Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, 1976
Performances presented by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the Adelaide Festival, Adelaide (AGSA and Festival Theatre) and in Sydney (AGNSW, Sydney Opera House and Coventry Gallery).
Nam June Paik is today revered as a visionary pioneer and radical innovator in the field of video and electronic media art. Paik invented the term ‘Electronic Super Highway’. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik studied musical composition, theory and technique in Tokyo, Munich and Cologne. His 1958 meeting with John Cage in Germany became a pivotal turning point for both artists and launched decades of collaboration between the two cultural provocateurs who irrevocably altered the passage and conception of music, performance and sound art. In Germany in 1963, Paik held what is now recognised as the world’s first exhibition of video art.
Within a year Paik moved to New York, where one of his first and foremost artistic collaborators was Charlotte Moorman, a cellist, performer and cultural events producer described by composer Edgar Varese as ‘the Jeanne d’Arc of new music’. Moorman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1933, studied at the Julliard School, became a leading classical cellist and played with the American Symphony Orchestra before departing the classical domain for the avant-garde in 1963. Moorman became involved with the Fluxus movement and undertook triumphant tours of experimental performance art in Europe. In New York, Moorman worked with John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneeman, Jim McWilliams, La Monte Young, Allan Kaprow, and most significantly, Paik.
Paik created four video sculptures especially for Moorman including his celebrated TV Cello, a piece the cellist described as ‘the first innovation in cello design since 1600’. Moorman featured in many of Paik’s performances and video works including his seminal 1973 single channel work Global Groove. Paik and Moorman’s vigorous collaborative relationship, at its height in the 1960s and 1970s, continued until Moorman’s death in 1991.
In 1976, Paik and Moorman presented a series of performances and artworks in Sydney and at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The tour was initiated by John Kaldor as the 4th in his series of Art Projects. Paik and Moorman presented more than 40 performances during their three week stay in Australia. Three of the four video sculptures Paik devised for Moorman were presented as was his TV Garden - considered the exhibition’s sculptural centre piece.
