Topless Cellist

Topless Cellist
Author: Joan Rothfuss
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 026202750X

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. 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 The Mike Douglas Show 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 Sonata for Adults Only. 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 Topless Cellist, the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist. 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. 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, Topless Cellist offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances.

A Feast of Astonishments

A Feast of Astonishments
Author: Lisa G. Corrin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780810133273

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition 'A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,' Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, January 16-July 17, 2016; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, September 8-December 10, 2016; [and] Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March 4-June 18, 2017"--Title page verso.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik
Author: Melissa Chiu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9780300209211

This new, fully illustrated catalogue on the celebrated progenitor of video art, Nam June Paik (1932-2006), brings together a host of scholars, artists, and Paik's own collaborators to illuminate the work of this innovative artist. An essay by curator Michelle Yun takes readers through Paik's highly original career, providing insight into his radical and witty experiments with technology, especially in relation to the body, which he viewed as vital platforms for the future of art, science, and popular culture. Scholars David Joselit and John Maeda contribute texts examining the artist's interest in new media and popular culture. A roundtable discussion with three of Paik's own artistic collaborators and contemporary artists' statements shed light on the collaborative process and Paik's enduring influence on artistic practice today. Drawing on the newly established Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this book also features never-before-published primary sources that highlight Paik's prescient attitude towards the integration of increasingly indispensable technologies into modern life. Distributed for Asia Society Museum Exhibition Schedule: Asia Society Museum (09/05/14-01/04/15)

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik
Author: Sook-Kyung Lee
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3791359533

Explore the ground-breaking work of 20th-century, avant-garde artist Nam June Paik, the pioneer of video art, and discover his impact on the digital age. Nam June Paik was one of the most presciently visionary artists of his generation, one who foresaw the ascendance of the screen in modern life, coined the phrase "electronic superhighway", and celebrated these developments with a humor and whimsy that counteracts some of the darker aspects of our technological age. This book features works from throughout Paik's five-decade career--from robots made from old TV screens to stills from his innovative video works and views of his renowned room-sized installations. Archival materials and excerpts of Paik's own writings offer a deeper understanding of the artist's extraordinary collaborative career. He had exchanges with avant-garde artists, musicians, and choreographers, including Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Beuys, and members of the Fluxus movement. Essays explore how Paik influenced a global network of artists and pioneered a radical and cutting-edge art practice. They also consider how Paik's transnational approach to art presaged today's issues around borders, immigration, cultural appropriation, and nationalism. By envisioning a future that has become a reality, Paik's work--and its humanity, scope, and optimism--is perhaps more important than ever. Published with Tate

Walker Evans

Walker Evans
Author: Olivier Richon
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1846381983

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner. The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed. Given today's growing economic inequality, the photograph feels pointedly relevant. The FSA, established in 1935, commissioned photographers to document the impact of the Great Depression in America and used the photographs to advertise aid relief. For four weeks in the summer of 1936, Evans collaborated with Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The result of that project was the landmark publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting three sharecropper families and their environment. These photographs were intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, and of their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. Kitchen Corner powerfully evokes Agee's observations of the significance of “bareness and space” in these homes: “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another... [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.”

The Pain Journal

The Pain Journal
Author: Bob Flanagan
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2000
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Item is the journal of the final year of the life of Bob Flanagan and tells of his illness and his life with Sheree Rose.

A Secret History of the Ollie

A Secret History of the Ollie
Author: Craig B. Snyder
Publisher: Pioneers of Skateboarding
Total Pages: 912
Release: 2015-02-28
Genre: Popular culture
ISBN: 9781930287006

Every culture has a creation myth, and skateboarding is no different. The Ollie forged a new identity for skateboarding after its invention in the 1970s, and it lies at the root of nearly every significant move in street skating today. This groundbreaking no-handed aerial has also affected the evolution of surfing and snowboarding, and has left a permanent impression upon popular culture and language. This, then, is the story of the Ollie, the history and technology that set the stage for its creation, the pioneers who made it happen, and the skaters who used it to start a revolution.

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik
Author: Sook-Kyung Lee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Art, Korean
ISBN: 9781849766357

Considered to be the founder of video art, Nam June Paik (1932- 2006) was a visionary artist who foresaw the importance of mass media and new technology, and its impact on visual culture. His cutting-edge, innovative, yet playfully entertaining work continues to be a major influence on art and culture to this day. This ground-breaking publication focuses on Paik's pivotal role in the cross-germination of radical aesthetics and experimental practices, emphasising his visionary insight and his pioneering role in the emergence and proliferation of performative and collaborative art practice. Bringing together works that span a fivedecade career, and including archival materials and excerpts of Paik's own writings, this book offers an in-depth understanding of the artist's innovative practice and his vision of a multidisciplinary future. His ideas such as 'Eurasia' and 'Electronic Superhighway', and his profound insight into a global age will be analysed in the context of transnationalism for the first time. In addition, texts will elaborate upon Paik's collaborations with other artists, musicians and choreographers, such as Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Beuys and Fluxus, highlighting Paik's global trajectory and considerable impact on digital culture, which connect his art to a new generation.

Art without Death

Art without Death
Author: E-Flux Journal
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3956793528

According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge. Fedorov's call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov's ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program. This book of interviews and conversations with today's most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today's art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries. Contributors Bart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther Zonsheim Published in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle Design by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick

Fluxus as a Network of Friends, Strangers, and Things

Fluxus as a Network of Friends, Strangers, and Things
Author: Magdalena Holdar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2022-09-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004520961

Being based in different countries around the globe, but keen to work together, Fluxus artists developed collaborations based on shared resources and creative autonomy – methods that also gave the artworks agency to perform beyond the control of their originators.