Nam June Paik — TV Bra for Living Sculpture

1969

Artists: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman · Year: 1969 · Medium: Performance sculpture — two small televisions worn as breast-coverings by cellist Charlotte Moorman during live performance · Substrate: Two miniature CRT televisions modified to receive live-modulated video signals; vinyl straps; Moorman's live performance of modified Cage and Paik compositions · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Howard Wise Gallery (exhibited); Paik–Moorman collaboration from 1964 onward TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) is a Paik–Moorman collaboration that had Charlotte Moorman perform topless Cage and Paik cello compositions wearing two miniature televisions strapped to her chest. The televisions were modulated in real time by the frequencies of her cello playing — higher notes produced one set of patterns, lower notes another. Moorman's breast-covering televisions were the artwork; her live performance was its activation; the audience saw both Moorman and the video content the bra displayed. The piece is canonical in the overlap between performance art, video art, and music. It is also canonical in the history of feminist art, though in complicated ways — Moorman was controversial in the late 1960s for performing topless, and Paik's framing of her as a "living sculpture" has been contested by subsequent feminist critics who have argued that the piece reduces Moorman to object-status. Moorman herself defended the piece as a statement of embodied performance; her own long career as a classical cellist turned avant-garde performer gives the defense weight. Paik and Moorman collaborated continuously from 1964 until her death in 1991. She was the Annual Festival of the Avant-Garde's founder and organizer from 1963 through the 1980s — the longest-running experimental-performance festival in New York — and her career was as substantial as Paik's in the underground performance scene. Lore Moorman was a trained cellist who had performed with the American Symphony before her turn to avant-garde. Her 1967 arrest during a performance of Paik's Opera Sextronique — where she performed topless in violation of public-indecency laws — was one of the defining obscenity-case moments in American art history. Paik and Moorman's collaboration extended through more than thirty works across three decades. Sources • Smithsonian American Art Museum — Paik/Moorman archive • Rothfuss, Joan — Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (MIT Press, 2014) • Howard Wise Gallery records (Getty)