Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman

As a schoolgirl in Little Rock, AR, Charlotte Moorman (1933–91) wanted the violin but got the cello. Decades later, cellist Moorman performed naked, flowers around her neck, legs around a cello-shaped ice chunk, scraping it with a Plexiglas bow until it crunched and melted. Time was the theme; frostbite was the result. This combination of bizarre invention and self-centered determination characterized this iconic figure in the avant-garde performing-arts scene. She connected with impressive achievers in the arts, producing, financing, staging, and performing in the New York Avant Garde Arts Festival from 1963 to 1980. Combined flashes, smashes, sirens, firecrackers, balloons, and flames surrounded performances in unusual venues: a Central Park pond, an East River island, Shea Stadium, the World Trade Center, and Grand Central Station. Her TV bra, consisting of two tiny screens strapped to her breasts, became famous. Art curator Rothfuss interviews Moorman's contemporaries and mines manuscripts and archives at Northwestern University to present photographs and fascinating lifestyle facts: her persistence, poverty, duplicity, self-aggrandizing idealism, ongoing relationships with men, arrests for indecent exposure, and disturbing management of her ultimately fatal cancer.