Official Poster for the 3rd Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York.

Item Details

New York, N.p., 1965, broadside

First, Very good

First edition. 7 1/2 x 25 inches. Offset. Old fold-lines (common as they were often mailed) and a ffew fant wrinkles at the top right. A very good copy. Three copies in institutional holdings.

Poster for the 3rd Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, September 7–11, 1965, at Judson Hall, founded and directed by Charlotte Moorman. The 1965 festival presented experimental music, Happenings, and performance art, including a Theater Piece performed by Philip Corner, Al Hansen, Gary Harris, Allan Kaprow, Takehisa Kosugi, Moorman, Nam June Paik, and James Tenney. 

The Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York was an annual event that began in 1963 as an open forum for the emerging experimental music scene in New York City. Established in 1963 by cellist (history often records her as the "Topless Cellist") and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, the festival ran for 15 years in various locations including Central Park, the Armory and the Staten Island Ferry. The 1965 festival gained notoriety as the police had to shut it down entirely. There was a performance Kaprow's Push and Pull and after it a number of the audience went on a rampage tearing down signs and yanking hubcabs off cars on the street outside, then breaking mirrored panels inside the venue. It was never held in a regular venue after that.

The director of the Festival, Charlotte Moorman, has been somewhat forgotten, likely as when she died (at the age of 57 in 1999) the kind of music she played and championed was still being debated about. Moorman herself was from a tight-lipped upper crust family and she graduated from Julliard with distinction. She began her musical career at the American Symphony Orchestra (her roommate for part of this time was Yoko Ono).

Moorman befriended and later performed with many well-known artists of the late 20th century, including Paik, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Byrd, Carolee Schneemann, and Jim McWilliams. This led to her loose involvement with the Fluxus movement of avant-garde performance artists. She later worked closely with many of its protagonists to interpret enigmatic scores written in the open-ended spirit of Fluxus. ] In 1966, Beuys, then associated with Fluxus, created his work Infiltration Homogen für Cello, a felt-covered violoncello, in her honor. However, Moorman, like numerous other female artists including her close friend Schneemann, was "blacklisted" by Fluxus-organizer George Maciunas for reasons that remain unclear" (Wiki).