Charlotte Moorman, Tradition Disrupter, Is the Focus of Two Shows
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Version 0 of 1. “Think Crazy” is sound advice for today’s artists, faced with cookie cutter training and art fair sclerosis. And the phrase did once have some practical application. It was emblazoned, like a logo, across a banner at one of the New York Avant Garde Festivals that took place annually in the city between 1963 and 1980, rounding up feral fringe talent from around the world and letting it loose in places like Grand Central Terminal, Shea Stadium and the Staten Island Ferry. By fringe, I mean people who worked with esoteric art media (air, bullets, spaghetti) and had names you’d never heard of. While a few participants — John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Karlheinz Stockhausen — were big cultural deals, most were not, and the open-door policy made the festival extra-special. Basically, if you proposed a tradition-crushing idea that had brains, passion or politics behind it, you were in. Given the anarchy that prevailed, the wonder was less that the event was successful than that it happened at all. And it only happened because of one person, the American artist and musician Charlotte Moorman, famous as “the topless cellist,” who invented the festival, produced it and coaxed city officials who didn’t know performance art from police procedurals into endorsing it. A person of Southern belle charm and limitless faith in the power of community, Ms. Moorman was, above all, a celebrant of disruptive newness. So it makes sense that the new art season opens with exhibitions that celebrate her, two of them. The larger, “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,” at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, focuses on her career; the other, “Don’t Throw Anything Out,” at the university’s nearby Fales Library, on her life. Both are demandingly complex, made up of hundreds of objects, videos, photographs and audio recordings, not to mention explanatory labels. But once you plunge in, you’re likely to stay, whether you’re deepening an existing acquaintance with the artist or meeting her, as many people will be, for the first time. After her death in 1991, at 58, the mainstream art world largely forgot her, or pegged her as a decorative accessory to the work of Nam June Paik, with whom she often collaborated. But with the arrival of a superb biography, by Joan Rothfuss, in 2014, and now these two shows — which come from the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, where a vast Moorman archive resides — the days of forgetting and misperceiving are over, and a foundational 20th-century art figure is revealed. Ms. Moorman was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1933, and was a star from the start. In the Fales show, her picture stands out from those of her classmates in her high school yearbook. They smile; she beams. Dark-haired and, in photographs, statuesque (it’s a shock to learn from her passport, also on view, that she was only 5’ 1”), she’s going places. In 1952, she was crowned Little Rock’s Miss City Beautiful. In the same year, she entered college as a music student, specializing in the cello, which she’d been playing since she was 10. In 1957, bent on a concert career, she moved to Manhattan and enrolled at the Juilliard School. And there her education changed. One of her classmates, the Japanese violinist Kenji Kobayashi, was hard-wired into the city’s New Music culture. He spent lots of time at a downtown loft that was shared by Ms. Ono and the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (they were then married), and used as a performance space. Artists like Simone Forti, David Tudor and La Monte Young did their latest things, genre-scrambling work that combined art, action, music and noise. Enthralled by what she saw and heard there, Ms. Moorman entered the scene. She did so by two paths. On the one hand, she began promoting avant-garde art professionally. In 1961, working for a booking agent, she helped to arrange Ms. Ono’s American solo debut at Carnegie Recital Hall. Two years later, on her own, she masterminded the inaugural Avant Garde Festival. Meanwhile, she was adding new work to her concert repertoire, notably Cage’s “26’ 1499” for a String Player.” This piece requires a performer to intersperse instrumental music with discretionary nonmusical actions and sounds. Over the years, it became a signature piece for her. (She presented an excerpt on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”) And her marked-up score is one of the Grey exhibition’s archival treasures, though the actions she wrote into it — drinking a Coke, reading instructions from a tampon box, turning an Army practice bomb into a pseudo-cello — infuriated the fastidious Cage, who found them self-aggrandizing. At some point, maybe through him, she met Mr. Paik, a Korean-born composer-performer. And much of the Grey Gallery show, organized over two floors by a collaborative team led by Lisa G. Corrin, the director of the Block Museum, documents their long working partnership. Their fundamental aims as artists were in sync. Both wanted to bring experimental art, with its liberationist potential, to a popular audience. And both were unabashedly willing to go to almost any theatrical length to do so. The cello, or some version of it, remained Ms. Moorman’s chosen instrument. Standard recital attire and comportment — concert gown, coif, focused expression — were her model for self-presentation. This show of formality served as a foil for the absurdist eroticism that Mr. Paik was bent on infusing into the classical tradition. The dynamic was most dramatically played out in a 1967 New York performance of his “Opera Sextronique,” during which Ms. Moorman played Massenet while dressed in an electrically lighted bikini, and then appeared nude to the waist, before being hauled off to jail by the city vice squad on charges of indecent exposure, and was later convicted. The incident brought her popular visibility, but of a somewhat dubious kind: as crazy-lady artist, daring but ditsy, and a passive component of a male artist’s work. Some feminist observers were not kind. (Andrea Dworkin called her “a harlot.”) Others, like Ms. Ono and Carolee Schneemann, who knew Ms. Moorman well, saw a political pulse beating under the antic surface of her art, and the dual exhibitions let us see this, too. References to militarism are frequent. The cello-bomb she put into the Cage piece was there for a reason. Explaining her work and that of her colleagues, in a 1967 interview, she said, “With the assassination of Kennedy, the war, the bomb — well, in times like this, you can’t just expect the kind of art you had before.” In a breathtaking 1983 video clip, she performs a piece called “Per Arco,” created for her by the Italian composer Giuseppe Chiari. It opens with an audiotape of gunfire and bombing, recorded by the composer during World War II. After a brief silence, Ms. Moorman begins to respond to what she’s just heard, rubbing her cello consolingly, then harshly, then suddenly slamming it with her bow before dissolving in tears. After a 1965 performance in Germany, she had written: Ms. Moorman wrote constantly, maybe compulsively, as if that were a way to pin down reality, order it, at least a little. Her ink-and-pencil planning maps for the festivals are so detailed as to baffle the eye. They appear, along with relics of the events, including the original “Think Crazy” banner by the Polish artist Marek Konieczny and dozens of you-are-there photographs by the great artist and avant-garde documenter Peter Moore (1932-1993), at the Grey Gallery. Examples of more personal writing, assembled by Scott Krafft of Northwestern University’s libraries, are at the Fales: annotated shopping lists; quick love notes to her husband, Frank Pileggi (1940-1993); decades’ worth of appointment books; and a double-barrel Rolodex that looks about to burst. In 1979, she was told she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, from which she seems not to have fully recovered. In the early 1980s, cancer recurred, and the diaries of her last years, written in tight lines on loose scraps of paper, are hour-by-hour accounts of pain endured and relief gained from morphine. She continued to work right to the end as an artist — “If I know I’m performing, I’ll be O.K.,” she writes — and as an advocate for an anti-normal, anti-market, necessarily outsider art. Her last recorded words to Mr. Pileggi — “Don’t throw anything out” — give the show its title. She left behind a mountain of material, much of which was deposited at Northwestern in 2001. The two exhibitions, as dense as they are with their hundreds of objects, represent a mere fraction of that material, the tip of the Moorman iceberg. Except it isn’t an iceberg. It’s a big, warm, spreading fire, always on the verge of leaping out of control, but crackling with new ideas and new histories. |