EVANSTON, ILL.- The indelible image of Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991)—playing the cello topless save for a pair of strapped-on miniature television sets—is about to be replaced with a more complex but equally powerful portrait of the girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, who metamorphosed into a seminal and barrier-breaking figure in performance art and an impresario of the postwar avant-garde. 

The occasion is A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s, a groundbreaking exhibition on view at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, where it will remain through July 17, 2016, before traveling to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in New York in fall 2016 and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria in spring/summer 2017. The exhibition is organized by the Block in partnership with Northwestern’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, home of the Charlotte Moorman Archive. 

For three decades beginning in 1960, the Juilliard-trained Moorman’s dedication to a radically new way of looking at music and art took many forms, some extreme, from playing the cello while suspended by helium balloons over the Sydney Opera House to performing on an “ice cello” in the nude. 

“I have asked myself why Charlotte Moorman is largely missing from the narratives of 20th-century art,” says Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philips Katz Director and curator of modern and contemporary art. “She is mainly remembered as a muse to Nam June Paik, but she was much more. In light of her influence on contemporary performance and her role as an unequaled popularizer of the avant-garde it is long overdue for her to be appreciated as a seminal figure in her own right.” 

Reflecting Moorman’s commitment to finding ways to bring new art to the broadest possible public by literally taking the avant-garde into the streets of New York, A Feast of Astonishments presents a marvelous assortment of artworks, film clips, music scores, audio recordings, documentary photographs, snapshots, performance props and costumes, ephemera, and correspondence. The vast majority has never before been exhibited. Together they offer fresh insights into Moorman’s improbable career in the eventful decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. 

A Feast of Astonishments benefits from a number of loans from private collections, including that of Yoko Ono, as well as from unfettered access to the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University Libraries. A companion exhibition, entitled Don’t Throw Anything Out, organized solely in conjunction with the Block’s presentation, frames the scope of the archive with a selection of objects and media ranging from Moorman’s double-barreled, heavily notated Rolodex to audio recordings of greetings and voice messages saved from her telephone message machine. 

During the exhibition period, the two-story Block Museum will be given over A Feast of Astonishments and Don’t Throw Anything Out, with its ground floor gallery transformed into a double viewing room for screenings of videos, including rare footage from the Charlotte Moorman Archive shown for the first time. The exhibition will also spill out onto the Northwestern University campus and the campuses of other universities in Chicago in related courses and public programs. 

Inside the Exhibition 

Charlotte Moorman built up a repertoire of pieces that she repeated through her career. In A Feast of Astonishments, an array of media, documentation, works of art and objects evoke these core performances, which in turn punctuate the largely chronological flow of the exhibition. 

Providing context for John Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player, a seminal work that Moorman played in venues ranging from orchestra halls to the Tonight Show, is Moorman’s heavily annotated score, which she carried with her to performances for over 30 years. This is paired with an affecting black and white photograph by Peter Moore (1965) showing her performing the Human Cello section of the piece, bowed over the artist Nam June Paik’s bare back, intensely `strumming’ him with a bow. In turn, this photograph is seen in contrast to a never before exhibited black and white television clip of Moorman frying an egg and playing a “bomb cello” in a performance of the Cage piece—to audience guffaws— in an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show (1967). Another historic moment brought to life is the 1967 performance of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique, which led to Moorman’s arrest on indecency charges. A performance by Moorman of Paik’s infamous composition is here captured in rarely seen, color film footage and in the display of the “electric bikini” worn by her during one movement of the work. 

Cellos representative of Moorman’s career made from neon, bombs, plexiglass and syringes are featured, as are key mixed-media works by Nam June Paik, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), TV Cello (1971/1990) and Charlotte Moorman II, a mixed-media sculpture created after Moorman’s death as an homage. Bomb Cellos (1965/1990), painted metal bombs to which Moorman added strings and played as part of John Cage’s 26’1.1499” are striking examples of how Moorman’s interpretations of that piece changed with the times, accreting new props and ideas with unceasing imagination. 

Moorman’s role as a connecter within the transatlantic avant-garde is explored in a section of the exhibition, “Moorman Abroad.” Moorman embarked for West Germany with Paik in 1965, participating in the 24 Hours festival in Wuppertal and in multiple venues interpreting Cage’s “26’1” as ‘a kind of pop music,’ with a gong, phone rings and radio sounds. Later performances in West Germany are also amply documented in A Feast of Astonishments by, among other items, black and white photographs of Moorman laying upon on a bed of large TV monitors on a sidewalk, bowing her cello, observed by crowd of onlookers (TV Bed, Nam June Paik, 1972); a hand-drawn poster created by Jörg Immendorff for a concert in Düsseldorf (1966); and a felt-covered cello cover emblazoned with a red cross, used by Moorman in performances of Infiltration Homogen for Cello, the only work Joseph Beuys created for another artist. 

A score and video of Moorman performing Giuseppe Chiari’s Per Arco is also featured in this section. In Moorman’s interpretation this composition consisted of five minutes of the recorded sounds of bombs falling during WWII, one minute and 40 second of silence, and six minutes of her reaction to the sounds of war with her cello and bow. Another work performed around the world and documented here is Jim McWilliams’s Sky Kiss, which called for Moorman to play the cello while suspended by helium balloons. 

A section is devoted to the history of the 15 annual New York Avant Garde Festivals Moorman organized between 1963 and 1980. In providing a detailed look at these now almost forgotten extravaganzas, A Feast of Astonishments supplies a much needed first draft of a missing chapter to the history of contemporary art. Drawing on the talents of much of New York’s vanguard community, these festivals were first held at Judson Hall on West 57th Street and later in such public spaces as Central Park (1966), Staten Island Ferry (1967), Grand Central Terminal (1973) and Shea Stadium (1974). 

From a letter from Ray Johnson describing his performance action Hot Dog Drop to a telegram from Mayor John Lindsay politely declining Moorman’s invitation to ride in a hot air balloon, an array of correspondence—typed, hand-written or drawn and scribbled on scrap paper—is assembled to reveal Moorman’s utterly personal approach to festival organization. Objects on view include the recently rediscovered hoop and costumes used in Noise Bodies, Carolee Schneemann’s wonderful but little known collaborative performance piece with composer James Tenney, a photograph of Takehisa Kosugi’s Piano ’66 floating in the pond in Central Park; a grainy 16-mm film clip documenting performances on the Staten Island Ferry; and styrofoam blocks that Moorman used to plan an artist parade for the Sixth Festival on Central Park West. 

Photographs capture striking moments in that Sixth Festival: Allan Kaprow’s `metallic ballet,’ which sent oil drums rolling down Central Park West; Les Levine’s float -- a glowing grid of neon tubes; Joseph Beuys’s mute piano, wrapped in gray felt; and, pulling up the rear, the Bell Labs and Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) float generating a computer printout of a “five mile poem.” 

An embarrassment of riches, A Feast of Astonishments presents more photographs by the photographer Peter Moore than have ever before been exhibited in one place. It also acknowledges the achievements of an under recognized artist, Jim McWilliams, creator of some of Moorman’s most audacious performances, and sheds light on the brilliant graphic design that McWilliams created for the posters that gave a vibrant identity to the festivals. 

Finally, running through the exhibition are images and accounts, some unexpected, of such influential figures of the 1960s, 70s and 80s as John