xiv. + 448pp. Profusely illustrated in b&w + 12 pages of glossy color plates. xiv. + 448pp. Appendix, Source Notes, Index. Pictorial endpapers. Printed on coated paper. HEAVY BOOK: Ships USPS Media Mail Only in a protective box. First Edition. 2nd (SECOND) Printing per print number line. Foreword by Yoko Ono. Small Remainder dot on top outer edge, TINY bleeds onto top margins pages 170-249 only. Near Fine/Fine dj. Publisher's overstock. Only flaw is small (3/16 inch) remainder dot in ink on top outer edge. Jacket like new: no creases, no tears.

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman. [hardcover]
Publisher: MIT Press (c2014)., Cambridge, MA/London.
Publication Date: 2014
Language: English
ISBN 10: 026202750X
ISBN 13: 9780262027502
Binding: HARDCOVER.
Edition: First Edition.
Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine dj

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Joan Rothfuss is an independent writer and curator based in Minneapolis.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

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Over 45 years combined of book selling & making: retail, manufacturing, & used books. Booktopia began online in 2006. Our inventory is mostly non-fiction albeit we have some Literature and Literary Criticism. Americana (State/Town History), Natural History, Political History, Colonial & American History. Science, Medicine. Florida History. Vermont/New England History. All book conditions are based on our experience. Any Remainders or Ex-Library copies - of which there are few - are noted. NO International orders.

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