A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s Charlotte Moorman was a bold, barrier-breaking performer and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her freewheeling avant garde festivals brought experimental art to a broad public for nearly 20 years. However, recognition of Moorman to date has been limited to her collaborations with other artists—including composer John Cage and Korean-American multimedia artist Nam June Paik—and to her 1967 performance of Paik’s “Opera Sextronique,” for which she became known as the “topless cellist” after being arrested on indecency charges.
The exhibition features original sculptures, photographs, video art works, installations, newly discovered props and costumes for performance art works, annotated music scores, archival materials, film clips and audio recordings. Many of these objects will be drawn from a one-of-a-kind archival resource held at Northwestern University Library, the Charlotte Moorman Archive, acquired by the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in 2001. The exhibition has been curated by a collaborative team: Lisa G. Corrin, Director, Block Museum; Corinne Granof, Curator of Academic Programs, Block Museum; Scott Krafft, Curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries; Michelle Puetz, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts, Block Museum; Joan Rothfuss, consulting curator and author of Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman; and Laura Wertheim Joseph, Consulting Curatorial Associate. Exhibition design by Dan Silverstein, Associate Director of Collections and Exhibition Management, Block Museum. Catalogs will be available for purchase following the program at the Block and in the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall lobby for $44.
A Feast of Astonishments is organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, in partnership with Northwestern University Libraries.
Opening program presented in partnership with the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University, and co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
Chamber Music, Takehisa Kosugi
Performed by Drake Driscoll, Class of 2018 Welcome Dan Linzer, Provost, Northwestern University Thanks Lisa Corrin, the Ellen Philips Katz Director, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University 3 Stories About Charlotte Moorman, Joan Rothfuss Projection One, Morton Feldman Performed by Riana Anthony, Master of Music, Class of 2017 Speed-dating the Avant-Garde: 15 Festivals in 30 Minutes, Barbara Moore Cello Etude Boreales, no. 1, John Cage Performed by Drake Driscoll, Class of 2018 Roundtable Artist Conversation, moderated by Hannah Higgins Sandra Binion Andy Gurian Alison Knowles Jim McWilliams Carolee Schneemann One for Violin Solo, Nam Jun Paik Performed by Myrtil Mitanga, Class of 2017
Peter Moore. Publicity photograph for 3rd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, August 26, 1965. Left to right: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Takehisa Kosugi, Gary Harris, Dick Higgins, Judith Kuemmerle, Kenneth King, Meredith Monk, Al Kurchin, Phoebe Neville. In front, kneeling, Philip Corner and James Tenney. Photograph © Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, NY.
Joan Rothfuss is an independent writer, art historian, and critic. From 1988 through 2006, she was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she organized exhibitions of work by Joseph Beuys, Bruce Conner, Fluxus, and Jasper Johns, among others. In 2014, she published Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman, the first book to explore Moorman’s life and work. Her other publications include Eiko & Koma: Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty (Walker Art Center, 2011), “The Ballad of Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman: A Revisionist History,” in Nam June Paik (Tate Liverpool and Museum Kunst Palast, 2010), and “FluxBeuys” in What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why. (Centro Cultural/Banco do Brasil, 2002). She teaches at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. Barbara Moore is an independent scholar of seminal late 20th-century art alternatives such as performance and artists books. She was the first editor at Dick Higgins’s legendary Something Else Press, a rare-book dealer for thirty years specializing in printed manifestations of the avant-garde, and has written and lectured extensively on these subjects. For more than 50 years she has managed the vast Peter Moore photographic archive, from which the images in her lecture have been selected, and is currently writing a book about the archive and its role in the historical documentation of performance art.
Moderator: Hannah Higgins has been a professor of art history at UIC since 1994. Her research and course topics examine twentieth century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, performance art, food art, and early computer art. Her books and articles argue for the humanistic value of multimodal aesthetic experiences. Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and co-editor with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012). She has received the UIC University Scholar Award, DAAD, Getty and Philips Collection Fellowships and is coexecutor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press. Sandra Binion is a Chicago-based video artist and performer. Binion has performed and displayed her art in numerous spaces, including the Evanston Art Center, Links Hall, Kunstraum (Stuttgart), The Goodman Theatre, and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Binion received a BFA in Dance from the University of Cincinnati, College Conservatory of Music and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She first became prominent in the 1970s, when she elevated mundane activities like ironing clothes, scrubbing steps, dining and doing laundry into highly regarded performance pieces. Binion has performed internationally and continues to contribute to the field in Chicago and beyond. Andrew Gurian is a filmmaker and video artist whose works have been exhibited on television and in museums and festivals worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and WNET/Channel 13 (NYC). Gurian joined the TP Videospace Troupe (founded and directed by Shirley Clarke) in 1972. Gurian appears in Nam June Paik’s and Howard Weinberg’s video tribute Topless Cellist: Charlotte Moorman and was the Associate Director of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. Since 2007 he has been a guest artist/lecturer at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Alison Knowles produces work that incorporates performance, radio and sound, papermaking and printmaking. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience. She graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt. In the 1960s, Knowles was an active participant in New York City's downtown artist community, making work alongside Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. During this time she began producing scores, events that rework everyday activities into performances that incorporate music. One of her most notable event scores, Make a Salad, was originally performed in 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.
Jim McWilliams (b. 1937) earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1959 and began his career as a designer at the Curtis Publishing Company. His design work has won awards from the Art Directors Club of Philadelphia, New York, and Hartford, The New York Type Directors Club, and the Communicating Arts Group of San Diego. Concurrently with his work as a designer, McWilliams was involved with the New York and Philadelphia avant-gardes. He conceived of and performed multimedia works, often with the pseudonym Joe Millions. Among these works were compositions he created for Charlotte Moorman, such as Sky Kiss (1968) and Ice Music (1972). He also designed posters for her Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals. Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist who transformed the discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. Her painting, photography, performance art, installation, and film and video works have been exhibited widely, including at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her numerous awards include the 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, and Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association, 2000. Schneeman has published widely and forthcoming publications include Imaging Her Erotics, from MIT Press.
Born in Japan, Riana Anthony began playing cello at age nine and was awarded two prizes in the Osaka Izuminomori Festival within two years. Living in Honolulu since 2003, she made her Honolulu Symphony debut at twelve. She has performed with the Maui Youth Philharmonic, the Shanghai City Symphony Orchestra and has received awards in competitions in Asia and North America. Twice a fellowship recipient at the Aspen Music Festival, Anthony has participated in the Moritzburg Festival, Meadowmount School of Music and Amelia Chamber Music Festival. She is a first year master’s student at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. Drake Driscoll is currently completing her second year at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music where she studies cello with Hans Jorgen Jensen. She previously attended Walnut Hill School for the Arts and the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. Her previous teachers include Natasha Brofsky, Elizabeth Beilman, and Nicole Johnson. During the summers, Driscoll has attended the Meadowmount School of Music, the Heifetz International Music Institute, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the International Music Academy in Pilsen (Czech Republic). Driscoll is currently a member of Northwestern University’s Chamber Orchestra and previously served as Assistant Principal of NEC’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal of the Triangle Youth Philharmonic, and Principal of the North Carolina Symphony Youth Sinfonietta. Myrtil Mitanga was born in Germany and began learning the cello at the age of four when she moved to Atlanta, GA with her family. She graduated from Atlanta International School in 2013, and is currently in her third year at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where she studies with Hans Jorgen Jensen. She was a semi-finalist in the Sphinx Competition Junior Division in 2012 and 2013, and a winner in the 2013 Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition. In January of 2014, she performed the final movement of the Lalo Cello Concerto with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and she is excited to perform Solitude by Atlanta composer Malcolm Parson with the Forsyth Youth Orchestra in the spring of 2015.
Composed in 1962, Chamber Music requires the performer to enter a chamber with openings, or simply a large canvas bag with zippered apertures, and play sounds with any instruments. The “music” resides in the performer’s movements within the bag, in the sounds it makes, and in the sequences of shapes and forms it assumes.
Projection One, a solo cello piece written in 1950 by Morton Feldman for the noted cellist Seymour Barab, explores categories of pizzicato, arco and arco-like ponticello, as well as harmonics. This work was written on graph paper with the pitch range of the instrument indicated in boxes inside larger boxes, giving the work a quality of improvisation and allowing the performer freedom of pitch choices within these registral ranges.
Composed in 1978, Etudes Boreales, no. 1 is one of Cage’s pieces created using star charts from the Atlas Borealis as a source of randomness. Cage traced the star maps and then used additional chance operations to determine, with painstaking precision, the specific qualities of those events (pitch, dynamics, duration, timbre, articulation).
Nam Jun Paik, One for Violin Solo First performed by Nam June Paik in 1962, One for Violin Solo undermines clichés of the classical music genre through an unanticipated gesture. Charlotte Moorman, who valued drama, humor, theatricality, and subversion in her work, was drawn to the ceremony of the piece, as well as its nihilism.
Gallery Talk: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde Thursday, January 28, 6:00pm Block Museum Exhibition curators discuss the bold, barrier-breaking musician and performance artist whose Annual Avant Garde Festivals made experimental art accessible to all. The evening also features the premiere of a new Moorman-inspired work, cm, by composer and recent Bienen School of Music graduate Elliot Cless.
Conversation and Performance: Choreographer Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body Monday, February 1, 6:00pm The GYM at 640 Lincoln St. (Art Theory & Practice Building) How can we develop a natural and intuitive flow between moving and speaking? What do we learn when our body intelligence and our verbal mind interact? Throughout her career, renowned experimental dancer, choreographer and writer Simone Forti has explored the relationship between dance and language; quotidian movement and performance. This program will combine an interview with Forti on her practice with Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies Amanda Jane Graham, with student performances from site-specific workshops Forti will just have conducted on Lake Michigan. Student performances will include Huddle, Forti’s seminal 1961 work included in Moorman’s Avant Garde Festivals. This program is co-sponsored by the Departments of Art History, Art Theory & Practice, and Performance Studies; the Dance Program; Mellon Dance Studies; and the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium.
/nublockmuseum
@nublockmuseum