Topless Cellist

<p><b>The first book to explore the extraordinary career of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whose work combined classical rigor, avant-garde experiment, and madcap daring.… Lue lisää <p><b>The first book to explore the extraordinary career of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whose work combined classical rigor, avant-garde experiment, and madcap daring. </b></p><p>The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on <i>The Mike Douglas Show</i> that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik's <i>Sonata for Adults Only</i>. In the 1960s, Moorman (1933-1991) became famous for her madcap (and often unclothed) performance antics; less famous but more significant is Moorman's transformative influence on contemporary performance practice-and her dedication to the idea that avant-garde art should reach the widest possible audience. In <i>Topless Cellist</i>, the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist. </p><p>Moorman's arrest in 1967 for performing topless made her a water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was a star of the avant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Paik, her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performance that combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde experiment-informed by intuition, daring, and love of spectacle. Moorman's annual festival of the avant-garde offered the public a lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance, poetry, film, and other media. </p><p>Rothfuss chronicles Moorman's life from her youth in Little Rock, Arkansas (where she was "Miss City Beautiful" of 1952) through her career in New York's avant-garde to her death from breast cancer in 1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were a performance. ) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, <i>Topless Cellist</i> offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances. </p>