Charlotte Moorman

EAI is pleased to present an evening focused on groundbreaking performance artist Charlotte Moorman's rarely screened performances for and with television and video. Centered around her extraordinary 1973 televisual "realization" of John Cage's 26' 1.1499" For A String Player at the WNET/Thirteen TV Lab, with collaborators Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, this program highlights how radically Moorman calibrated her performances for unconventional contexts, further disrupting traditional artistic hierarchies. Barbara Moore, independent scholar and close associate throughout Moorman's professional career, will be in conversation following the screening.

This program is organized in conjunction with the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s-1980s, on view at NYU's Grey Art Gallery through December 10, 2016.

Please join EAI for Participation, a special three-hour video program that will be screened continuously from noon-6pm on Friday, May 10th and Saturday, May 11th. Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ant Farm, Charlotte Moorman and Jud Yalkut, Carolee Schneemann, and Jean Dupuy, Participation looks to a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw a profusion of artist-initiated projects, collaborative experimentation, and an inclusive, improvisational ethos. The screening features rare footage of performances and happenings, pioneering video documents, and experimental participatory works, capturing a community of young artists responding to the countercultural sensibility and social transformations of that era. Using newly available portable video technology as well as 16mm film, these artists created extraordinary documents that allow viewers in 2013 to experience something of the multi-disciplinary, interactive and process-based spirit that defined the alternative artistic and cultural scenes of that time.

ESSAY
CHECKLIST
EXHIBITION BROCHURE
INSTALLATION VIEWS
CONVERSATIONS AT DIA:BEACON: Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos, and Paul Ryan with Lori Zippay
PRESS: New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Bullett
PHOTOS: Circa 1971 Gallery Talk with Lori Zippay, February 2012

Dia Art Foundation presented Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Circa 1971 brought together 20 moving image works from EAI's collection of over 3,500 media artworks. Celebrating EAI's 40th anniversary, the exhibition was organized by guest curator Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI.

Circa 1971 included pieces by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Shirley Clarke, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, TVTV, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

Taking the year of EAI's founding as its point of departure, the exhibition set in dialogue a series of diverse works created in and around 1971, which are linked by alternative artistic and activist impulses. Circa 1971 exposed the generative encounters among these artists and influences and initiates unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate works.

Sound Stage was a special Saturday afternoon screening program featuring artists' videos that are driven by music performance. Sound Stage was presented as part of Chelsea Sound: A Not-For-Profit Festival of Artists in Sound, organized jointly by Printed Matter Inc., Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, Electronic Arts Intermix and Family Business. Taking place in Chelsea's Gallery District on Saturday, October 27th, the collaboratively produced festival included a series of performances, sound installations, and video screenings throughout the day across four venues.

Featuring works from the last four decades by a diverse group of artists, Sound Stage presented a program of videos that foreground musical performance. The screening embraced artists' documentation of music performances, artists' performances that incorporate live music, and works created for the camera and screen in which musicians take center stage.

EAI celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-five minute screening demonstrated why a concise statement is so powerful. Ranging from analog video abstraction to quick visual comedy, conceptual exercises to formal experiments with duration, commissioned public service announcements to critiques of the quintessential short-form structure, the TV commercial, the works in this screening demonstrated the enormous possibilities that artists have found in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

The screening included works by Dan Asher, Beth B, Phyllis Baldino, Michael Bell-Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, Matthew Geller, Gran Fury, Gary Hill, Ken Jacobs, Tom Kalin, Kalup Linzy, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Paul Sharits, Stuart Sherman, Shelly Silver, Michael Smith, Leslie Thornton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

Famously described by composer Edgar Varese as "the Jeanne d'Arc of new music," Charlotte Moorman was a central figure of the New York avant garde of the 1960s and '70s. As a performer, she was a longtime collaborator of Nam June Paik, who created many of his best-known pieces for her, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV Cello (1971). At X, EAI presents videos by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut that capture Moorman's unique performances. Included in the program are Yalkut's realization of Moorman and Paik's extraordinary performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player, documentation of Moorman's first performance on Paik's TV Cello in 1971, and rare performance documentation from Paik's archive of Moorman playing the TV Cello while lying on Paik's TV Bed and early performances in Germany and New York from the 1960s.

During the PERFORMA07 performance biennial, EFA Gallery was transformed into a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's Viewing Room, a program that provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world. Visitors to EFA Gallery were able to choose from a curated selection of major performance-based video works by over 30 artists from the EAI Collection. Viewers were able to watch these seminal performances and contemporary classics at their own pace in a comfortable viewing environment. During the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd, programs featuring selected works were installed throughout the gallery.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a selection of early works from the EAI collection that feature some of contemporary art's most legendary artist/muse collaborations Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, William Wegman and Man Ray, and Andy Warhol and the Superstars. The screening was preceded by a special evening viewing of the group exhibition The Muse at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, which also explored the role of the muse in contemporary art.