Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman by Joan Rothfuss (review)

Thoroughly researched and somewhat fast-paced, this book by Joan Rothfuss on Charlotte Moorman, American performance artist, avant-garde musician and entrepreneur, is an intriguing read. She was an interesting woman and participated in innovative works, but I’m not sure why the author calls hers an “improbable life.”

Charlotte Moorman (18 November 1933–8 November 1991) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to an alcoholic mother and a father who died when she was young. She toyed with a classical career and trained with various teachers, including, briefly, at the Juilliard School of Music. She also played with various orchestras and quite possibly would have succeeded as a classical musician, although appointments were difficult for her to find. She soon came under the influence of certain avant-garde composers and experimental artists, such as Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik (with whom she collaborated a great deal) and John Cage, allowing herself to be used in exciting but sometimes very dangerous ways. She wore a television set bra, rested TV sets on her bare breasts, caressed an ice cello, performed nude, hung suspended by several helium-filled balloons above the Sydney Opera House while playing the cello, hung suspended from helium-filled weather balloons in a piece called Sky Kiss created by Jim McWilliam, and so on.

Paik created many works for Moorman, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV-Cello (1971). An inevitable notoriety came her way when she performed Paik’s Opera Sextronique at the Film-Makers Cinematheque in New York City (1967). This musical event required she perform acts with her cello in various states of nudity and props that included a bikini with blinking lights in the first movement and then being topless in the next and so forth. She was arrested and charged with indecent exposure mid-performance by three plain clothes policemen. It was this arrest that gave her fame as “the topless cellist.”

As an entrepreneur, Moorman may have had the most influence on the avant-garde scene. She founded the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York in 1963. This festival presented experimental music (of the Fluxus group and happenings) as well as performance, kinetic and video art, which was in its infancy at the time. The title “Annual” was a bit of a misnomer as the festival wasn’t held every year; instead, just 15 events happened from 1963 to 1980. The events were performed in very interesting places, including Shea Stadium, the World Trade Center and the Staten Island ferries. Moorman was a valuable spokesperson and negotiator for what were challenging and controversial performances, even speaking on a well-known popular television show in order to drum up support for her ventures.

The Korean-American composer Paik and others employed Moorman to expose prevailing ideas about femininity and the role of women in music, but she herself was never a feminist and she was uninterested in feminism. It is on this point that I question the author’s remark that Moorman’s performances critiqued the way classical music just uses female musicians as a conduit for male authority, for Moorman’s absence of interest in speaking her own voice merely perpetuated this scenario. She was obedient to the intention of the composer, usually a male composer. This point is crucial to my query regarding the “improbability” of Moorman’s life. That she did not ever question the authority of the male gaze is the thread that connected her life, as I see it. To be sure, she broke away from the conservatism of the “white picket fence” mentality of the small town in which she grew up, but she continued to see, as they did, that the man was the mover and shaker of life.

Moorman contracted breast cancer and, typical to her way of being, used this experience as a performance piece. Not even death was to be excluded. This endeavor was...