Tuesday, November 10, 2015

            I did a presentation on Charlotte Moorman, acclaimed avant-gardest and cellist. My main point was that her art was executed in order to establish a union of man and technology in the face of that same technology growing out of our hands.
             There are many reasons for Marshal McLuhan to include a photo of Charlotte Moorman in his book, Understanding Media. Moorman’s pieces, especially when collaborating with fellow artist Nam June Paik, fused sculpture, performance, music, commerce, and art. Paik’s use of Moorman and the TV Bra, for instance, was his way of humanizing technology by forcing it into a fusion with the human body and incorporating it into art performance (Fogle, Douglas). While Moorman and the cello were earthy and fleshy, the TV Bra was a pair of essentially electronic pasties which were wired and and devoid of emotion. Together these two aspects turned Moorman into the perfect artist for the McLuhan age, an era when technological gadgets were not the universal bodily prostheses that they are today.

2 comments:

  1. I think the idea of humanizing technology by making it one with the human body is very interesting. We tend to think of that idea as very literal (such a cyborgs) but it may be happening all around us in much more subtle ways.

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  2. Yo dawg this was tight. I loved your presentation I thought t was really dope. Yaaaaaaw you already know!

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