A Letter to Charlotte Moorman

Art in America, June, 2000 by David Bourdon

You and Nam June Paik made a triumphant tour of Europe in 1966, performing together in Rome, West Berlin, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Stockholm and Copenhagen. You premiered a new work, Opera Sextronique, which called for your partial nudity, in Aachen, West Germany. In Venice, competing with the fanfare surrounding the opening of the Biennale, you and Paik performed a "gondola Happening" on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge. The audience cheered when you and Paik glided into view in your gondola. Wearing a low-cut evening dress, you began playing John Cage's 26'1.1499" for a String Player, for which you had assembled a variety of percussion gadgets. (In your numerous renditions of this piece, you often blew a whistle, smashed a glass bottle with a hammer, hit a gong, threw a cymbal on the ground, pushed a buzzer, screamed, broke a balloon, and occasionally fried a couple of eggs on a hotplate.) At one point Paik removed his shirt and knelt before you, becoming a "human cello" as you bowed his back. Afterwards, you performed Paik's Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saens. Halfway through the piece, as intended, you jumped into the canal ("with 10 centuries of polluted water," Paik remarked), then emerged to play the remainder of the work. When the concert was over, you hurried to a doctor for a typhoid shot.

Back in New York, Opera Sextronique created shock waves at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, 125 West 41st Street, on Feb. 9, 1967. Admission was intended to be by invitation only, and the audience of some 200 guests consisted mainly of your friends and supporters. But as we took our seats and smilingly waved to one another across the auditorium, we became aware that we had been infiltrated by several square-looking, heavyset men. Some of us immediately recognized them as plainclothesmen; we giggled at their pathetic attempts to blend in, and waited to see what, if anything, they would do.

The curtain opened on a dark stage. The opera consisted of four "arias," or acts, all conceived to showcase your many talents. In the first aria, you entered slowly, wearing a three-part "light bikini," consisting of a trio of triangles outfitted with six-volt electric bulbs. By remote control, Paik could make the lights flash on and off, either intermittently or rhythmically. You took your chair and played Paik's variations on Massenet's Elegie, accompanied by Paik on the piano. At the conclusion of the aria, a worried-looking Paik came to the front of the stage and rather humbly asked if the performance could continue. All faces turned toward the plainclothesmen to observe their response, but they pretended they were not there.

For the second aria, you appeared nude from the waist up, wearing a long black skirt. I think just about everyone was genuinely startled. With your customary determined seriousness, you played Paik's variation on Brahms's Lullaby, stooping from time to time to put on various masks, including a gas mask. At one point, you somehow attached two battery-driven propellers to your breasts. I liked the clattering sound they made when you leaned too close to your instrument and they struck the cello.