Nam June Paik — Opera Sextronique — the Moorman arrest

1967

Artists: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman · Year: 1967 · Medium: Performance art — multi-act operatic performance with Moorman performing topless in one act · Substrate: Cello, piano, projected film, live electronics, performative costume transformations · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Filmmakers Cinematheque (performance venue) On the night of 9 February 1967, at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque on West 41st Street in New York, Nam June Paik and the cellist Charlotte Moorman performed Paik's Opera Sextronique. In the second movement, per Paik's score, Moorman was to play her cello topless. She did. Partway through, a plainclothes detective from the New York Police Department stopped the performance, and both Paik and Moorman were arrested on obscenity charges. The trial ran for nearly two months. Moorman was convicted; Paik was not. The verdict against Moorman was suspended, and her legal team — led by the civil-liberties attorney Ernst Rosenberger, with testimony from John Cage, Al Carmines, and a long list of uptown critics — used the case to argue successfully that the New York obscenity statutes could not constitutionally apply to a serious artistic performance. Two years later, the state legislature amended the relevant statute. The Moorman verdict is why you can now perform nudity on a New York concert stage without an arrest. What matters for this archive is less the scandal than the fact that Opera Sextronique was a media work. Paik had been placing television sets, video delay loops, and signal-scrambling modifications into Moorman's performances since 1964 (TV Cello, TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes), and Opera Sextronique was a specific argument that the concert performer could be, for television purposes, a transmission surface. The topless movement was not a provocation for its own sake in Paik's conception — it was an argument that the body in a televised performance is already a screen, and that the policing of that screen is a media question. Paik continued to work with Moorman until her death from cancer in 1991. Their partnership is one of the foundational collaborations of American video art. Lore Moorman and Paik had met in 1964 when Moorman, a classically-trained cellist from Arkansas, was curating the annual New York Avant Garde Festival and approached Paik as a collaborator. She was thirty-three at the time, a serious concert musician who had played with Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony. Her willingness to perform the 1967 piece at the explicit legal risk transformed her career into a durable radicalism she could not have retreated from. After the arrest she spent the rest of her life performing Paik's pieces in the full knowledge that any US performance might be raided; she was not arrested again, but the possibility shadowed every booking. Paik dedicated several later works to her — most elegiacally Charlotte Moorman (1997), a memorial video installation — and kept her cello, a 1736 Amati, in his studio until his own death in 2006. Sources • Rothfuss, Joan — Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (MIT Press, 2014). • Hanhardt, John G. — Nam June Paik (Whitney, 1982; rev. 2015). • Smithsonian American Art Museum — Nam June Paik Archive.