The cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) was an intrepid performer who was central to avant-garde culture in New York during the 1960s and ’70s—the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music,” the composer Edgard Varèse dubbed her—even if many weren’t sure how to evaluate her talents.  Was she advancing the cause of free expression when she played on stage in the nude or wore a bra of televisions or was attached to a flight of balloons or let herself be covered in 20 pounds of chocolate fudge?  Or did some of her antics become an excuse for men to ogle her and for the public to dismiss all unconventional art as a put-on? Was she, as well as being collaborator and muse for Nam June Paik in his revolutionary mixed-media pieces, also his stooge?  These questions were debated in New York’s downtown artistic circles (especially by feminists) when she was alive. And they are quietly raised again in the celebratory exhibition and catalog “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, as well as in Joan Rothfuss ’s entertaining new biography, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman.”  According to Ms. Rothfuss’s research, Moorman could have enjoyed a normal middle-class American life. Growing up in Little Rock, Ark., an only child who studied music and won the “Miss City Beautiful” contest at age 19, she was not a born rebel. Even after her move in 1957 to New York, where she attended the Juilliard School for a year and married a double-bassist, she envisioned herself playing cello in an orchestra or string ensemble.  But performing the classics, Moorman decided, was a bore compared to the offerings in New York’s experimental music and art scene during the ’60s. Her marriage annulled, she took up with a series of male mentors. (She ended up happily paired with the visual artist Frank Pileggi. )  An eccentric who never threw anything away, Moorman has left the show’s six curators—one of whom is Ms. Rothfuss—with almost too much material to sift in presenting her flamboyant life. (Northwestern bought the artist’s archive and has been organizing it since 2001.)  In addition to photographs of her in many productions, the exhibition has museum loans of Paik’s video sculptures and a program of films and videos that shows her playing works by Paik (“Sonata for Adults Only”) and others. There are cellos that Moorman fashioned, in neon or from syringes (used for her cancer treatments), as well as the felt-covered instrument that Joseph Beuys made for her to use in one of his works.  Annotated scores of music she performed by New York’s avant-garde ( John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Paik) are here, along with her copy of Karlheinz Stockhausen ’s “Originale (Originals),” a piece from 1964 in which she played the part of the “String Player,” wearing only gauze. Moorman was a key figure in helping these composers to introduce unpredictability, spectacle, danger and humor into the rarefied air of the classical music concert.  One way to liberate the audience, Paik believed, was to add nudity. In 1967 Moorman performed half-naked in his “Opera Sextronique” at a theater near Times Square. Arrested for indecent exposure, she spent the night in jail. The tabloid reporting on her trial, which resulted in a suspended sentence, defined her ever after in the public’s mind as the “Topless Cellist,” a label she resented when she wasn’t capitalizing on it.  Moorman’s packrat habits have proved invaluable in reconstructing a less well-documented phase of her career: her role as an impresario.  In 1963 she founded an annual Festival of the Avant Garde in New York. With almost no resources except her own vivaciousness, she produced it for 15 years, moving it around the city into nontraditional arenas for art and music—Grand Central Terminal, Shea Stadium, Floyd Bennett Field, and the World Trade Center.  The walls and cases in the exhibition’s second half are papered with her ads and programs for the festivals, supplemented by the photographs of Peter Moore, one of the few who attended all of these ephemeral events. Dozens of composers (Varèse, Cage, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio ), filmmakers ( Bruce Conner, Jack Smith ), performance artists and dancers ( Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Lucinda Childs ) participated because Moorman cajoled them.  She had “a flair for getting EVERYBODY involved, including the more sophisticated who think Charlotte is silly; and she always somehow pulled it off,” wrote the critic Jill Johnston in the Village Voice after one of these festivals.  Some feminist artists in the ’60s and ’70s were wary of Moorman. Carolee Schneemann thought her a “narcissist,” and the roster of her festivals was overwhelmingly male.  The public was more flummoxed. In a clip here from the Merv Griffin TV show, the studio audience laughs nervously as she holds a string down the back of Jerry Lewis and uses him to perform Paik’s “Human Cello.”  A comedian in her own right, whose friendly smile and Southern accent could disarm most hostile crowds, Moorman knew that just because you weren’t afraid to look ridiculous didn’t mean you weren’t serious.  Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
Cellist Charlotte Moorman’s work divided opinion, but one thing’s for certain: She was deeply serious about her artistic projects.