A Letter to Charlotte Moorman

Art in America, June, 2000 by David Bourdon

On Sept. 14, 1968, the 6th New York Avant Garde Festival assumed the form of a nighttime parade down Central Park West, ending in Central Park. The artists paraded on foot, on stilts and on floats. Some pushed carts or carried placards or banners. Joe Jones rode his musical bike. You performed a piece by McWilliams, playing your cello in midair while harnessed to several large helium-filled balloons. This was, I believe, the first of many pieces that McWilliams concocted especially for you, all designed to showcase your inimitable talents.

While aloft, grappling with your cello and bow, you kept a wary eye on a group of polka-dotted interlopers in the street, led by Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist known for her "nude-ins." Yayoi had crashed the festival with her band of young men and women who were infamous for their surprise disrobing in public places. Venturing into a well populated space, often at lunchtime, the entire troupe of performers (except for Kusama herself, who wore a polka-dotted leotard) suddenly doffed their clothes so that the artist could embellish their naked bodies with hand-painted polka-dots.

As soon as you noticed Yayoi and her group infiltrating your gathering, you halted the procession for about 15 minutes as you attempted to get the police to expel them from the parade. But the police said that Yayoi and her conspirators, as long as they kept their clothes on, could not be arrested or prevented from accompanying the parade.

"A New York Avant Garde Festival without the participation of my group of true idealists is unthinkable," Kusama later declared in a letter to the Village Voice (Sept. 19, '68). The festival was "in dire need of truly avant-garde events" because it was "stale, stagey, and contrived," she wrote. While claiming "respect for Charlotte Moorman as a pioneer of nudist art," Kusama also boasted that she had taken "nude art out of the theater and put it into the street--made it entirely nude instead of semi-nude."

Your collaboration with Paik attained an apogee of lunacy with the TV Bra for Living Sculpture. This device was his contribution to a group exhibition, "TV as a Creative Medium," which had its debut at New York's Howard Wise Gallery on May 17, 1969. Consisting of two three-inch television tubes encased in Plexiglas boxes, the bra was connected by dangling cables to a foot pedal, with which you could scramble the image. In addition to this gadget, which technically prevented you from being altogether topless, you wore a long skirt. In an accompanying brochure, Paik claimed that in using TV sets to form a bra--"the most intimate belonging of human being"--he was demonstrating the human use of technology.

The TV Bra was the first of four video sculptures that Paik created especially for you. In 1971 he devised TV Cello, enclosing three TV monitors in separate Plexiglas boxes, the smallest screen positioned in the center to create a cello-shaped instrument; the screens juxtapose images of you playing, video collages of other cellists and live images from the performance area. You frequently played the TV Cello, while wearing another 1971 work, TV Glasses, which suggests a Star Trek visor whose screens showed what was being videotaped live by a nearby camera. Paik marshaled 10 video monitors and covered them with a sheet of Plexiglas to make TV Bed (1972), which plays both videotapes and live television broadcasts. You could concertize while reclining upon the bed.