Madeline Charlotte Moorman (November 18, 1933 – November 8, 1991) was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music" she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator with Korean American artist Nam June Paik.

Early life

Madeline Charlotte Moorman was born on November 18, 1933, in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the age of ten she began to study cello. After her graduation from Little Rock High School in 1951 she had a music scholarship to attend Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. She attained her B.A. in music in 1955. From 1958 to 1963 she was also a member of Jacob Glick's Boccerini Players. This led to her loose involvement with the Fluxus movement of avant-garde performance artists. She later worked closely with many of its protagonists to interpret enigmatic scores written in the open-ended spirit of Fluxus. In 1966, Beuys, then associated with Fluxus, created his work Infiltration Homogen für Cello, a felt-covered violoncello, in her honor. However, Moorman, like numerous other female artists including her close friend, Schneemann, was "blacklisted" by Fluxus-organizer George Maciunas for reasons that remain unclear.

Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York

In 1963 Moorman founded the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, which presented the experimental music of the Fluxus group and Happenings alongside performance, kinetic art, and video art. Despite the event's title the festival was not held annually. There were fifteen festivals from 1963 to 1980.

Collaborations with Nam June Paik

At the Second Avant Garde Festival, Moorman convinced Karlheinz Stockhausen to restage his performance piece, Originale, using his original collaborator Nam June Paik. This meeting began the decades-long collaboration between Moorman and Paik in which they fused sculpture, performance, music and art. For this performance, Moorman was to perform movements on the cello in various states of nudity.

Following Moorman's death, Paik made a film entitled Topless Cellist (1995) about Moorman's life and avant-garde performances.

In 2001, Northwestern University Library acquired her archive. A portion of the archive's photographs, scores, props, and costumes were exhibited at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and the Grey Art Gallery in 2016 and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in early 2017.

Death

In the late 1970s she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy and further treatment, to continue performing through the 1980s in spite of pain and deteriorating health. She died of cancer in New York City on November 8, 1991, aged 57.

References

Further reading

  • 24 Stunden. Beuys, Brock, Jährling, Klophaus, Moorman, Paik, Rahn, Schmit, Vostell. Hansen & Hansen, Itzehoe-Voßkate, 1965.
  • Vostell. Die Weinende, Homage to Charlotte Moorman. Galerie Inge Baecker, Köln 1992.
  • The World of Charlotte Moorman. Barbara Moore, Bound & Unbound, New York, 2000.
  • 24 Stunden - in Fotografien von Bodo Niederprüm. Das Wunderhorn, 2016, .
  • Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman by Joan Rothfuss, MIT Press, 2017, .
  • Archivio Conz
  • Artnet
  • October 1969 BBC radio interview by Harvey Matusow with Charlotte: Avant Garde Arts in New York (44 mins mp3)
  • A Trove of Archival Performances by Charlotte Moorman from UBUWEB
  • New York Times obituary