The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carvedice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments onThe Mike Douglas Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, anda belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik's Sonata for AdultsOnly. In the 1960s, Moorman (1933--1991) became famous for her madcap (and oftenunclothed) performance antics; less famous but more significant is Moorman's transformativeinfluence on contemporary performance practice--and her dedication to the idea that avant-garde artshould reach the widest possible audience. In Topless Cellist, the first book toexplore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of anextraordinary American artist. Moorman's arrest in 1967 for performing toplessmade her a water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was a star of theavant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, JosephBeuys, John Cage, and Paik, her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performancethat combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde experiment -- informed byintuition, daring, and love of spectacle. Moorman's annual festival of the avant-garde offered thepublic a lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance, poetry, film, and othermedia. 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-gardeto her death from breast cancer in 1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were aperformance.) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, Topless Cellist offersa fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was morethan the sum of her performances.

A brand new history of contemporary performance and its crucial role in contemporary art, written by one of the world's leading curators and writers on performance art.

The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today. Celebrated for bridging the gap between art and life, Gates’ work encourages political, social and spatial change, and reaches beyond a traditional art audience. His output includes sculpture, installation, performance, architecture and urban interventions, and has been exhibited and critically acclaimed in important exhibitions including Documenta Kassel and the Venice Biennale. This is the first time all his significant projects are collected and examined together.

Using elements of autobiography to address such issues as religion, sex, race, family and the struggle of women to move beyond their traditional roles in society, these women integrate aspects of ritual, monologue, music, visual arts and theatre in their performances as they help to forge a new literary and theatrical tradition.

An icon of performance art and the indie-music world, this is the first book on the artist’s full career to date, as curated by the artist herself. Laurie Anderson is one of the most revered artists working today, and she is as prolific as she is inventive. She is a musician, performance artist, composer, fiction writer, and filmmaker (her most recent foray, Heart of a Dog, was lauded as an “experimental marvel” by the Los Angeles Times). Anderson moves seamlessly between the music world and the fine-art world while maintaining her stronghold in both. A true polymath, her interest in new media made her an early pioneer of harnessing technology for artistic purposes long before the technology boom of the last ten years. Regardless of the medium, however, it is exploration of language (and how it seeps into the image) and storytelling that is her métier. A few years ago, Anderson began poring through her extensive archive of nearly forty years of work, which includes scores of documentation, notebooks, and sketchbooks. In the process, she rediscovered important work and looked at well-known projects with a new lens. In this landmark volume, the artist brings together the most comprehensive collection of her artwork to date, some of which has never before been seen or published. Spanning drawing, multimedia installations, performance, and new projects using augmented reality, the extensive volume traverses four decades of her groundbreaking art. Each chapter includes commentary written by Anderson herself, offering an intimate understanding of her work through the artist’s own words.

A SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, ROUGH TRADE, PITCHFORK AND UNCUT MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARMusician and artist Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and conventions for four decades.