inhabitants should somehow be contained—sets the tone for the rest of the article, in which East Harlem and its Puerto Rican residents are framed as contrary to the avant-garde. “Neighborhood kids harassed participants, stole objects from the exhibits, damaged a Bucky Fuller dome and crushed a plastic shelter designed by Yale professor

Ralph Drury. A small cadre of cops was on hand, but reinforcements were called in after Miss

222 Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: Art for Your Ear!” New York Times, October 26, 1969. Included in the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival materials, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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Moorman herself was threatened with a shovel. ‘Goodbye, we hope you’ll never come back,’ caroled Puerto Rican youths to avant-gardists as the Festival rattled to an end.”223 In Glueck’s writing, the “neighborhood kids” are called out (along with their ethnicity) and excluded from

Moorman’s stated mandate to educate the “public” via the Festival medium.224 This Component grapples with the tension between the success projected by the bulk of the archival documents, and those few archival traces that call that success into question.225

Though it doesn’t seem likely that the creators, curators, and organizers of the Moorman archive were actively trying to hide these incidents, it is also true that Moorman (who had already put on six festivals and who hoped for many more) had a stake in smoothing the rough edges of reception; she needed to reassure potential future donors and artists of both her own competence, and the continued viability of the Festival brand. Glueck continued: “Miss

Moorman, who’s spent several weeks restoring the island to its pre-Festival squalor” (those words, of course, were Glueck’s editorial and not Moorman’s fact) “pooh-poohed the assaults as

‘part of the kids’ normal play behavior, which to be sure is more destructive than that of any kids

I’ve seen. But it’s romantic and arrogant to think they were rebelling against us.’”226 In an article by Jud Yalkut that seems to have been written just after the conclusion of the Festival’s first week—when emotions were still high and there hardly had been time to process the events—

Moorman is quoted as saying “I had such trouble with the kids trying to steal things…. The kids

223 Glueck, “Art for Your Ear!”

224 For more on Moorman’s educational mandate, see “Assemblage: Festival.”

225 In her Moorman biography Topless Cellist, Rothfuss also presents the Seventh Festival as less than an unqualified success; we take different paths to the same end.

226 Glueck, “Art for Your Ear!”

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ran away with [a] sculpture while I was talking to the police and we ran after them and rescued

[part of it].” Moorman never mentions ethnicity in her comments, but there remains something distasteful about the notion of the white experimentalists righteously “rescuing” art from the hands of black and brown children.227 Later in the article, she backtracks, emphasizing what she characterized as a good-natured relationship between the avant-gardists and the Puerto Rican kids. “‘If the kids wanted to help a work succeed,’ remembers Charlotte, ‘they would do everything possible to help it.’”228 Several other items in the archive include similarly conciliatory notes: “Dear Miss Glueck,” Moorman wrote in an undated letter, presumably after the October 26 article, “I thought you might be interested in these photos, especially where the children are helping us. Also the kids waited each day for Jackie Cassen to bring her strobe so they could dance in front of it.229 P.S. The neighborhood kids were marvelous to help me hand out poems + events every day such as this one by Jackson Mac Low.”230

Moorman’s protestations might truly reflect a perspective different from Glueck’s, informed by her ever-present goal of “reaching new people” —or they might smack of too little, too late: an attempt to clean up bad publicity. And, indeed, another review titled “Avant Garde

Fest: Art or Vandalism?” (October 9, 1969) by the Village Voice’s Ron Rosenbaum—

227 Jud Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.” Though the article was published in 1970, Moorman’s quotations may be dated to sometime after the Festival’s first week had concluded on October 5, but well before the Mill Rock reprise began on October 26.

228 Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.”

229 Cassen, a light artist, contributed a piece called “Electric Succah” to the Seventh Festival.

230 Given that this letter in the archive is an original, it is difficult to determine whether Glueck received Moorman’s note. Letter from Moorman to Glueck, written on photocopy of Jackson Mac Low poem, [n.d.], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival materials, Charlotte Moorman Archive. Also included in Moorman’s archives are a number of contact sheets including photographs taken by Peter Moore of “the neighborhood kids” interacting with Festival participants and their art.

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conspicuously absent from the Moorman archive given her attention to collecting press—also called into question the Festival’s achievements.231 In the process, it provided a wealth of day-of details that add to the archival reconstruction presented in Component 1. A good portion of

“Avant Garde Fest” sets aside the questions of race, land, and gentrification, and sympathetically profiled Moorman and the organizational difficulties she encountered over the course of the

Festival. “When I reached Charlotte Wednesday,” Rosenbaum wrote, “she told me she had been without sleep since the past Saturday because she had been forced to stand guard all night, every night, over the expensive tv and electronic equipment used for festival projects.” A few of these stories are positively charming, full of pluck and happy endings. For example: Moorman was kept awake in one nighttime vigil by her dog who had eaten (was fed?) amphetamine tablets originally prescribed for Moorman—and in the end, no one tried to steal anything.232 Or:

Moorman’s showpiece Balloon Ascension was cancelled again and again due to weather or lack of audience—but at the last minute on the Festival’s last afternoon, she rose above the crowd and many photographers were on hand to document the performance.

Not every challenge ended happily. Ernst Lurker’s piece Blooming Inflation (described above) seemed doomed from the beginning. The permits were a nightmare; the boat to transport his raw materials never arrived; every available substitute was too small or too broken down to do the job; the men Lurker hired to help set up the sculpture still needed to be paid; and when the project’s backer discovered the state of affairs, he backed right out. There Lurker stood, several thousand dollars in debt with nothing to show for it and no possibility of help from a festival

231 Ron Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest: Art or Vandalism?” The Village Voice, October 9, 1969.

232 Rosenbaum notes elsewhere in the article, however, that some of the electronic equipment housed in the Bucky Fuller dome was damaged by the rain.

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administration with its own perpetual financial troubles.233 In another section of the article,

Rosenbaum describes a “jowly dark suited photographer” from the Daily News who

“occasionally turns to a companion to snicker something about how he’s sorry it was too cold for

Charlotte to pose topless with the cello.”234 Rosenbaum stops short of exploring the ways in which Moorman—impresario and musician—faced challenges from within and outside her art world specific to her presentation of gender, but there’s no doubt from the author’s tone that the photographer was a boor and Moorman a martyr.

But Rosenbaum’s chronicle of events would not be complete without giving column space and attention to the kids from the largely Latinx neighborhood of East Harlem who were confused by and a little bit angry with the white experimentalists swooping in to occupy the space: they “had been accustomed to thinking that Ward’s Island was their playground,”

Rosenbaum writes.235 Unlike Glueck’s article, no implied or potential violence peppers

Rosenbaum’s account of the interaction. The journalist begins with a description of the youth’s reaction to Poppy Johnson’s offering to the Seventh Festival, which consisted of a large dead fish, an old suitcase, a saw, a dead bird, and a television (among other things), each tied to the trunk of a tree. “A kid called Carlos…freed the fish from the tree and paraded a well-aged fish head down to the East River for its final swim. Later the dead bird flew again, briefly.”

Rosenbaum recounted how Carlos and his friends happened upon a piece called Picnic Scene

233 In the end, Blooming Inflation was mounted in a Festival “reprise” from October 26-October 31, 1969 on Mill Rock Island (accessible only by private boat, featuring pieces to be viewed from a distance). A photograph in the Charlotte Moorman Archive shows a man waving from just beneath a ball of flame at the top of a tall ladder, miniscule in comparison to the enormous balloons floating nearby. Photographs from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

234 Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest.”

235 Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest.”

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“and seemed to appreciate its duality as environment and art. First they threw off the plastic cover, tossed around the wine bottle for awhile, and played a brief intense game of no-rush touch

[football] with the milk carton. But when they were finished, they put everything back together in a close approximation of the original Picnic Scene and carefully drew the plastic covering back over the work again.”236 Though it’s impossible to know what the kids were thinking as they encountered this avant-garde art (likely for the first time), Carlos and the others here exhibit a respect not often accorded by, say, mainstream newspaper reviewers.

Rosenbaum also recorded how the artists reacted to the kids’ artistic explorations.

The beauty of the grassy Ward’s Island site was that it lacked the restrictive closure of a museum, and didn’t encourage a museum-like separation between art and observer. Most of the artists wanted a site which was more playground than museum. But when some of the artists discovered the kids’ definition of playground, they began to use terms normally alien to the avant garde [sic]: ‘vandalism,’ ‘property,’ ‘police protection.’ When these people saw the kids scattering collage materials all over the grass, breaking off pieces of the urethane foam igloo as if it were the Gingerbread House and treating the constructions without any trace of museum reverence, many artists packed up their work and left the island.237

This scene exposes the paradoxes in Moorman’s deeply-held commitment to courting new audiences—beginning with the question: which audiences?238 For the Seventh Festival,

Moorman aimed for outreach in a variety of ways, from supporting pieces that encouraged audience participation (such as Benjamin Patterson’s “Kite Flying Event”), to planning

236 Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest.”

237 Rosenbaum, “Avant Garde Fest.” Rosenbaum’s assessment is borne out in an editorial by Seventh Festival participant Lil Picard for the East Village Other. Though I have not been able to locate the full article, Picard is quoted by Jud Yalkut in his article “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival”: “Anticlimactic on the other hand was the dark reality, that those who regard Wards Island their sacred property, destroyed the yellow plastic structure….”

238 In the loaded words of Jud Yalkut: “The Festival islands are accessible only from that part of New York known as East Harlem, which is populated almost exclusively by lower-class Puerto Ricans, and this was both a pride and point of contention towards the basic principles of the Festival.” Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.

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translations of selected printed materials. In a letter to Yoko Ono, for example, Moorman noted that “since there’s such a large Puerto Rican population, I’d like to make one [a copy of a poem from Grapefruit] translated into Spanish.”239 Presumably, the artists who donated their time and work to the Festival each year shared Moorman’s goals of education and exposure to some degree. Rothfuss isn’t wrong when she argues that one of the great lessons for Moorman from this particular Festival experience was that “not all audiences necessarily wanted what she had to offer.” At the same time, the fact that so many artists pulled their work is also a condemnation of this outsider avant-garde art world of the 1960s and its relationship to the people and places often framed as outside of its purview, outside of its usual audience. Even Moorman’s special treatment of the materials for this Festival held at this location makes clear that her conception of the “public” she aimed to reach and educate was limited to the largely white, young people most visible in extant photographs of the fifteen Festivals; her “audience” was never as broad as her rhetoric implied.

These disquieting attitudes towards audience and race embedded within the Festival’s realization are encapsulated by the careless way Grace Glueck labeled Ward’s Island as squalid and branded the (explicitly named) “Puerto Rican youths” as troublemakers. The historical context for such remarks must begin with the land. Early on, Ward’s Island developed an

“incoherent and unappealing identity,” as Sharon Seitz notes in her book The Other Islands of

239 According to Yalkut, Ono’s “PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD” was translated into Spanish and handed out “to the neighborhood people.” Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.” Moorman also contacted Jan van Raay about printing her “Grok Piece” in Spanish, but van Raay says she “can’t afford to have a typographer set that too—if possible, it would be typed and printed—but then,,, what do you do? Discriminate? I’d feel better if everyone got it the same way.” Letter Jan van Raay to Charlotte Moorman, from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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New York City,240 that was related to the neighborhood closest to the Island (East Harlem), the people who lived there (first generation and immigrant Puerto Ricans), and the relationship and perception of those people to and by the city of New York. After a flurry of newspaper articles in the early 1950s celebrating the newly built Pedestrian Bridge from 102nd Street in East Harlem,

Ward’s Island appeared only sporadically in the contemporary mainstream newspapers and in the

Black and Latinx presses: for most New Yorkers, Ward’s Island appears to have been an invisible appendage to the body of Manhattan. One article published on July 20, 1963 in the New

York Times focused on Ward’s Island as a case study in disappointment and disrepair. “Many parks are crowded on summer weekends, of course,” reporter Philip Benjamin wrote. “But not many seem as neglected as this one.”241 He described overflowing trashcans, piles of beer cans, benches littered with candy wrappers and newspapers. A scene made more disheartening, he implied, when juxtaposed with the promise of the new park when it opened ten-odd years earlier, not to mention the sheer amount of money ($2,100,000 he notes, twice) sunk into the footbridge that made the park accessible.242

By 1970, the parks on Ward’s and Randall were frequently used by the denizens of East

Harlem: “Family Happiness is Randall’s Island,” read the title of another New York Times article by Martin Gansberg.243 Gansberg painted a picture of “hundreds of New York families”—“most

240 Sharon Seitz, The Other Islands of New York City: A History and Guide 3rd Edition (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2011), 178.

241 Philip Benjamin, “Widespread Debris Indicates Neglect at Manhattan’s Only Park With Picnic Grounds,” New York Times, July 20, 1963.

242 Nor was Benjamin the only reporter to loudly broadcast the amount of money (the equivalent of more than $20 million in 2019) necessary to build the footbridge. See also “Ward’s Island,” New York Times, May 26, 1951; “Ward’s Island Footbridge and Park Opens,” New York Times, May 19, 1951.

243 Martin Gansberg, “Family Happiness is Randall’s Island,” New York Times, August 3, 1970.

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of them Puerto Rican”—in the process of picnicking, playing softball and dominoes, and napping. “We come out here because it’s cool and it’s pleasant and it’s quiet,” one woman said.

“They can’t get into any trouble down here,” another woman said of her sons, explaining “that they lived in the housing project built on the site of the old Polo Grounds at Eighth Avenue and

155th Street.” To be clear, mainstream print record does not appear to support Glueck’s assertion that the park space of Ward’s Island in the 1960s and 1970s was “squalid.”244 The sum total of the New York Times reportage adds up to the following: (1) the park was built for the residents of

East Harlem, (2) it was poorly maintained, and (3) it served as a picnic destination for Puerto

Rican families—a relatively innocuous conclusion if ever there was one.

Nonetheless, Glueck signals New York City’s historically fraught relationship to the land that would become known as East Harlem, beginning with the earliest arrival of white settlers.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that land was seen as the perfect location for a country home—just far enough from the bustle of the city for rich New Yorkers to feel they were on vacation.245 At the turn of the twentieth century, public transportation began its expansion out of the city center; suddenly, the accessible (but relatively long) commute made East Harlem less desirable for the fashionable set, and more attainable for the immigrants who worked on construction projects and in the city’s garment district. “…[T]he first wave of immigrant wage laborers in the 1880s and 1890s convert[ed] East Harlem into one of the poorest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the history of the United States,” Philippe Bourgois notes in

244 Several incidents did take place on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital on Ward’s Island, but these did not involve the public.

245 Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, 2nd edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1996]), 55.

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his book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1996).246 Initially German and Irish

Catholics, then Central and Eastern European Jews, African-Americans, Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians: all arrived to the neighborhood in successive waves, looking for affordable housing and the comfort of the familiar.

East Harlem’s immigrant communities, then, constituted a stereotype of the neighborhood that was imposed from the outside, and that grew stronger and more vitriolic as time went on. There were very real complications within the community; for instance, in the

1880s the East Harlem Italians (mostly hailing from Sicily and the south of Italy) were largely employed as scabs by major transportation and construction companies to replace striking Irish workers—who lived mere blocks away. The neighborhood was segregated into ethnic factions of immigrants disinclined to cede territory and unfazed by physical force; the Italians (as the newest arrivals) were pushed into the dirtiest, poorest housing nearest the river; and all of this was used by powerful institutions—from the government to the fourth estate—as confirmation of the often racialized charges of lack of control, baseness, filth, chaos, and substance abuse against the neighborhood and the people who lived there.247 In other words, East Harlem had both a particularly violent reputation and a particularly destitute reality when Puerto Rican immigrants began trickling into the neighborhood in the 1930s.

There are several intersecting factors to consider here. First, after invading Puerto Rico in

1898, U.S. multinational companies completely transformed the rural economy from semi- subsistence farming to largescale agriculture, with the goal of profitable export. In 1952, Puerto

Rico became a “Free Associated Commonwealth”—subject to the laws of the United States, but

246 Bourgois, In Search of Respect, 56.

247 Bourgois, In Search of Respect, 56.

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entirely disenfranchised by it. Second, these changes to Puerto Rico’s sociocultural traditions contributed to an intense period of migration in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, Virginia

Sánchez Korrol observes that between 1940 and 1970, the Puerto Rican population in New York

City skyrocketed from less than 1 percent, to more than 10 percent of the total population.248 To put it another way, 1.5 million Puerto Ricans—a third of the island’s population—immigrated to

New York City by choice or necessity in the 1950s and 1960s.249 Not only were they subjected to the same, predictable racism and marginalization perpetuated against every new immigrant community, but Virginia Sánchez Korrol also argues that Puerto Ricans were, for all intents and purposes, the only visible Latino group in the city until the 1990s—they were, in short, perceived as a unique Other for more than sixty years.250

The newly-migrated Puerto Rican residents of New York City, stripped of their island traditions and lumped together indiscriminately into one great unwelcome wave of immigrants, incorporated themselves into life in East Harlem and gradually transformed that space from

Little Italy into El Barrio, in the process staking their claim as Nuyoricans. In the 1960s and

1970s, one means of effecting such change was via youth groups who served as (self-appointed, but nonetheless powerful) spokespeople for and protectors of East Harlem. The New York chapter of the Young Lords (along with other groups like the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, El

Comité, and the Puerto Rican Students’ Union) was largely composed of second-generation

Puerto Ricans actively working towards social justice through an explicitly radical politics that

248 Virginia Sánchez Korrol, “Puerto Ricans,” Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd edition, (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press; New York: New-York Historical Society, c2010 [c1995]), 1058.

249 Bourgois, In Search of Respect, 51.

250 Korrol, “Puerto Ricans,” 1059.

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took into account every step of the Puerto Rican journey—from Spanish and American imperialism on the island, to the coloniality of life in the United States.

Which brings us back to the New York Avant Garde Festival and its location on Ward’s

Island just across the bridge from El Barrio. Glueck’s condemnation of East Harlem and its environs can be traced back to the 1880s.251 Against this backdrop of oppression, the young boys’ claim on the usually-abandoned park space on an island close to the low-rent projects where their families lived served as its own, small gesture of self-determination. The Seventh

Annual New York Avant Garde Festival participants’ interactions with and reactions to neighborhood youth speak to the gap between the “success” in reaching the public projected by

Moorman’s “History of the Avant Garde Festival” and other archival documents, and the New

York City-based art world’s exclusion of certain publics that challenged their comfortable understanding of avant-garde audiences.

251 It is amazing how many times Bourgois is able to take a 1930s descriptor of the locale—“The street was very dirty, refuse of various kinds such as watermelon rinds…old boxes and papers was everywhere in evidence…an empty store [had a broken window]”—and note that it could just as easily have applied to the 1890s, the 1990s, or (we might add) 1969. Bourgois, In Search of Respect, 63.

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Component 3 Ward’s Island

Ward’s Island, like East Harlem, had a longer history than the Seventh Festival acknowledged when organizers chose the island as its location. Ward’s Island as it stands today was, for most of its history, two islands: Ward’s and Randall’s—separated by a narrow channel that in the 1940s and 50s was filled in with construction site waste. In their earliest recorded history, before Mayrechkeniockkingh Indian Chiefs Seyseys and Numers sold them to the Dutch governor Wouter Van Twiller in 1637, Randall’s and Ward’s were Minnahanonck and Tekenas

Islands, respectively.252 With the arrival of the Dutch came the two islands’ inescapable association with colonialism in fact and in spirit.

At first, these islands were owned and operated by individuals: Barent Jansen Blom,

Captain John Montresor, Thomas Delavell, Thomas Parcell, Thomas Bohanna, Benjamin

Hildreth, William Lowndes—a parade of relatively wealthy, white men with plans for betterment through the land they bought, held, and named. Their plans were thwarted by the war: in this case, George Washington commandeered what would become known as Randall’s Island for use as a smallpox quarantine during the Revolutionary War; the British chose Ward’s Island as an army base and, after ousting the Americans, turned Randall’s into an officers’ hospital.253

252 Ives Goddard, “The Origin and Meaning of the Name ‘Manhattan’,” New York History 91, no. 4 (Fall 2010), 284; Joseph Schuldenrein, Mark Smith, Susan Malin-Boyce, Celia J. Bergoffen, “Phase 1A Archaeological Investigation for the Proposed Randall’s Island Field Development Project” (Geoarcheology Research Associates, 2008), 10. (From this point on, I will cite this source as it appears in the footer of the document itself: Geoarcheology Research Associates, “Randall’s Island Fields Projects.”)

253 Seitz, Other Islands, 180-181; Geoarcheology Research Associates, “Randall’s Island Fields Projects,” 10-11. Throughout this section, I refer to current naming conventions for ease of reference: at the time Randall’s was “Montresor’s” and Ward’s was “Great Barn.”

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Ward’s Island was given its current name after it was sold to brothers Jasper and

Bartholomew Ward post-Revolution; they hoped to use the land for farming. When the envisioned farm community failed, they opened a cotton mill. When the cotton mill proved to be too isolated, they built a bridge from one side of their island across the channel to Harlem. These were all reasonable strategies for encouraging settlement on the island, but in the end the only thing they settled there was their name: the cotton mill closed, the bridge was destroyed by a particularly vicious storm in 1821, and Ward’s Island, almost entirely abandoned, receded from

New York’s collective concerns for twenty years. 254

After the War of 1812, after the farms had failed and the mill was shut down and the bridge had collapsed and the private owners had all but given up on the land, the city government began to reimagine the potential in these uninhabited, unloved islands to keep certain people— the poor, the sick, the troubled, the criminal, the dead—out of sight and out of mind.255 By 1843, a new potter’s field had opened on Randall’s Island; not long after, 100,000 bodies were exhumed from the potter’s fields in Madison Square Park and Bryant Park and reburied on

Ward’s Island.256 The city bought Randall’s Island outright in 1835 for $60,000, and purchased tracts of Ward’s Island not long between 1851 and 1855. These bills of sale were the permission it needed to keep adding to its “public works” on the land.257

254 Seitz, Other Islands, 181.

255 According to Seitz, this was part of the government’s larger strategy to use all of the city’s islands— including Riker’s, Blackwell’s, and eventually Ellis—as a kind of physical repository for “social outcasts.” Seitz, Other Islands, 178-188.

256 “Wards Island Park,” Official Website of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, accessed Nov. 16, 2017, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/wards-island-park/history.

257 “Historical Timeline,” Randall’s Island Park Alliance [website], accessed Nov. 16, 2017, https://randallsisland.org/timeline/. $60,000 in 1835 translates to approximately $1,742,400 in 2019.

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What follows is an astonishingly long list of interrelated institutions, asylums, refuges, and plants that were built on Randall’s and Ward’s in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Ward’s Island was the site of the State Emigrant Refuge, an enormous hospital for sick and destitute immigrants established in 1848, with separate wings containing a nursery, two chapels, and a barracks.258 Ward’s Island also housed the Male

Department of the New York City Insane Asylum (established 1868, opened to patients 1871), which later became part of the Manhattan State Hospital (1899)259; the New York Inebriate

Asylum (opened to the public 1868), which was later converted into the Ward’s Island

Homepathic Hospital (1875)260; a rest home for Civil War Veterans called the Soldiers Home of the City of New York (located in a separate ward of the Inebriate Asylum, 1868)261; and a work house, or the 19th century equivalent of a homeless shelter (in operation as of 1885).262 In the

258 John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609-1871 (New York: E.B. Treat; San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co; St. Louis: H.C. Wright & Co; New Orleans: J.H. Hummel; Chicago: W.T. Keener, 1871), 554-556.

259 “Manhattan Psychiatric Center,” Asylum Projects, accessed May 14, 2019, http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php/Manhattan_Psychiatric_Center. Sources disagree on exact dates. Aslymprojects.org, a specialized wiki project, lists the dates in the text above. The Geoarchaeology Research Associates’ “Randall’s Island Fields Project” notes that the Insane Asylum opened in the 1880s in buildings formerly used as the State Emigrant Refuge. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s history of “Wards Island Park” places the Asylum’s opening in 1863 (accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/wards-island-park/history). None of these sources provide footnotes or documentation for their claims.

260 This was renamed the Metropolitan Hospital in 1894 when it was moved to nearby Blackwell Island. “New York Inebriate Asylum on Ward’s Island, 1868-75: Home,” New York Medical College Health Sciences Library [website], accessed November 16, 2017, http://guides.library.nymc.edu/inebriate_asylum.

261 Walter Sands Mills, History of the First Twenty-Five Years of the Ward’s Island and Metropolitan Hospital, 1875-1900, (Rooney & Otten Print. Company, 1900), 28.

262 “The Unknown Dead,” Bridgeport Morning News, September 22, 1885.

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twentieth century (1937 to be exact), the city opened the Ward’s Island Water Pollution Control

Plant, the world’s highest capacity sewage treatment center.

Randall’s Island contained separate facilities with distinct goals and aims. The

Almshouse was made up of many divisions spread across several islands; Randall’s branch was first built in 1845 and consisted of three departments known as the “Nurseries”: a building for healthy children, the Infant Hospital (opened 1869), and the so-called Idiot Asylum (opened

1860). Randall’s also housed the Children’s Hospital (1848), as well as the House of Refuge which was run by the Society for Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (1854).263

For the architects and historians of New York City, creating these institutions was not only the expedient thing to do, it was often spun as the responsible, moral thing to do. “...[The

Ward’s Island Asylum] is one of our best public buildings, and was erected for a noble purpose,”

John Francis Richmond wrote in 1871.264 Later in his book, he discussed the Ward’s Island’s

Infant Hospital: “It is doubtful whether any better place for foundlings will be provided among the charities of New York.”265 In regard to the House of Refuge, Richmond wrote: “The Society

[for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents], one of the most beneficent and humane in the world, was incorporated in 1824, with power of self-perpetuation.” As late as 1950, an article by

Richard H. Leach in the journal New York History titled “The Impact of Immigration Upon New

York, 1840-60” argued that the creation of an Emigrant Refuge “minimized the adverse effects

263 Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 562.

264 Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 557-58.

265 Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 565.

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of the European influx and made it possible for the new Americans better to contribute to the growth of the United States.”266

This vision of New York’s outer islands as loci of compassion and accountability was not what its inhabitants actually experienced. George M. Price, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived on Ward’s Island in 1881, paints a grim picture: “The well-bred, those who, according to a typical American expression, possess between several thousand and several million dollars and who cross the ocean in the first or second class, disembark in Hoboken….” he wrote in From the

Memoirs of an Immigrant 1881-1891. “The rest of the mortals (immigrants) who do not amount to anything and who arrive in steerage have to be taken to Castle Garden…. The poor, ailing and aged, they transport to Ward’s Island.”267 Price’s account is rich in the details that are often left out of the more sanitized histories of New York’s institutions and development:

No one exiled on this island is permitted to leave. …The barracks, in which the immigrants were distributed, consisted of immense structures made of boards covered with tar on the outside, and also having windows. …At 1.00 P.M., they served lunch consisting of bread…[and] a sort of liquid in which very often, instead of grains and cereal, there floated worms, and finally a slice of smelly meat. …But the moral suffering from the stern and humiliating treatment of the officials was even worse than the material and physical privations. Ineffable, painful and bitter was the thought that after the exodus from Russia, after the triumphant receptions in Europe and the rosy hopes of the best in America, which the immigrants cherished, they were suddenly exiled on an island, where they were confined in a prison and were treated like criminals.268

Each institution on the islands carried its own set of secrets. After the Infant Hospital was founded, the mortality rate of the foundlings hovered at a deplorable 58.99%. “The nursery

266 Richard H. Leach, “The Impact of Immigration Upon New York, 1840-60,” New York History 31, no. 1 (January 1950): 25.

267 Ward’s Island and Castle Garden functioned as a busy two-pronged waystation for newly arrived immigrants before the opening of Ellis Island in 1892.

268 Leo Shpall, “The Memoir of Doctor George M. Price,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 47, no. 2 (December 1957): 104-6.

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population,” Richmond reports in New York and Its Institutions, 1609-1871, “has several times been sadly overtaken with epidemics, now believed to have resulted, at least in part, from an inadequate supply of good water.”269 The House of Refuge was populated mostly by Irish teenagers, underfed, compelled to work the majority of the day for outside contractors—labor

“designed to tame their fiery, vicious natures,” Richmond reports.270 If they fell behind, the children were allegedly beaten or hung by their thumbs. “Not surprisingly,” says Seitz in The

Other Islands, “the refuge was beset by armed revolts and arson throughout its existence.”271 On the Ward’s Island, the Insane Asylum packed in nearly twice the number of patients it was approved to treat; an 1888 state investigation came to the conclusion that it “should be condemned as uninhabitable.”272 (Not much came of that report. In fact, state Senator Roy M.

Goodman led an exposé of the “filthy,” “deplorable” conditions at Manhattan State Mental

Hospital as late as 1971.273) Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses; we’ll put them on Ward’s Island where they will live in the midst of dehumanizing pain, sickness, and squalor.

A cynic might say this prime real estate so close to Manhattan was bound to eventually catch the attention of some savvy businessman or bureaucrat. A rosier take is that reform was inevitable. In either case, newly appointed Parks Commissioner Robert Moses served as the catalyst for change in the 1930s. His proposal—a plan that tapped into the colonizing impulses of urban renewal—was to build a series of bridges that would link together a park initiative from

269 Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 565.

270 Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 569.

271 Seitz, The Other Islands, 183.

272 Seitz, The Other Islands, 183.

273 Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Goodman Assails Mental Hospital: Conditions on Wards Island Are Called a ‘Disgrace,’” New York Times, March 25, 1971.

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the Bronx to Manhattan to Queens. To that end, he filled in the channel between Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island to create a single large landmass; erected his bridges (including the

Triborough Bridge in 1936 and the Ward’s Island Pedestrian Bridge in 1951); ejected nearly all of the hospitals, reform schools, and institutions; and in their place developed parks and recreational spaces.274 In 1936, the pièce de resistance was built in 1936 on the Randall half of the island in the form of Downing Stadium, a 21,000-seat sports facility that served as the home base of that year’s Olympic trials.

It was far from a perfect fix. One result of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and

‘80s was poor maintenance of park grounds, with spaces like Ward’s already serving economically disadvantaged communities taking the brunt of the cuts. In the 1980s, the few remaining hospitals found themselves in the midst of a period of repeated robberies and rapes perpetuated against both staff and patients. And the Charles H. Gay Homeless Shelter, an originally-temporary emergency shelter that opened in 1981, created new discords between the shelter, the hospitals, and the nearby residents of El Barrio: “[T]he adjacent hospital accused the residents of stealing, trespassing, and exposing themselves to children, while East Harlem saw its

Ward’s Island bridge deteriorate into a frightening lair for crack dealers and addicts.”275 Despite all the horrors that had gone before, this was the time period in which Ward’s Island gained its unsavory reputation.

274 Robert Caro’s 1,200 page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, The Power Broker, is an unstinting portrayal of Moses’ yen for power at the expense of the little guy. In Caro’s history, Moses displaced poor and minority communities by systematically building expressways through some of the New York City neighborhoods least able to resist, and championing low bridges that inhibited access to parks by buses and other forms of public transit. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974).

275 Seitz, The Other Islands, 186.

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In the 1990s, a “well-connected” Upper East Sider named Karen Cohen began a major rehabilitation effort to combat what she described as “more garbage and more condoms and more drugs” brought about by the budget cuts in New York City.276 The Randall Island Sports

Foundation entered into a public-private partnership with the City of New York in 1992, working with an “army-run, inner-city youth program” to clean up the space.277 And they did: the

Foundation reforested, restored wetlands, created new pedestrian pathways, and even used its resources to improve other under-served city spaces like Thomas Jefferson Park in East

Harlem.278 Ward’s and Randall’s Islands circa 2017 are a complex of lush sporting fields, a $45 million track and field arena, a golf center, a tennis academy, and acres of beautiful park land.

Though the islands still house the now state-of-the-art Manhattan Psychiatric Center, the Kirby

Forensic Psychiatric Center, the enormous sewage treatment plant, and a number of homeless shelters, these institutions are not the focus of the city’s marketing initiatives.279 The photos on the website are clear: orderly fields of green grass as far as the eye can see, and smiling faces at major arts events like the Frieze Art Fair and the Governor’s Ball. This is, you see, a reclaimed island, a rehabilitated island. The New York Avant Garde Festival is never mentioned in the

276 Seitz, The Other Islands, 179.

277 Seitz, The Other Islands, 186.

278 “Historical Timeline,” Randall’s Island Park Alliance.

279 Ian Frazier wrote a long article about homelessness in New York City for The New Yorker in 2013 (“Hidden City,” October 28, 2013): “I asked a guy sitting on the curb in front of the [Charles H. Gay Building] shelter what he thought of it. He considered for a moment and said, ‘Jail’s worse.’” Gustvao Solis’s October 16, 2012 article for CityLimits.org (“The Men Who Ride the Homeless Bus”) is an exposé of the relationship between shelter residents and nearby neighborhood residents that could have come right out of the 1970s. And Michael Gartland’s October 13, 2015 New York Post article on the shelter’s rundown facilities and unsanitary conditions (“Raw sewage floods homeless shelter for 6th time in 2 years”) and a December 3, 2014 article on VoicesofNY.org titled “Shelter Residents Vulnerable to Abuse by Guards” are both heart-wrenching reminders of the islands’ past in their present.

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histories of Ward’s Island—but the process of neo-colonial gentrification in which it participated is ongoing and inescapable.

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Component 4 The Avant-Garde and Social Justice

A few participants in the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival recognized

East Harlem residents’ claims on Ward’s Island. “[T]he un-cool reception gave pause to at least one participant, ‘destruction artist’ Jean Toche (who, as one of his contributions, burned a pyre of wooden milk crates),” Grace Glueck wrote in her October 26 column. She printed a short excerpt from a much longer letter originally sent to the East Village Other.280 “Dear Charlotte, hope you will not be mad with this statement,” Toche wrote at the top of the version deposited in the Charlotte Moorman Archive. “I just had to write my impressions from what took place. I repeat what I told you at the time. Love, Toche.”281 The letter included a frank acknowledgement of the cultural intrusion that the Festival represented:

Being flesh and blood, I have fallen victim to the egomania which attacks all artists. I found myself greedily participating in irrelevancy at the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival on Ward’s Island, seeking fame and glory, typical to bourgeois fever. But my discomfort grew more and more as I returned each time passing through East Harlem, to the land of the insane asylum and the drug addiction hospital. …We artists had invaded an island, which was the only park and playground for the neighborhood Porto [sic] Rican kids, and had imposed upon them something totally alien: the products of a white arrogant decadent Kultur, and an abstract and totally irrelevant language called ‘Art.’ ‘Hey, Mister, who sleeps in that dome?’ How can you possibly justify to a kid who has to sleep in a half-burned down neighborhood, in rooms covered with poisonous lead walls and rats all over the place, that a dome was built not to sleep in but to project abstract lines- and-dots-type of films or to show light boxes? …The only constructive point of the Festival is that it forced a lot of people to cross that section of Harlem and maybe realize for the first time in their lives what it is to have to live in a ghetto. It also brought forth strikingly the absolute necessity for the artist to become more relevant to his environment and to the social struggle going on in the world, if art is to survive as a meaningful force.

280 Glueck, “Art for Your Ear!” Jud Yalkut mentions that Toche sent his letter to the East Village Other in “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.” Yalkut’s description of that letter includes information not present in the copy Toche sent Moorman (described below), for example, the claim that “the only relevant art work on Wards Island was Ortiz’ RAT-WORK.” (Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.)

281 Letter Jean Toche to Charlotte Moorman, [n.d., includes copy of document dated October 9, 1969] from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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To express and not repress. To involve oneself in reality and human criticism instead of playing irrelevant and indifferent abstract games. To try to understand what is around us instead of patronizing and telling it to the people. It touches the very essence of art. Art for art’s sake has died on the barricades of Ward’s Island.282

Let it be said: this was not Toche’s first manifesto. Elsewhere in his letter, he references

Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the police state, and conditions of poverty in the United States. Taken as a whole, the contents of Toche’s letter aptly circumscribe the sociocultural context for an examination of national, local, and identity politics within the art world that realized the Seventh

Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. In this Component, I concern myself with the disconnect between the political ideals of Festival organizers and participants, and—in most cases—the absence of corresponding political action. A general unawareness of the history of

Ward’s Island is only one manifestation of the art world’s political disengagement.

Jean Toche’s engagement with social justice as an artist and a citizen ran deeper than this isolated letter. Born in Belgium, he moved to New York in 1965 and immediately threw himself into the city’s radical, leftist, politically-driven art scene. In an essay included as part of a show at Judson Gallery in 1968, Toche laid out the stakes. “I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE,” he wrote.

I question the very validity of the Art Establishment. I question the very validity of that language called ‘ART’. …Has the time come for the artist to make a choice: Either to stay the adulated ‘creative’ toy of an aristocracy engaged in the most atrocious hypocritical games of corruption, domination and violence, and so probably become irrelevant and meaningless, like an old rotten core. Or, to involve himself more directly in human crises, and maybe become something more complete than just an ‘artist,’ something which would include today’s social problems, and a definite commitment to the development of the human race, as well as a firm stand against man’s exploitation and manipulation.283

282 Letter Toche to Moorman, [n.d., includes copy of document dated October 9, 1969].

283 Jean Toche, “I Accuse,” NO!art, edited by Borie Luris and Seymour Krim, 1988, accessed May 15, 2019, http://www.no-art.info/toche/essay-accuse.html.

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It wasn’t a particularly new sentiment (Hanns Eisler, for one, made a similar plea in the 1930s) but for Toche, the choice was clear and he believed himself to make it both through his art and in his fellowship: he associated himself with the Destruction in Art movement and the Art Workers’

Coalition, and in the process found likeminded artists similarly intent on subverting the industry of art.284

In 1969—the same year as the Seventh New York Avant Garde Festival—Toche founded the Guerrilla Art Action Group (or, GAAG: a play on both the verb and noun forms of the homonym) with Jon Hendricks, another serial New York Avant Garde Festival participant.285 For

Hendricks, political action was personal; after attending art school in Europe, he arrived back in the United States in 1964 and was immediately drafted in the Vietnam War. He claimed conscientious-objector status as a Quaker, and eventually found a job at Judson Memorial

Church in New York City. It wasn’t long before Hendricks, too, found himself caught up in the

Art Workers’ Coalition. And with these relationships in place, he and Toche created GAAG. The artistic products of GAAG took many forms, but at its heart was the explicit goal of using art to force the institutions and individuals in power to take a moral stand on U.S. politics. “Our idea

284 According to Kristine Stiles, “destruction in art introduced destructive processes into artistic vocabulary in order to collapse means, subject matter, and affect into a unified expression for the purpose of commenting directly on destruction in life.” Kristine Stiles, “The Story of the Destruction in Art Symposium and the ‘DIAS Affect,’” in Gustav Metzger: Geschichte Geschichte, ed. Sabina Breitwieser (Vienna; Ostfildern-Ruit: Generali Foundaiton and Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 41-65. The Art Workers’ Coalition was a short-lived (though relatively large) group of artists formed in 1969 who organized demonstrations, events, and meetings that pressured museums to change their policies on artists’ rights and the representation of artists identifying as women and people of color, and that served as a platform for members to the Vietnam War. See Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “Situationist International, Artist Placement Group, and Art Workers’ Coalition,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economic, Culture & Society 21, no. 1 (2009), 34-49.

285 “I was more…anti-involved [in the Festival],” Hendricks told me an interview in 2017. Hendricks took part in the Festivals at Ward’s Island, Shea Stadium, the Armory, and Floyd Bennett Field. Jon Hendricks, interview with author, August 8, 2017.

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was to bring an awareness of the horrendous things that our government was doing to the

Vietnamese people and also, in general, to support free speech and human rights,” Hendricks said many years later.286

One of GAAG’s most famous pieces took place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in November in 1969, just a few months after the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde

Festival.287 In the words of Jon Hendricks, the group “theaterized” a war scene in an effort to bring attention to their demand that all Rockefeller family members immediately resign from the board of the MoMA in acknowledgement of their role in the manufacture of chemical weapons used in the Vietnam War. “We feel strongly that if art is humanist, a humanitarian endeavor, its antithesis is the destruction of human life,” Hendricks said in a 1972 interview for the Archives of American Art. “Now the Rockefeller family is getting large sums of money from the overt destruction of human life. And yet at the same time they are funding, sponsoring, encouraging the arts.”288

Poppy Johnson, Silviana Goldsmith, Toche, and Hendricks (all members of GAAG) arrived in the lobby of MoMA. Hendricks read a statement; the others scattered copies of their research documenting the Rockefeller family’s activities on the floor and into the hands of anyone willing to take one. And then they attacked each other. And they bled. They ripped at

286 Kim Conaty and Jon Hendricks, “By the way, what’s Fluxus?” MoMA, May 15, 2019, accessed October 17, 2017, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/708-by-the-way-what-s-fluxus-jon-hendricks- on-the-formation-of-the-gilbert-and-lila-silverman-fluxus-collection.

287 Although this performance was not affiliated with Moorman or the New York Avant Garde Festival, a summary of that day’s events is contained within Moorman’s archive. In other words, there is reason to believe that Moorman knew about GAAG’s Museum of Modern Art performance (in particular), as well as similar pieces motivated by national politics and performed by the art world that sustained her Festival.

288 Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, “Oral History interview with Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, 1972 December 13.” Archives of American Art, [n.d.], accessed May 15, 2019, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jon-hendricks-and-jean-toche-11910.

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each other’s clothes, they screamed and cried—and all the while, two gallons of beef blood in plastic sacks taped beneath their outerwear bled and spurted and covered the floor viscously, metallically. None of the performers touched the guards or the spectators; none of the guards or spectators tried to stop the performers. The museum bigwigs were furious, and at some point somebody called the police. But the audience was of many minds: “Some were amused,” Toche said. “Some applauded. Some were furious. …We were trying to get a taxi and some people passed by and thanked us for what we did.”289 Theater, open discussion, flyers, manifestoes—art of all shapes and sizes mobilized in pursuit of their goal.

Toche and Hendricks weren’t the only members of Moorman’s avant-garde art world worried about their place at the intersection of politics, ethics, and art. In fact, as Benjamin

Patterson (musician, composer, artist, core Fluxus member, longtime participant in the New

York Avant Garde Festival) said of his corner of the avant-garde many years after the fact:

“First, remember, doing anything as radical as Fluxus at that time, was by definition,

POLITICAL! …[W]e were all in the LEFT and ‘anti-establishment.”290 These artists and musicians were well-primed to think about the political—in part because they were considered to be so themselves by virtue of the kind of art they created. In practice, however, this took many forms.

In July of 1969 (just two months before Moorman’s Seventh Festival), Source: Music of the Avant-Garde published its sixth issue on the theme of “politics.” Source, a relatively new but enthusiastically received player on the experimental scene, was an innovative approach to presenting avant-garde materials. The California-based magazine included essays, but also

289 Hendricks and Toche, “Oral History.”

290 Valerie Cassel Oliver and Benjamin Patterson, Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012), 226.

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scores, performance notes, circuit diagrams, and LPs. “I think you’ve done beautifully,” John

Cage said after receiving the first issue, “and everyone else is of the same opinion.”291 Not many of their issues carried a specific theme; it was a mark of the timeliness of the subject matter that the entire sixth issue was devoted to a single topic—in fact, the editors didn’t “develop” the issue so much as follow the path that the submitted materials seemed to generate.292

“The controversy that these and similar new scores have aroused is not so much ‘should music be used for [political and social] ends?” the editors, led by Source founder Larry Austin, asserted in an essay, “—indeed, who would hesitate in the face of the events of the past few years—but, rather, ‘can music be used for these ends? Is it capable of being effective in these areas?”293 As a frame, “political and social ends” is imprecise: does a “political end” refer to commentary, critique, advocacy, activism, partisanship, or none of the above? It seems, however, that this vagueness was designed to encourage a multiplicity of answers. For a feature positioned midway through the issue, the editors called a handful of noted experimental musicians and composers on the telephone and asked: Have you, or has anyone, ever used your music for political or social ends?294 The answers are revealing. Composer Morton Feldman collaborated on a film project about Vietnam, but otherwise had not used his music for political or social ends. ONCE Group founder Robert Ashley noted that every piece of his could be considered

291 Larry Austin, Douglas Kahn, and Nilendra Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), ix.

292 Austin, Kahn, and Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 211.

293 Austin, Kahn, and Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 211.

294 According to the accompanying essay, the editors felt that the immediacy of the telephone and the directness of their chosen question would keep respondents on their toes and help avoid canned answers. “Except for one person who refused to answer the question, everyone reached was willing, even anxious, to reply and to have his answer recorded,” they offered. Austin, Kahn, and Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 211.

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either political or social or both—and, in fact, that any piece of music that was about something must be either about musical procedure or politics. Robert Moran, a composer now known particularly for his operas and ballets, made the excellent point that whether or not he designed them this way (and he usually didn’t), several of his pieces had been construed as anti-war statements. Experimental pianist David Tudor said no, he didn’t think in those terms. Barney

Childs, immersed as he was in indeterminacy and improvisation, took it a step further and not only hoped that nobody would ever interpret his music as political, but even went so far as to say: “I think music which is topical to this degree tends to destroy itself. I think it tends to become dated and its topicality turns to musicological curiosity.”295 For the majority of these artists and composers, then, to ask if their work was “political” was to ask if it explicitly engaged with (usually contemporary) national politics: Vietnam, police brutality, civil right, and other pressing issues of the day.

Clear enough. But then, another series of responses probe the differences between

“political” and “social.” When Fluxus member and frequent Festival contributor Dick Higgins was asked whether political or social characteristics were included in his work, he waxed eloquent about power structures. “I try to exemplify social structures which I would like to see realized on the practical plane,” he said. Terry Riley, an affiliate of the San Francisco Tape

Music Center and the West Coast avant-garde, made a similar comment in relation to In C: “Yes,

I was conscious of the fact that it was very democratic, no one had a lead part, everyone supposedly contributing an equal part…. In that sense, I guess it’s social.” And John Cage noted that “I am interested in social ends but not in political ends…I’m interested in society, not for

295 In the context of this musicology dissertation, it’s hard to argue the point.

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purposes of power, but for purposes of cooperation and enjoyment.”296 When reminded about the

“social” portion of the question, it seems, composers turned to the way their artistic creations could serve as a model for the processes and products of an idealized world as they perceived it.

For Ben Patterson, one of the few people of color embedded firmly within Moorman’s avant-garde, being political could not—and should not—be limited to the contents of a given work.297 Patterson was interested in both the political and the social as it related to his work, his personal life, and his colleagues. “It was a time (according to me),” he said, “when no artist should ‘sit on the fence.’”298 In 1990, Patterson interviewed himself for an essay first included in a special Fluxus issue of Kunstforum (a well-known contemporary art magazine), and later reprinted in the exhibit catalog Born in the State of FLUX/us. His answers to his own questions are as unequivocal as anything avant-garde-related can be: “Fluxus was never really political,”

Patterson said. “All it really did with its reputation for radical aesthetics was to provide a safe refuge and masks for a bunch of well-meaning artists.” 299 It’s a terrible irony that, as George

Lewis points out, Patterson’s presence has allowed historians to paint a picture of a robustly

296 Austin, Kahn, and Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 211.

297 As mentioned in the Introduction, a number of contemporaneous avant-gardes actively embraced the identities and interests of musicians of color. See Brigid Cohen, “Enigmas of the Third Space: Mingus and Varèse at Greenwich House, 1957,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 1 (2018): 155-211; George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Mike Sell, Avant- Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

298 Oliver and Patterson, Born in the State of FLUX/us, 114.

299 Ben Patterson, “Ich bi froh, dass Si emir diese Frage gestellt haben [I am glad that you asked me that question],” Kunstforum International 115 (Sep-Oct. 1991), 166-177; Ben Patterson, “I’m Glad You Asked Me That Question,” in Born in the State of FLUX/us, eds. Valerie Cassel Oliver and Benjamin Patterson (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012), 108-116.

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diverse art world after the fact—a picture that aligns with the leftist political ideals the art world supposedly upheld.300 Understandably, Patterson couldn’t help but take personally the fact that his colleagues and friends talked big—and yet somehow never made it to the March on

Washington. “Yes, I was disgusted, and yes, the lack of support for civil rights and antiwar efforts was an important factor in my subsequent ‘retirement’ from the art scene.”301 Patterson, too, was looking to “become something more complete than just an ‘artist,’” and he clearly had hoped to take his friends, colleagues, and collaborators with him.

Toche and Hendricks seem to have been the only participants to question publicly the ethics of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival as it related to local politics of race and place, and national politics of race and class.302 The others may have wrestled with it internally—at least in theory, it was something the experimentalists were thinking about in relation to their art and their lives—but no one else spoke out. In the heat of the moment—and then in the historical urge to label the experimentalists as freaks and hippies, leftists and

300 George Lewis, “In Search of Benjamin Patterson,” in Born in the State of FLUX/us, eds. Valerie Cassel Oliver and Benjamin Patterson (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012), 118-129.

301 Patterson, “I’m Glad You Asked,” 114.

302 In the 7th Festival Folders at the Charlotte Moorman Archive are proposals for three pieces to be performed at the Seventh Annual Avant Garde Festival that touch on the history of the islands. Destruction artist Ralph Ortiz’s protest piece “Food for Thought” consisted of rat traps ringing Ward’s Island. “Destroy rats, destroy poverty, destroy inequality,” Ortiz wrote in his Festival proposal. This piece was realized; according to Jud Yalkut in his article “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival”, Ortiz emptied his rat traps every day. Toche is quoted as saying the piece depicted “a strong reality on the island facing the worst slum sectors of East Harlem, giving the artist-interested invaders of Ward’s Island a taste of things as they are and an ecological, sociological lesson.” The other two pieces are not mentioned in any post-Festival review and there is no way to know if or how they were actually performed. Jon Hendricks proposed to “return Ward’s Island to the Algonquin Indians.” Jack K. Quinn proposed a piece titled “Ward’s Island Used”: “Ward’s Island used to belong to the Brooklyn Indians. They raised pigs on the Island. It was said to be a woodland well watered with meadows and excellent for fishing. Today the East River here at Hell’s Gate is an open sewer of oil slick, scum bags and raw shit.” Proposals from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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radicals—it is easy to forget that this extended art world was made up of many individuals with many stakes in and many understandings of the nature of political action.

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Component 5 The Day the Music Died, or The New York Pop Festival (1970)

Jean Toche’s open letter about effects of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde

Festival on the East Harlem community seemed to have little effect within the art world, or outside of it. In 1970—just one year later—another music festival took place on the same island

(this time on the Randall’s half) with similarly disastrous results, and the question of how politics and music should coexist was once again brought to the fore.

Advertisements for the July, 1970 New York Pop Festival began to pop up in April in trade publications like Variety and Billboard.303 Using the magic Woodstock formula, the producers planned to sell tickets to three nine-hour concerts with big name acts: Steppenwolf,

Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Ravi Shankar, Tony Williams

Lifetime with Miles Davis and Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and more. Moorman chose her half of the island for the Seventh New York Avant Garde Festival for its open spaces and ability to break out of a concert hall or museum aesthetic; the producers of the NY Pop Festival chose

Downing Stadium on the other half of the island for precisely the opposite reason: a stadium enclosed the performance space with fences and facilities necessary to convince both permit- granters and public opinion that nothing about this event would get out of control, that this would not be another Altamont Free Festival remembered for its violence.304 On the surface, the

Randall’s Island location seemed the perfect setting for three days of peace and music in the big city.

Like Moorman’s Seventh Festival, The New York Pop Festival didn’t proceed exactly as planned. Less than a month before curtain, the RYP/OFF Collective—a coalition of leftist, anti-

303 [Advertisement], Variety, April 15, 1970: 44; [Advertisement], Billboard, May 2, 1970: 26.

304 Robert Santelli, Aquarius Rising (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1980), 223.

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racist, mostly white political activist groups including the White Panther Party, the Weathermen, the Free Rangers, and the Revolutionary Youth Party Collective (which itself represented the

Gay Liberation Front, the Committee to Defend the New York Panther 21, the Youth

International Party and the Underground Press Syndicate among others)—approached Don

Friedman and Brave New World, Inc., Productions. According to historian of rock Robert

Santelli in Aquarias Rises (1980), the white radicals asked to handpick ten community bands, each of which would receive $5,000 plus expenses; they asked for ten thousand free tickets; they asked for legal aid funds for the Panther 21 Defense Committee and monetary aid for anyone arrested during the festival; they asked for a copy of the festival film they were certain would eventually be made; and they asked for a portion of the profits. If the promoters agreed, the white radicals would provide security and endorse the concert to their friends; if not, the white radicals would storm the gates and wreak havoc.305

It wasn’t long before Friedman was visited by representatives of yet another radical leftist group, the Young Lords—anti-capitalist militarist defenders of the Puerto Ricans of Spanish

Harlem, and self-appointed keepers of Ward’s and Randall’s Islands.306 The Young Lords had their own set of demands, including preferred bands, a set-up to distribute newspapers and leaflets, a stage for a public address, and a slice of the profits to benefit El Barrio in the form of

305 Santelli, Aquarius Rising, 224. Eventually, the white radicals received promises that they would be able to pick a few community bands to perform (though the bands would not be paid a stipend); that they would not be given free tickets, but any extra space in the venue after ticket sales were finished would be made available for free; that the producers would set aside a bail fund for the Black Panthers; and that the white radicals would receive a portion of the proceeds (the exact amount to be decided after the festival was over).

306 Santelli, Aquarius Rising, 224.

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neighborhood TB tests and free breakfasts for children.307 The producers, the Young Lords, and the white radicals came to an agreement: “This is the only way that large music festivals can go on,” Friedman’s co-producer Robert Gardiner said to The New York Times. “The music business and producers must relate to politics and the youth culture.” They pledged to give a percentage of the proceeds to the activist groups to be used for community projects.308 A good start; the results, however, were less utopian.

To begin, the activist groups were given a platform to speak to the considerable audience before the music began. Jim Rutherford spoke on behalf of the RYP/OFF Collective: “Rock is the cultural part of politics, and it’s not going to be segregated or ripped off anymore,” he said.309

Denise Oliver spoke in her capacity as the Minister of Finance of the Young Lords. “Randall’s

Island is in the middle of the Puerto Rican community, and one of the reasons why the Young

Lords is here is because festivals like these are usually ripping everybody off,” she said.

…[Y]outh have a right to get together and express how they feel about things. …We wanted this festival to deal with the fact that politics don’t end when you start listening to music. So one of the things we ask the youth of America to demand is that their music and the money that is made off of it by capitalists be returned to the people who put that money up. And that’s all I gotta say—all power to the people.310 Speech after speech after speech. When the scheduled music finally began three hours after the advertised starting time, the crowd was restless. (In fact, an article in the New Yorker

307 “TB tests and free breakfasts” may be found in Seitz’s The Other Islands, though I have not been able to verify these specifics in other sources. The other demands are made in a fictional scene (based on real life) in Bert Tenzer’s The Day the Music Died and can be corroborated from the documentary footage included in that same film.

308 “Rock Fete Proceeds to be Shared Here,” New York Times, July 14, 1970, 33; Seitz, The Other Islands, 191.

309 George W.S. Trow, John Gabree, and Hendrik Hertzberg, “Talk of the Town: Three Festivals,” The New Yorker, August 1, 1970.

310 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer, ([Bert Tenzer Production, Ltd,], 1977).

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noted that the first act, John Sebastian, was able to score some points by “putting down what had gone before.” The article continued by quoting Sebastian: “‘There are some things we can do to make the world better, but it sure as hell isn’t making people sit around while they want to listen to music,’ he said in a tone that was certainly impatient and may have been a little smug.”311) At least the advertised musicians showed up: John Sebastian, Grand Funk Railroad, Steppenwolf and Jethro Tull all played their sets, and at four o’clock in the morning, Jimi Hendrix in his

“Butterfly” costume brought down the house with “Foxy Lady” and “The Star Spangled

Banner.”312

The aforementioned performers appeared as-scheduled on Friday at the New York Pop

Festival largely because they didn’t know any better. The Saturday groups, on the other hand, heard all about Friday: how the Young Lords made an attempt at providing security, but how the white radicals looked the other way at gate-crashers; how the backstage overflowed with radicals and fans; how the band managers had already started to argue about promised payments.313 The

Saturday groups heard about all of it, and many made strategic decisions not to appear. Ravi

Shankar, Delaney and Bonnie, Richie Havens, the Tony Williams Lifetime featuring Miles and

Clapton: no-shows. The New York Pop Festival promoters called friends and professional contacts in search of emergency replacement bands; Elephant’s Memory and Rhinoceros filled in the gaps. Ten Years After was the only scheduled band to go on stage and the whole evening ended at midnight.

311 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

312 Richard Stim, “Music,” Newsday, July 20, 1970. One source (Sharon Seitz in The Other Islands of New York City) notes that Hendrix had to be lifted out by helicopter at the end of his set, but I have not found any other corroborating sources.

313 Stim, “Music,” Newsday, July 20, 1970; Santelli, Aquarius Rising, 226.

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The audience turned ugly; more and more people pushed in at the gates. By Sunday morning, the producers declared it a free festival in an attempt to stem the threat of riot. The crowd booed and threw things at anyone who dared to speak from the stage. At one point, a group of attendees hoisted the flags of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam; another burned part of the stadium field with trash barrels and police barricades as kindling.314 “The producers say, don’t come without a ticket,” Carman Moore wrote. “I should amend it to ‘don’t come at all.’”315

There is essentially no way to understand the New York Pop Festival as a success—not commercially, not politically, not artistically. The audience was unable to hear the bands they had been promised. The producers ended more than $275,000 short of their projected income.

The various radical groups were given no money because there were no proceeds. The bail fund for the Black Panthers was put on permanent hold. Almost none of the bands were paid.316

According to the mainstream and entertainment industry press, this wasn’t a case of the producers mismanaging money and expectations; instead, it was by and large the fault of the political youth who put “considerable unsubtle pressure” on the producers, and “us[ed] the concert for their own purposes.”317 Not entirely incorrect, but certainly not the whole story; nonetheless, it was the explicit joining of radical politics to music festivals that was cast as the scapegoat. “…[P]eople who inject politics into music festivals, a la the recent New York Pop

314 “Rock Fest Fans Rout Promoters,” The Austin Statesman, July 20, 1970, 16; Stim, “Music,” Newsday, July20, 1970.

315 Carman Moore, “A Study in Mistrust,” The Village Voice, July 23, 1970.

316 Santelli, Aquarius Rising, 228.

317 The exception here was Carman Moore, who basically blamed money. “Considerable unsubtle pressures” is from Trow, Gabree, Hertzberg, “Three Festivals,” The New Yorker, 1 August 1970; “concert for their own purposes” is from Seitz, The Other Islands, 191.

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Festival, are wrong and only serve to mess things up,” Jesse H. Walker wrote in his column

“Theatricals” for the New York Amsterdam News, Harlem’s leading newspaper.318

Without the notoriety of Altamont, the New York Pop Festival has been all but forgotten by both scholars and fans; it doesn’t rate in the pantheon of 1960s rock music festivals. But it did have something of an afterlife—tiny ripples spread out across the 1970s in two related but distinct forms. According to Robert Santelli, the only reason the Festival managed to survive

Saturday afternoon (when the restlessness, the boos, the whispers grew pervasive, and the gate- crashing reached its peak) was that the people filming the concert put up enough money to protect their investment, to hold on to the chance of a lucrative film out of the chaos.319 The resulting footage—shaped, reformed, and repackaged—provided enough raw material to tell the story of the New York Pop Festival through the festival film medium. And that is exactly what director Bert Tenzer did. Twice.

In his article “Out of Sight: The Mediation of the Music Festival,” Mark Goodall argues that Jazz on a Summer’s Day (the 1959 film of the Newport Jazz Festival) provided a prototype for later festival films such as Woodstock (1970). First, it “enhance[d] the already spectacular nature of the event;” second, in an effort to capture the festival feel or spirit, it provided a carefully produced and almost “impressionistic” glimpse of the audience as much as the musicians; and third, in so doing, it actively worked against negative press and bourgeois fears of hippies, freaks, and rock n’ roll.320 The festival film genre, in other words, never neutrally

318 Trow, Gabree, Hertzberg, “Three Festivals.”

319 Santelli, Aquarias Rising, 228.

320 Mark Goodall, “Out of Sight: The Mediation of the Music Festival,” in The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture, ed George McKay (New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2015), 34- 49.

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documents a given festival, and nor is it ever pure homage. From the beginning, it has expressed an artistic point of view, and occasionally a political agenda.

When the producers of the New York Pop Festival first approached Bert Tenzer about filming the concerts, he turned them down because he didn’t want to “shoot[] a rock festival per se.”321 It was only when the white radicals and the Young Lords made their demands, when the producers capitulated—when contemporary politics were put front and center—that he finally agreed. He brought five cameras to the festival and put them into rotation filming the musical acts onstage, the audience as it listened and waited, and a series of interviews with activists and rock fans.322 The result was both an expansion of the festival film genre and an attempt to revitalize the very concept of a festival. In Free (1973), Tenzer combined documentary footage with dramatic (fictional) scenes depicting negotiations between the radical youth and the festival producers (played by actors); at calculated moments in the action, he projected freeze-frame images on the screen while live, onstage rock bands performed music from the script.323 Tenzer

321 American Film Institute, “Free: Document Note,” AFI Catalog of Feature Films, accessed May 10, 2019, https://catalog.afi.com/Film/54944-FREE?sid=16a5d1c3-837d-4ff0-8f1c- 8a586b7bc618&sr=0.8563489&cp=3&pos=9.

322 American Film Institute, “Free.” Even in the moment, Tenzer was uncertain how many of the bands would allow him to use their footage in the final film without extra fees.

323 These performances tended to be by little-known or unsigned groups (for example, Buckwheat, Dr. John, Wet Willie) in order to cut costs. “Cin-A-Rock Expands Distribution of Pkg,” Billboard, June 16, 1973, 20. The reality may not have lived up to the hype: “One of the pic’s major sale angles is the impression created that it interlards live rock performances with those on film, a technique designed to simulate the musical feelin go fhte Randall’s Island festival. However, except for a couple of walk-ons during the unreeling by a guitar strumming singer-narrator, it is simply a film followed by a rock session with neither particularly dependent on the other. The method used to tie it into one package is overt statement, an approach that doesn’t work very well.” “Film Reviews: Free,” Variety, March 14, 1973.

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called the whole package “Cin-A-Rock,” and marketed it to movie theaters and drive-ins as “a new form of outdoor festival.”324

Though the film Free is lost to posterity, it seems Tenzer recycled most (if not all) of the narrative in a new documentary film also about the New York Pop Festival, titled The Day the

Music Died (1977). By this point, Tenzer had abandoned the Cin-A-Rock format, but he continued to experiment with the festival film genre. As in Free, The Day the Music Died features actual footage from the 1970 New York Pop Festival alongside dramatized scenes that play out the now-familiar backstory, as well as long stretches of documentary footage of political speeches, battlefields, protests, and musical performances from other places and times in the

1960s. On the surface, these montages of unrelated content come across as pure filler. Before long, however, the viewer realizes that this “fake” footage in intimately connected to Tenzer’s vision of how the New York Pop Festival should be understood and remembered.

The first thirteen minutes of the seventy-five minute film—before the opening credits roll, before the plot kicks in, before anything happens—is a long montage of extra-festival footage. John F. Kennedy leads off with his 1961 inaugural address, followed by a cut to a surf- rock style music video with young people dancing on a beach; a cheesy spinning newspaper graphic trumpets headlines about school desegregation, the moon landing, women in miniskirts; a clip from a march for civil rights is followed by one of Martin Luther King delivering his “I

324 “‘Cin-A-Rock’ Expands,” Billboard, 16, 20. For more on alternative understandings of music festivals, see “Assemblage: Festival.” The Hollywood Reporter review panned Free due to its quick, jolting cuts between scenes and its “refusal to explore the festival coherently” (American Film Institute, “Free”). Variety dubbed it “very uneven” (“Film Reviews: Free,” Variety). But Box Office reported that “3,600 patrons, mostly young singles with dates and young married couples, turned out Wednesday night, November 29, and stamped approval with thunderous applause on Bert Tenzer’s imaginative use of the multi-media process.” (“Atlanta Audience Gives Cin-A-Rock Premiere Show Standing Ovation,” Box Office 102, no. 10-11 (December 18, 1972): SE9.

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Have A Dream” speech; footage of the Beatles is interspersed between cuts of interracial couples kissing and newsreels from the Vietnam War. Above all of this, Tenzer overdubs a jukebox-style soundtrack made up of timely popular music—some of which is related to national politics (“I

Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag”), some less so (“I’m the One”), but all of which tracks the progress (musical and otherwise) of the 1960s. Nothing related to the New York Pop Festival appears in the first thirteen minutes of this documentary about the New York Pop Festival. Even so, by the end of the opening montage, the audience is left not only with a sense of one decade’s worth of teleology, but also with the conviction that music and politics—national politics, the world’s issues as they played out in the moment—are inextricably intertwined.

The story of the New York Pop Festival proper, then, begins with dramatized scenes.

Murray the K is a (real-life) DJ at a radio station that is reporting on festival developments; this is the frame for the plot, the device to deliver backstory and commentary outside the purview of documentary footage. It’s Murray the K who tells us that a coalition of twenty-one radical and militant groups have made a series of demands on festival producers, but Tenzer doesn’t stop there. He also scripts and films dramatizations of the moment those demands were made. “Your festival is being held in the recreation area for the people of El Barrio,” the actor playing the spokesperson for the Young Lords says. (We, the viewers, see him from across a large desk—as though we are the producer listening to the Young Lords’ pitch, as though we are implicated in the decision of the white cultural elite.) “That’s our baseball diamond, our football field, our soccer field. Our people have given it all up for your festival. You are bringing in 100,000 outsiders and charging $8.50 per ticket—you’re exploiting the people of our ghetto, man, and

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you’ve got to pay them. And the promoters are responsible to our people and to our culture, or else the festival won’t happen.”325

One scene is fictional; the next is real documentary footage, but from earlier in the sixties. Brief flickers of crowd scenes with overdubbed electric guitar music (presumably from the New York Pop Festival, but uncredited) give way to the viewer’s first real glimpse of

Tenzer’s footage taken the night of July 17, 1970. Mountain is onstage; it’s dark, the spotlights are pink and red and a little bit demonic; the crowd is high. For a few minutes, the film sets aside all talking, all proselytizing, and focuses on the music.

By the end of this segment, it becomes clear that Tenzer works within four different modes of filmmaking: fiction that is based on a true story, documentary footage unrelated to the

New York Pop Festival, documentary footage obviously from the New York Pop Festival

(usually music or speeches made from the stage), and documentary footage probably from the

New York Pop Festival (crowd scenes, impromptu interviews). Their juxtaposition is the core technique that builds the film dramatically.

In one scene, DJ Murry the K puts out a (fictional) question over the air asking his audience what they think about the demands from the various radical groups, and receives a

(fictional) response from a woman who argues that it’s easy to think everything should be free but the bands already paid their dues. Later in the film, Tenzer shows a clip of a real-life interview with a young white man surrounded by his young white friends on the stadium field

(there is very little context given for this quote other than hindsight): “I think it’s really ridiculous because what they’re saying basically is: you white people come—no, no no, I shouldn’t say it that way—outsiders come here, you spend your money because you’re

325 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

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influential, you have money to spend. In other words, you spend your $8.50 or your $21 for three days and then you get out of our communities. We don’t want you here.” At another point, the audience hears an audio clip of John Lennon saying he would never give money towards violence or to fanatics while the camera shows clips of young people making their own (free) music in Downing Stadium before the bands came on. This scene plays out as though Lennon had pulled out of the New York Pop Festival after he heard about the riots, though Lennon had never been involved at any stage of the planning.326

At one point the camera cuts to the real-life Denise Oliver, representative of the Young

Lords, who also appears in an interview on the stadium lawn:

When you can afford to pay a group seventy-five grand, you know for two hours’ worth of time or an hour’s worth of time on stage, and you’ve got families right across the water that have six kids and live on fifty dollars a week, that’s an obvious contradiction. …You know, all groups make a lot of money, and a lot of these groups are dishing back people’s culture at them, you know making off of the way people have grown up, the pain, the death, the suffering, and the joy that they’ve gone through—that’s essentially what music is about.327

When she reappears in a more official interview just off the mainstage, she continues on that theme: “So we said that…some of the money from here has to be brought back to the communities that the money came out of, you know, it has to go back to the Puerto Rican community. It has to go back to the Black community. It has to deal with releasing some political prisoners. Some of the money has to go back to the white community.”328

326 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

327 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

328 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

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It’s a more radical perspective than those of the previous speakers. It is also reframed by yet another perspective in yet another quick interview with a festival-goer: “This festival here, I kind of dig it,” a young man says.

but, you know, so many political things going on, you know, along with the music, it confuses, you know. I feel it personally that they are hassling me, you know, like I’m Puerto Rican and they look at me as a traitor to the Puerto Rican thing, you know. They think I’m trying to, trying to live the way the white men do, you know just be yourself and not get involved with the revolution, like physically. At times it confuses me, like I ask myself whether I’m doing the right thing or not, you know, copping out…. But I don’t know the truth man, I just don’t know yet. I’m young. I want to find out though.329

There’s more film still to come—an ending so bleak that it becomes possible to read its conclusions as satire, as a kind of mainstream, adult, conservative projection upon the 1960s, youth culture, and rock music that shuts down any empathy that may arise out of the juxtaposition of so many points of view. Concert footage of audience fights and medics with stretchers is juxtaposed with non-concert footage of Watts and Berkeley and Chicago and police action against youth protests. Jimi Hendrix plays his distorted version of the “Star Spangled

Banner” made famous the previous year at Woodstock—a symbol of peace and hope, or an ironic commentary on the decline of the United States of America, the rock music festival, or both. Then comes a voiceover on top of footage of a messy, deserted Downing stadium: “It was the last cry of the ‘60s. Nothing had worked. The movements struck out. The people didn’t make it. No one got the kind of free they really wanted. And the decade that started with such hope ended with the summer of ’70 in disillusion.”330 THE END proclaims the screen. A scrolling list of the names of rock stars, their ages, and their causes of death is still to come.

329 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

330 The Day the Music Died, dir. Bert Tenzer.

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Even taking the film’s ending at face value, it remains a product of its time. The New

York Pop Festival was one of a string of failed festivals that immediately inspired opinion pieces about the decline of the festival and its pernicious influence on American culture. Dan Heckman wrote an article for the Village Voice on July 30, 1970 titled “Rip-Offs and Revivals” (“It still doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people that Woodstock was an ending and not a beginning”).331 The August 19, 1970 issue of Variety contains no fewer than three festival- related articles: “Greed Kills Love Rock Fests” by Jeff Samuels (“Jack Holzman…views rock festivals as an important aspect of the youth culture and a prime vehicle for live exposure, but he believes that the concept has gotten sidetracked and that the big, extended festival has outgrown itself”), “Rock Fests Nearing Finale?” by Bailey Andrew (“The passing of pop festivals, if that happens, will not be mourned by all”), and “Isle of Wight Promoter Banking on Film to Put

Rock Fest in Black” by a staff writer (“The only way to be sure of making money out of a pop festival is to organize it badly”).332 None of the three mention the New York Pop Festival by name—in fact, two of the three are focused on the import of American rock festivals into

England—but all come from the same impulse to reconcile the promise of Woodstock with what happened on Randall’s Island.333

331 Dan Heckman, “Rip-Offs and Revivals,” The Village Voice, July 30, 1970.

332 Jeff Samuels, “Greed Kills Love Rock Fests,” Variety, August 19, 1970; Bailey Andrew, “Rock Fests Nearing Finale?” Variety, August 19, 1970; “Isle of Wight Promoter Banking on Film to Put Rock Fest in Black,” Variety, August 19, 1970.

333 The impulse soon made its way into American law. Michael Ethen’s “The Festival is Dead, Long Live the ‘Festival’” chronicles the ways in which festival promoters of the 1970s circumvented the locally mandated “Woodstock laws” designed for “public security” on a more-or-less case by case basis. Michael Ethen, “The Festival is Dead, Long Live the ‘Festival’,” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, no. 2- 3 (2014): 251-267.

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Back to the film. A review in the Boston Globe took a dim view of Tenzer’s take on the festival: “‘Day the Music Died’ Is a Painful Death,” the title declared. Levey ragged on the first ten minutes of pre-credits footage, the “crude” editing, the “faked-up” plot. “A non-movie about how the 1960s began with a bang and ended with a whimper. Maybe the film is directed toward the dope-smoking market, but it was such an endless 75 minutes for a clear-headed fellow that if you see it stoned you’d better bring lunch and dinner. It’s going to seem like forever. And you ain’t going to like it,” he concludes the review.334

In many ways, this evisceration of a review misses the point. Tenzer’s film never claimed to be factual; it was aspirational. It was never supposed to be a straightforward, plot-oriented film about how the 1960s began and ended (à la Robert Levey). Tenzer took liberties with both documentation and timing in order to shape his narrative. As one example among many:

Hendrix’s concluding performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” was actually performed the first night of the festival when it wouldn’t have served the film’s purposes. The footage of JFK’s speeches, the March on Washington, the battlefields of the Vietnam War—all of this, in the world of The Day the Music Died, is included precisely to give the New York Pop Festival political valences above and beyond those it actually possessed. Yes, the Viet Cong flag briefly flew on the stadium field at some point that weekend—but the festival wasn’t about the Vietnam

War. It wasn’t about national politics or the 1960s as a decade. Rather, it was about the relationship of 1960s music festivals to both local and national politics. It served, in some sense, as a test-run for what festivals could become. “We hope that this festival will be an example for all festivals that follow,” Denise Oliver of the Young Lords said in an on-camera interview.

Tenzer manipulated and expanded the festival film genre to underscore the questions already in

334 Robert Levey, “Review/Movie: ‘Day the Music Died’ is a painful death,” Boston Globe, June 6, 1977: 14.

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the air on those three days in July of 1970—questions only amplified after a weekend of violence. What if, he says via his rhetoric, his exaggerations, his juxtapositions—what if we explicitly connected the politics of the 1960s to the music of the 1960s?

Tenzer’s film documentation of the New York Pop Festival resists forcing a happy ending—the festival was a disaster, after all, and that last over-the-top voiceover is a devastating reminder of what could happen as much as what did happen—but it nonetheless serves in a kind of outreach capacity in several ways. First, it complicates the stances that seemed so clear in the press (the radicals ruined the festival with their demands; the producers could never understand where the radicals were coming from; music and politics should be kept separate). Second, it nuances the human emotions and positions involved even to the point of proto-intersectionality: statements by the Young Lords vie for air time against interviews with a young Puerto Rican who feels he doesn’t fit in; white concert goers are alternately depicted as down for the cause or petty bourgeois. Finally, reviewing the film in aggregate—the documentary footage, the dramatized scenes, the clean slate at the beginning, the devastation at the end—is a potent reminder of how many viewpoints are expressed, and how many moments that played out one way could have been acted out differently. In Tenzer’s film, the New York Pop Festival may not have been the example that all future festivals would follow, but it was an example—with a dash of warning tossed in for good measure—of a festival balanced on a fulcrum between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of what felt even then like a new era.

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Component 6 No Nudity or Heavy Politics

The fall-out from of the 1969 Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival slowed

Moorman down momentarily (the Eighth Festival wouldn’t take place until 1971), but it wasn’t long before she was back on her feet.335 (By contrast, Don Friedman, the producer of the New

York Pop Festival, spent many years selling real estate after the event wrecked his management career. 336) At least part of the reason Moorman was able to bounce back so quickly was thanks to a strict five-word policy on participation that she put in place long before the Seventh Festival and kept in place long after: “No nudity or heavy politics.”337 Moorman kept this relatively tight leash on the political content of her Festivals in order to ensure the goodwill of the city and the donors (both individuals and corporations) with an eye towards accessing future sites, permits, and audiences willing to be reached and educated about the avant-garde under the Festival umbrella. This, as I show in Component 6, did not sit well with members of the avant-garde art world who wished to move art ever closer to social justice. A process of political awakening— or, in some cases, the crystallizing of already-held political convictions—unfolded over multiple

335 Moorman usually said that she didn’t organize a 1970 Festival because of surgery for fibroid tumors, but given her exploits immediately after later surgeries, Rothfuss believes it more likely that the build-up of seven Festivals was exhausting and she needed (and took) a break. See Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 252. In fact, in an interview with Stephen Varble in Critical Mass, Moorman attributed her break more directly to this particular Festival: “If you recall, I had to skip the festival the next year because, well, the amount of sheer physical labor that I exerted on this festival was debilitating,” she said. Varble, “Interview with Charlotte Moorman,” 178.

336 Jim Fishel, “Promoter Friedman Beats His Way Back,” Billboard 88, no. 17, April 24, 1976, 26.

337 For Moorman, nudity was political. In 1967, she was arrested during her performance Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique in which she played the cello nude from the waist up; a judge tried and convicted her of public indecency. (See “Assemblage: Cello.”) “Heavy” politics on the other hand, was and remains an opaque term. Though the modifier “heavy” originated out of the contract Moorman signed with the New York Parks Department in order to secure Central Park as her Festival site in 1966, it later functioned as a disclaimer for her inconsistent censorship of pieces with clear allusions to national politics.

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iterations of the Festival as participants took sides in the question of what, exactly, these

Festivals should educate the public about.

When the editors of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde made their survey and asked their chosen composers “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your music for political or social ends?,” it was Moorman who provided the longest response.338 Yes, she said, she had used her pieces for political or social ends—because (and this is key) she wanted to reach people. “All the pieces I do, I hope, have social elements to them, and many, I hope, have political elements,” she said.

“…The piece that I did in which I was arrested two years ago definitely had an important message, and that’s what I feel that ‘social ends’ means—that it has an important and relevant message.”339 Curiously, Moorman limited her response to examples from her performing (and collaborative composing) career; she does not mention the New York Avant Garde Festival.

A first impression of her answer is tangled and complicated: on the one hand, she appears passionate, assured of the righteousness of her cause and the strength of her convictions. On the other, it is never clear exactly what “political” means to Moorman—or what “important,”

“interesting,” “relevant,” or “message” mean for that matter. The details she provides are found in the description of her performances and the audience’s reactions to them, not in any kind of a theory with which to conceptualize or analyze her work.340 In other words: it is abundantly clear that she cares deeply about the art that she makes and what it could do; in the context of this

338 Several composers asked for time to think about the question and send in “composed” written statements; those are longer than any of the answers provided over the phone.

339 Austin, Kahn, and Gurusinghe, Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 211-219.

340 Rothfuss puts it succinctly: “[Moorman] was neither given to debate nor concerned about situating her work within a complex, theoretical framework. Her goal, to bring advanced art to a wider public was basic and broad, and she always kept it in sight.” Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 211.

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short telephone conversation, it is decidedly less clear that she thinks deeply about the art that she makes and what it could mean. This observation becomes a criticism when it is applied to her handling of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival.

In her efforts to “reach new people,” Moorman neglected to consider the history of her chosen site, the impact she would have on the people who understood Ward’s Island to be part of their home, or how that would reflect on her Festival.341 She couldn’t have been entirely insensitive to these issues, because Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche brought their concerns to her personally before the Festival took place. In our 2017 interview, Hendricks remembered riding in the cab of a rented truck with Moorman on their way to set up something or other (art world in action): “We talked about it [our critique of the location] with her. I don’t think she agreed or really registered. …She had a vision for presenting avant-garde music to the world that…wasn’t open to sensitivity of what she was using.”342

Looking back on the Seventh Festival years after the fact in an interview with Stephen

Varble, Moorman, too, admitted the wide range of problems that afflicted the realization of her

1969 Festival. “This was one of the most terrible undertakings I ever had to do,” she said. “To fight the elements, to go to a place that doesn’t have electricity, go to a neighborhood where the children don’t have food or television sets in their homes. How can they look at TV artwork and appreciate it when they don’t even have a TV in their house?”343 Her words neatly echo Toche’s open letter written immediately after the Festival had ended (“How can you possibly justify to a kid who has to sleep in a half-burned down neighborhood…that a dome was built not to sleep in

341 For more on Moorman’s goal to reach new people, see “Assemblage: Festival.”

342 Jon Hendricks, interview with author.

343 Varble, “Interview with Charlotte Moorman,” 178.

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but to project abstract lines-and-dots type of films or to show light boxes?”344), though the focus on televisions rather than houses lends a veneer of superficiality at odds with the sentiment—a betrayal of her real interest. In other words, she was not asking how can these children live, but how can they appreciate art?

To put it plainly, the collective impact of the New York Avant Garde Festival was never as politically oriented or motivated as many of its individual participants maintained (even, to extrapolate from the Source interview, Moorman herself). The Fourth Festival, the beginning of the move outside the concert hall, was also the beginning of Moorman’s “no nudity or heavy politics” policy that would remain in place until the end.345 It was never a secret; she even brought it up to a newspaper reporter when a belly dancer carrying a snake around her waist showed up to the Fourth Festival and was instantly reported to the mayor’s office. “‘I hate to throw her out,’ laments Charlotte Moorman, the fresh, pretty director of the festival (or, as one wag put it, Dada’s Red-hot Mama), ‘but it was necessary. The city told me no nudity or heavy politics. I couldn’t let one belly dancer spoil it for the dozens of artists who had come here from all over the world.’”346

Moorman wasn’t wrong to worry that breaking the “no nudity or heavy politics” policy might ruffle feathers. For the Sixth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival—a parade of art- floats down the middle of Central Park West—Jean Toche created a piece titled Carcan in which

344 Glueck, “Art for Your Ear,” 1969.

345 Earlier in 1967—the year of the Fourth Festival—Moorman had been arrested for public indecency during her performance of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique. Jon Hendricks argues that this skirmish with the law may also have contributed to Moorman’s new policy (Hendricks, interview with author).

346 Douglas M. Davis, “What’s Happening in the Avant-Garde,” The National Observer, September 19, 1966.

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the artist tied himself to a cross placed next to a sign that referenced the violent encounters between police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which had taken place three weeks earlier.347 When Moorman submitted an application for the parade permit, she included short descriptions of each of the pieces planned for that night; a few were rejected for one reason or another, but Toche’s was approved. All the same, the night of the

Festival arrived and the piece readied for performance, when the police captain in charge of the parade stopped Toche under threat of arrest, forced him off his float, and cut the electricity.348

Although no lasting consequences accrued, the episode clearly supported Moorman’s instinct to err on the side of caution.349

The tension between caution and education boiled over just in time for the Ninth Festival, scheduled just ten days before the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential election. Not only did

Moorman send out her call for participants with the usual note attached about caveats and conditions, she also personally warned artist-participants John Giorno and Les Levine not to

“express your conscience on the war.”350 So, objecting to what they saw as censorship at a time when speaking out was of paramount importance for many, they dropped out of the Festival.

347 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 228. The Charlotte Moorman Archive includes a full page of handwritten notes detailing props and expenses; in short, Moorman was well aware of Toche’s piece and what it would take to produce it. [Charlotte Moorman], Handwritten notes “Jean Toche,” Charlotte Moorman Archive, Box 6, Folder 36.

348 Correspondence Jean Toche to Mayor John Lindsay, September 24, 1968, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

349 Toche was angry enough to write a letter to the mayor detailing all of the damage done to floats— smashed lights, smashed sculptures—that were “attacked by neighborhood kids,” and requesting better neighborhood police protection for future Festivals (correspondence Toche to Lindsay, September 24, 1968). His words are eerily reminiscent of the way Glueck and Rosenbaum describe the destruction of Festival property by East Harlem youth during the Seventh Festival.

350 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 286.

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Toche and Hendricks followed suit, and then went one further. Not only did they refuse to participate in the Ninth Festival, they also documented their non-participation.351 “…[F]irst of all, stating ‘no nudity, no heavy politics’ created a chill on the potential of creativity,” Toche noted. “…We feel especially strongly about this at a time when there is more and more brutalization of all our freedoms by governments.”352 Though they didn’t want to stop the festival or ruin it for the other artists who chose to participate, they did want to make a statement.

A written statement, dated October 4, 1972:

We did not participate in the Ninth Avant Garde Festival held aboard the Alexander Hamilton South Street Seaport Museum, New York, because: (1) the principle of freedom of expression is basic to the very existence and survival of art. As artists we do not accept any form of censorship be it imposed by federal or local government, private enterprise, “well-meaning” citizens or from our own community; 2) to require permission to function as an artist forces the artist to be subject to an arbitrary will whether permission is granted or not and therefore equates censorship; 3) now, of all times, when civil liberties and human rights are being eroded and destroyed on all fronts in our society by the Nixon administration artists cannot afford to stick their heads in the sand or build sand castles on the beach. Each one of us as individuals can effect changes. Apathy is death. Refusal to face reality is suicide. Wake up!353

According to Hendricks, he and Toche sent out this statement in the form of a letter to a variety of people, including several of the Festival organizers. “One individual wrote back,” he said, and

351 It’s worth noting, however, that although Hendricks did not participate under his own name or that of the GAAG, he did help realize Yoko Ono’s “48 Reflections From Dawn to Night”—a piece consisting of mirrors embedded in crosses propped up in the bleachers of Shea Stadium waiting for the sun to hit them just so. Political convictions are one thing, but the relationships forged in art worlds die hard. Hendricks, interview with author.

352 Hendricks and Toche, “Oral History.”

353 Guerrilla Art Action Group, GAAG, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, 1969-1976: A Selection (New York: Printed Matter, c1978), [unpaginated: Number 36: October 31, 1972: press release—re the 9th N.Y. Annual Avant Garde Festival, South Street Seaport, NYC; refusal to be censored].

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though he never mentioned who, he explained that this man engaged in a prolonged correspondence that challenged all parties involved.354

The goal of Hendricks and Toche’s non-participation (and its documentation) was two- fold: first, that the public—their audience—would take what they had learned and turn it into political action. A kind of “social end” brought about through the hard “political” message of their original statement, in the terminology of the Source magazine editorial from July 1969.

Second, it allowed Toche and Hendricks and anyone else who chose to engage with these social justice-inclined artistic practices to justify their choice to be artists. “When we became the

Guerrilla Art Action Group, we stopped being theater. We decided we had to combine our art and our lives so we wouldn’t be a lie,” Toche explained.355

Their art and their lives were already inextricably bound up with the art world that produced the New York Avant Garde Festival. Whatever her faults as a political activist,

Moorman didn’t take offense at Toche and Hendricks’ statement and corresponding correspondence (though she didn’t change her policies on politics or nudity, either). By the 10th

Festival—just one year later—both men were back, this time with a performance of an action/information piece in support of Michael X, a Trinidadian poet and human rights activist who had been “condemned to death by his government to appease British interests.”356

Hendricks, Toche, Virginia Toche and Joanne Stamerra (members of the GAAG), and Margaret

Ratner (one of Michael X’s lawyers) distributed posters, collected donations, and spent time

354 Hendricks and Toche, “Oral History.”

355 Hendricks and Toche, “Oral History.”

356 Guerrilla Art Action Group, GAAG: A Selection, [unpaginated: “Number 39: December 9, 1973: description of an action at the10th N.Y. Annual Avant Garde Festival, Grand Central Sation, NYC— information piece in support of Black Trinidadian poet and human rights activist Michael X”].

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talking about the Michael X Defense Committee with festival attendees for eight hours in a box car at Grand Central Station right alongside the rest of the Ninth Festival events. Unabashedly political, and apparently appropriate for the New York Avant Garde Festival this time around.

There are very real ways, then, in which Moorman’s Festival did align with Toche and

Hendricks’s (not to mention Patterson’s, Ashley’s, Higgins’s, et al.) pressing concerns about how music, art, and politics should coexist and interact, about the relationship between artist and activist. Moorman’s goal to reach new people was not negligent; it came out of the same impulse as GAAG’s conversations with audience members and board members in their performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art. To effect change one discussion, one experience, one epiphany at a time: the politically-motivated experimentalists must have been aware of these opportunities and “social ends” afforded by the Festival’s quasi-institutional status. “We did not wish to ‘sink the Festival’ because, like you, we believe that—even though we felt a regretable

[sic] chilling effect to our Artistic Freedom and our Civil Rights as artists—the Festival is still one of the freest forums of expression in our otherwise repressive society,” Toche and Hendricks later admitted.357 This push and pull between unlimited care and an unthinking disregard— between the (often repressed but still substantial) possibility of the political, the politic need to be

“neutral,” and the quiet power of the social—was what frustrated participants like Toche and

Hendricks about the New York Avant Garde Festival, and simultaneously motivated them to return year after year.

357 Jud Yalkut, “Evolution of the New York Avant Garde Festival.”

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Component 7 The Museumification of the Avant-Garde

Charlotte Moorman chose Ward’s Island as the site of her Seventh Annual New York

Avant Garde Festival in part because it disrupted the museum or concert-hall setting within which audiences expected music and art to exist and thrive. She wanted festival-goers to understand their place in the art world—to cross the same boundaries that the artists crossed— and she believed this could not be done in the confines of traditional artistic spaces, with all that they represented.358 The Guerrilla Art Action Group—members of which were proud Festival participants until they weren’t before they were once more—was similarly invested in re- envisioning artists’ relationships with museums and institutions, via a slightly different tack;

Toche and Hendricks formed their Group in an explicit reaction to the unwillingness (or ignorance) of museums to divest from the donors, corporations, and institutions that made possible both art and war. And Fluxus championed the dissolution of any boundary between art and life—which, we can surmise, would include a boundary like a literal glass case. “I thought I made it clear that I was not enthusiastic about exhibits in galleries or institutions,” Maciunas wrote in one letter.359

This 1960s experimentalist aversion to museums as location and institution is well- documented in interviews, essays, and manifestos. Even so: in 2016, Northwestern University reached into its archives, contacted a bevy of scholars and artists to lend their expertise and materials, and put on a traveling museum exhibition titled “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte

Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s.” The exhibit opened at the Mary and Leigh Block

358 “I think if she could have got a museum, she would have used it,” Jon Hendricks told me (Hendricks, interview with author).

359 George Maciunas, “Letter,” in Fluxus etc. Addenda 1, ed. Jon Hendricks (New York: Ink &, 1983), 233.

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Museum at Northwestern (January-July, 2016), moved to the Grey Art Gallery at New York

University (September-December, 2016), and finally landed in Salzburg at the Museum der

Moderne (March-June, 2017). The Fourth Festival, the Seventh Festival, the Twelfth Festival, and every essentially-uncurated, open-spaced, disruptive New York Avant Garde Festival in between, before, and after are all well-represented.

As a Moorman scholar let loose in the impeccably curated, thoughtfully organized, media rich exhibit at its Block Museum showing, I can tell you: it was thrilling. In the moment, I didn’t worry about contradictory messages the exhibit might send, or whether and how it aligned with

Moorman’s goals. I was simply enthused about the variety of material culture on display in front of me and my good luck in being able to see the best of Moorman’s archive in one fell swoop.

As a Moorman-centric exhibit, the show consisted of a great deal beyond Festival-related materials. Just a taste: Her annotated score of Cage’s 26’1.1499” For String Player hung on the wall; a raised glass case housed pieces of violins sacrificed to performances of Nam June Paik’s

One For Violin Solo; three mangled evening dresses Moorman wore during her performances of

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece were carefully laid flat, affixed to canvas, and given pride of place in a small room in the very middle of the exhibit. (I listened to one of the curators, Corinne Granof, and an art history graduate student talking about the relative merits of this presentation— exquisitely beautiful, and at the same time easily construed as fetishization). The far left corridor—the last stage of the exhibit—displayed framed photographs of the Festivals taken by

Peter Moore and borrowed from Barbara Moore. Viewing stations offered headphones with which to listen to and watch film clips—Moorman on the Johnny Carson show, a home movie shot by a teenager of the Fifth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. But the curators also mounted multiple TV’s running distinct footage at full volume with nothing to stop the

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intermingled soundtracks from reaching the museum-goers in every corner of the room. The colors of the photographs and scores and artifacts, the flicker of the moving images across television screens, the buzz and clash of competing sounds and recordings: the experience coalesced into the tiniest bit of chaos (in spite of the order and remove promoted by glass and frame), and in that sense fit its subject matter.

This recent Block Museum exhibit participated in a long history of placing the material legacies of 1960s experimentalism (sometimes ephemeral, often performative, frequently conceptual) within the confines of museum walls. (There is less of a history of actually performing this same repertoire, but that’s another story.) Jeff Berner first showed his Fluxus-

Dada-avant-garde collection in an exhibit called “Aktual [sic] Art International” at the Stanford

Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1967.360 Since 1989, most of that collection can now be found at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Barbara and Peter Moore Fluxus

Collection found a home at Harvard University in 2005.361 And each of the three largest collections of Fluxus- and 1960s experimentalist-related art and ephemera are also affiliated with museums: the Hans Sohm Archive has been housed at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart since 1981; the

Jean Brown Archive was bought by the Getty Research Institute (attached to the Getty Museum) in Los Angeles in 1985; and the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection was donated to the

Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2008.

All of this is to say that avant-garde artifacts have been firmly embedded in a handful of permanent collections at major museums, and as Joan Rothfuss (curator at the Walker Art Center

360 Jeff Berner, “Jeff Berner,” [n.d.], accessed October 17, 2017, http://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Berner.html.

361 “HUAM acquires prominent Fluxus collection,” Harvard Gazette, July 21, 2005, accessed October 17, 2017, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2005/07/huam-acquires-prominent-fluxus-collection/.

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and a driving force behind the 1993 exhibit “In the Spirit of Fluxus”) told me, “typically when a museum gets a big collection of something, they want to present it.”362 Hence a string of recent exhibits at the MoMA drawing heavily from the Silverman Collection, including: “Fluxus

Preview” (2009-10), “Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962-1978” (2011-12), “Tokyo 1955-

1970: A New Avant-Garde” (2012-13), “There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s

4’33”” (2013-14), and “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971” (2015). So it seems as though Fluxus, the avant-garde, and experimentalism are all having a “moment” in the museums—in part because the museums have acquired major collections and are now making good on their investments. In part, Jon Hendricks believes, it’s because we’re right around the

50-year anniversary of this avant-garde’s heyday; it’s much the same timeline through which

Dada entered the museum, he pointed out.363 In part, Joan Rothfuss noted, these artists are getting older and beginning to think about questions of legacy and influence; museums are building on their permanent collections as artists give up (one way or another) their personal collections. Rothfuss also told me that interdisciplinarity is more frequently being written into museums’ mission for collections and programs.364 And, in addition to these more practical reasons Jon Hendricks continues, it is in part to do with the state of the world. “We have cyclical times,” he told me in an interview in August 2017, “and something’s urgently needed—and whether it’s this—I wouldn’t say that you’d repeat something, you can learn from it from it and

362 Rothfuss, interview with author.

363 Hendricks, interview with author.

364 Rothfuss, interview with author.

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see more directions, [more] ways of confronting really very serious crises and situations in the world and in our government.”365

Hendricks co-founded GAAG; he has long championed political art. What is surprising, however, is that Hendricks made this statement this from his vantage point as Consulting Curator of the MoMA’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection: the anti-museum artist-activist- youth has become the venerated authority on the museumification of the explicitly and implicitly anti-museum art works associated with 1960s experimentalism. His perspective on the irony of the museumification of the avant-garde, then, is very much a part of his day to day life. What should we make of this paradox? And—though I didn’t ask the question explicitly—how do we justify it? “If you look at a museum as having a responsibility to having to show to the public our cultural activities and what took place in a period, they should be showing [this art],” Hendricks began. He went on:

Then the irony is: well, it was intended to be torn or blown up or stepped on. You can do that, but then you don’t have that any more. So you have to use people’s imaginations. …But if it was worth doing in the first place, it’s worth saving and presenting and a museum is one way of doing that. There are other ways of doing that. …So, yeah, I think it should be shown in museums. We should know what went on. It wasn’t just Warhol and De Kooning and whoever the other big artists were at the time. It was all these other artists—like Dada. Dada wasn’t in the museums; it was against the museums. Or futurism—they went out of the museums and threw stuff out of airplanes and, you know, it was like embracing the whole world and reaching people. If you only wait for people to come into museums…however, people do come into museums, so it’s a pretty good place to catch them.366

Joan Rothfuss had a similar take:

I think it’s kind of inevitable—if you’re going to be making objects, for sure, and even now, if you’re making performances—that people are going to want to preserve them in some way or for history. And that just happened to be happening through museum

365 Hendricks, interview with author.

366 Hendricks, interview with author.

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collections. …[I]t’s a little bit against the spirit of the work, having encased and untouchable and white glove kinds of situations, but there isn’t really any other way to keep it from being lost. So we try to do our best to make it available for people to interact with in some way. …But I still think it’s not only inevitable but probably desirable for this kind of work to enter a museum context.367

In other words, in order for this art, these people, and this movement to live on—for its politics to resonate, for it to mean something beyond its own time—compromises must be made.

It’s a statement both obvious, and a little sad. At the same time, what Hendricks and Rothfuss make clear is that people are coming to see these exhibits; Moorman’s art world is having its moment. And if Hendricks is right that the act of learning about the avant-garde can stimulate new ideas and make us rethink approaches to our own political climate and events happening in the world today, then a photograph of Moorman and her cello in a hot-air balloon hovering high over Ward’s Island—an island with history, an island with political ramifications—is no longer as uncomplicated, as idyllic, or as neutral as it might initially seem.

367 Rothfuss, interview with author.

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ASSEMBLAGE: Cello archive • festival • genre • gender • instrument • Moorman • technology • witchcraft

Balloon Ascension: Cello

Component 1: The Many Cellos of Charlotte Moorman Charlotte Moorman played the classical cello, the ice cello, and the chocolate cello. She played the cello in concert halls, on trains, and held aloft by helium balloons. I theorize the relationship between Moorman and her instrument by drawing on U.S.-American witchcraft discourse and positioning the cello as her familiar, the source of her “powers.” instrument • Moorman • witchcraft

Component 2: On Trial: Gendered Understandings of Moorman and Her Music In 1967, Moorman was arrested and convicted of indecency for her topless performance of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique. Judge Milton Shalleck opened the trial about public decency (about Moorman’s body in a public space) with a discussion about genre—a pairing that I argue is best understood by examining the outbreaks of witchcraft trials that took place in New England in the mid-seventeenth century. gender • genre • instrument • Moorman • witchcraft

Component 3: The Avant-Garde as Music? As the New York Avant Garde Festival found its footing, the critics of major New York newspapers wrestled with genre, labels, and definitions. Over the course of the first four Festivals (1963-1967), reporters gradually adjusted their language from forced application of classical-music and music-theoretical terminology, to something less constrained by tradition; the perceived value of the uncategorizable music-art-events featured at the Festivals was reframed accordingly. archive • festival • genre • instrument • Moorman

Component 4: Notations (1969) The experimental art world also wrestled with whether and how to self-define. John Cage’s Notations (1969) is a commentary on the contemporary and future relationships of experimental music to technology—but it also served as an insider lookbook that simultaneously exposed the gender and race disparities embedded within the art world’s creation of itself. archive • gender • genre • technology

Component 5: The Death of the Musical Avant-Garde If the New York Avant Garde Festival was less than a critical darling in its early years, it’s also true that it fared little better in 1980, its fifteenth and final iteration. It wasn’t that the Festival had somehow lost its charm as time went on, because according to the newspaper reviews from earlier years, it had very little charm to lose in the first place. A little over halfway into its

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fifteen-year tenure, however, the popular criticism began to take a particular turn: the New York Avant Garde Festival, critics informed readers, was not avant-garde at all. In focusing on the little-studied later Festivals, I show how the critical obsession with language and terminology of the first four years never truly receded; by the Tenth Festival, it had been reconstituted under another guise. festival • genre • technology

Component 6: The Rebirth of Charlotte Moorman From critically-acclaimed museum exhibits to performative recreations, the musical avant- garde has recently experienced a rebirth, and perhaps no part of it more dramatically than the reputation and legacy of Charlotte Moorman. Put on trial literally, and then again metaphorically by second-wave feminist activists, colleagues, and art historians, Moorman all but disappeared from the narrative of the 1960s avant-garde. As of the 2010s, however, Moorman is being reclaimed as an important figure in that history. Her historiography parallels the historiographical rehabilitation of witches by feminist scholars and in popular culture. archive • gender • genre • instrument • Moorman • technology • witchcraft

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Balloon Ascension: Cello

Fig. 4: [Jorge Castaneda Leon], “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois.

October 5, 1969: the last day of the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival’s first week.368 Charlotte Moorman had tried to perform her pièce de resistance, Balloon Ascension by Yukihisa Isobe, each day leading up to that last Sunday—but something always went wrong: the sky threatened rain, or the photographers decamped, or the audience turned out too sparsely

368 For more on the challenges of dating the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, see Introduction, fn. 4.

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to warrant the elaborate preparations necessary to realize the piece. It was already high afternoon when Moorman removed her cello from its case and held it in one hand as she was helped into the basket of a hot air balloon. She settled herself, positioned her cello between her knees, nodded to the balloonist and the composer (both of whom were in the basket with her), and finally began to play as the patriotically striped hot air balloon rose into the sky over Festival grounds.

What would it have sounded like, that performance enacted from the basket of a balloon?

According to Joan Rothfuss in her biography of Moorman, the crux of the composition was the ascent itself; sound was incidental.369 In my reading of the piece, however, the act of listening is crucial (regardless of the sounds that were or were not produced). Perhaps Moorman chose to play a Bach prelude as she hovered in the air; perhaps she merely mimed bowing her instrument.

I imagine individual audience members below straining to hear “recognizable cello music” over the sounds of the wind and the crowd: Was that it? Did you hear it? For some, Balloon Ascension activated the auditory imagination, and the cello as a stand-in for the musical establishment framed responses to the piece that largely defied categorization, and to the avant-garde art world that enabled this and similar works. As I argue over the course of this Assemblage, however, the cello (a material object representing the Western classical tradition) also framed responses to

Moorman as a woman, and as a female musician. I show how issues of gender and genre are tied to Moorman’s reception, and how using witchcraft discourse as a lens through which to view this gendered, genred reception can provide insight into stakes for both insiders and outsiders as they allowed (or denied) Moorman entry into histories and historiographies of the avant-garde.

369 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 249.

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Component 1 The Many Cellos of Charlotte Moorman

In order to theorize the relationship between Moorman and her instrument, I begin by exploring what it could mean to position Moorman’s cello as her witch’s familiar—an entity grounded in the seventeenth-century historical imagination. To be clear, I am not arguing that

Moorman was a “witch” or that she ever thought of herself as one. Nonetheless, the metaphor foregrounds the give-and-take of Moorman’s relationship with her instrument—an alliance that defined her personally and professionally. For very situation in which her close association with the cello allowed it to act as a tool of agency, another arose in which it conjured conditions of objectification and instrumentalization. Furthermore, studying Moorman’s career more broadly through the lens of U.S.-American witchcraft discourse—a concept I will unpack throughout the

Assemblage—places her within a long lineage of mostly women who were literally put on trial by their extended communities for their perceived transgressions, often consisting of a refusal to conform to gender norms or abide by the script of standard narratives.370 Moorman’s subversion of the classical genre that is, in some sense, the cello’s inheritance—and her insistence on flaunting her physical and cultural femininity all the while—often put her on the wrong side of polite society, frequently put her on the wrong side of the musical establishment, and occasionally put her on the wrong side of the law. Witchcraft discourse as a lens productively brings together a nexus of themes including genre, gender, and the human and non-human actors that enact the norms and exclusions of the social (and, in this case, musical) imaginary.

370 For another study that uses witchcraft discourse as a lens through which to understand contemporary society, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers 2nd ed. (New York City: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, [1973] c2010).

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Moorman’s inescapable association with the cello began early in her life. Madeline

Charlotte Moorman was born on November 18, 1933—the only child of a young couple living in

Little Rock, Arkansas. By the age of 10, Moorman had discovered the instrument that would become the defining feature of her life and work: the cello. Childhood lessons from neighborhood teachers blossomed into a music major at Centenary College in Shreveport,

Louisiana (1955). She bought her professional instrument in 1956, pinning her hopes for a concert career on an eighteenth-century cello advertised as a pedigreed Lockey Hill, a celebrated

British instrument maker.371 In 1957, she earned a master’s degree from the University of Texas before moving to New York for a year of post-graduate study at the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Leonard Rose, a major cello virtuoso of his generation. She was able to secure employment with several prestigious New York-based classical ensembles, including the

Boccherini Players (1958–63) and Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (1957–

1967), as well as freelance work for churches, recitals, recordings and private functions.372 In other words, Moorman had a solid pedigree in classical music.

The years 1961–1963 marked a turning point in Moorman’s career. Her signature piece at the time was Kabalevsky’s Cello Concerto, a standard in the cello literature, and she often traveled to play as soloist with regional orchestras in the New York area. “While I was playing

371 After Moorman’s death, Andrew Gurian and Barbara Moore learned that although Moorman had bought an English instrument made in the late eighteenth century, its provenance had likely been deliberately falsified to increase its value. Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 383-84.

372 For her first few years in New York, Moorman supplemented her income with a part-time day job at a telephone answering service (see Gisela Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication: The American Avant- Garde Cellist Charlotte Moorman,” in Cello Anthology, ed. Gabriele Bonomo [Milan: Alga Marghen, 2006], [unpaginated].) Presumably she quit that job as she gained name-recognition within the contemporary music world; by the time she was brought to trial in 1967, Judge Shalleck made sure to point out that the cellist “has been on the unemployment payroll” despite numerous performance engagements and TV appearances (see Charlotte Moorman, “An Artist in the Courtroom (People vs. Moorman),” in Cello Anthology, [unpaginated]).

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that solo, I was wondering in my mind: had I turned the gas off in my apartment in New York?” she reminisced in Fred Stern’s 1980 video retrospective. “And I realized, my God, if my mind can wander like this while I’m playing a solo…, can you imagine what the audience [is thinking]? So I started looking for contemporary music.”373 Her introduction to the downtown music scene was as convoluted and star-studded as one could possibly hope: a Juilliard classmate, Kenji Kobayashi, brought her to hear his performance of works by Japanese experimentalist Toshi Ichiyanagi at the home of Ichiyanagi’s then-wife, Yoko Ono.374 One- divorce-each later, Ono and Moorman moved into a West End Avenue apartment as roommates and the die was cast: Moorman was swept up in the avant-garde scene—one night she could be found performing Ono’s “Cut Piece,” the next playing in a concert featuring the music of La

Monte Young. This was Moorman’s turn to experimentalism; it wasn’t long before she quit performing with classical ensembles in order to devote herself fully to the avant-garde.

In this new world, Moorman’s cello didn’t always take the form of a wooden body with strings and a horsehair bow. In fact, it is fair to say the nature of her cello was in constant flux.

Over the course of Moorman’s career, she played a Bomb Cello, an Ice Cello, a TV Cello, a

Chocolate Cello, and a Human Cello. She played the cello underwater, in the air, on a train, in a bag, topless, and lying down. She collected an apartment’s worth of figurines holding cellos, posters displaying cellos, ephemera featuring cellos. She created cello art out of plastic, syringes, neon, and military practice bombs.375

373 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 144.

374 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 48.

375 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 352.

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For the reporters, audiences, and even lawyers trying to make sense of the art Moorman created, the genre-defying nature of her performances was mitigated by the comfortable recognition of her schooling; Moorman was rarely identified without a mention of her “classical” instrument close behind. In the early years of the Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, reporters routinely referred to Moorman’s training as a classical musician: “cellist Charlotte

Moorman,” they introduced her, or “Charlotte Moorman, a cellist,” or, occasionally, “a lovely cellist (Charlotte Moorman).”376 This last conflation of Moorman’s appearance and her vocation—the gendering of Moorman’s body (and the music it made)—was anything but unusual for a female professional cellist in the 1960s. Adrian Curtin draws on George

Kennaway’s Playing the Cello, 1780-1930 to argue that the contemporary fascination with cellist

Jacqueline du Pré—and the language used to describe her in the press—was also a result of her sex.377 In Kennaway’s history, the introduction of the endpin—a support structure other than human legs—in the late 19th century reconfigured traditionally “masculine” associations with the cello and paved the way for the social acceptance of women cellists. In the process, the instrument became “a sexually charged emotional vehicle.”378 Moorman, as usual, upped the ante: in 1967, she was infamously brought to court after the police interrupted her performance of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique, in which she played the cello naked from the waist up.

376 William Bender, “A Composition That Lasts All Night,” The New York Herald Tribune, September 8, 1963; “Cellist, Charlotte Moorman and Paik…,” The Village Voice, August 27, 1964; Alan Rich, “Stockhausen’s Originale,” The New York Herald Tribune, September 9, 1964.

377 Adrian Curtin, “‘O body swayed to music’: The allure of Jacqueline du Pré as spectacle and drama,” Studies in Musical Theatre 9, no. 2 (2015): 151.

378 George Kennaway, Playing the Cello, 1780-1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 185, 200.

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Reporters seized once more on the intersection of gender and the classical music industry: “The

Topless Cellist,” headlines blared.379

Given that Moorman was rarely identified without her cello(s) despite (or, perhaps, because of) the repertoire she championed, more than one scholar has attempted to theorize the relationship between this particular cellist and her instrument. In her article “Bomb-Paper-Ice:

Charlotte Moorman and the Metaphysics of Extension,” Kathy O’Dell carefully navigates the distinctions between the argument that Moorman “came to understand her cello as an extension of her body,” and the argument that Moorman’s cello was “an entity with which she ‘became one’.”380 In “Indecent and Uncanny: The Case Against Charlotte Moorman,” Sophie Landres explores Moorman’s “transhuman identification with her cello.”381 In the context of Moorman’s biography, Rothfuss understands the cello as Moorman’s “alterego.”382 Each of these readings frames Moorman as subject or object, an exercise as bound up in understanding Moorman’s status as a woman in the art world as in grasping the human-instrument relationship itself. What none of these lenses account for, however, are the methods by which Moorman drew power to live her everyday life from her instrument. None of these metaphors account for the way in which Moorman became beholden to her own image as “The Topless Cellist”—her relationship

379 In the next Component, I will explore gendered understandings of Moorman and her music.

380 Kathy O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice: Charlotte Moorman and the Metaphysics of Extension,” in Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 153. Adrian Curtin points out that a 1967 review of a du Pré preformance by chief music critic of the New York Times Harold Schonberg “made reference to ‘a set of gestures and physical movements that all [but] merged her body with the cello.’” (See Curtin, “O body swayed to music,” 152.) This is instrumentalization of the female body in a quite literal form.

381 Sophie Landres, “Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman’s Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2017).

382 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 352.

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with her cello exacted a price paid out of her reputation and legacy. None of these metaphors foreground the fact that the cello itself takes different physical forms, and although all these metaphors attempt to clarify the often unspoken role of gender in shaping Moorman’s career, they do not go so far as to acknowledge that Moorman’s literal and metaphorical trials resulted from the dissonant juxtaposition of her femininity, her musical instrument, and the relationship of both to the classical music establishment. By introducing the lens of witchcraft lore and history to the discourse, I show how Moorman’s instrument—in all its many, changing guises— provided her with a source of power from which she could draw not only during performances, but also in her daily life. The examples that follow are not an exhaustive catalog of Moorman’s cellos or her career. Nonetheless, they illustrate how Moorman’s relationship with what I am calling her “instrument-familiar” can situate her actions and motivations as a female performer, artist, colleague, and friend. With her cello-familiar at her side, Moorman performed art, shaped her image, and advanced her own and her colleagues’ goals.

My use of the “familiar” metaphor requires a short excursus into witchcraft history in the

United States. A familiar was, in shape, an animal—usually small and domestic: a cat or a dog, for example. Each day, the witch would ceremoniously feed her familiar from her “witch’s teat”—a mark or physical protuberance made by the Devil to seal their pact, most often located on or near a breast or the vagina.383 In return, the familiar would perform acts of magic on command (usually curses).384 Given that these familiars were themselves supernatural beings, their physical shape was mutable. Furthermore, using the powers granted to her by the Devil, a

383 Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, c1987), 12; Larry Gragg, The Salem Witch Crisis (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1992), 5.

384 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 8.

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witch could change the appearance of her familiar—or herself, or her neighbors, for that matter.385 The inviolability of daily feedings, however, provided the opportunity for accusers to prove a woman was a witch by engaging in a “watching,” secretly tracking the comings and goings of an animal to a suspected witch’s house.386

Carol F. Karlsen begins her study of the witchcraft fever that hit New England in the mid-seventeenth century by arguing that the specifics of witchcraft were made manifest out of the deeply-held collective imagination: “[T]he identification of a witch was a process of social consensus that reached beyond the leveling of a charge—that required enough community support to warrant a bill of indictment….”387 By the 1640s, the domestic familiar had been socially constituted in New England. In the sixteenth century, Margaret Alice Murray reports, domestic familiars were theoretically recognized both in Scotland and across the British Isles, but nearly all extant records mentioning the familiar come from the east of England.388 “The

Domestic Familiar came into such prominence during the trials of the Essex witches in 1645-46, owing to the sensational records of the two witch-finders, Matthew Hopkins and Jon Stearne, that is has ever since been regarded, though erroneously, as an essential part of the outfit of a witch.”389 In the New World a century later, the domestic familiar was an expected instrument in any accused witch’s toolbox, and was frequently used as evidence against her in trials.

385 Margaret Alice Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Faber and Faber Limited, [1931] 1952), 84; Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 8.

386 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 8.

387 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 66.

388 Murray, The God of Witches, 83-84.

389 Murray, The God of Witches, 87.

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Set aside for a moment the rather disturbing act of feeding (which will return in the next

Component via a discussion of the way Moorman’s relationship with her cello “fed” on her reputation), and focus on the magic. In the seventeenth century, that magic would have been inherently, inalterably malefic, indicative of a witch’s relationship to evil forces. At the root of this historical belief, however, is the equation of “magic” with “powers.” My claim is that the

(neutral-value) “powers” of Moorman’s familiar manifested in three ways: she used her non- conventional cellos to advance her career by strategically marshaling shock and spectacle; the realization of avant-garde pieces written specifically for Moorman and her cello encouraged her to face and overcome everyday fears (heights, water), and ultimately to self-fashion as a fearless crusader for the arts; and her cello sculptures served as visual, soundless indices of Moorman herself that also could be sold for monetary gain.

First, it is not hyperbolic to say that Moorman’s non-conventional cellos—her familiar in changed appearance—made her career. Playing off the expectations of genre—of what a classical cellist “is,” does, and sounds like—her avant-garde cellos gave her the power to advance not only her own agenda, but the agendas of her friends and colleagues through the twin pillars of exposure and education. When Moorman performed composer and graphic artist Jim

McWilliams’s Candy, Or the Ultimate Easter Bunny in which the cellist covered herself and her instrument in thirty pounds of melted dark chocolate and shredded coconut, she counted on the novelty (even shock value) in relation to the standard narrative of classical music in order to generate publicity. It worked: preview and review articles of her 1973 performance were written up in newspapers around the globe, from the United States to Germany. Moorman premiered another McWilliams concept, Ice Music—in which she appeared onstage naked and played a cello made out of ice until it melted—at the 1972 International Carnival of Experimental Sounds

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in London, England, and later went on to perform the piece in the United States, Australia, and

Germany. Again, the allure of the new and experimental—dashed through with Moorman’s signature spectacle and unconventional cellos—attracted audiences all over the world. In

Moorman’s view, this kind of exposure was good not only for her own career or that of her friends, but for dissemination and normalization of the larger avant-garde art world.390

Moorman’s “classical” cellos—in form, if not in deployment—afforded her another kind of power: they created a feedback loop in which her cello-grounded performances shaped her character—assertive, fearless, willing to put her credibility and her body on the line for her art— both on- and off-stage, and her character dictated the kinds of “pieces” (both on- and off-stage) she was most drawn to perform. To put this feedback loop in concrete terms, take once more the example of Balloon Ascension, Isobe’s composition for hot air balloon and cellist executed at the

Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. Next, consider two of Moorman’s best-known repertoire pieces by McWilliams, Sky Kiss (in which she played the cello while held aloft by forty helium balloons) and Flying Cello (a piece in which her cello was tied to one side of a swinging trapeze and Moorman to the other, with the dim but ever-present hope of meeting in the middle somewhere along the way for a glorious sound-event). Then note that Moorman was afraid of heights.391

Moorman frequently used her cello as a shield against her fears. Though she couldn’t swim, but she played a few measures of “The Swan” before climbing a ladder to immerse herself in a giant tub of water (or, once, the Grand Canal in Venice) for Paik’s Variations on a Theme by

Saint-Saens. Addressing the same fear, she played her cello underwater in a deep sea diving

390 For more, see “Assemblage: Festival.”

391 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 337.

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outfit in McWilliams’s The Intravenous Feeding of Charlotte Moorman. The fact that she consistently faced her fears through her cello performances—that in projecting herself as fearless, she became fearless—meant that Moorman discovered she could overcome any fear (or least present herself that way) through performance. “She is terrified of everything in life,” her husband and business manager Frank Pileggi told Gisela Gronemeyer. “But if you tell her it’s a performance, then she’ll do anything.”392 Every performance—each inextricably linked to

Moorman’s background as a cellist, and her association with the cello—was an opportunity to present herself as the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music” that Edgard Varèse dubbed her as early as

1964, and such a crusade brooked no weaknesses.393

In 1990, Moorman was given the opportunity to produce a gallery show at the Emily

Harvey Gallery, a “retrospective exhibition of her career.”394 The cellos displayed at the show illustrate a third set of “powers” Moorman derived from her relationship with her instrument: monetary compensation, the ability to live by her art. The gallery show was called “Charlotte

Moorman: Child of the Cello,” and it took place on February 24. Encouraged by Harvey and

Paik, Moorman created a series of static, sculptural artworks in the shape of her instrument familiar that were not designed to make sound or feature in performance. Neon Cello took the form of a stylized cello shaped from black Plexiglass outlined with neon tubing. Cello with Child consisted of “a violin encased in a cello-shaped box of clear Plexiglas that she showed next to a photograph of herself as a chubby, smiling toddler.”395 These sculptures were first and foremost

392 Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”

393 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 106.

394 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 352.

395 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 352.

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created to be sold in the service of covering her always-mounting bills spanning daily living expenses, Festival expenses, medical expenses, and even expenses for the upkeep of her growing archive.396

Moorman’s sculptures also, not incidentally, may be interpreted as physical representations of Moorman, her life’s work (in the form of a cello), and the illness she battled for more than a decade: in 1979, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, though she never stopped performing until her death in 1991. According to Rothfuss, Syringe Cello should be read as

“essentially a self-portrait that marries her past, her present, her body, and her disease….”397 The base of Syringe Cello is “cello-shaped sheets of Flexiglas onto which Moorman glued syringes that had been used to administer morphine to ease her cancer-induced pain in the final years of her life.”398 The syringes indexed her body and her pain; the sculptural nature of this art attested to Moorman’s refusal to adhere to generic categorization; and even the gallery setting implied the distance she had traveled in achieving legitimacy (an almost-contradictory goal with respect the avant-garde art world’s modus operandi, but one which Moorman spent her career trying to attain nonetheless). When Moorman was given the opportunity to populate and curate a

“retrospective exhibition” with her own art, she chose to highlight the cello—even when the sculptural form did little to showcase its traditional attributes of sound, resonance, or timbre. Her familiar instrument—the cello—in this changed form not only lent itself to art-as-commodity, it also served as an avatar for Moorman and her art.

396 In practice, the “upkeep of her archive” translated to “money for rent”: Moorman’s archive lived with her until the end of her life, at which point it was transferred to Barbara Moore’s apartment before finding a home at Northwestern University.

397 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 352.

398 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 159.

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All these cellos, in all their many forms, with all their purposes, at all stages of her career, are also illustrative of Moorman’s—and the larger avant-garde’s—urge to blur the lines between her life and the art she created. The notion of the cello as Moorman’s familiar proves the point:

Moorman was empowered by her relationship with her instrument, and she was able to draw on that power both within and outside of performance settings. She serves as an avant-garde exemplar for the audiences she wished to educate. When a cello can be played underwater, when a cello can be made of chocolate, when a carton of leftover syringes used to administer morphine to treat a fatal cancer can become a cello: then how can a cello—a physical stand-in for the power of the arts—not be a part of our collective everyday concerns? How can our reading of the cello not resonate with the way we live our lives? Anything can become our instrument of choice.

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Component 2 On Trial: Gendered Understandings of Moorman and Her Music

If Moorman’s cello-familiar was a source of power, it was a volatile one and it exacted a price for its services. According to the seventeenth-century imagination of witchcraft described above, domestic familiars fed from the body of their masters—and not just any part of the body, but from a teat usually located near the breasts or vagina, areas of erotic pleasure and Puritan fear. Should we wonder, then, when Moorman exposed her breasts in the course of a cello performance titled Opera Sextronique and was promptly put on trial for indecent exposure?

Legally speaking, the opinion in Moorman’s case, which was issued by Judge Milton Shalleck in

May of 1967, argues that Moorman “‘did perform an act in which she did willfully and lewdly expose her private parts in a theatre where others were present’” allegedly in violation of section

1140 of the Penal Law, and at the same time committed a “violation of section 43 of the P.K. [by an] ‘act which openly outrages public decency.’”399 The accusations leveled against Moorman were prompted by more than the simple fact of her exposed breasts. I argue that Shalleck’s

“outrage” was rooted in the perception that the coalition of Moorman’s female body and her cello familiar challenged the canonical vision—the inheritance, as I will call it—of “music.”

People & C. v. CHARLOTTE MOORMAN, ostensibly about public decency, centered around the judge reconciling entrenched notions of genre with the performance under scrutiny.

Examination of the defendant took place on April 19, 1967. Charlotte Moorman entered the courtroom—her dress perfectly creased, her hair perfectly coiffed—and took her place in the

399 Judge Milton Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE,” New York Law Journal, Thursday, May 11, 1967.

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witness box. “The people of the State of New York on the complaint of Officer Michael

Mandillo against Charlotte Moorman, defendant,” intoned the bailiff.

The circumstances of the trial revolved around a performance of Nam June Paik’s Opera

Sextronique in which Moorman played the cello first in a bikini outfitted with six-volt light bulbs that could be manipulated remotely, and later nude from the waist up. Although the performance was meant to have been by invitation only, a number of plainclothes policemen had infiltrated the audience. Both Moorman and Paik were arrested and separately charged.

Back to the April 19 and Moorman’s testimony in her own defense. “Name,” requested

Judge Shalleck.

“Charlotte Moorman.”

“Your business or occupation.”

“I am a mixed media artist.”

Pause.

“What is it?”

“I am a mixed media artist, emphasizing the cello, primarily, the cello.”

“You are a mixed media artist emphasizing the cello,” the judge repeated. “I must confess at this stage I really don’t know what you mean by a mixed media artist.”400

In Judge Shalleck’s defense: neither, it seems, did anyone else. As one might imagine, the press reveled in this unexpected confluence of music and sex: major newspapers printed full page articles complete with grainy photos of Moorman being led away in handcuffs, a man’s

400 Court Reporter’s Minutes, People of the State of New York v. Charlotte Moorman, February 27,1967, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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oversize coat draped over her shoulders.401 Across the country, reporters united in depicting the event as eccentric and describing every last detail down to the position of the light bulbs on the bikini she wore in the first movement. They diverged, however, in their conceptualization of just what exactly the event was. An AP article in New York’s Watertown Daily Times noted that

“[t]he performance at a Times Square area theater last night was billed as a cello recital;”402 the

LA Times informed its readers that “Miss Moorman’s rather specialized art involves ultramodern mixed media…”;403 and according to the New York Times “[t]he defendant…was found guilty of performing a lewd act on Feb. 9 in a one-woman show….”404 Was Moorman’s performance music, art, theater, or some combination of the above? It was, as we will see in Component 3, the same question about this outsider art world that plagued reporters covering Moorman’s New

York Avant Garde Festival.

The fact that Shalleck opened the trial about public decency (about Moorman’s body in a public space) with a discussion about genre and labels is significant. Consider this: Paik, too, was arrested and put on trial. He was released because, the judge argued, “a musical composition

401 David Bourdon, “A Letter to Charlotte Moorman,” Art in America 88, no. 6 (Jun 2000): 83.

402 “Topless Cellist Arrested,” Watertown Daily Times, February 18, 1967.

403 Martin Bernheimer, “The Case of the Topless Cellist,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1968.

404 Jack Roth, “Topless Cellist is Here Convicted,” New York Times, May 10, 1967.

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could not be pornographic.”405 Moorman, as a woman and a mixed media artist, did not receive that benefit of the doubt.406

Shalleck’s opinion, published in The New York Law Review, is begun in the style of

Tristram Shandy, as he himself notes at the beginning of the piece.407 It makes for memorable, if misogynistic, prose:

Among the more wondrous of God’s many physical creations is that of the human female breast. Both utilitarian and functional, they serve, at least, as a source for the lacteal nourishment of tender new-born children—a most basic part of life. In the mind of many the breasts are not less important for their attractiveness, sexually, in arousing libido in the human male…. But in no poem, in no prose respected by the test of time have I read, in no valued oil, in no statue or bust accepted for its imagery, technique and beauty as art, have I seen, either visually described or portrayed, a picture of a nude or “topless” cellist in the act of playing that instrument—or, for that matter, a similar description or portrayal of a “topless” waitress with breast pendant over a plate of hot soup or cup of steaming coffee! I wonder if anyone has. Perhaps, then, the breast in these latter milieu is not artful.408

“Milieu” may be replaced by “genre” as Shalleck elaborated his objections.

Was it a tableau? If it were musical, there is little to convince that the extraneous non- dress helped the performance. Jacqueline DuPre, as a young cellist, needs no such

405 Laura Wertheim Joseph, “Messy Bodies and Frilly Valentines: Charlotte Moorman’s Opera Sextronique,” in Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 51.

406 The history of U.S. American witchcraft discourse as it intersects with issues of race is still undertheorized. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Moorman benefitted from her identity position as a young, white, seemingly middle class artist.

407 “If I were Mr. Sterne’s Shandy, I might write this entire opinion and decision in this vein and style,” Shalleck writes. Later he retracts his stylistic influence and returns to his reliance on “the legal concepts which constrain my decision” (though, truthfully, the prose is not so very different before and after the stated break): “But I cannot write in that vein and style, for I am no Mr. Sterne… Nor can I poke fun at either, for Shandy and the defendant, like Benvenuto Cellini, are each too grand in his-and-herself to be satirized.” Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

408 Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

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accoutrement these days to be acclaimed for her musical ability. I doubt if Pablo Casals would have become as great if he had performed nude from the waist down….409

Shalleck’s opinion in its entirety is sexist, homophobic, racist; it is the work of a man in power fighting for the status quo. Much of the why behind his decisions—including, I argue, his fixation on genre—resonates with the why behind the outbreaks of witchcraft trials that took place in New England in the mid-seventeenth century.

There is, first, the question of who was most likely to be put on trial for witchcraft.

Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Women, Church, and State (1890) claims the distinction of being the first book to highlight the simple fact that women were most likely to be accused and convicted of witchcraft.410 Nearly one hundred years later, Carol F. Karlsen’s The Devil in the

Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987) followed suit. Karlsen combed through trial documents from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England to find patterns: though any individual accused as a witch may have been a man, a woman, rich, poor, married, or single, the majority of accusations that resulted in a trial were brought against single women who were “moderately poor.”411 In other words, these were women without the networks or resources to escape or otherwise deflect the accusation. This is also, not coincidentally, an accurate

409 Shalleck goes on to answer this own question: “If it were 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. We are, therefore, left in the proverbial dark.” Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

410 Matilda Joslyn Gage, Women, Church, and State: The Status of Women Through the Christian Ages: With Reminscences of the Matriarchate 2nd Ed. (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1893, [1890]), 217-294.

411 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 77.

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description of Moorman, who at the time was divorced and who at all times was strapped for cash. Furthermore, as a newer player on the avant-garde scene that was itself an outsider to the mainstream capital-A Art World, Moorman was afforded none of the protections that patrons or institutions could offer.

In addition to these demographic attributes, Karlsen argues that women accused of witchcraft often had two other qualities in common. First, their character: witches were “almost always described as deviants—disorderly women who failed to, or refused to, abide by the behavioral norms of their society.”412 Whether that manifested as perceived aggression, ill- temper, female pride or any number of other “disagreeable” personality traits, the point was not so much the trait itself but the way it could be used as evidence of “women’s refusal to accept their ‘place’ in New England’s social order,” as Karlsen succinctly notes.413 Moorman was famously unwilling to let propriety get in the way of her end goal—performing a piece, producing a festival, ensuring the legacy of the avant-garde.414

The seventeenth-century social order was more than neighborly politesse, however. At its core, the social order was shorthand for the success of the patriarchy, and to defy it was to challenge what Karlsen calls “gender arrangements.”415 The reasoning snowballed from there: to question gender arrangements was to imply “that these women were dissatisfied with—indeed had no respect for—their society’s rules governing sexual behavior.”416 Hence the importance

412 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman,118.

413 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 119.

414 See “Assemblage: Festival.”

415 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 119.

416 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 137.

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attributed to the strategically placed teats from which familiars took their bloody meals, the notion that witches were seducers of men and women alike, and the belief that witches gave birth to demons instead of children. Shalleck played into these stereotypes when, quoted above, he noted that breasts are for breastfeeding—“a most basic part of life”—and then proceeded to detail all the ways Moorman used her breasts incorrectly. The problem, however, was that in the early years of colonial settlement in New England, “society’s rules governing sexual behavior” were less than defined. By the time a rash of witch accusations broke out in the 1640s,

Massachusetts magistrates were creating public policy about sexual mores and enforcing newly written rules and codes.417 It was, in fact, not so unlike Judge Shalleck’s position in the late

1960s, (un)comfortably situated in what would become known as the sexual revolution. “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,” Shalleck wrote. “But…[t]he defendant knew what she was doing, anticipating full well the results of her acts. I doubt, however, that she expected the law to pounce upon her in satisfaction. …The court can do nothing about that, for it has sworn to judge impartially without that kind of emotion which would sway it to decision not supported by the facts and the law as it is now.”418 The conflation of Moorman’s “weakness to ill-considered influences” and her knowing participation in so-called obscenity mirrors the seventeenth century concern that a witch’s individual powers could hurt—or, worse: seduce— others and corrode a general social order. For Moorman—in all of her assertive disagreeability— to perform a piece topless was to align the visual appearance of her staged body with deviant behavior.

417 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 194-197.

418 Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

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The other recurring situation Karlsen found in her patterning of witchcraft accusations also turned on the defiance of an established social order. “However varied their backgrounds and economic positions,” she argues, “as women without brothers or women without sons,

[accused witches] stood in the way of the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to another.”419 In other words, these women stood to disrupt the traditions of inheritance. And this is where Moorman’s cello—her familiar—and the spectre of genre come into play again. Already established as a deviant by virtue of her exposed breasts and assertive demeanor, Moorman further disrupted the social order by playing avant-garde music on a cello after attending a conservatory no less vaunted than Juilliard. In other words, she corrupted her cultural inheritance (already complicated by the fact of her female body in a male lineage of composers and performers) connoted by her claim on a musical instrument.

Shalleck returned to this idea of “cultural inheritance” again and again over the course of his opinion. “The question,” he asked, “is whether such an ‘event’ or ‘happening,’ if at all offensive, should offend, cacophonously, more than the eyes, ear and nose. Can it stand community tolerance if it goes beyond that and offends community life, thinking, and laws? …The community considers it a misguided uprising. Most feel that this sort of activity is mocking people and their way of life.”420 Moorman, as an individual and a representative of the avant-garde, defied the social order through the subversion of a classical inheritance—identified here by the display of her female body onstage in the service of this new and cacophonous anti- genre. “No one should conclude that I mean hereby to stifle the advancement of the arts,”

Shalleck hurried to affirm in his climactic paragraph.

419 Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 116.

420 Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

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Quite the contrary, there should be experimentation. There should be new ways of self- expression. There should be a means for all to contribute to a richer and more rewarding world of art. What this decision does, I believe, is to steer the artist down the same path of endeavor but with the debris removed from the newly-constructed vehicle because there is presently a legal stop sign in the way. That stop sign says that lewdness is not permitted on the road. Only the approbation of those who make up our common standards can change that stop sign to the go ahead signal of an artistic green light.421

Genre, then, was not an incidental tangent in Moorman’s trial; it was the crucial component that linked together so many of the challenges to the 1960s status quo—to art, to gender arrangements, and to the rules governing each of these and their relationship to one other.

“What is done, worn, and accepted depends in good measure, on the desires, likes and wants of the community as a whole….If our wishes change, so will the laws,” Shalleck wrote midway through his legal opinion. He neglected to mention that this is exactly how witchcraft trials winked in and out of existence so many centuries earlier, but Karlsen’s insistence that “the identification of a witch was a process of social consensus” nonetheless remains germane to

Moorman’s trial.

Moorman’s trial experience resulted in lasting consequences. After all, even accused witches who were exonerated of practicing dark magic in seventeenth-century New England faced community stigma for the rest of their lives. For her part, Moorman is most often remembered as “The Topless Cellist” (an epithet that emerged as a result of the Opera

Sextronique scandal) both historically and historiographically speaking.422 From 1967 on, newspaper articles relentlessly reminded readers of Moorman’s notoriety by referring to her as

421 Shalleck, “People v. Charlotte Moorman, Part IE.”

422 According to Joan Rothfuss, the first newspaper article to use the term “topless cellist” was Ralph Blumenfeld, “The Cellist Dropped Her Top,” New York Post, February 10, 1967. See Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 400.

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the “Topless Cellist,” and in 2014 Joan Rothfuss used the phrase as the title of her Moorman biography—the first major piece of published scholarship about the cellist. Moorman’s archives contain copious evidence of daring feats of networking to offset potential allies, funders, venues, and institutions unwilling to align themselves with a woman artist so branded by the law. If her notoriety proved a challenge during her lifetime, it was also an obstacle to her postmortem legacy: Barbara Moore argues that this notoriety “inadvertently places in the shadows much else that Moorman has done”—namely, the New York Avant Garde Festivals.423 Moorman’s cello familiar may not have drunk blood from her teat, but it sucked away at her reputation and legacy.

423 Barbara Moore, “New Music News: Eroticello,” EAR Magazine, May 1987. Moorman herself much preferred the nickname given to her by Edgard Varese as a result of a successful concert of his music in the [Second] Annual New York Avant Garde Festival “Jeanne d’arc of New Music.”

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Component 3 The Avant-Garde as Music?

Even in the early days of Moorman’s turn to experimentalism, her cello acted as a stand- in for “classical” music. The evolution of her career turned on defying those expectations, which she did both through her cello performances—usually legible in the context of “musical activity”—and her behind-the-scenes accomplishments as a producer. Before Syringe Cello, before Flying Cello, before the cello made of ice: Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde

Festival—or “6 concerts ‘63,” as it was known then—was a music festival. A new music festival, yes, but a music festival held in a concert hall, introduced by a written program including works by composers performed by musicians, and featuring pianos and cellos and melodies and obvious sounds. It was a far cry from the chaotic, simultaneous, open-air, free-form Seventh

Festival described in Assemblage: Island.

In Component 3, detailed portraits of the first four New York Avant Garde Festivals show how newspaper and magazine coverage exhibited a gradual blurring of the words separating one art form from another over the course of those early years. To quote Howard

Becker: “Even when you don’t want to do what is conventional, what you do want to do can best be described in the language that comes from the conventions, for it is the one language everyone knows.” 424 The identification of genre is a process of social consensus—until, that is, a new language is developed and assimilated into common practice. The “fit-into-music-at-all- costs” mentality of the Festival’s first reviews eventually acknowledged the avant-garde’s indebtedness to other modes of thought. These reviews by the artistically conservative, predominantly white male tastemaker critics are among the only voices to have documented the

424 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 57.

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early Festivals, and they are reactionary: “Many in the audience felt hopelessly old-fashioned in their notions about music,” music critic Richard Freed of The New York Times wrote in a review of one concert during the Third Festival, verbalizing a complex that seems to permeate critical responses to the performances at hand.425 Reliably, however, Moorman included these press clippings in her Festival folders; the quantity of reviews (though not necessarily the quality of reviews) was an important metric by which she judged her ability to reach new people. The sneering tones these critics took towards the early Avant Garde Festivals—further exemplified by Judge Milton Shalleck’s opinion in Moorman’s Opera Sextronique trial—were part and parcel of the status quo approach to counterculture of all kinds, and to this art world in particular.

In The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (2011), Mike Sell argues that “though those who police and disrupt vanguards have deeply impacted the history of the avant-garde, they have received almost no attention from scholars and critics of the avant-garde.”426 In Component 2, I explored the New York City judiciary’s policing of Moorman-as-performer; in Component 3, I show how the local and national press—represented by critics who held the cello sacred— policed Moorman-as-producer.

Harold Schonberg, chief music critic of the New York Times, and John Gruen of the New

York Herald Tribune sat in the audience of Frederic Rzewski’s American piano debut, the first concert in a six-concert series at Judson Hall in August of 1963 produced by Charlotte Moorman and Norman Seaman. On the program were three American premieres by Busotti, Stockhausen, and Rzewski himself, as well as one world premiere by Giuseppe Chiari. Schonberg’s and

425 Richard D. Freed, “Avant Garde Festival Reviews Erik Satie in Music & Dance,” New York Times, August 27, 1965.

426 Mike Sell, The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (London; New York: Seagull Books, 2011), 119.

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Gruen’s reviews (“Music: Frederic Rzewski at the Piano” and “Far Out Concert, Stupefying

Boredom,” respectively) follow remarkably similar trajectories. They report the circumstances of the concert, as well as its location, and personnel; they offer a brief overview of the first three pieces on the program, complete with discussion of glissandos, tone clusters, and rests; they nod to the influence of the visually-inspired Gestural School of music; and finally, they describe what

Gruen called “the most outrageous event of the evening.”427

That would have been “Teatrino,” the Chiari piece—the big finish—and the materials alone were enough to raise the critics’ classical music-loving eyebrows: in addition to a piano, a snare drum, a phonograph, and a tape recorder, the piece called for (among other items) several books, a ping-pong ball, a handsaw, and a number of rubber dolls. “In the interests of keeping the record straight,” wrote Schonberg, “here is what happened during this composition: The tape recorder switched on. Static-like noises. Mr. Rzewski, seated at a table, rose and pressed down on all five dolls at once. They made plaintive noises. He read a poem. ….”428

Other concerts in the series also received serious (if similarly unenthusiastic) consideration by the critics. Ross Parmenter’s New York Times review of the second concert, featuring Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Music for Piano No. 4 and John Cage’s Variations II and III, focused on what he considered the “climax” of the evening: the physically painful intensity of

Cage’s amplified water-drinking in Variation III. “Come to think of it,” he wrote in his reflection

427 John Gruen, “Far Out Concert, Stupefying Boredom,” New York Herald Tribune, August 21, 1963. The “Bibliography of the New York Avant Garde Festival” included in Cello Anthology lists the second- printing title of the review: “Far Out Concert, 5 More to Come.” Gruen is best known as a photographer and art critic who also covered music and dance; he is the author of The New Bohemia, and The World’s Greatest Ballets.

428 Harold Schonberg, “Music: Frederic Rzewski at the Piano,” New York Times, August 21, 1963.

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on the concert, “they did not sound like pieces at all. Actually, they were mosaics of sounds.”429

Another New York Times music critic, Raymond Ericson, gave an unusually flattering portrait of the third concert framed by the “virtuosity” of composers and performers alike.430 And from

Gruen’s review of the last in the series: “One can actually become engrossed in pieces whose vocabulary may sound alien, at first, but which slowly reveal themselves as containing substance,” he wrote.431 It is also true, however, that he limited his review to the first three works of program, all of which featured conventional instruments in relatively conventional idioms:

Christian Wolff’s “For 5 or 10 People” was described as “music that was jaggedly linear,”

Morton Feldman’s “De Kooning” evoked a “romantic ambiance,” and Earle Brown’s “December

1952” even had “a kind of tonal beauty.”432

Despite consistently sold-out houses (“Honestly, we turned away two hundred people every single night,” Moorman noted433), ticket sales were not enough to repay the original capital fronted by Norman Seaman that first year. Nonetheless, Moorman strongly advocated making the concert series an annual event, and in 1964 Seaman agreed once again to help produce what became known as the Second Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. Seaman’s goal,

Moorman explained to a set of handpicked recipients in a letter soliciting new work, was to create “an annual Festival for America.”434 A lofty purpose, a great dream—and with this more

429 Ross Parmenter, “Music: Avant Garde Sound Mosaic,” New York Times, August 22, 1963.

430 Raymond Ericson, “Music: Unusual Sounds,” New York Times, August 28, 1963.

431 John Gruen, “When Far Out Music Comes Close to Home,” New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1963.

432 Gruen, “When Far Out Music.”

433 “Charlotte Moorman interviewed by Harvey Matusow,” Ubuweb.

434 Charlotte Moorman, [letter to potential participants], [1964], from the Second Annual Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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ambitious conception of the Festival came both a new name and more ambitious programming: in addition to a series of concerts similar to those of the previous year, Moorman had her heart set on performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s music-theater work Originale.435 This was contingent upon Stockhausen’s consent—a permission which he was initially reluctant to grant.

In its original incarnation, the piece was written specifically for the composer’s friends in

Cologne. Moorman convinced him, however, that her New York art world—friends and acquaintances—could serve as appropriate proxies. Avant-garde director of Happenings Alan

Kaprow could be substituted for film and stage director Carlheinz Caspari, that Fluxus artist Ay- o might stand in for painter Mary Bauermeister, and that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a reasonable alternative for writer and composer Hans G. Helms. Indeed, it looked as if everything was going Moorman’s way until Stockhausen raised one last objection: “[H]e said, “Well, I wrote it for Nam June Paik.”436 Paik, a Korean composer and artist, figured prominently in the

European avant-garde art world; Moorman would later forge with him one of the most significant artistic partnerships of her career. “I went back to my hotel,” she continued, “and as I walked into the room, the phone rang and it said ‘Paik here,’ and I said ‘Where?’ He said, ‘Here in New York.’”437 Paik’s participation secured, Moorman began planning her Festival in earnest.

By the second year of what was now known as the New York Avant Garde Festival, organizers and critics alike had a better idea of what to expect. The ten-concert series running

435 Although the Festival programs, the Festival reviews, and Moorman’s subsequent interview patter all attribute the piece to Stockhausen, Originale is now usually recognized as a collaboration between Stockhausen and Mary Bauermeister. See Mary Bauermeister, Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen (Munich: Edition Elke Heidenrireich bei C. Bertelsmann, 2011).

436 Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”

437 Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”

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from August 30 to September 13, 1964 received preview articles in The Village Voice, The New

York Herald Tribune Magazine, and The New York Times. In two of these notices, Moorman and her cello—a musician and her musical instrument—set the tone for the upcoming event.438

William Bender’s by-lined Herald Tribune Magazine article, on the other hand, seems to have taken its cue from the previous year: “Take the Theater of the Absurd, in which things aren’t always what they seem,” Bender wrote. “Add a dash of the action painting of men like Pollock, with the drip, drip, drip. Throw in the moving sculpture of Calder, in which the confining frustrations of stationary form are resolved. Then mix it all together, turn it into music, and you will have a rough approximation of what is in store for visitors to the second New York Avant

Garde Festival that starts in Judson Hall tonight.”439

The ten concerts of the 1964 Festival were loosely divided according to event-type: an advance flyer listed the programs as “Moorman”; “Electronic music”; “Mumma & Ashley”; “All

Varèse”; “Ensemble concert”; and five separate performances of Originale.440 Moorman’s recital included several of what became signature works in her repertoire—especially Earle Brown’s

“Synergy,” Giuseppe Chiari’s “Per Arco,” and John Cage’s “26’1.1499” for a String Player”—as well as the debut of Paik’s robot K456 accompanying the cellist in Stockhausen’s “Plus-

Minus.”441 In his New York Times article, Ericson called her “quite fetching” and praised “her

438 Discerning readers may also have noted the Times’ deadpan description of the opening concert: “Monday: Charlotte Moorman, cellist, assisted on various instruments and devices by Nam June Paik and an electronic robot, Judson Hall, 8:30pm” (New York Times, 30 Aug 1964).

439 William Bender, “Far Out on 57th Street,” New York Herald Tribune Magazine, August 30, 1964.

440 Barbara Moore, ed, The World of Charlotte Moorman: Archive Catalogue (New York: Bound & Unbound, 2000).

441 Earlier that evening, the audience was treated to Nam June Paik’s “Robot Opera.” Due to a technical malfunction, however, the robot was, alas, unfit for a second performance. Leighton Kerner, “Buzz Buzz,” The Village Voice, September 3, 1964.

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ability to draw unlikely sounds from her instrument,” before finally quibbling with her tempo choices.442

Harold Schonberg’s review of the Festival’s second, electronic music concert meted out

Great Truths: “Everything about the evening…seemed terribly old-fashioned. Part of the boredom was due to the fact that the various composers, employing the most up-to-date of media, simply had little talent.”443 From “the tonal language of what could be one of the most exciting of postwar musical phenomena” to “electronic manipulation of something corresponding to a tone row,” Schonberg situated the concert within a European musical tradition; its status as music was never even called into question—and indeed, as an isolated concert, there was no reason to do so.444

The third concert of the 1964 series, however, was not granted such an unconditional pass, although the explicitly musical strength of its composer-performers was duly noted. Robert

Ashley’s piece “Wolfman” in particular caused a certain consternation among musical critics.

“He clipped dark lenses over his glasses, stood before a microphone in center stage and shouted at the top of his voice for almost 18 minutes,” read one review before going on to complain about permanent ringing in the author’s ears.445 In another, Ashley was referred to as “his own screaming soloist.”446 Although it seemed critics couldn’t quite make up their minds about what

442 Raymond Ericson, “Avant Garde Festival Opens,” New York Times, August 31, 1964.

443 Harold Schonberg, “Music in Electronic Vein,” New York Times, September 1, 1964.

444 Throughout his career, Schonberg was heavily invested in the classical European musical tradition.

445 Howard Klein, “Music—the Avant Garde,” New York Times, September 2, 1964.

446 “Screaming soloist”: John Gruen, “Avant Garde Screams: Vocal & Recorder,” New York Herald Tribune, September 2, 1964.

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they heard, they all agreed that it was worth calling into question: Howard Klein’s New York

Times article used the word “happenings” for the first time in this series of reviews (although he later retracted the label), and John Gruen enclosed the word “music” in dark quotation marks.447

Predictably, the critics loved the relative safety of the next night’s all-Varèse concert.

Even the ensemble concert’s questionable content—including Paik’s “Robot Opera,” Morton

Feldman’s “King of Denmark,” and Joe Jones’s “Mechanical Quartet,” among other works—was somehow mitigated by its attentive “auditors” and instrumental performers: Klein pointed out that “the theme seemed to be the fusion of pop art and music,” he identified “some bona fide musical works,” and he described the “score” (in quotation marks) of Philip Corner’s “musical work” (sans quotation marks), “Moving Piece.” “The festival seems to be a part of the city’s musical life,” the critic notes at one point.448

The real terminological vagueness was saved up for Stockhausen’s Originale. A short preview in the Sunday New York Times titled “A Happening Will Happen,” argued that the piece

“cannot be described because it can’t be described, and if it could be described, it probably shouldn’t be described.”449 The piece was undeniably overwhelming: bowls of goldfish hung from the ceiling, a live chimpanzee in a little blue dress banged a gong, kids built things out of wooden blocks, two models undressed and donned feather boas. Through it all, a pre-composed

447 By 1969, Howard Klein was working for the Rockefeller Foundation. “Dear Charlotte,” he wrote on September 5, “We have no program for dealing with festivals of any kind or with production of events and, therefore, not only are we unable to contribute this year but will probably not be able to help you in the coming years. I am sorry that this is so, since we agree that the Avant Garde Festival each year significantly widens the spectrum of arts available in New York City. Good luck!” Letter Howard Klein to Charlotte Moorman, [1969], from the Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

448 Howard Klein, “Music: Avant Garde Festival Closes,” New York Times, September 4, 1964.

449 “A Happening Will Happen,” New York Times, September 6, 1964.

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recording emanated from loudspeakers while Charlotte Moorman played the cello hanging from the balcony. The chaos inside Judson Hall was mirrored by the confusion just outside: in

Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut explores the picketing of Originale by a group called Action Against Cultural Imperialism, led by philosopher, musician, and anti-art activist

Henry Flynt and Fluxus founder George Maciunas (“Stockhausen—Patrician ‘Theorist’ of White

Supremacy—Go to Hell!” their leaflets read).450 Though most accounts (both contemporary narratives and later scholarship) frame the protest as a Maciunas-conceived Fluxus piece designed to provoke the many Fluxus members and affiliates performing inside the hall, Piekut’s work reinstates Flynt as the mastermind of the confrontation and restores historical understandings of the impact of his anti-imperialist cultural politics. These misattributions and misunderstandings are at least partially a result of the overlapping art worlds that characterize even these early years of Moorman’s Festival. “They looked like the participants in ‘Originale,’ they acted like the participants in ‘Originale,’ and they dressed like the participants in

‘Originale,’” Harold Schonberg wrote for the New York Times.451

What was a critic to make of it all? A review in the New York Herald Tribune began by stating that “Stockhausen’s premise is that music is theater.”452 The Times’ Schonberg, too, first described “this 20th-century monument to the drama” before acidly comparing it to musical works by Bach and Beethoven (“Now here comes Stockhausen, with the most significant contribution yet”453), and Leighton Kerner in The Village Voice brought up “the corpse of the

450 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 66-71.

451 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 66.

452 Alan Rich, “Stockhausen’s Originale,” New York Herald Tribune, September 9, 1964.

453 Harold Schonberg, “Music: Stockhausen’s Originale Given at Judson,” New York Times, September 9, 1964.

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Wagnerian ideal of total musical theatre.”454 By the end of the Festival’s run, Originale and the protests against it inspired more than fourteen reviews—in periodicals as diverse as The New

York Times, Newsweek, and Playboy, in sections from “Music” to “Entertainment” to “Dance.”

By the Third Annual Avant-Garde Festival in 1965, Moorman took on more organizational responsibilities than ever before: Norman Seaman pulled his financial support and

Moorman became sole producer. The new set-up involved more work, certainly, but also more freedom. Moorman was able to tailor the Festival to artistic specifications informed by her interactions within the art world. Still contracted at Judson Hall, she nonetheless introduced dance, chamber music, film, poetry, theater, and jazz in addition to the art music, chamber music, and action music of previous festivals.

With this expanded scope came a renewed concern about the Festival’s finances and its ability to support so many forms of art. In a letter to John Cage, Moorman described her attempts to draw on mainstream resources: The Rockefeller Foundation was “not interested in anything this controversial or extreme” (although a representative promised to bring up the Festival’s plight once again at a meeting later that fall), The Fromm Foundation referred to “their already over capacity commitments,” and (Charlotte noted with indignation) “John Hay Whitey doesn’t consider our efforts art!”455 Rather than admit defeat, Moorman turned to her artist-friends: Cage wrote letters of support; Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles gave cash; Jackson Mac Low, Allan

Kaprow, Nam June Paik, and George Brecht fronted expenses without any certainty of returns; composers and performers donated their works and their time; publishers allowed free access to

454 Leighton Kerner, “Originale,” Village Voice, September 24, 1964.

455 Letter Charlotte Moorman to John Cage, [1965], from the Third Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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scores and tapes; schools as well as individuals loaned equipment.456 Moorman wrote letters to thank each and every contributor personally and to update them periodically on the state of the

Festival’s finances; her efforts to be inclusive with financial details encouraged interest and engagement—in other words, encouraged community and cohesion of what was already in the process of becoming the Festival’s art world.

With the logistics behind her, the performances proceeded as planned, and the reviews came thick and fast. Given the clear separation of concerts—all the poetry one night, all the film the next—music critics did not bother reporting any performance not legible as music.

Reasonable enough. What is noteworthy, however, is that nobody else bothered covering them either. The film night and the poetry program are both lost to posterity, and the theater pieces that made the cut did so paired with a work by John Cage.457 Critics and audiences seemed perplexed that a so-called music festival would include these obviously unmusical events.

This does not mean that critics were at a loss for subject matter, however. Howard Klein explored new territory in his first review of the first concert (Nam June Paik’s action music).

Appearing in the music section of the New York Times, it was titled “’A Happening’ Opens

Festival,” and (after branding Paik’s work “a study in instant ennui”) Klein went on to say that

“The festival will present 13 events in all (they can’t really be called concerts).”458 No? He lists the equipment including a piano; he notes the rather conventional musical titles (“Prelude in D minor,” “Variations on a Theme of Saint-Saëns”); he calls upon the spirit of Dada; he even

456 Correspondence, [1965], from the Third Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

457 Richard D. Freed did include a few cursory sentences about the dance night in his review of the electronic concert.

458 Howard Klein, “Music: ‘A Happening’ Opens Festival,” New York Times, August 26, 1965.

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documents participation by Moorman, who has by this point been thoroughly established as a classically-trained cellist. All of this, and yet now, after precedent had been set, the reader is specifically told that this is not music. (And lest one worries that our critics were losing the art of a cutting conclusion: “Fraught with pretensions of profundity, Mr. Paik’s efforts lacked any spark of originality, sensitivity, or talent….Maybe the festival will improve. It couldn’t get worse.”459)

Nor was Klein the only critic befuddled by the first concert’s relationship to “music”;

William Bender’s New York Herald Tribune article reinforced Klein’s conclusions. “Basically,” he argued, “[the performance] was a cousin to ‘Happenings,’ that wacky wing of the avant-garde in which the performer becomes the composer or author, the audience the performer, and anything a work of art.”460 This acknowledgment of action music’s relationship to other collaborative, genre- and role-defying avant-garde aesthetics alerted the reader to a basic tenet of the art world’s philosophy.

Separating concerts so clearly by genre had the unintended benefit of a corresponding separation of reviews; those performances that met with critics’ approval could receive unqualified praise. The all-Satie concert—a comparatively canonic nod that seemed to provide a historical lineage for the rest of the Festival—received uniformly rave reviews: “What made his music striking 50 years ago,” the Times’ Richard Freed argued, “is…the wit, the charm, and the frank good humor amplified by a thoroughly musical mind,” or, as Leighton Kerner noted,

“There’s no faking in performing Satie, and the musicians and dancers who performed him at

459 Klein, “Music: ‘A Happening’.”

460 William Bender, “Avant-Garde Festival,” The New York Herald Tribune, August 26, 1965.

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Judson Hall were real musicians and dancers.”461 The third year’s “ELECTRONIC music,”

“JAZZ concert,” and “ENSEMBLE concert” also fared as they always had: the critics did not particularly care for them, but something about the “traditional” instruments kept the musical status-quo. In the words of Howard Klein: “The audience had no complaints.”462

Then, on Tuesday September 7, audiences were treated to Allan Kaprow’s Push-Pull, directed by Carolee Schneemann.463 Audiences were asked to leave the concert hall during intermission in order to scavenge soft materials that could be used to “construct an environment of two rooms.”464 The Happening did not go according to plan: “…[W]hen Judson Hall officials, not to mention the police, discovered that every garbage can, curb, and alleyway along 57th

Street was suddenly being looted, and that the loot was being brought into Judson Hall, things took a readily predictable turn: No one was permitted back inside and the ‘performance’ was cancelled there and then,” the Herald Tribune reported.465 As a result, Moorman was asked to sign a new contract emphasizing discipline of performers and audience members before being allowed to finish the series.466

461 Richard D. Freed, “Avant Garde Festival Reviews Erik Satie in Music & Dance,” New York Times, August 27, 1965; Leighton Kerner, “Peter Pan and Dada,” The Village Voice, September 16, 1965.

462 Howard Klein, “Festival of the Avant-Garde offers Jazz at Judson Hall,” The New York Times, September 4, 1965.

463 The provenance of this iteration of the piece is troubling. Although Allan Kaprow conceived of the original, there is evidence that Carolee Schneemann directed the Festival version. Moorman, however, only ever referred to Kaprow in her stories and press about Push-Pull. Laura Wertheim Joseph discusses this and the letter that Scheemann wrote to Moorman (which essentially accused Moorman of not caring about women) in Feast of Astonishments. Joseph, “Messy Bodies.”

464 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 138.

465 John Gruen, “Judson Hall Audience Sent Out to Scavenge,” New York Herald Tribune, September 9, 1965.

466 The contract signed by Moorman read: “With reference to the lease date August 10 between Cami Realty Corporation and Charlotte Moorman, it is mutually understood and agreed that the Licensee will

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According to Freed, Push-Pull and the other theater-performance pieces included in the

Festival were “non-musical.” In his final treatment of the Third Annual New York Avant Garde

Festival, Freed held nothing back: “Miss Moorman and her colleagues showed that their collective heart belongs to Dada, and… this meant that enthusiasm obscured good…judgment.

[Satie’s] works were music when they were new and remain so now. This could not be said of the bloop-bleeps, furniture-building, piano-smashing, strip-teases and measured silences that dominated the other programs.”467 For all intents and purposes, these Third Festival performances were no different from Chiari’s “Teatrino” or Ashley’s “Wolfman”—yet the reviews for both of those pieces were twisted and pummeled to fit preconceived notions: if these works were composed by composers, performed by musicians, and took place in a concert hall, then they must be evaluated as music. Freed may not have taken time to write a review of the poetry program, but after three years of evaluating and reevaluating this avant-garde’s style, he finally expanded his critical vocabulary.

Then came the Fourth Festival. After the Push-Pull incident, Judson Hall declined to renew the Festival’s contract, and Moorman claims she was forced to look elsewhere for a suitable venue.468 Rather than book another concert hall, Moorman chose to explore unorthodox options, to act on her intuition that exposure could be the key to educating the public about the

not perform any act or theater piece that will provoke a disturbance in the audience leading to an undisciplined or uncontrollable condition; and that the Licensee also agrees there will be no further audience participation activities; also that the hall will be used in a manner that will not lead to further damage to both the hall itself or its contents therein.” From “Contract signed following Kaprow event forbidding further ‘disturbances,’” September 8, 1965, Charlotte Moorman Collection.

467 Richard D. Freed, “Music: Avant-Garde Grinds to a Halt,” New York Times, September 13, 1965.

468 Joan Rothfuss points out that there is little evidence to support Moorman’s accusation of concert hall banishment, but it makes for a wonderful origin story at a pivotal moment in the Festival’s history. Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 139.

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aesthetics and values of the avant-garde. The Fourth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival took place in Central Park at 72nd Street on September 9, 1966. The unusual site meant that the thirteen concerts of the previous year, each one determined by art-type or genre, had to be condensed into one extended performance—a format in line with the avant-garde’s penchant towards mixed-media works and general integration of the arts. According to John Cage, the move out of the concert hall was one of Moorman’s major achievements: “She was probably one of the first to realize the absolution of performance and music,” he said in an interview with

Gisela Gronemeyer after Moorman’s death.469

Due in part to excitement generated the previous year, Allen Hughes wrote a preview of the Fourth Festival for the Sunday edition of the New York Times:

Charlotte Moorman, a cellist in Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra…who shoots a gun, breaks glass and cooks while playing the cello in a solo composition by John Cage…and whose lawyer wishes she’d go back to Bach, will present the fourth annual New York Avant Garde Festival on Friday. On the Mall in Central Park. She regrets that it can’t begin until 6:00am and that it must end at midnight, but she figures there will be at least enough time to present the works and performances of 77 artists from 14 countries.470

Hughes, a newcomer to avant-garde reportage, focused almost exclusively on Moorman’s musical background, highlighting her various advanced degrees and describing her as “a highly professional cellist who knows her way around the standard repertory.” For information about the Festival itself, however, the reader was required to read between the lines: “On the Mall in

Central Park” does not adequately convey the risk—the innovation!—involved in moving a

“music” festival outside of a concert-hall setting, and “performances of 77 artists” cannot begin to communicate the variety of works slated for performance. In fact, Hughes referred readers to

469 Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”

470 Allen Hughes, “One is Avant-Garde…,” The New York Times, September 4, 1966.

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the “Music Programs on Page 10” for a summary of events—a listing that constricted the

Festival to a single art form. While critics such as Freed, Bender—even Schonberg— demonstrated a marked evolution of vocabulary as they gained experience with the methods and values of this avant-garde, the music-centered language and approach of Hughes’s initial review hearkens back to the first years of Festival coverage.

Nonetheless, if the preview profiled Moorman in her capacity as a professional musician, the re-view sketched quite a different picture; the assessment attempted to present as holistic a vision of the Festival as possible, and that meant addressing visual as well as sonic phenomena, spatial as well as temporal mediums. New York Times critics Dan Sullivan and Richard F.

Shepard split coverage of the 18-hour festival into a Day Shift and a Night Shift. Largely descriptive, the article does an admirable job of representing the unrelenting sights and sounds.

The image of two jazz saxophones duet-ing across the Central Park Pond is juxtaposed with Joe

Jones’ “musical bike” and Jim McWilliams’ “Picnic” (in which the point was to eat as many hot dogs and watermelon slices as possible—even if that means regurgitating what you had already eaten in order to continue). Sullivan asked of Dick Higgins’ “Danger No. 2”—is it music?

Higgins might have pictured the work in his mind’s-eye before answering: there he sat in his lawn-chair, dressed in a striped tunic while his wife, artist Alison Knowles, applied shaving cream before carefully drawing a razor back and forth across his scalp. “‘It’s music,’ Mr.

Higgins said, ‘because I can hear it. To the audience, of course, it’s theater.’”471 Shepard reported several conversations beginning with “What does it mean?” Both critics eschewed labels in favor of letting the scene speak for itself. The National Observer’s Douglas M. Davis similarly opted

471 Dan Sullivan and Richard F. Shepard, “The Avant-Garde Day in Park Goes On and On,” New York Times, September 10, 1966.

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for description over opinion. His article stressed, above all, unity—unity of vision, unity of purpose: “A desire to push out away from all the traditional forms and harmonies to the furthest limits not only of opposition but of mixture. ‘For me,’ says Takehisa Kosugi, radical Japanese composer, ‘music is not only sound, but time, space, and environment as well.’”472 It seems that four years into this experiment, the avant-garde may have finally started to get its message through in critical representations. Indeed, Davis may have nailed the thesis statement on the head, but it is Shepard who wins the consolation prize for “best description doubling as meaningful metaphor”: “Miss Moorman and her colleagues sat on 12 stepladders and shouted

‘up, up’ or ‘down, down.’ The crowd got into the spirit and shouted back. Nothing was settled.”473

472 Douglas M. Davis, “What’s Happening in the Avant-Garde,” National Observer, September 19, 1966.

473 Sullivan and Shepard, “The Avant-Garde Day in Park.”

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Component 4 Notations (1969)

In 1969, the same year as Moorman’s Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival,

John Cage published a book titled Notations under the imprint of Dick Higgins’s Something Else

Press. “This handsome book is a labor of love, an amazing and inexhaustible treat,” Van Meter

Ames, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, wrote in his review of Notations for the Summer 1970 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.474 Inside are single pages from scores—some polished and previously published, some still in draft form—by 269 composers, as well as quotations taken from a questionnaire answered by those composers on the subject of notation. While the scores were organized alphabetically, the written excerpts were shuffled, placed, and resized according to the workings of the I-Ching.475

Charlotte Moorman was not involved in the making of Notations, nor was she asked to contribute a score; this Component of the Assemblage isn’t about her. Having said that,

Notations provides an illuminating counterbalance to a narrative centered on Moorman and her

Festivals because of its attempt to delineate an art world rooted in musical experimentalism that largely overlapped with Moorman’s Festival-centric avant-garde.476 Though Notations was not

474 Van Meter Ames, “Reviewed Work: Notations by John Cage,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 4 (Summer, 1970): 559-660.

475 The preface written by Cage in 1968 notes that 269 composers are represented in the pages of Notations. In her article “Happy New Ears! In Celebration of 100 Years: The State of Research on John Cage,” Deborah Campana cites 400 music manuscripts from 274 composers that currently reside in the John Cage Collection. Deborah Campana, “Happy New Ears! In Celebration of 100 Years: The Sate of Research on John Cage,” Notes 69, no. 1 (2012): 12.

476 A significant number of the composers represented in Notations also participated in (or had music performed at) one or more of the New York Avant Garde Festivals. A sampling of these include: Robert Ashley; Ay-O; David Behrman; George Brecht; Earle Brown; Sylvano Bussoti; John Cage; Giuseppe Chiari; Philip Corner; Ken Friedman; Jimmy Guiffre; Bici Hendricks; Geoffrey Hendricks; Dick Higgins; Toshi Ichiyanagi; Ray Johnson; Joe Jones; Allan Kaprow; Alison Knowles; Takehisa Kosugi; Jackson Mac Low; Max Mathews; Richard Maxfield; Gordon Mumma; Max Neuhaus; Pauline Oliveros;

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designed to be comprehensive, I argue that it was and remains a remarkably coherent catalog— or, as Cage himself positioned it, “an archive”—of the contemporary art world, and of that art world’s understanding of disciplinary boundaries.477 In other words, Notations provides a window into the relationship between the avant-garde and music from the perspective of insiders.

That perspective is complicated by retrospective analysis of who was included, who was excluded, and whose labor went acknowledged (John Cage’s labor) and under-acknowledged

(Alison Knowles’ labor) in this publication. The answers to those questions illuminate how an art world that thrived on notions of newness and resistance also perpetuated ideologically conservative patterns of race, gender, and prestige.

The story of Notations begins with the ever-present need for creative solutions to financing experimental art practices. In this case, Cage and Jasper Johns put together a spectacularly successful benefit art show to fund the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s

1964 world tour, and they were interested in the possibility of more performances, exhibits, and printed artifacts to raise money for various avant-garde causes.478 Notations, then, began as a project to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, a New York City non- profit invested in the idea of “artists for artists”—artists working in physical media donating works for auction to support “needy practitioners of the performing arts.”479 In addition to its life

Yoko Ono; Nam June Paik; Benjamin Patterson; Steve Reich; Frederic Rzewski; Erik Satie; Carolee Schneemann; Karlheinz Stockhausen; James Tenney; David Tudor; Edgard Varèse; Wolf Vostell; Robert Watts; Christian Wolff; La Monte Young.

477 John Cage, “Preface,” in Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), [unpaginated].

478 Deborah Campana, “Happy New Ears!,” 11.

479 Several of the Foundation’s first sets of grants were awarded to members of Moorman’s extended art world: Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and La Monte Young, among

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as a book, Notations was also conceived as a free-standing art exhibit, and was in fact shown in late 1969 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts on East 53rd Street in New York City.480

Given its auteurs and provenances, Notations generated an advance buzz that took the extended art world by storm. Pontus Hulten, the director at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, expressed interest in showing the complete collection—the work of all 269 composers, just as

Cage conceived it.481 The Walker Art Center was similarly “enthusiastic and astonished at the depth of the collection,” though the curators there wished to select “choice manuscripts” in order to be able to play in the gallery the music shown on the walls.482 Music historian Gilbert Chase inquired about featuring Notations in his YEARBOOK.483 Publishers Lerici Editore and

Feltrinelli were both in contact about the possibility of an Italian edition.484

others. The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts is now called the “Foundation for Contemporary Arts.” See “Foundation for Contemporary Arts,” accessed May 7, 2019, https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/about; and “Talk of the Town: Artists for Artists,” The New Yorker, March 9, 1963, accessed May 7, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/03/09/artists-for-artists.

480 Donal Henahan, “What, You Never Learned to Read Music?: Yes, It’s Music,” New York Times, November 30, 1969.

481 Letter Dick Higgins to John Cage, March 3, 1967, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 6, Folder 14, Item 24, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

482 Letter Alison Knowles to John Cage, [undated, 1967-68], Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 7, Folder 19, Item 21, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

483 Letter Higgins to Cage, March 3, 1967.

484 In a letter dated November 18, 1968, Dick Higgins considered the difficulties and implications of translating Notations: “You may know of an appropriate translator,” he wrote to Cage, “and I imagine that Gianni-Emilie Simonetti could be trusted with the execution of your graphic concept. So it may not be impossible. Or perhaps you’d simply prefer for the work to remain as it is, like a completed painting, in English.” Letter Dick Higgins to John Cage, November 18, 1968, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884- 1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 6, Folder 15, Item 1, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

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Dick Higgins, founder of the Something Else Press, and Alison Knowles, consulting editor on the project, fielded all of these requests and conveyed them back to Cage as appropriate. “If the archive is to become useful (and salable) it must be publicized as a collection, and not just as one of the Press’s publications,” Higgins to wrote to Cage in early

1967.485 If its archival function, its ability to build legacies, and its practical proof of the transmogrification of music into other mediums were all important, so too was the project’s original goal to make money (in the process, funding all those other things).

According to composer Jean-Charles François in an article for Perspectives of New Music

(1992), the published version of Notations “had nothing to do with an attempt to demonstrate something, but rather with showing a diversity of graphisms and corresponding aesthetics.”486 In a sense, this resonates with one of Cage’s own prefatory statements: “The collection was determined by circumstances rather than any process of selection.”487 In the final product, the scores were organized alphabetically, and any accompanying information determined using the I

Ching. Neither Cage nor his editors organized the collection based on subgenres, schools, or interest communities. At its most basic level, the collection was to consist of pure information about the state of notation in 1969 without any interfering bits of “meaning” hidden inside the text or its formatting.

Such emphasis on ideological purity has often served as a screen behind which to conceal the work of women and people of color. The passive voice I introduced in the previous

485 Letter Higgins to Cage, March 3, 1967.

486 Jean-Charles François, “Writing without Representation, and Unreadable Notation,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no.1 (1992), 8.

487 John Cage, “Preface,” Notations.

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paragraph—“the scores were organized,” “accompanying information was determined”—serves as a nod to both the role of chance in the creation of the manuscript (certainly true), but also to

Alison Knowles’s often-unrecognized labor in bringing the Notations manuscript to fruition. In a letter to John Cage on January 23, 1967, Dick Higgins (as editor-in-chief of Something Else

Press) got down to business: “[Alison Knowles] has asked to be allowed to [sic] all the editorial and design work on the Catalogue—this is okay with me if it’s okay with you. Naturally I’ll help her on it, so there won’t be any technical problems. But she’s in love with the book, and being a visual artist, she may be able to make a valuable contribution.”488 When Cage wrote back in the affirmative, Alison Knowles officially became a collaborator on Notations.

The John Cage Archive illuminates just what Knowles actually did in the interest of producing Cage’s “inexhaustible treat.” She received and processed the questionnaires, comments, and most of the manuscripts the composers sent for the project, and then entered them in an ongoing database of Notations-related information. She called the printer. She personally responded to any questions the composers had about their participation, and soothed them when there were misunderstandings. She contacted copyright holders of individual manuscripts. She prodded Cage to share his I Ching results so she could use them in formatting the composers’ words on the pages of Notations. She then formatted the composers’ words on the pages of Notations. She reminded Cage to write thank you letters to specific composers as

488 Correspondence between Dick Higgins to John Cage, January 23, 1967, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 6, Folder 14, Item 16, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University. Cage’s reply is also included in this archival item: “Saw Alison and her work. Delighted.” Higgins and Knowles married in 1967; Knowles was often and intimately involved with the workings of the Press. This letter, however, marks the beginning of a shift in the Notations correspondence: from here on out, Higgins writes Cage about lawyers and logistics, but Knowles writes about content, aesthetics, and promotion.

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the manuscripts rolled in. She contacted and liaised with museums considering showing the exhibit. She worked with Dick Higgins in his role as editor of Something Else Press.489 There is an argument to be made that Alison Knowles is as much the author of Notations as Cage, given that the volume is a compilation of the musical works of others.490 Cage himself soft- acknowledged Knowles’s role in one version of the preface—he calls her an editor and notes that

“the composition of the page is the work of Alison Knowles”—but it is equally true that her name is absent from both the cover and the reviews that followed. Her labor is gendered; she engages in Etha Williams’ use of “reproductive labor”—labor that literally reproduces these

(mostly white, male) composers’ scores in book form, and that further amplifies both the composers’ and John Cage’s legacy as paragons of experimental art.491

Despite François’ assertion that the volume is about graphisms and aesthetics, and Cage’s that the volume was a product of circumstance rather than selection, a few ideas and themes do tie the manuscript together—do “demonstrate something.” For one thing, Notations is positioned as a meditation on the role of technology in art. “At the present time…and throughout the

489 Knowles’ letters are undated, but the majority were written between 1967 and 1969 during the lead-up to the publication of Notations. Some dates can be further pinpointed based on descriptions of life events: her “unannounced and unnoticed” participation with Philip Corner in the ferryboat edition of the New York Avant Garde Festival (1967), or her split and impending divorce from Dick Higgins (1969-70). See Alison Knowles, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 7, Folder 19, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

490 In fact, the first line of text on the home page of Knowles’ website is: “In the early Sixties Alison Knowles composed the Notations book of experimental composition with John Cage….” Alison Knowles, personal website, accessed May 8, 2019, https://www.aknowles.com/.

491 Etha Williams, “La femme clavecin: Vitalist Materialism, Reproductive Labor, and Queer Musical Pleasure in the Late Eighteenth Century,” [presentation] Conference of the American Musicological Society, 2018; Williams derives her use of the term from her reading of Suzanne Schultz, “Dissolved Boundaries and ‘Affective’ Labor,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2006. There is an argument to be made that Moorman, too, amplified the work of others at her own expense via her still under-acknowledged role as producer of the New York Avant Garde Festivals.

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world,” Cage wrote in one version of the preface included in an anthology of Cage’s writings,

“not only most popular music but much so-called serious music is produced without recourse to notations.” He went on:

This is in large part the effect of a change from print to electronic technology. One may nowadays repeat music not only by means of printed notes but by means of sound recordings, disc, or tape. One may also compose new music by these same recording means, and by other means: the activation of electric and electronic sound-systems, the programming of computer output of actual sounds, etc. …This book, then, by means of manuscript pages…shows the spectrum in the twentieth century which extends from the continuing dependence on notation to its renunciation.”492

Notations was explicitly positioned as a last hurrah for the science, art, and practice of notation before it collapsed under the weighty expectations of emerging technologies. It was the backwards-looking herald of a new age, an archive of the old to usher in a new kind of music.

Notations also contributed to the ongoing conversation that questioned the relationship between this “outsider” experimental art world and the boundaries of music and genre. Donal

Henahan’s New York Times review “What, You Never Learned to Read Music?: Yes, It’s

Music,” is indicative of the anxieties of the time.493 “Musical notation—the craft of representing musical events on paper—had not changed substantially in more than 300 years,” Henahan started. “…But in the last decade particularly, the strand of continuity has frayed and now it is in danger of snapping.”494 Henahan was never particularly sympathetic to the experimental music community in general, and certainly not to the composers “who exploit computer technology

[and] compose blocks of digital information that look like airline-reservation readouts for

492 John Cage, “Preface to Notations (1969),” in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 113.

493 Six years after the first review of the first New York Avant Garde Festivals, New York Times reviewers were still stymied by the idea of calling the offerings of Notations “musical notation.”

494 Henahan, “What, You Never Learned to Read Music?”

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especially complicated vacation trips.” (“Did you get the tune, or shall we hum it again?” he asks at one point.) But here again—in 1969, seven years after the first New York Avant Garde

Festival reviews—Henahan’s quarrel with experimentalism is rooted in the difficulty of reading its products within pre-existing categories and genres.

“Cage, as ever, is intent upon breaking down what he and followers think are barriers between the arts,” Henahan notes. The skepticism implied by his opening salvo carried through the remainder of the review as he insisted on those barriers: was the result music, or art, or theater? “Impelled by some strange need to be seen as well as heard, these new scores use all of the techniques of modern pictorial art,” Henahan wrote. “In the problem area where music and theater intersect and cross-pollinate, ‘scores’ for happenings are to be found.” And his argument goes on: If composers completely reject the “old score’s rigidities” and imprecisions, then eventually music will once again become “unwritten and uncopyrightable, everyone’s property and no one’s. …ASCAP and BMI would shrivel to nothing, for no composer could claim his work as property in the capitalist sense.” 495 In tying the demise of notation to notions of ownership and capitalist principles, Henahan implicitly links Cage and the larger world of experimental music to social movements of the 1960s—to the counterculture.

Though Henahan found any confusion of genre to be distasteful, it is also worth noting that there was no such confusion on the part of the insiders: all these “cross-pollinations” co- existed happily—were meant to co-exist happily—within the covers of Cage’s book, within the walls of the original museum exhibition, and within the context of real life working and social relationships. In practice, then, the book Notations and the work contained therein represents the art world that made it. First and foremost, it demonstrated something about the process of

495 Henahan, “What, You Never Learned to Read Music?”

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curation—the scores included were by Cage’s friends, or the composers and artists who possessed enough cultural capital and art world credibility such that they attracted the notice of this luminary of experimentalism. In this sense, Cage’s rhetoric positioning the project as

“without selection” is misleading.

Given the intersection of professional and social roles within the very notion of an “art world,” it is not surprising that so many of the letters and correspondences that now reside in the

Notations Collection in the John Cage Archive at Northwestern University also include personal messages, pleas for money or help engaging performances. Some of these messages are contemporaneous with the production of Notations, and some from both before and after the project’s working dates were added by Cage after the fact—in the process proving the breadth, depth, and evolution of his many art world relationships. Robert Ashley, for example, wrote a letter in 1962 enclosing a proposal combining arts and architecture that he was shopping around academic departments, as well as a request for a recommendation for someone who could be effective at representing experimental music in academic settings. “I can’t close without saying how much I am aware of your thinking (and preaching) as a basis for our proposal. It embarrasses me somehow that I am sending the proposal to you.” 496 Larry Austin requested articles and/or compositions for Source Magazine on April 10, 1967, and the archive contains

Cage’s response in May (“I’ve enjoyed very much seeing a copy of Source which one of the students has here. I think you’ve done beautifully and everyone else is of the same opinion”).497

496 Letter Robert Ashley to John Cage, September 14, 1962, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 1, Folder 15, Item 1, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

497 Correspondence between Larry Austin and John Cage, 1967-68, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884- 1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 1, Folder 16, Items 3 and 12, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

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George Brecht sent a flyer detailing the YAM Festival Delivery Event.498 Jimmy Guiffre thanked

Cage in 1968 for allowing the use of his name as a reference for a Guggenheim Fellowship application (which, incidentally, Guiffre received).499 Notations is inextricably linked to the art world it implicitly described and circumscribed.500

Even in the moment, Cage seemed aware of this. The John Cage Archive contains several copies of a form letter sent to Notations’ contributors that succinctly captures Cage’s purpose:

“Dear Giuseppe Chiari,” he writes in one, “I am delighted that you are represented in the archive which I have built up for the benefit of the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. It has shaped up beautifully and offers an excellent cross-section of what has been happening in the music world for the last quarter century….”501 Particularly telling in this short mission statement is Cage’s use of the word “you”—“you” are represented, as opposed to “your works.” It seems

Cage is less interested in the product than in the producer and the process—an approach consistent with his artistic philosophy, and one that highlights his attributed position as father of the extended experimental art world.

498 “YAM Festival Delivery Event,” [flyer], Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 3, Folder 1, Item 11, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

499 Letter Jimmy Guiffre to John Cage, April 8, 1968, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884-1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 5, Folder 21, Item 14, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

500 To be clear, there were also many letters—even whole folders of correspondence—to and from individuals whose names I did not recognize. Cage’s archive spills out into the far, far outer reaches of the art world—connected only by virtue of their relationship to Cage. In other words: if Notations cannot be separated out from the art world, it is also true that Cage cannot be entirely limited by it.

501 Letter John Cage to Giuseppe Chiari, [form letter], July 20, 1967, Series II: “Notations Project, 1884- 1990 (bulk 1960-1969); nd.”; Sub-series 2: Correspondence; Box 3, Folder 17, Item 1, John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

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If it is true, however, that Cage recognized this book as (1) a kind of representative survey of the art world (however incomplete), and (2) an archive with the ability to both build legacies and document a particular time and place in the history of composition, then consideration of exactly who was included or excluded is crucial. No contemporary review and no article by historians after the fact has engaged in a critique of Notations as a record of Cage’s understanding of his art world. Of the 269 composers represented in Notations, a grand total of sixteen are women and only a handful identify as people of color. To be clear, there was no shortage of artistic activity in communities that embraced women and people of color as musicians and artists in the United States during this period. George Lewis’s research on the

Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians stands as a call to action to investigate the work of people of color in experimental milieus; Benjamin Piekut juxtaposes the New York

Avant Garde Festival and the Jazz Composers Guild; Mike Sell explores Fluxus, the Black Arts

Movement, and the Living Theatre in the context of contemporary avant-gardism; Kathy O’Dell writes of the ways women associated with Fluxus were simultaneously invited and undermined in their contributions to the collective.502 As Lewis points out in his landmark article

“Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Cage envisioned his work and his art world as a descendant of European intellectual and musical traditions—a notion that is bound up in racialized power relations.503 Regardless of whether the lack of diversity within Notations indicates a failure on the part of Cage and the editorial team to reach or to

502 Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself; Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise; Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Kathy O’Dell, “Fluxus Feminus,” TDR 41, no. 1, (Spring 1997), 43-60.

503 George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996).

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recognize diverse composers, or whether it indicates that those composers chose to contribute their time and cultural capital to projects with different values and goals, the takeaway remains the same: Notation’s inclusion of so many varieties of musical scores (and the sounds they represent) should not be equated with a perfectly inclusive community.

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Component 5 The Death of the Avant-Garde: The 15th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York

The 15th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York took place July 20, 1980 at the

Passenger Ship Terminal (Berths 5 and 6) located at 55th Street and 12th Avenue in New York

City. Though Moorman didn’t know it at the time, this would be her last Festival: a grant application for the 16th lies abandoned in the archive.504 The events ended for a number of reasons: first, the members of the 1960s avant-garde were aging. In Moorman’s case, she regretfully postponed the 15th Festival’s original date of 1979 because she needed time to recuperate from surgery (a fact about which she was quite open). 505 From then on, she was constantly balancing her performing career and her health. Another reason, however, stemmed from the cognitive dissonance of reconciling fifteen long years of Festival activity with the semantic notion of the avant-garde as “ahead of its time” and “outside of the mainstream.”

Archival documents and press reviews from the later festivals show the extent to which the critics’ notion of the “avant-garde” relied on (1) innovation and shock value, (2) “quality,” defined in relation to mainstream art, and (3) the autonomy of an art world that insisted on countercultural bona-fides. Component 5 explores the Avant Garde Festival’s quasi- institutionalization (in terms of longevity, sponsors, and goals) through detailed examination of archival materials related to the Fifteenth (and final) Festival, and in the process highlights a

Festival iteration that has received little scholarly recognition.

504 “Application to New York State Council on the Arts,” Project dates July 1, 1979-July 1, 1980, from Fifteenth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive. The dates of the proposal suggest that Moorman started this application before the Fifteenth Festival took place (as mentioned above, it was eventually postponed until and took place in 1980).

505 In fact, Moorman planned to create an educational film about her mastectomy and invited artist Andor Orand to document tests and surgeries as they occurred. Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 337.

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As a term, “avant-garde” is sticky: heavily theorized but with popular overtones, implicitly gendered and raced. The Tate Museum in London offers a distilled definition on its public-facing website rendering the avant-garde as “art that is innovatory, introducing or exploring new forms or subject matter.”506 In his influential scholarship, Andreas Huyssen explores the thin line between notions of “avant-garde,” “modernism,” “postmodernism,” and

“kitsch.”507 Mike Sell, a scholar of avant-garde literature and performance, envisions the avant- garde as a “minority formation that challenges power;” he also notes that “to be avant-garde is to perform.”508 None of these institutions or scholars refers specifically to Moorman and her

Festival, but audiences and critics who experienced the Festivals in all their glory often conveyed their experience through similar kinds of rhetoric and terminology. By the tenth festival, reporters questioned the Festival’s authenticity as it aligned with a Tate-style definition—as something new or shocking. Headlines like “When Festival is 10, Is it Avant-Garde?” and

“Avant Garde on Its Derriere” took over the popular press.509 If “avant-garde” equaled “new,” then over time the label had become a liability to the Festival’s success. Even earlier, art critic

Robert Hughes wrote an essay titled “The Decline and Fall of the Avant Garde” (1973) that

506 “Avant-Garde,” Tate Museum, accessed May 8, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/avant- garde.

507 See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s,” New German Critique, no. 22 (1981), 23-40; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c1986); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995).

508 Mike Sell, “Introduction,” in Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical, ed. Mike Sell (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5- 6.

509 Michael T. Kaufman, “When Festival is 10, Is It Avant-Garde,” New York Times, December 10, 1973; “Avant Garde on Its Derriere,” The Village Voice, December 6, 1973.

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specifically called out the Ninth Annual New York Avant Garde Festival (1972) as “a fair example of the problem.” This festival was, he says, “a confusion of irresolute trivia, …so affably amateurish, like a transistorized rummage sale, that one gave up expectation.”510 It was perceived, to turn to Huyssen, as walking a fine line between “avant-garde” and “kitsch.”

The Festival’s longevity leads back to Sell’s definition, the notion of a “minority formation that challenges power.” The ideal of the “avant-garde” imagines a self-sustaining art world working against mainstream cultural tenets and scraping together resources despite the non-understanding—even disapproval—of the majority. The notion of an “institutional avant- garde”—which entails levels of money, power, and support—is not impossible (see, for example,

Huyssen on the co-option of the avant-garde by the “culture industries”511), but it is antithetical to the ideology “avant-garde-ness” seeks to enshrine. Could the New York Avant Garde Festival be “avant-garde” if the plans for the (unrealized) 16th Festival boasted a budget of nearly

$323,000?512 Could it be “avant-garde” if it took grants from the biggest governmental and corporate entities in the United States, or if it advertised a list of cooperating organizations nearly a page long? Could it be “avant-garde” when the Mayor of New York City, Edward Koch, proclaimed the day of the 15th Festival, July 20, 1980, as “AVANT-GARDE ART DAY”?513

“Ironically,” literary critic Matei Călinescu argues, “the [1960s] avant-garde found itself failing through a stupendous, involuntary success.”514

510 Robert Hughes, “The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde,” Time 100, no. 25, December 18, 1972.

511 Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition,” 27.

512 This is the equivalent of approximately $984,809 in 2018.

513 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 339.

514 Though Moorman clearly courted that success—“involuntary” is not the relevant word in her particular case—the press nonetheless judged her efforts based on popular understandings of the “avant-

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Even in its last years, the success of Moorman’s Annual Avant Garde Festivals depended on more: larger, better, flashier. “Look, we all see this as a gift to the city of New York,”

Moorman told one reporter. “So even though it gets bigger each time, we just do it.”515 As humble brags go, that one holds up. By the 15th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in

1980, she hoped to accommodate 650 artists at Pier 81 in the Hudson River Park, with expected audiences in the thousands. It was an ambitious project, and she needed resources to make it a reality. To that end, Moorman made decisions over the years that exchanged art world autonomy for money, favors, and prestige—and, in the process, raised the possibility of an institutionalized avant-garde festival. In the case of the Fifteenth Festival, Moorman asked for (and received) funds from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Council on the Arts, among others. For the first time, she also solicited corporate funding from Con Edison, Temco Service

Industries, Inc., and Market Probe International, Inc. After studying Moorman’s archival documents—replete with personal memories as well as transaction records—I believe her pursuit of corporate sponsorship fits with her overriding devotion to her Festivals and her art. Everything else—including politics and even ethics—took a secondary position.516

Moorman wanted more than money for her Festival, however. Early in 1980, she received a letter asking permission for WGBH-TV in Boston to shoot an hour-long documentary about the New York Avant Garde Festival for PBS’s NOVA, a nationally distributed television program. “This festival has been a critically important meeting place between the artist and the

garde.” Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 121.

515 Howard Smith, “Scenes: Coast Garde,” The Village Voice, June 9, 1980.

516 See: “Assemblage: Island.”

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public for many years,” producer Barbara Holecek wrote to Moorman, “and I feel that the interaction between artist and public in this context will help bring a television viewing audience closer to an appreciation of the environment of contemporary art.”517 Though the project never aired (to my knowledge), the producers did travel to New York City for a series of pre- production trips. The final product would have included footage of artworks and audiences the day of the event; pre-Festival meetings between Moorman, the Port Authority, and various union groups; and Festival set-up. “We hope the film will capture the process of creating this kind of art—this seems crucial to understand the final work,” Holecek notes.518 National exposure was

Moorman’s reason for being; she promptly included the documentary’s existence in her press releases. In her conception of the Festival’s purpose, nothing could have signaled greater success—even if it also implied a mainstream palatability connoted by public television’s endorsement, a respectability antithetical to public-facing understandings of “avant-garde” practice.

According to Moorman, twenty to twenty-five new artist proposals arrived daily at

Festival headquarters as the event approached.519 In another compromise—this time to her commitment to lowering barriers to Festival participation—Moorman submitted a number of artist statements to the Mayor’s Office for approval (generally those that involved permits, large props, or obvious danger). Her concession ensured cooperation from the governmental entities that controlled access to sites and materials. In a letter from Andy Gurian (Moorman’s close

517 Letter Barbara Holecek to Charlotte Moorman, May 16, 1980, from Fifteenth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

518 Letter Holecek to Moorman, May 16, 1980.

519 Letter Charlotte Moorman to Barbara Holecek, June 18, 1980, from Fifteenth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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friend and one of the younger experimentalists who helped manage the enormity of later

Festivals) to Annette Kuhn (Assistant to the Mayor), Moorman asked for a rescue helicopter

(“we are not expecting drownings,” Gurian wrote on Moorman’s behalf, “but Jim McWilliams calls for a cellist to be suspended from a helicopter”), and a small fleet of row boats. She also asked for an introduction to sympathetic executives at technology companies such as Sony and

Hitachi (“Their support has always been hard to come by—they are so profit-oriented”). “I am sorry that we have to eliminate the streamers from the parachutists in Le Ann Bartok

Wilchusky’s piece,” Gurian ended his letter, “but, it is true we cannot be littering all over the city.”520 Annette Kuhn’s response came fast and furious: “What do you mean when you talk about the parachutists in Le Ann Bartok Wilchsky’s piece? I thought I made it clear that no planes were to be used, because I am totally opposed to anyone flying, much less jumping, from a plane in an urban area. It is dangerous and inappropriate…. Don’t do it.” Then, an addendum in large, handwritten letters: “Otherwise, you’re terrific.”521 Behind-the-scenes negotiations were both omnipresent in Moorman’s life, and central to the stories she told about her events. They also changed the specifics of her Festivals with little warning and little fanfare.

The day of the Fifteenth Festival is difficult to corral into a coherent narrative. The sheer number of participants, the variety of their work, the enormity of the space, the looseness of the record keeping: it mirrors the chaos inherent in the event itself. Newspaper writers described some of what they saw, but (similarly overwhelmed) often neglected to obtain names and titles.

Among the many performances by some 650 artists, critics noted “minimal novels” written

520 Letter Andrew Gurian to Annette Kuhn, July 10, 1980, from Fifteenth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

521 Letter Annette Kuhn to Charlotte Moorman and Andrew Gurian, July 15, 1980, from Fifteenth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, Charlotte Moorman Archive.

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inside fortune cookies and passed out to the audience; a piece by Alison Knowles involving

“bean readings”; music by David Tudor and Robert Ashley; a pig on a treadmill; drums cued by electronic motion sensors; Pauline Oliveros’ “Cheap Commissions”; poetry readings; palms readings; “The Great North River Fish Tournement [sic]” conducted by Ben Patterson; and a man cooking beans on a hot plate before burying them in the sand.522 According to the artist proposals, Ay-O’s “Hello Charlotte—Transparent Rainbow Flags” waved from the poles on the

Terminal’s roof; Andrew Gurian helmed a floating barge featuring video art; Jud Yalkut and Si

Fried organized a 12-hour film program; and Shridhar Bapat coordinated two continuous 12-hour videotape screenings. A simultaneous 12-hour concert devoted to electronic music took place in a different part of the building; and a 12-hour poetry reading occupied a third corner. Ray

Johnson (of Seventh Festival helicopter-hot dog fame) and Toby Spiselman performed a piece titled “Portrait of Charlotte Moorman.” Moorman and Jim McWilliams planned to “collaborat[e] in the air.” The Fifteenth Festival’s press release is crowded with the names of participants from previous Festivals: Robert Ashley, John Cage, Shirley Clarke, Robert Filliou, John Hendricks,

Joe Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, Les Levine, Jackson Mac Low, Yoko Ono, Hants Otte, Nam June

Paik, Ben Patterson, Dieter Roth, Carolee Schneemann, Jean Toche, plus hundreds more.

The reviews from 1980 fixated on the question of whether or not the Fifteenth Festival should be considered legitimately “avant-garde.” “I wanted to know why she still employs the avant-garde title in spite of the fact that the label has been rendered virtually meaningless,”

Howard Smith of The Village Voice wrote in a preview article.523 The story Moorman tells in response—her first Festival lacked adequate sign-posting, she and her collaborators were sued by

522 Ari L. Goldman, “Avant-Garde Art: Reactions Mixed,” The New York Times, July 21, 1980.

523 Howard Smith, “Scenes: Coast Garde,” The Village Voice, June 9, 1980.

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a woman who claimed her hearing had been impaired, and they were advised by a judge to change the name of the event to reflect its contents—is just ever so slightly embroidered, perfectly rehearsed.524 It is a reminder that more than music and art becomes entrenched over fifteen iterations; the stories surrounding this avant-garde, its origins, and its raisons d’etre were becoming—if not stale—at least expected. An article in the Soho News titled “Artful Dodger” made this explicit. “[I]f public and official trepidation over the Festival has died out,” it argued,

“so, if truth be told, has the interest of today’s avant-garde crowd. After all, many of the regular participants in the Festival are now as established in their own way as Stokowski, and many others pass it up or have passed away.”525 Another way of saying: it was no longer new, no longer innovative, and its artists were no longer on the margins.526 Vivien Raynor’s review of the

Festival in her New York Times “Art People” column embellished the theme: “…[T]he enterprise was again partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State

Council on the Arts, as well as by many private corporations. This should prove that despite disapproval voiced by some of the 11,000 visitors it attracted, the festival has become a venerable institution.”527 The Annual Avant Garde Festival as institution: printed in black and white for all to see.

524 Other versions of this story appear in (to name only a few) Goldman, “Avant-Garde Art”; Gerald Marzorati, “Artful Dodger,” Soho News, July 16-22, 1980; Peter Frank, “The Avant-Garde Festival: And Now, Shea Stadium,” Art in America 62, no. 6 (November 1, 1974): 106.

525 Marzorti, “Artful Dodger.”

526 Alison Knowles agreed: “No one else was really interested in continuing because I felt that the last years of it lacked a certain zip, you know. It wasn’t that interesting any more.” (See: Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”)

527 Vivien Raynor, “Art People,” The New York Times, August 1, 1980. This article is a profile of Moorman herself as much as Moorman’s event.

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Moorman insisted over and over again that the label “avant-garde” simply warned her

Bach- and Beethoven-loving audiences that something different was in play. If she had her way, she said in interview after interview, she would have called the event something else—a

“contemporary arts festival,” perhaps—because this was “the art of the present” and “the music of today”—the music that permeated every aspect of her own daily life, that proved to her the inalterable co-dependence of life and art.528 Of course, her insistence on “music of today” was somewhat belied by her insistence on rehashing the same pieces over and over again. How could

Variations on a theme of Saint-Saens be the “music of today” in 1990 if it was the “music of today” in 1960?529 “There’s nothing unusual,” Moorman told reporter Ari Goldman of the New

York Times during the Fifteenth Festival. “It’s all very normal.” That tidy sentence can be read either as a substantiation of Moorman’s goals to educate the public through exposure to her art world, or as the crux of her problem with respect to the “avant-garde” nature of her events: after all, how can the “avant-garde” be “normal?” So much for the years of agonized wrestling with and reconciliation of definitions of genre on the part of both insiders and outsiders to the avant- garde in the 1960s and 70s. In the end, it was all old hat.

528 See Goldman, “Avant-Garde Art”; Frank, “The Avant-Garde Festival,” 106; Charlotte Moorman, [Notes: List of Possible Festival Names], [1963], from “6 Concerts ‘63” in the Charlotte Moorman Archive.

529 “That battle has been won, it’s known, it’s been published, it’s been looked at and photographed, but she needed to perform it over and over again,” Alison Knowles said of Moorman’s repertoire involving nudity. (See: Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication.”)

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Component 6 The Rebirth of Charlotte Moorman

In the first decades of the 21st century, the 1960s musical avant-garde is experiencing a rebirth via scholarship and museum exhibits, and no part of this process is more dramatic than the restoration of Charlotte Moorman’s reputation and legacy. As explored above, Opera

Sextronique (1967) put Moorman on trial in the court of law, but its consequences extended long past her day before the judge; the literal trial was one symptom of a larger “witch hunt.” Every moment since then, Moorman has faced informal re-trial by feminist activists, art historians, and even her collaborators and friends. Her recent rehabilitation by scholars and young artists alike, however, finds its parallel in the recent rehabilitation of witches in American feminist scholarship and pop culture.530 This section consists of a historiography in two parts—a brief history of witchcraft discourse followed by a history of Charlotte Moorman discourse: divided by centuries, but linked by circumstance.

Marion Gibson’s Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (2007) is a sweeping history and historiography of witchcraft and its discourses. The long chronology of her subject matter encourages a many-layered, historically-inflected understanding of the power of the collective imagination; Gibson argues that myth shaped U.S.-American perceptions of witchcraft as much as factual records.531 Though the inhabitants of seventeenth-century New England may have imagined witches to be purely malefic beings, witches of the European tradition—out of which

New England’s understanding of witches grew—were never so limited. As Lyndal Roper

530 “A lot of young women artists in particular have found Charlotte Moorman to be of great inspiration to them for a lot of reasons,” Joan Rothfuss told me in 2017. Rothfuss, interview with author.

531 Marion Gibson, Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007), 77.

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contends in his introduction to The Witch in the Western Imagination (2012): “The witch was compelling because she was symbolically and psychologically capacious.”532

The figure of the witch took hold of the western European imagination because she could express terrors that lay beyond words, reaching into deep ambivalence about death, identity, and motherhood. But she could also bring different cultural registers together, elite and popular, classical and carnivalesque….The figure of the witch resists definitive interpretation.533

In that spirit, Matilda Joslyn Gage argued in 1890 that the witches of Europe’s early modern period were not evil at all; they were misunderstood proto-suffragists—or, in the words of Gibson, “forward-looking, skilled, and wise, with special biological and mental powers linked to their femininity.”534 Gibson retrospectively categorizes U.S.-American views about witches at the turn of the twentieth century into a small number of prominent, co-existing stereotypes—one of which was the purely malefic presence of the seventeenth-century, another the diametrically oppositional notion of witches as “exemplary feminist gurus.”535 Increased literacy and education contributed to a shift in the values and valences associated with the imagined witch figure, but so too did a succession of distinct witch characters (spread out over more than a century) rooted in popular culture. In this context, “[i]t was not so important to understand what had really happened at Salem in 1692 as it was to grasp the possibilities that witchcraft might offer to modern women,” Gibson wrote.536

532 Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 3.

533 Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination, 24.

534 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 113.

535 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 138.

536 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 140.

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According to Gibson, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its subsequent

Hollywood adaptation (1939) turned the representation of witches into a metaphor of female empowerment.537 From 1964 to 1972, the television series Bewitched projected the image of a witch as a paragon of virtuous femininity, tamed (and limited) by her relationship to the domestic sphere. Alyson Hannigan’s character Willow in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

(1997-2003) offered the narrative of a young woman exploring her multifaceted identity through witchcraft (although, as Gibson points out, the death of Willow’s female love interest and her subsequent rebranding as a drug-fueled evil alter-ego plays into the patriarchal retribution and atoning that are always required of both LGBT and witch characters).538 Gregory Maguire’s best- selling novel Wicked (1995)—and its liberal adaptation as a Broadway musical by Stephen

Schwartz (2003-present)—placed a new spin on Baum’s Witch of the West by framing her as the misunderstood hero of Oz. American Horror Story dedicated its third season, “Coven” (2013), to the daily (if also magical) lives of descendants of the Salem witchcraft trials. While U.S. witches never entirely shed their seventeenth-century reputation—in living memory, the invocation of the witch as a woman who corrodes the social order has been wielded by men in power as a weapon against “disagreeable” real women including Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton—these examples (a few among many) of characters from printed page and screen broadened the imaginative potential of the witch.

Twentieth-century scholars followed suit, reframing history and advocating for the multivalent possibilities of witchcraft discourse as a lens through which to study the nexus of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Carol Karlsen’s Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987) proved

537 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 138-140. Fun fact: Baum was Gage’s son-in-law.

538 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 179.

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landmark thanks to its rigorous archival study of women in the seventeenth-century, but also thanks to its insistence that academic feminism had the potential to “interact[] with mainstream political culture.”539 Karlsen’s book gave permission to future scholars to explain contemporary life through the study of witches. Gibson’s Witchcraft Myths provides what is perhaps the best historiography of these studies through its publication date in 2008—but even as recently as

2017, Kristen J. Sollée’s Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive posits a “witch feminism” built on sexual liberation that allows millennial women to reconcile the history of misogyny with ideals of contemporary empowerment.540 Within musicology, Joy Press, Simon

Reynolds, Sarah F. Williams, and Stacy Wolf (among others) have all explored the intersection of the witch figure, gender, and musical genre. Reynolds and Press have studied how 1970s female punk musicians (Moorman’s contemporaries, if not her colleagues) reframed the witch to complement ideologies of “rock she-rebels,” Williams has focused on the way seventeenth- century English broadside ballads communicated female transgression, while Wolf authored a

“feminist history” of the Broadway musical Wicked.541

All of this is to say that in the context of twenty-first century scholarship and popular culture, the witch figure not only “resists definitive interpretation,” it also encourages manifold interpretations. That attribute was both the root of Charlotte Moorman’s problem—the reason she was put on trial in both the court of law and the court of public opinion—and the method of

539 Gibson, Witchcraft Myths, 129.

540 Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley: ThreeL Media, 2017).

541 Joy Press and Simon Reynolds, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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her recuperation as a significant figure in the history of the 1960s avant-garde.542 Throughout her career, Moorman cannily “merged denial and consent” (according to Kristine Stiles)—hedged her bets—as a means of managing her legacy. In the aftermath of Opera Sextronique, for example, Moorman wrote a letter describing herself as a pawn of the classical music tradition: the composer told her to do it, so she did. When the dust had settled, however, she crowed proudly about her role in creating precedent that ultimately loosened restrictions on nudity in art in New York City.543 The sum total of her statements allows for her history to be read by multiple constituencies towards drastically different ends.

The inability to pin down Moorman’s complicity in the power dynamics of her field finds its parallel in an inability to categorize her art: she was not quite a cellist, not quite a composer

(and so the music scholars ignored her). Her performances drew power from the musical imaginary (and so the art historians ignored her). She organized behind the scenes as much as she performed (and so the creator-centered narratives ignored her). And constant references to

“The Topless Cellist” hampered her ability to organize by stereotyping her as, in essence, a modern-day witch: a disruptive, difficult-to-read female presence that needed to be crushed. In other words, once again, the myth that grew up around Moorman trumped the facts of Moorman.

What Moorman needed was a champion: a Karlsen of Moorman studies who would remind the world that “difficult-to-read” constituted an opportunity.

That person was Joan Rothfuss, an art historian and curator, who published the first

Moorman biography in 2014. Though other scholars had written about Moorman previously—

542 For a lengthy analysis about the ways in which second-wave feminists “put Moorman on trial,” see Joseph, “Messy Bodies.”

543 Charlotte Moorman, “An Artist in the Courtroom,” in Cello Anthology, ed. Gabriele Bonomo (Milan: Alga Marghen, 2006), [unpaginated].

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Piekut’s Experimentalism Otherwise (2011) includes one chapter about Moorman’s performance of 24’1.1499” by John Cage, and another about the demonstrations against Stockhausen’s

Originale at the Second Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, for example—Rothfuss dedicated her entire book to Moorman and her legacy. Her idea to write the biography began at a performance at the Walker Art Museum in 2001: cellist Joan Jeanrenaud reimagined one of

Moorman’s signature pieces, Ice Music, for the modern world.544 In her seven performances of

Ice Music (1972-1978), Moorman walked onto a concert hall stage—nude—and played a cello made of ice until it melted. Whereas Moorman had been naked, Jeanrenaud wore a wetsuit.

Whereas Moorman allowed the ice to melt naturally over the course of numerous hours,

Jeanrenaud relied on a series of tools—saws, rasps, pitchforks—to break up the ice cello.

Whereas the sounds of Moorman’s plexiglass bow and her repressed shivers took center stage,

Jeanrenaud introduced electronic sound manipulated in real time to highlight the potentials of new technology as it interacted with the experimental and performative. In other words, the differences and resonances between the two performances created a web of interpretations, intended and projected, that proved Moorman’s worthiness as an object of study within the larger history of the avant-garde. Moorman became a lens through which to view female experiences of art and life.

Since then, Moorman enthusiasts have begun the process of reclaiming her place in the art world through both public practice and scholarly assessment. In 2016, Northwestern

University’s Block Museum of Art curated an exhibit titled A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte

Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s. Devoted to Moorman’s life and career, the exhibit inspired another cellist (Seth Parker Woods) to re-re-imagine Ice Music. As part of the festivities,

544 Rothfuss, Topless Cellist, 5.

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the Block Museum also organized a series of scholarly talks, arranged a conference featuring emerging scholars presenting on Moorman, and published an exhibit catalog. Subsequently, art historians Saisha Grayson and Sophie Landres both completed dissertations with Moorman at their center.545 Moorman’s strategy for normalizing the avant-garde through education and exposure (in her case, via the festival medium) now seems to serve as the guiding principle for her own process of canonization.

To be clear, Moorman’s recuperation is still in development. Though the events and publications listed above are one kind of progress, information about her life and work is still limited to a small number of (easily-available) sources, and to the archival documents closely guarded by universities and museums. Few scholars consider Moorman their primary object of study, and most of those who do identify as art historians. It is a testament to Moorman’s management of her own legacy—the statements she made, and her documentation of even the most contradictory of those statements—that the Block Museum’s A Feast of Astonishments exhibit catalog presents numerous essays by scholars with distinct, occasionally opposing arguments about Moorman’s relationship to both national and identity politics, and to feminism in particular.546 These range from Lisa G. Corrin’s interview with artist Carolee Schneemann, who positions Moorman as a “pioneer of feminist principles,” to Kristine Stiles understanding of

545 Saisha Grayson, “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman” (Ph.D. dis.s, City University of New York, 2018); Sophie Landres, “Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman’s Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2017).

546 The essays particularly interested in Moorman and feminism include: Lisa G. Corrin, “Noise Bodies and Noisy Women: A Conversation with Carolee Schneemann,” 108-121; Joseph, “Messy Bodies,” 41- 60; O’Dell, “Bomb-Paper-Ice,” 153-168; Kristine Stiles, “Necessity’s Other: Charlotte Moorman and the Plasticity of Denial and Consent,” 169-184; all in A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016).

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Moorman’s motivation as “provocation at all costs.”547 As more information about Moorman has entered into circulation, scholars have begun to explore what Moorman might—in the words of witchcraft historian Marion Gibson—offer to modern women, how Moorman scholarship might—in the words of witchcraft historian Carol Karlsen—interact with mainstream political culture. In Moorman, scholars have found a single historical figure ripe for reaching deep into ambivalence about gender and genre, a figure bringing together the elite and the popular, the classical and the carnivalesque: a witch by any other name.

547 Lisa G. Corrin, “Noise Bodies and Noisy Women,” 120; Stiles, “Necessity’s Other,” 169.

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Conclusion

Fig. 5: “Charlotte Moorman performs Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension,” [October 5, 1969], Photographs from the 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in the Charlotte Moorman Archive (AS9), Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, Illinois.

1969. The Seventh Annual New York Avant Garde Festival. Every year, Charlotte

Moorman, mixed media artist and organizer of the annual festival, gave a “keynote performance”: the most spectacular production at the fair. On the morning of Sunday, October

5—the weather cooperating, the photographers at attention, the audience in formation—she gathered her cello, gathered her skirts, and stepped into the basket of a patriotically-striped hot air balloon for the premiere of Yukihisa Isobe’s Balloon Ascension. Slowly, grandly, the balloon rose into the sky. From her vantage point in the air, Moorman would have seen the fruits of her

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labor: the avant-gardists and the audience playing their parts, the artworks and performances progressing as planned (more or less), the permits safely filed, the money she raised evident in the abundance of props and electric lights, the boat she borrowed to move materials idling in the dock. From people to things to ideas, from big picture decision to tiny details, Moorman was responsible for designing, scheduling, organizing, fetching, delegating, formalizing, and manifesting her Festival.

The moment my dissertation proposal was approved, I began planning a FluxFest. In part, it was an attempt to understand the ins and outs of my material and subjects more thoroughly, more experientially, more phenomenologically. What exactly is required of an impresario? How did Charlotte Moorman juggle her life and her art, or were they in fact seamlessly integrated? In part, it was a bid to bypass the problems of relying solely on reified recordings as source material. What do these pieces actually sound like? How does audience participation change our perceptions of their effectiveness? In part, it was an experiment to see how modern audiences familiar and unfamiliar with the avant-garde ethos would react. In what ways has Fluxus entered the mainstream? What is the avant-garde’s legacy?

This wasn’t my first production of a historically-informed event. My senior year of college, the Carleton College Music Department and the Northfield Fire Department allowed me to perform Annea Lockwood’s Burning Piano in the middle of the campus quad—and, in fact, helped me to arrange for Lockwood herself to give a pre-performance lecture and light the match.548 In the first year of my doctoral program, I organized a seven-course dinner based on

548 Keith Goetzman, “Where Do You Stand on Burning Pianos?” in Utne Reader, May 26, 2009, accessed February 15, 2018, https://www.utne.com/arts/where-do-you-stand-on-burning-pianos.

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the food principles of the Italian Futurists. No friends were lost in the realization of that dinner, which—you may know—was not a foregone conclusion.549 In other words, I had enough experience to be properly daunted by the thought of recreating a FluxFest based on George

Maciunas’ FluxFest Sale (1966) and FluxFest Kit 2 (1970). I planned to draw heavily from the repertoire listed on the posters, augmented with a few original pieces in the style of Fluxus by contemporary composers. This, I felt, would constitute an important nod to the crucial newness of Fluxus in its day. In the spirit of Moorman’s festivals, anyone who wanted would be allowed to perform anything they wanted. It would be living proof that Fluxus could be performed by non-musicians and non-artists, using a limited number of inexpensive props, in a place where audience members would inadvertently walk by and be drawn in, and art and life would (for an hour or two) collide.

My festival needed a location. It needed performers. It needed funding for props and advertising. And shortly after I announced in my grant proposals that this would take place as part of my research—that it would, in fact, serve as a critical feature of my methodology—it needed to happen regardless of whether I had all of those things (location, performers, funding) in order. This, then, is one of the many points about festival organizing that remains opaque in the scholarly literature about festival organizers: there comes a point in the planning stages when enough people are involved and enough money is invested that a performance is unavoidable.

549 We skipped “Simultaneous Ice-Cream” (Vanilla dairy cream and little squares of onion frozen together), but did ask our guests to participate in a version of “Aerofood” (The diner is served from the right with a plate containing some black olives, fennel hearts and kumquats. From the left he is served with a rectangle made of sandpaper, silk and velvet. The foods must be carried directly to the mouth with the right hand while the left hand lightly and repeatedly strokes the tactile rectangle. In the meantime the waiters spray the napes of the diners’ necks with a perfume of carnations while from the kitchen comes contemporaneously a violent sound of an aeroplane motor and some music by Bach). F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, ed. Lesley Chamberlain, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989).

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Casting a wide net, I applied for a non-resident tutor position at one of the Harvard Houses.550 I pitched the FluxFest as a spring event; I was hired.

On the one hand, an affiliation with a House solved many of my logistical problems. Not only would it provide a beautiful outdoor courtyard space, it came with a small amount of funding, an administrator to help source chairs and tables, and a sponsor in the form of the

Harvard-sanctioned House Deans. It wouldn’t require extra permits or applications, which would in turn allow me a looser timeline: no need for lists of committed performers for preapproval, no need for detailed budgets. On the other hand, relying on an institution to support a Festival of fundamentally anti-(art)-establishment works raised complicated questions tied to the politics and ethics of medium and genre. By aligning myself with Harvard via an undergraduate dorm, what kinds of rules and restrictions was I tacitly agreeing to? Would I be required to censor my performers? Would such censoring effectively ruin the historical interest of the event? Would there be restrictions about who could see a performance on campus? (And, given that this particular House was located farthest away from campus-proper, who would make the trek to see the performance in the first place?) Moorman was intimately acquainted with these compromises.

The ethics of organizing historically-informed events eclipsed by the need for measurable progress, I immediately came up against yet another impresarial truth: April 16, the projected performance date, was carefully chosen to balance the House’s events schedule and to coincide with a relatively open period in the semester for undergraduates and graduate students alike.

April 16 was also, as it turned out, just a few weeks before I was to give a conference paper, before a chapter of my dissertation was due for a first reading in my writing group, and a month

550 In non-Harvard speak, this is an adviser and event organizer affiliated with a specific dormitory.

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or so before my wedding. Whether or not art-is-life and life-is-art, both Moorman and I had other art/life events to simultaneously plan and execute. These other events, as will become apparent, did play a role in shaping what my FluxFest came. At the same time, they meant nothing in the context of what I was now thinking of as the number one rule of Festival planning: when enough people and enough money are involved, the performance must take place.

I began to advertise, mostly with an eye towards gathering participants. I steered clear of social media (as an introverted musicologist, I had neither the fact of nor the wish for an online presence substantial enough to get itself noticed—though I have no doubt that if Moorman was alive today, her social media skills would be on fleek). Instead, I sent emails—nice, short, user- friendly emails detailing two preliminary non-binding interest meetings—to all of the Music

Department graduate and undergraduate students; all of the students taking related music classes; everyone at the House where the Festival was to take place; all of the Art and Art History

Department graduate and undergraduate students; and anyone else I could think of who might conceivably be interested. By my count, I sent that email—with slightly different “cover letters” to appeal to each group—to upwards of 600 people.

The night of the first preliminary meeting, not a single student showed up to ask about

Fluxus. “The people likely to show up to a performer’s meeting are people who already know something about Fluxus,” I assured the House Dean when she expressed some concern about the lack of turnout. The real purpose of doing this performance at a dormitory as part of my non- resident tutor duties, I went on, would be to expose the students to something new, and ask them to expand their concept of what music is and could be. In order to prove my point, I began to tell her about one of the pieces a music graduate student had already volunteered to perform—a piece I could hardly wait to see in real life.

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“It’s called ‘One for Violin Solo’ by Nam June Paik,” I explained. “You take a violin and you raise it very, very slowly over your head—” (here I mimed raising a violin) “—if you do it right it should take six to ten minutes, ideally,” (I told her), “and when you get to the top you smash it down as fast as you can on a hard surface” (one swift movement: the last part of the mime).

There was a long pause. “You’re going to do what?” she asked.

“Smash it,” I said matter-of-factly.

Her eyes widened, shocked—and two things became clear to me all at once. First, the essence, the ethos, the fact of Fluxus wasn’t getting across. Second, this particular piece—or, the concept behind the piece—was shocking to audiences of experimental music in the 1960s, mildly titillating to students of music who touched on the zany musical world of John Cage in their undergraduate survey classes, utterly commonplace to me as someone immersed in the scholarship on musical experimentalism, and borderline sacrilege to someone whose main—and meaningful—connection with music sparked via flute etudes from the 1800s.

I changed tack. “There will also be a piece in which two trumpet players perform pop tunes with a rubber glove over their mouthpieces,” I hurried on, “and maybe a piece with paper airplanes.” Skeptical and mollified all at once, she continued our conversation about logistics; after all, the show must go up and the show must go on.551 (In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have opened with “One for Violin Solo.”)

The afternoon of the second preliminary meeting, I entertained a grand total of four interested performers in an empty classroom in the Music Building. All four were friends of

551 An enormous thank you to Christie MacDonald, Smith Research Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Research Professor of Comparative Literatures, and Faculty Dean at Mather House. There is no House Dean more supportive of musical activities in all their guises.

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mine. Two meetings; four performers—five including me. Six including my fiancé (who was inevitably going to be drafted in the service of Art and Art Worlds). In truth, I was neither all that surprised, nor all that worried. It would have been one kind of triumph to say that the performers encompassed a broad swath of interests and education and life experience, but I could see the advantages of working with a relatively small number of performers, all of whom were the kind of close friends who would give up their Saturdays to participate in a festival for the sake of our friendship and a healthy dose of intellectual curiosity. Even so, the ideal number of performers was some number higher than six. I cornered colleagues in the library; I plugged the festival at lunch; I suggested—no, curated—specific pieces based on specific interests and capabilities, all with an eye towards a cohesive-but-varied program. Moorman was known for a specific brand of flirtatious charisma.552 Though I hope I kept my overtures professional, I nonetheless began to understand the usefulness of charm and the importance of having favors to call in.

In the end, I sent a spreadsheet with a list of approximately twenty-five Fluxus pieces that seemed viable in the context of our limited budget and House affiliation to the eleven total graduate students and friends who agreed to make up my performing force. I made it very clear that although the performers should not feel limited to this specific set of pieces, I wanted to give them the option of selecting something at their comfort level without requiring them to do research on their own already heavily-scheduled graduate student time. A few performers signed up for multiple pieces; several asked to be placed where needed; I made the executive decision that there would be a number of full-ensemble events and nobody argued.

552 See especially Joseph, “Messy Bodies,” 41-59.

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The final program was more curated than I thought ideal, and I wondered if that made it too much “my” concert and not enough a collective effort—and how much that mattered. The programs for Oliveros’ TudorFest and Ashley’s Here2 Festival, neither of which were strict

“FluxFests” but both of which were affiliated with institutions of one kind or another, were carefully curated. I understood that these final programs took shape partly due to practical considerations (rather than philosophical or artistic ideals). Some of these tied back to the idea of rules and regulations, but some were based on even more prosaic needs: one of the pieces I suggested required a piano, I realized, but I had no way to get a piano to the middle of an outdoor courtyard. I thought about performing a piece with a blender, but we would have no power source. We had access to a circular bench curled around a large tree that might have been perfect as a narrow, elevated stage—but then we would have no table on which to smash a violin.

Entering the countdown to April 16, what most surprised me was the way planning this festival took over every waking thought. Walking down the street on my way to teach class, I remembered the famous Fluxus Rainbow dinners and suddenly I was planning a small reception with only orange food: carrots, cheddar cheese, goldfish crackers, vanilla wafer cookies, Reese’s

Peanut Butter Cups, orange juice. I started a box of materials pulled from around my house that I planned to bring to the performance as props for the various programmed pieces. The result was cheap and sustainable: I added my fiancé’s high school running trophies, some gold paint I found in the basement, and a hairpiece that was supposed to have been a braid for my wedding but that clearly didn’t match my hair color. These were my personal things with personal histories and personal attachments. The pictures of Moorman’s apartment near the end of her life show the mountains of things she gathered together over the years—ephemera, artworks, empty yogurt

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cups, her personal collection of dolls. 553 It’s not difficult to imagine her pulling this and that to defray the cost of something new. Many demands on a small budget make it expedient to gather what you can from the materials at hand; in the process, a Festival becomes imbued with secret meanings the audience—even the rest of the performers—will never know. Then again, those performers may have contributed their own secret meanings: the rest of the props came from festival participants willing to lend big items (speakers) and small items (coins), as well as a single trip to the neighborhood Target. I armed myself with a carefully drawn up list of

“necessities,” and a second more open list of “possibilities.” A word of advice: future FluxFest organizers would do well to head straight for the section displaying kids’ party supplies. A piñata for Peter Frank’s “Breaking Event,” of course! Pack after pack of bubbles to hand out to the audience to encourage participation during Albert M. Fine’s Card Piece. I reluctantly re-shelved a foam finger reading “Boston” earmarked for Ken Friedman’s “Explaining Fluxus”; I couldn’t justify the expense.

The day arrived. All eleven performers present and accounted for.554 It was cold; we always knew that was a possibility for a mid-April date in Boston, but it was really cold. So cold,

I sent a friend to get boxes of hot coffee to warm the hands of performers and audience members alike. (In the end, we barely touched them—another expense that could have been avoided. The cost was ultimately irrelevant to my tiny event, but it wouldn’t have been negligible for a constantly-in-debt operation like Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival). In any case, each and every performer pitched in to set the stage moving tables and chairs, or preparing props and

553 Krafft, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” 184-190.

554 Thank you: Katie Callam, Grace Edgar, John Gabriel, Monica Hershberger, Krystal Klingenberg, Olivia Lucas, Sam Parler, Matthew Leslie Santana, Tom Scahill, Dan Tramte.

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organizing materials. Dan Tramte and Krystal Klingenberg set up all of the electronic equipment in record time. (In the moment, I found this to be the purest manifestation of the art world’s collective knowledge in action. If I had been on my own, we never would have gotten started.)

These graduate students may not have been seasoned members of Fluxus or the avant-garde, but they were for the most part active musicians well-versed in the “extra” roles required to put a performance together. Well-versed, in other words, in the responsibilities and value of an extended art world.

At 11:00 am when the event was supposed to begin, we had exactly four people in the audience. Five if you counted a baby. We stalled a bit, we fidgeted with our props, and by the time we truly opened the show fifteen minutes later, there were twenty or so people interspersed among the performers not on stage.555 (In an interview I conducted with Jon Hendricks, he began reminiscing about one of his early New York shows: “If we had 25 people come to the event, and experience it,” he began—and then he cut himself off, “that would be amazing.”556) I opened the show with a few sentences about the history of Fluxus. It was never the beginning I had envisioned (would Maciunas ever have deigned to explain himself?), but I couldn’t resist a bit of context and it gave me a chance to direct the audience’s attention to Klingenberg and her location on a bench just off the mainstage. She held up an enormous pad of paper with various

555 I should note that the courtyard we chose for our stage was surrounded on all sides by Harvard dormitory buildings. As it turned out, a student I was teaching that semester lived in one of those dorms and watched a fair amount of the performance from on high. “What did you think?” I asked him eagerly; in the most politic manner possible, he said it was very interesting and then reminded me that trumpets playing Celine Dion and choruses of eleven individuals all singing different tunes at once is perhaps not the kindest Saturday morning wake up call for a student who had been out late the night before. Which is just to say, we almost certainly had a much larger audience than the intrepid (and visible) souls who gathered on the courtyard lawn.

556 Hendricks, interview with author.

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written instructions for the audience to follow throughout the FluxFest: this was Albert M. Fine’s

Card Piece. Laugh, one card read. Blow bubbles, said another. Boo and hiss, commanded a third.

With the preliminaries taken care of, the Festival was officially out of my hands. I got up now and again to announce the title, composer, and performer of each piece, but by and large the performance moved of its own accord. It wasn’t perfect; it was always surprising. John Gabriel and Olivia Lucas waited patiently, seated and blindfolded at opposite sides of a small, round, metal mesh table, as Monica Hershberger and I carefully pulled out item after item from a series of plastic bags in preparation for Peter Frank’s Breaking Event. We showed the audience the piñata shaped like a cupcake, several dishes, two eggs, an empty shampoo bottle, a pillow, a series of trophies, on and on—placing each object on the table in turn. After everything had been set just so, we handed Gabriel and Lucas each a hammer. Three, two, one. SMASH. (It was a terrible noise.) Lucas and Gabriel eagerly took off their blindfolds; they hadn’t hit a thing.

Walker Evans and Kelly Hiser premiered Baby Piece. The performers lay down on the concrete side by side. Evans sat at one end of the resulting people-table and Hiser at the other.

They encouraged baby M to crawl across the performers. Baby M wouldn’t. The performers

(myself included) couldn’t stop giggling and the composers chose not to set a predetermined signal for when the piece would end. I remember the sun coming out, the warmth on my back.

Matthew Leslie Santana performed Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo.557 He had practiced raising the violin as slowly as possible, had conveyed to me the unexpected strength required to keep his arms steady for those long minutes. In performance, the audience fidgeted

(as expected)—and when Leslie Santana finally smashed his violin down as hard as he could, only a few tiny chips of woods flew off the back. So much for my thought to acquire a cheap

557 This was one of Moorman’s core repertoire pieces, though it wasn’t written specifically for her.

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student instrument for greatest effect. (Leslie Santana tried again on a stone bench during the reception to much better effect and enthusiastic applause.) Lucas and her poker face smashed crackers in David Det Hompson’s Lessons. Sam Parler stared intently at a basket of oranges while Katie Callam painted them white, and Tom Scahill ate one whole in Bengt af Klintberg’s

Orange Events. Hershberger and Grace Edgar (also known as the ensemble Silver Bellz) painted their faces metallic silver and performed a trumpet duet with rubber gloves affixed to their mouthpieces (inflate, deflate, inflate, deflate) in Joe Jones’ Duet for Brass Instruments.558 The whole ensemble performed Alison Knowles’ Piece for Any Number of Vocalists to outstanding effect; the last two minutes featured Scahill singing solo and the rest of us wondering when and if he planned to stop.

Gabriel, though, unquestionably stole the show with his rendition of Concerto for Piano and Performer, also by Albert M. Fine. The point of the piece is to remove 88 items from your person—one for each key on the piano. This ideally would have been done with a live piano for timing purposes, but the logistics were such that I had prerecorded a descending chromatic scale with what I hoped was adequate time between each note. I brought a wireless speaker with which to play the recording, and promptly panicked when I realized it wasn’t nearly loud enough to reach the audience. Improvising, I held the speaker up to a microphone for the eight minutes it took for Gabriel to perform the piece—and in the process, I found myself with a perfectly clear sightline of the audience.

Gabriel began by removing a couple of hats, mittens, jacket after jacket; from the jackets, he pulled out bits and bobs, a container of floss, a condom. He peeled off layer after layer, and as he pulled off his jeans to reveal a pair of long johns underneath, I watched the House Dean’s

558 The Silver Bellz’s version of Jones’ piece heavily featured the tune “Let’s Talk About Love” by Celine Dion.

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eyebrows go through the roof. It dawned on me that Gabriel and I had never discussed his realization beyond the need for a piano track. On the one hand, I felt I had already “censored” the performers enough by choosing an exceedingly tame program relative to some of the

Fluxconcerts of the 1960s, and I had no plans to stop any piece already in motion. On the other hand, there we were on the grounds of a Harvard House, and as the organizer I was in some sense personally responsible for bringing all of this together. Gabriel took off his shirt, he took off a sock, he took off the other sock. And then, watching him standing there in the cold in nothing but a pair of tight blue underwear, we all realized—Gabriel included—that there were still a few notes left to sound. We looked at Gabriel, he looked at the audience; a bass note rang out and he mimed a look of embarrassment and covered his body with both hands like something out of a dream or a cartoon. Flux perfection.

We capped our Festival with a performance of Audience Piece No. 6 by Ben Vautier:

“The stage is transformed into a refreshment area. After the curtain is raised, the audience may come on stage to eat and dance.” Audience members joined performers and we ate our orange food in the spirit of the Fluxmeals. Several students revealed they were taking a class that required a concert review, they had chosen this, and could they ask us some questions? The rest of the audience chatted and laughed and gradually slipped away to run errands and finish homework. We were left to tear down the stage as quickly as we could and get ourselves out of the cold.

Out of the cold and into a pub, where we debriefed over brunch. In the hour or two during which we ate our eggs and drank our orange juice, I was surprised and touched to listen to the performers talk about how they would tweak their pieces in the next performance, about what

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they would choose to do in the next FluxFest, and about how unexpectedly “fun” it all was.

Several of the performers—graduate students earning their Ph.Ds.—as well as several audience members (in this case, also academics) began to explore ways to introduce Fluxus into the classes they would be teaching the following fall semester. I went home to find three separate emails asking for recommendations, bibliographies, and advice—all of which I was, to put it mildly, thrilled to provide. In the spirit of Moorman’s “reaching new people,” I had concrete evidence of increased interest and even the potential for sustained engagement on the part of the

(few and proud) participants, performers and audience members alike.

This was a miniscule FluxFest—far from the scale of something like the New York

Avant Garde Festival. As a relatively inexperienced organizer, I took shortcuts, I made compromises. So did Moorman. I also gathered together my art world, and I applied Moorman’s tips and tricks towards Festival planning and realization.

Those logistical epiphanies directly impacted the way I’ve written about avant-garde festivals in the pages of this dissertation—but so too did the epiphanies that resulted from what I didn’t do, the issues that flew under my radar in the context of the time and effort it took to coordinate so many moving parts. (It is easy to become single-minded in the face of a to-do list several pages long.) Though I recognized the ethical implications of aligning my Festival with a certain kind of institutional power, I neglected to consider how my Festival—the individuals included as performers, composers, and audience members; the intent and reception of the pieces on display; the kinds of advertising I did; the explicit coding of genre and content—did or did not reflect or affect national or identity politics. I celebrated the avant-garde’s ability to shake up complacencies about what art is and could be, and in the process I (like many) inadvertently

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equated avant-garde art with leftist ideals. That equation is too easy: it tells a story of art’s power that is parallel to but not the same as the attention to inequalities highlighted by feminism and civil rights, or to the break with sociocultural norms embodied by the counterculture. Generic chaos is one manifestation of these movements, but it is not the entire narrative.

In the end, my 2016 FluxFest was a dress rehearsal for the thesis itself, a first draft of the stories—of soaring success and perilous pitfalls—that I wanted to tell about the New York Avant

Garde Festival and the art world it encapsulated. Because of the outsider nature of the art world, the public (and, in some cases, the avant-gardists themselves) assumed that content followed form, that rebelling against conventions of genre was tantamount to declaring a revolution against sociocultural norms and engaging in activist practice. To recreate a FluxFest in 2016, then, should not have been an apolitical exercise. “We have cyclical times,” Jon Hendricks told me in our interview, “and something’s urgently needed [now] and whether it’s this, I wouldn’t say that you’d repeat something, but you can learn from it and see more directions, ways of confronting really very serious crises and situations in the world and in our government.” In short, the avant-garde is a useful lens through which to actively relate the past to the present, and exploring the assumptions—correct and incorrect—that inform our understanding of the avant- garde serves to focus that lens. The phenomenological experience of producing a FluxFest informed the questions I asked about the avant-garde, the materials I sought in archives, the people I contacted for interviews. Once collected, however, those archival documents and firsthand accounts reshaped my understanding of the ethical responsibilities of the avant-garde then and now. Charlotte Moorman was the founder and organizer of fifteen impressive New

York Avant Garde Festivals. With the benefit of hindsight—with full awareness of the strengths

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and flaws of her project to educate the public about the power of the avant-garde—I am gearing up for my own Festival Number Two.

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Bibliography

Archival Collections

Charlotte Moorman Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

David Tudor Papers 1800-1998, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA

Dick Higgins Papers ca. 1960-1994, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA

Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, NY

Jean Brown Papers 1916-1995, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA

John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

Pauline Oliveros Papers, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Division, New York, NY

Walker Art Center Archive, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

University of Kansas Sound Archive, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS

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Hendricks, Jon. Interview with author, August 8, 2017

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