Charlotte Moorman. Think Crazy

The Château de Montsoreau - Museum of Contemporary Art dedicates an exhibition to Charlotte
Moorman, true legend of international contemporary art
Charlotte Moorman. Think Crazy moves away from the reductive image of "topless cellist" given to Charlotte Moorman since her
performance of Nam June Paik's Opera Sextronique to present the unclassifiable, iconoclastic and radical artist, at the same time
cellist, performer and event organizer.

The "Jeanne d'Arc of New Music"

By her militant attitude, Charlotte Moorman was very early nicknamed the "Jeanne d'Arc of New Music" by the composer Edgar Varèse.
After an academic training, Charlotte Moorman breaks free from the shackles of classical music to offer a vision of contemporary music based on the porosity between artistic practices.
She gets closer to John Cage who develops a music where the sounds of the world are used as a source of creation.
On each occasion, Charlotte Moorman enthusiastically questions the border between music and plastic arts and collaborates with the most innovative artists of that time: Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys.

The instrument of desire

Whatever the proposal, Charlotte Moorman executes it with precision.
In her performances, Charlotte Moorman highlights the physical and even carnal relationship between her body and her instrument like when she plays naked on a cello cut in a block of ice (Ice Cello, 1976) or when she plays on a bomb transformed into a cello (Bomb Cello, 1965).
She nevertheless manages to shock public opinion and be arrested when, in 1967 during the Sextronic Opera performed with Nam June Paik, she takes off her clothes and goes in playing topless. Many feminist artists (except her friend Carolee Schneemann) publicly denounced her for exposing her body.
Sometimes a foreign body appears, like that of Nam June Paik in Child of the Cello. 

If the body can serve as an instrument in the service of music, on the other hand, it is never instrumentalized.
Charlotte Moorman jokes about the idea of ​​beauty conveyed by classical painting and denounces society's obsession with
female body. In a photo taken for Miss City Beautiful in 1952, she was already showing her sumptuous beauty with a detachment
casual and amused. Hanging in the sky with Jim McWilliams Sky Kiss balloons in 1976, in front of the Sydney Opera House, she
plays intensely on his instrument dressed in a concert dress like a classical concert performer.

Think Crazy 

In 1963, Charlotte Moorman created "the Festival avant-garde", a festival that would last for 15 years. Scheduling events,
it invites artists (filmmakers, dancers, poets, musicians…) as well known as unknown to invest the city of New York. The festival ceased to take place in traditional performance halls to take place in public space (the bac J.F. Kennedy, Central Park, the Wards and Mill Rock Islands, the Arsenal of the 69th Infantry Regiment or Shea Stadium), thus precedent for future major festivals of this kind.
Like a motto on the banners of the Avant-Garde Festival, "Think Crazy" by Polish artist Marek Konieczny is a
exhortation to daring and creativity. Combining his classical training with the avant-garde, Moorman once remarked: "I
don't feel like I'm destroying a tradition. I feel like I'm creating something new. "