The obvious way to begin a review of “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” would be to describe the scandalous performances for which the late musician and impresario Moorman is best remembered: as the topless cellist who was arrested before going bottomless, who sometimes wore a brassiere of mini-television screens, and who once played an ice cello nude until it melted.
Let’s not do that.
Let’s begin instead by noticing the unusual move that the Block Museum has made by devoting its entire building, minus one little corner of textiles on permanent display, to a figure who is today considered marginal, when she is considered at all. Who is best known as the collaborator of Nam June Paik, the Korean artist who made television his medium, sculpting towers of monitors programmed with trippy interpretations of network news. Paik, of course, constructed Moorman’s TV bra, as well as a cello of screens and a light-bulb bikini. He, in turn, let his naked back be strung and bowed by her.
Moorman and Paik were lifelong collaborators in a field that understands collaboration but prefers to remember individual artists. That’s tidy and appealing — good for monographic coffee table books and strong museum collections — but rarely accurate. The avant-garde variety of performance that thrived in locales as far-flung as New York and Tokyo and Dusseldorf beginning in the late 1950s, that eschewed unique marketable objects and championed creative gestures belonging in a lunchroom as much as on a theater stage — that kind of art was rarely the production of a single person.
It must have been exhilarating to live and experience, but it can be challenging to exhibit. The Block has done a thrilling job, mounting a show that feels like a cross between an archive and a multimedia spectacular, and the curators have been shrewd in choosing Moorman as their central figure. Born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1933 and trained there as a classical musician, Moorman eventually made her way north to study at the Juilliard School. Once in New York, she found herself exposed to the downtown arts scene, where composers like John Cage were quick to embrace a capable cellist willing and able to perform unconventional scores, which might involve “playing” a television set, a record player and a skillet on a hot plate; rustling around inside a large blue nylon bag with an instrument; or smashing a violin.
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Many artists, among them the legendary Joseph Beuys, wrote work uniquely for Moorman. My favorite is by Jim McWilliams, who sent her up into the air, held aloft by colorful helium balloons, to play her cello for the clouds. She also took on pre-existing scores as part of her repertoire, including one by Yoko Ono in which audience members are given scissors and invited to snip the performer’s clothing. By her own reckoning, Moorman enacted “Cut Piece” hundreds of times.
Those tender-but-tense scenes of laceration — a video screens alongside three deconstructed gowns — must have made Moorman even more suspect than she already was among feminists of the time, who considered her nudity narcissistic and maligned her fancy dresses and make-up. (They weren’t the only ones who complained; Cage found her interpretation of his compositions overly theatrical.) More recent feminist scholars have tried to right that history, acclaiming artists like Moorman’s friend and collaborator Carolee Schneemann for putting their own bodies into challenging art, but Moorman remains outrageously underappreciated.
Her contributions extend massively beyond Moorman herself: more than a third of the exhibition is devoted to the annual New York Avant Garde Festival, increasingly larger extravaganzas that she organized from 1963 until 1980. These events involved anyone and everyone Moorman could pull into her whirlwind, and the participant lists read like a who’s who of international experimental art, with representatives big and small from new music, kinetics, light art, environments, computer art, jazz, Fluxus, happenings and whatever else was being made at that moment.
Moorman was inclusive artistically and also in terms of audience: after holding the festival in a recital hall for its first few years, she moved on to Central Park, the Staten Island ferryboat, Grand Central Terminal and Shea Stadium. The outsize energy, charm and ambition it must have taken to pull this all off is superseded only by the extraordinary vision of floats designed by Dieter Roth, Les Levine, Allan Kaprow, Beuys and other vanguard artists making their way up Central Park West as part of the parade that constituted the 6th Annual Festival.
(It really is a vision: the parade, like so much other living art, is subject to the limits of documentation and ephemeral remains. Two black-and-white photographs, an arrangement of Styrofoam blocks, and a poster are what we have to go on to re-imagine the procession. The great photographer Peter Moore, who took nearly every picture in the exhibition, deserves special mention for preserving an entire era that, being so much about direct experience, didn’t always leave over much for posterity.)
Moorman, for her part, seems to have understood the importance of the repository. Her substantial archives, which are housed in Northwestern University’s library, about a five-minute walk from the museum, are the work of a hoarder who lived in a world worth hanging onto. Displayed in a mini-show entitled “Don’t Throw Anything Out” are artworks by friends Ray Johnson, Brian Buczak, Ay-O, Jackie Apple and Ono, all signed with affection to Moorman; testaments of love to and from her husband Frank Pileggi, including a birthday message broadcast on the Spectacolor electronic sign in Times Square; props from a “crotch music” performance of 1973; annotated grocery receipts; and a Rolodex open to J. Lennon, whose entry has been crossed out with the explanation “murdered dec 8, 1980.”
The final section documents Moorman’s death in 1991, at the age of 58, after 13 years of living with cancer, with records as extensive, mundane and revelatory as those of her life in art. A chart kept during a hospital stay notes that Peter and Barbara Moore brought pajamas and a camera; John and Yoko sent flowers but didn’t visit; the Fluxus artist Geoff Hendricks came with an artwork. A month of “pain diaries” minutely tracks the agony in her right breast, the location of injections, the television shows she watched, food she ate, chores she accomplished, sleep she slept.
Even in the end, suffering from terrible illness, Moorman remained attentive to the human. Yes, the human. Just as she herself was, all along, the human element on the stage amid the television sets, on talk shows discussing experimental art, in the gallery next to the metal sculptures.
“A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” and “Don’t Throw Anything Out: Charlotte Moorman’s Archive” run through July 17 at the Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, 847-491-4000, www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
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