Opera for Automatons: Charlotte Moorman's Early Collaborations with Nam June Paik

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the cellist and Happenings artist Charlotte Moorman performed avant-garde compositions in a manner that exceeded her job description. Rather than interpret scores with fidelity to the composers' intent, she read political or affective content into notation, ignored time brackets, and explored what I will refer to as the meta-histrionics of simultaneously being and being tasked to act like a professional performer. Moorman's most notorious performances occurred while working with the composer and media artist, Nam June Paik. Beginning with their first collaboration in 1964 and concluding with the 1969 performance that followed her arrest for indecent exposure, this dissertation analyzes how Moorman's radical interpretation style conditioned the methods and politics underlying their co-creations. It reveals that their conflation of Cagean indeterminacy with operatic motifs sought to defy both social and compositional control over performing bodies. Such a conflation reflected their roles within systems of production and is best understood through the automatons that populate their performances. As analogies for aesthetic hybridity, uncanny effects, and the rebellion of subaltern populations, automatons embodied the amalgamated form as well as the counter-cultural sentiment of the compositions in which they were situated. Against the conceit that Moorman and Paik's experimentation with cybernetic instruments "humanized technology," I argue that cyborgs, robots, and "living sculptures" denounced the instrumentalization of women and workers. I further argue that Moorman's meta-histrionics, transhuman identification with her cello, and criminal trial helps usher a feminist discourse on objectification into the postwar media ecology.