{"product_id":"topless-cellist-the-improbable-life-of-charlotte-moorman-isbn-9780262533584","title":"Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Mike Douglas Show\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eSonata for Adults Only\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 \u003ci\u003eTopless Cellist\u003c\/i\u003e, the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMoorman'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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRothfuss 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, \u003ci\u003eTopless Cellist\u003c\/i\u003e offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300696019173,"sku":"NP9780262533584","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262533584.jpg?v=1767742827","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/topless-cellist-the-improbable-life-of-charlotte-moorman-isbn-9780262533584","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}