Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman

by Joan Rothfuss

The first book to explore the extraordinary career of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whose work combined classical rigor, avant-garde experiment, and madcap daring. The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on The Mike Douglas Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik's Sonata for Adults Only . In the 1960s, Moorman (1933–1991) became famous for her madcap (and often unclothed) performance antics; less famous but more significant is Moorman's transformative influence on contemporary performance practice—and her dedication to the idea that avant-garde art should reach the widest possible audience. In Topless Cellist , the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist. Moorman's arrest in 1967 for performing topless made her a water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was a star of the avant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Paik, her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performance that combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde experiment—informed by intuition, daring, and love of spectacle. Moorman's annual festival of the avant-garde offered the public a lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance, poetry, film, and other media. Rothfuss chronicles Moorman's life from her youth in Little Rock, Arkansas (where she was “Miss City Beautiful” of 1952) through her career in New York's avant-garde to her death from breast cancer in 1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were a performance.) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, Topless Cellist offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, Art

464 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent biography and a page-turner on the avant-garde angel of the Fluxus era and beyond. Saying that she was never part of the Fluxus movement physically, but clearly in the same spirit. Charlotte Moorman not only made art, performed art, but also 'presented' new music/art and a remarkable woman. Reading the book I started developing a crush on her and was devastated that she contracted cancer, which led to her death. There are individuals who one can point at, or focus on, and others will come to that flame that brights lightly. Moorman had the talent, vision to bring artists together, and although always a bumpy road, New York, and world art culture are better because of her presence. For those who are interested in 20th-century arts and its culture - this is a must-read.

[Susan Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Topless Cellist not only brings Charlotte Moorman to life, but also captures the zeitgeist of an era. The whole neo-Dada / fluxus / Happenings / Avante-garde experimental movement of the 1960's and 1970's is very well documented. Nam June Paik becomes a very real person to the reader. His evolution from collaborations with Charlotte Moorman to the video work for which he is more well known is part of the journey. I'm so glad there is an archive of all of Charlotte Moorman's ephemera, available to scholars. Topless Cellist brings the whole story to all the rest of us.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this account of Charlotte Moormans life. Not only for the way she chose to live her life, but also for all those avant garde festivals she put together, I wonder if this festival still exists, I would have loved to live in New York in the 60s and 70s to see that. It not only portraits her work, her personality, but also the work and presence of others in her life like Nam June Paik, John Cage. Some of these anecdotes are pretty great, like when Maciunas (the Fluxus self appointed leader or something) put a protest together outside one of the avant garde festivals where other Fluxus artists were presenting their work, and some people thought it was part of the show. Crazy times, I really wish I could have seen them. Wonderful.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice biography of one of the more difficult to pin down characters in the 1960s-70s New Music/Performance Art scene in New York (one of many difficult to pin down types). The biography seems copious and detailed but reads very lightly. Strangely, the last decade of her life is almost entirely skipped over, but it is always difficult to narrate such slow deaths and there may not have been enough details left to string a narrative through. Works as an interesting companion to thoughts on Nam June Paik's works from the mid-60s on as they were frequent collaborators and many of his works, even after her death, were informed by their many years of collaboration.

[John Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting biography of an influential artist intertwined with her performance

[Mills College Library]

Biog M8256r 2014

[Jennifer Mullman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining biography of a colorful life.