"Published in conjunction with the exhibition 'A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,' Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, January 16-July 17, 2016; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, September 8-December 10, 2016; [and] Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March 4-June 18, 2017"--Title page verso.

In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time—New York City, 1964—Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt’s demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.

This comprehensive international bibliography is the first to attempt documentation of this diverse field, covering the history of Artist's Performance. It focuses on its early twentieth-century antecedents in such movements as Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus as well as its peak period in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with such developments as Gutai, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Situationism, and Guerrilla Art Action. Major emphasis is also given to sources on 115 individual performance artists and groups. More than 3700 entries document print and media materials dating from 1914 to 1992. Organized for maximum accessibility, the sources are also extensively cross-referenced and are indexed by artist, subject, title, and author. Three appendices identify reference works, libraries, and archives, and addenda material not found in the book text, and two others list artists by country and by group or collective.

The 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. The 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 The Mike Douglas Show 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 Sonata for Adults Only. 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 Topless Cellist, the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist. Moorman'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. Rothfuss 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, Topless Cellist offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius / by Stephen F. Eisenman -- Prophets, madmen, and millenarians: Blake and the (counter)culture of the 1790s / by Mark Crosby -- William Blake on the West Coast / Elizabeth Ferrell -- William Blake and art against surveillance / Jacob Henry Leveton -- Building Golgonooza in the Age of Aquarius / John Murphy -- "My teacher in all things": Sendak, Blake, and the visual language of childhood / Mark Crosby -- Blake then and now / W.J.T. Mitchell

A retrospective and creatively collaborative review of this international feminist conceptual artist Young women victims of a garment factory fire in New York in 1911. An autobiographical progression through stages of womanhood. American veterans killed in Iraq. A giant trough filled with books and surrounded by an urban cornfield. The subjects of Harriet Bart's art are as varied as the media and genres in which she works--sculpture, installation, textiles, painting, drawing, artist's books. Harriet Bart: Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection is a comprehensive look at the prolific and dynamic career of this international feminist conceptual artist. A founder of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM, a nationally recognized feminist art collective in the Twin Cities) and of the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, Bart has sought deep and evocative expressions of memory through several decades of innovative artistic creation and collaboration. This book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of her work at the Weisman Art Museum in 2020, features poetry and prose contributions by significant writers, artists, and curators who have been influenced by her art. Contributors: Betty Bright; Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum; Robert Cozzolino, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Elizabeth Erickson; Heather Everhart; Nor Hall; Matthea Harvey, Sarah Lawrence College; Joanna Inglot, Macalester College; Lyndel King, Weisman Art Museum; Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi; Jim Moore, Hamline U; Diane Mullin, Weisman Art Museum; Samantha Rippner; Joan Rothfuss; John Schott; Sun Yung Shin; Susan Stewart, Princeton U.

A work-by-work guide to the composer's groundbreaking music Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker offers close, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception. Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's significant post-1959 experimental works (excepting pieces covered in volume 1). Wannamaker includes technical information, an analysis of intentions and goals, graphs and musical examples, historical and biographical context, and thoughts from Tenney and others on specific works. Throughout, he discusses the striking compositional ideas found in Tenney's music and, where appropriate, traces an idea's appearance from one piece to the next to reveal the evolution of the composer's art and thought. A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.