“He was a developer and a discoverer, so many of his ideas are relevant today, from project-oriented work, to discussion-led thinking, to the ephemeral; all of that is now commonplace. That is a central contribution of his work.” – Joachim Jäger, New York Times Saturday, June 4th Inflation of Otto Piene’s: Grand Rapids Carousel 9AM, Arts […]
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“Trisha Brown’s dances are shaped by dreams of levitation, by geometry, enigma, physics, by memory, mathematics and geography, by language. Her gestural imagery challenges perception of the moving body, making the impossible appear possible.” – Marianne Goldberg, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers Trisha Brown is among the most acclaimed choreographers to emerge from the postmodern era. She first came […]
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On April 8 and 9 an international group of curators, scholars and performers convened at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art for “Performed in the Present Tense,” a free two-day symposium considering the present field of performance art. Inspired by the Block Museum exhibition, “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,” participants examined […]
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Pioneering software innovator Peter Norton has donated 68 contemporary artworks from his personal collection to Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, a transformative gift that includes a wide variety of media from more than four dozen internationally known artists.
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Watch WTTW’s Chicago Tonight coverage of the exhibition Feast of Astonishments, broadcast January 26, 2016 “Being labeled “the topless cellist” was a mixed blessing for one American artist of the avant-garde. Charlotte Moorman’s occasional nudity in her performances attracted the curiosity of “The Tonight Show” and TV audiences. It also may have distracted from the […]
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Morton Feldman’s “Projection One” (1950), performed by Riana Anthony, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Master of Music, Class of 2017. The piece explores categories of pizzicato, arco and arco-like ponticello, as well as harmonics. It was written on graph paper with the pitch range of the instrument indicated in boxes inside larger boxes, […]
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Nam Jun Paik’s “One for Violin Solo” (1962), performed by Myrtil Mitanga, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Class of 2017. The piece undermines clichés of the classical music genre through an unanticipated gesture. Charlotte Moorman, who valued drama, humor, theatricality, and subversion in her work, was drawn to the ceremony of the piece, as […]
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A roundtable discussion of Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, moderated by Hannah Higgins, professor of art history at University of Illinois at Chicago, and featuring Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist who transformed the discourse of the body, sexuality, and gender; Alison Knowles, multi-media Fluxus artist; Jim McWilliams, designer of most of the posters for the […]
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John Cage’s “Cello Etude Boreales, no. 1” (1978) performed by Drake Driscoll, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, Class of 2018. The pieces was created using star charts from the Atlas Borealis as a source of randomness. Cage traced the star maps and then used additional chance operations to determine, with painstaking precision, the specific […]
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Barbara Moore, Independent Scholar and Director, Peter Moore Archive Speed-dating the Avant-Garde: 15 Festivals in 30 Minutes Barbara Moore is an independent scholar of seminal late 20th-century art alternatives such as performance and artists books. She was the first editor at Dick Higgins’s legendary Something Else Press, a rare-book dealer for thirty years specializing in printed […]
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