The First Non-Human Action Artist: Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik in Robot Opera

ORIGINALE ALL OVER AGAIN

Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik began their collaboration while Moorman was producing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale (Originals, or Real People) for her 1964 New York Avant Garde Festival. Written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister, Originale seemed to encompass the most radical developments in post-war composition: electronic sounds, the austere mathematical order of serialism, and the messy, veristic improvisations found in happenings. Moorman was relatively new at producing but well established as a wayward cellist whose interpretation of New Music exceeded the job description. Rather than interpret scores with fidelity to the composers’ intent, Moorman began to read political or affective content into notation, ignored time brackets, and explored what I refer to as the meta-histrionics of simultaneously being and being tasked to act like a professional performer. This was especially the case in compositions that contained elements of indeterminacy. Moorman seized such work as an opportunity to redistribute musical assignments, past the point of re-authorship and into a transhumanist realm where even she and her cello were commutable.

Early evidence of Moorman’s unorthodox approach can be seen in performances of John Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player ([1955], 1960). Through an aleatory structure that calls for indeterminate sound sources, Cage intended the work to bring attention to nature’s infinite and objective sonic field. Moorman began studying the score in 1963 and diaristically annotated it throughout her career, much to Cage’s chagrin. Her self-referential style was more at home in later works by composers such as Paik, Philip Corner, Giuseppe Chiari, Jim McWilliams, and Takehisa Kosugi who welcomed the way Moorman personalized and dramatized her role. The score for Corner’s Solo with . . . (1963), for example, contains instructions such as, “strike that soloist pose” and “in general, act like a soloist.” Moorman realized it by playing the perpetually late, often disheveled, obsessively annotating cellist that she was. She delayed the curtain rising and waited even longer to appear on stage before running off to retrieve her cello. She then fussed with the instrument and scrutinized the sheet music for an excruciatingly long time only to have music finally play out of a loudspeaker.

Rather than caricature an archetype or correlate recorded music with a faceless, neutral subject, Moorman presented herself as uniquely defined yet interchangeable with the musical apparatus. The ventriloquism anticipated an inter-subjective relationship with instruments and sound technology that became a constant throughout her career. Moorman’s cello was instrumental to this radical mode of interpretation in all senses of the word. It was the object through which she performed musical labor and her partner in producing sound. It was the emblem that identified her role and a tool through which to navigate her discipline. In works where she appeared to transfigure or merge with her instrument, the familiar conceit that she “played herself” became literal and uncanny.

Undoubtedly, Moorman was attracted to how the roles in Originale are based on performers cast to play themselves. The dramatis personae reads like a who’s who of the avant-garde. With surreal exceptions for a child, animal attendant, and newspaper seller, each cast member is a representative from an aesthetic field in which they made an “original” contribution, one both novel and philosophically bent toward authenticity in art. Combining the spontaneity of happenings with the precision of serial music, the score organizes their idiosyncratic actions into “timepoints” or “timeboxes,” which are then read as notation. Stockhausen’s electroacoustic composition Kontakte (1958–60) serves as a thread to unify the disjuncture between characters, competing sounds, and simultaneous activities. Moorman’s production was to be Originale’s New York premiere as well as the crown jewel of her festival. To restage the work, she proposed New York counterparts for the twenty-one “originals” that appeared in the Theater am Dom performance in Cologne three years prior. She substituted the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, for Hans G. Helms and replaced the stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, with the happenings progenitor, Allan Kaprow. But for the...