A Letter to Charlotte Moorman

Art in America, June, 2000 by David Bourdon

You must have thought highly of Stockhausen, because you scheduled performances of his Originale for the last five evenings of the 1964 festival. The work generated tremendous excitement and press coverage and really launched your festival as a vital cultural event. Originale was a rather freely structured combination of the composer's taped electronic music and various live actions. You had rounded up a star-studded cast that included Allan Kaprow, Allen Ginsberg, Max Neuhaus, Ay-O, Robert Delford Brown (who created a sensation in an outrageous costume with an enormous stuffed phallus that swung below his knees) and, of course, Nam June Paik.

Standing on a chair, fully dressed, Paik sprayed his head and upper body with shaving lather, dowsed himself with rice, and then plunged into a washtub. He scooped up some of the soapy water into his shoe and gargled with it. You captured the audience's attention on at least two occasions--while lying supine on the floor, plucking the cello that lay horizontally on top of you, and while playing Bach as you dangled from a balcony.

You and Nam June subsequently became the dynamic duo of mixed media, performing throughout much of western Europe and the eastern U.S. So different in background, so incongruously paired, you complemented each other to perfection. You became his muse and foremost interpreter, while he created special pieces that served as your springboard to international celebrity.

Paik courted renown by conflating music with sexual exhibitionism. One of his most salacious (never performed) compositions, Young Penis Symphony (1962), called for ten male "instrumentalists" who would stand behind an enormous sheet of white paper, stretching across the stage from floor to ceiling, and successively poke their sex organs through a hole in the paper. In you, he found an ideal female performer with the courage to disrobe in order to advance the cause of new music. Did you stop to think twice before performing Paik's Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only (1965)? His composition consisted of a printed score of Bach's Suite No. 3 for unaccompanied cello, which Paik annotated with hand-written instructions, identifying certain bars with the performer's removal of various items of apparel (shoes, stockings, garter-belt ...). When the piece had its premiere at New York's New School for Social Research in January 1965, you played a few measures of music, then paused to take something off, and so forth, until you finally ended up in a bikini.

On the opening night of your 3rd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, in August 1965, you performed Paik's Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saens. For the piece, you wore a transparent cellophane garment and played the French composer's The Swan, accompanied by Paik at the piano. Halfway through the composition, you stopped playing, climbed a stepladder and dunked yourself in a barrel of water. You emerged, dripping wet, to finish the piece.

The last to be held in Judson Hall, that festival featured 57 works--one too many for Judson's management. The offending piece was Allan Kaprow's Happening, Push Pull, for which the artist gave the audience 40 minutes to go out into the streets and scavenge creatively for debris. The audience returned with their trashy treasures and were intercepted at the concert-hall entrance by a squad of suspicious policemen, who wanted to know why so many people were grubbing through the neighborhood's litter baskets. Judson Hall decided it was time for you and your festival to move on.