The First Non-Human
Action Artist
Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik
in Robot Opera
Sophie Landres
ORIGINALE ALL OVER AGAIN
Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik began their collaboration while
Moorman was producing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale (Originals,
or Real People) for her 1964 New York Avant Garde Festival. Written in
collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister, Originale seemed to encompass
the most radical developments in post-war composition: electronic sounds, 这
austere mathematical order of serialism, and the messy, veristic improvisations
found in happenings. Moorman was relatively new at producing but well estab-
lished as a wayward cellist whose interpretation of New Music exceeded the job
description. Rather than interpret scores with fidelity to the composers’ intent,
Moorman began to read political or affective content into notation, ignored time
brackets, and explored what I refer to as the meta-histrionics of simultaneously
being and being tasked to act like a professional performer. This was especially
the case in compositions that contained elements of indeterminacy. Moorman
seized such work as an opportunity to redistribute musical assignments, 过去的
the point of re-authorship and into a transhumanist realm where even she and
her cello were commutable.
Early evidence of Moorman’s unorthodox approach can be seen in performances
of John Cage’s 26’1.1499” for a String Player ([1955], 1960). Through an aleatory
structure that calls for indeterminate sound sources, Cage intended the work to
bring attention to nature’s infinite and objective sonic field. Moorman began
studying the score in 1963 and diaristically annotated it throughout her career,
much to Cage’s chagrin. Her self-referential style was more at home in later works
by composers such as Paik, Philip Corner, Giuseppe Chiari, Jim McWilliams,
© 2018 Sophie Landres
PAJ 118 (2018), PP. 11–25.
土井:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00390
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and Takehisa Kosugi who welcomed the way Moorman personalized and drama-
tized her role. The score for Corner’s Solo with . . . (1963), 例如, 包含
instructions such as, “strike that soloist pose” and “in general, act like a soloist.”
Moorman realized it by playing the perpetually late, often disheveled, obsessively
annotating cellist that she was. She delayed the curtain rising and waited even
longer to appear on stage before running off to retrieve her cello. She then fussed
with the instrument and scrutinized the sheet music for an excruciatingly long
time only to have music finally play out of a loudspeaker.
Rather than caricature an archetype or correlate recorded music with a faceless,
neutral subject, Moorman presented herself as uniquely defined yet interchange-
able with the musical apparatus. The ventriloquism anticipated an inter-subjective
relationship with instruments and sound technology that became a constant
throughout her career. Moorman’s cello was instrumental to this radical mode
of interpretation in all senses of the word. It was the object through which she
performed musical labor and her partner in producing sound. It was the emblem
that identified her role and a tool through which to navigate her discipline. 在
works where she appeared to transfigure or merge with her instrument, 这
familiar conceit that she “played herself” became literal and uncanny.
Undoubtedly, Moorman was attracted to how the roles in Originale are based on
performers cast to play themselves. The dramatis personae reads like a who’s who
of the avant-garde. With surreal exceptions for a child, animal attendant, 和
newspaper seller, each cast member is a representative from an aesthetic field in
which they made an “original” contribution, one both novel and philosophically
bent toward authenticity in art. Combining the spontaneity of happenings with
the precision of serial music, the score organizes their idiosyncratic actions into
“timepoints” or “timeboxes,” which are then read as notation. Stockhausen’s
electroacoustic composition Kontakte (1958–60) serves as a thread to unify the
disjuncture between characters, competing sounds, and simultaneous activities.
Moorman’s production was to be Originale’s New York premiere as well as the
crown jewel of her festival. To restage the work, she proposed New York coun-
terparts for the twenty-one “originals” that appeared in the Theater am Dom
performance in Cologne three years prior. She substituted the American poet,
Allen Ginsberg, for Hans G. Helms and replaced the stage director, Carlheinz
Caspari, with the happenings progenitor, Allan Kaprow. But for the role of “Action
Composer,” Stockhausen insisted that only Nam June Paik would suffice. “What’s
a Paik?” was Moorman’s apocryphal response, betokening the humorous mix-ups
between people and things in so many of their collaborations to come.
Paik’s performances had been referred to as “action music” since 1959, 那一年
he violently tipped over a piano in Hommage à John Cage (1958–59). For Originale,
12 PAJ 118
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he tossed beans into the air and onto the audience, slowly unrolled a ream of
paper that was covering his face and used it to wipe his tears before screaming
and throwing the paper at the audience. He played tapes of recorded music spliced
with screams and radio programs, smeared shaving cream and rice on himself,
plunged into a tub of water and then sat at a piano, playing for several minutes
before banging the keys with his head. There was a specific musicality to Paik’s
Artaudian cruelty and iconoclastic rage against fine European instruments. Far
from gratuitous, they redirected senses to the non-repeatable sounds that arise
when objects are acted upon in an unpredictable manner. Incorporating these into
Originale’s score delimited his “authentic” acts to set and repeatable timepoints.
If even head-banging piano keys and pelting the audience with beans could be
contained by compositional order, the disposition proved exhaustible. 尽管
audiences still felt rattled, his actions no longer fulfilled what he believed was
an essential “yearning or angst for the nonrepeatable.”1 Paik’s attention turned in
two directions: reconfiguring electronics and formulating a strain of happenings
where sounds would surprise people on the street.
Because Paik became known as one of video art’s founding fathers, his pivot
towards electronics tends to eclipse his sustained interest in performance. 在他的
1986 recollection, the shift was as precipitous as it was techno-centric:
行进 1963. While I was devoting myself to research on video, I lost my
interest in action in music to a certain extent. After twelve performances
of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Originale,” I started a new life from Novem-
误码率 1961. By starting a new life I mean that I stocked my whole library
except those on TV technique into storage and locked it up. I read and
practiced only on electronics. 换句话说, I went back to the spartan
life of pre-college days . . . only physics and electronics.2
But Paik was also actively envisaging how to transcend music’s current state. 他
was tired of compositions that merely rearranged the traditional components of
music without accomplishing what he referred to as an “ontological” revolution
in the discipline. “The beauty of moving theater,” as he called his new ontology,
“lies in this ‘surprise a priori,’ because almost all of the audience is uninvited,
not knowing what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer.”3 As
with Moorman’s burgeoning interpretation style, such an arrangement confused
professional roles and identities to dramatic effect. 因此, when beckoned to play
himself in Originale all over again, Paik brought an animatronic doppelganger:
Robot K-456. He had just finished assembling it out of junk parts with assistance
from the artist and engineer, Shuya Abe. Now dubbed “the first non-human action
artist,” the robot served as Paik’s sandwich board, understudy, and accomplice.
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 13
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OF FEAR AND FAILURE
It was not rare to see automatons in 1960s happenings. Consider “the sand-
wich man” in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959); Pat Oldenburg’s
benumbed expression as she is manipulated by Lucas Samaras in Claes Olden-
burg’s Voyages I at the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company (1962); Carolee Schnee-
mann’s appearance as a nude sculpture posed like Manet’s Olympia alongside
Robert Morris in Site (1964); or the living doll in Marta Minujín’s La Poupée
(The Doll) (c.1963). As early as 1962, Susan Sontag observed that the genre was
populated by “anesthetized persons” and people treated like objects.4 Absurdly
enacting “meaningless mechanized situations of disrelation,” these automatons
made happenings “a demonic [原文如此] comedy” a la Artaud. “You giggle because you’re
afraid,” Kaprow explained.5 Fear came from not knowing what would “happen”
during such opaque and confrontational events. The threat of violence always
loomed. 然而, what most frightened the art establishment was how the artist’s
unpredictable and mechanically executed processes “hazard failure, the ‘failure’
of being less artistic and more lifelike.”
Moorman and Paik thus developed their partnership around an avatar of fear
and failure. Treated like a living member of their ensemble and frequently mal-
functioning, Robot K-456 elicited nervous laughter while befogging distinctions
between performed, programmed, and natural behavior. Commonly described as
“skeletal” or with reference to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, its exposed electronics
belonged to the démodé and lowly wastelands of camp and mass consumption.
In post-war art that aimed for a closer proximity to life, defunct, decrepit mate-
rial frequently stood for the contemporary human condition. By reinvesting junk
with aesthetic value, artists such as Oldenburg and Kaprow redefined culture as
the mere production of expendable commodities. Their gritty environments and
assemblages suggested that the cycle of possession and dispossession is precisely
what makes us human and that to be human is to be sorely alienated from life.
Left cadaverous, Robot K-456 embodied the sense of deadened life and alienating
obsolescence that permeates our built environment. Paik considered it “a Happen-
ing tool,” in service to an art of both shock and disrelation. “I thought it should
meet people in the street and give one second of surprise. Like a quick shower,”
Paik explained, “I wanted it to kick you and then go on. It was a street-music
piece.”6 To be kicked by the robot was to be incorporated into the performance.
Being within the art and indistinct from its defining substance was to assume
the status of a found object—one among others comprising the work of art and
equally disposable. Moorman’s festival provided a stage as well as unscheduled
opportunities to encounter Paik’s kinetic creature and be reified. The robot’s
solo act was titled, Robot Opera (1964), but the title was thrown around loosely.
14 PAJ 118
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之间 1964 和 1965, a specific performance with Moorman, a concert of
works by multiple composers or just Paik, and several street theatre promenades
all carried that name. What Robot Opera more clearly designates is the operatic
and sci-fi inflected style that both artists brought to their collaboration when the
robot worked as much as when it failed.
From Monteverdi’s early baroque L’Orfeo (Orpheus, 1609) to Mozart’s classical Die
Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791), there is a long tradition of musicians play-
ing musicians in opera. Like Orpheus and Tamino, they are figures who move
between the sensible world and the invisible noumena that govern them, 使用
music as a source of agency. Music doesn’t just express wrath in opera; it strikes
the characters. It doesn’t express longing so much as it issues pleas. Not unlike
action music, it is a sonic performative that self-reflectively displays its own effect.
In so doing, opera reflects relationships between prevailing conceptions of power
and subjectivity. Musicologists and cultural theorists such as Gary Tomlinson,
Slavoj Žižek, and Mladen Dolar posit that the tragically absolutist opera seria and
democratically comedic opera buffa paradigmatically negotiate these relationships
through role-reversal. Beginning with Robot Opera and continuing in works such
as Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964), Opera Sextronique (1967), Mixed-
Media Opera (1968), and TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), Moorman and Paik
interchanged with automatons and instruments as they too considered music’s
performance of subjectivity and its fantastical staging of power relations. 但是,
all accounts of Robot Opera have looked past opera to extol Paik’s aesthetic use
of cybernetics. They parrot his quip that Robot K-456 “humanized technology”
as if it was a winning point in the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate,” (七月 24,
1959) which measured the happiness and prosperity of citizens by their countries’
proliferation of new-fangled appliances.
Predicated on Paik’s “desire to humanize technology,” the recent Nam June Paik:
Becoming Robot exhibition at the Asia Society (九月 5, 2014–January 4, 2015)
typifies this tendency.7 The exhibition was widely received as an attempt to cement
Paik as the grand patriarch of video art and all the electronic media that have
become mainstream. Greeting visitors at the entrance, Robot K-456 was positioned
as a prototype for Paik’s subsequent robot-shaped sculptures, which are studded
with his famous video montages but immobile. 同时, Moorman was
repeatedly recast as “Paik’s muse.” Thus, Robot Opera (among other collabora-
tions with Moorman) was said to “underscore [原文如此] Paik’s interest in humanizing
technology by using Moorman’s body, often in various stages of undress, as a
canvas onto which the artist attached his prominent electronic sculptures.”8 The
Asia Society’s teleological claims shift attention from the multiple, meaningful
events that constitute the work of art to the single, accession-numbered artifact.
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 15
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Robot K-456’s actions go unanalyzed, which in turn glazes over the work’s social
satire, bypasses the theories and traditions that occupied the artists’ thoughts, 和
grants Moorman as little agency as the non-living figure she played beside. 这
is a strange fate for a thing made to move not just through space but through the
fluid genres of happenings, street music, and opera. It is a strange catchphrase to
describe reification, 复活, and transhumanist role-playing.
A year after Becoming Robot closed, a recuperative exhibition opened. Organized by
the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and traveling to New York University’s
Grey Art Gallery and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, A Feast of Astonish-
评论: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s drew upon the Char-
lotte Moorman archive treasure-trove at Northwestern University to prove that
Moorman was not art material, but an artist and a powerful impresario. Yet where
Robot Opera was concerned, the visual nature of performance documentation and
display did little to restore her contribution or the robot’s musicality. 虽然
the curatorial team made great efforts to pepper the installations with footage,
scores, and other explicating ephemera, dependence on Peter Moore’s photo-
documentation couldn’t help but halt movement and silence sound. Attending
to what was operatic about the Robot Operas darkens the sunny notion of human-
ized technology but illuminates the context. It reminds us that the trailblazing
experiments integrating technology into performance were often wary of the
militaristic, 资本家, and otherwise dehumanizing implications, even as they
reveled in the baroque spectacle of new power sources. For while the machine’s
kinesis demonstrated the commodifiable marvels of modern science, operatic
motifs mocked the instrumentalizing effect of the Cold War’s proxy contests.
INSTRUMENTAL SUBSTITUTIONS
To the extent that “humanizing technology” derives from Paik’s well-known
(and Moorman’s slightly less known) interest in cybernetics, it should be read
as a duplicitous statement. Later in his career, Paik would even append it with
the disclaimer, “I make technology ridiculous.”9 The same conclusion could be
reached by considering what he called “the common denominators” between
Norbert Weiner, Marshall McLuhan, and Cage. In addition to mixed-media,
indeterminism, and the “simulation or comparison of electronics and physiology”
Paik considered Henri Bergson’s “conception of TIME” to be an important link
within “the relationship of aesthetics and cybernetics.”10 Contrary to mechanis-
tic perceptions, this is time conceived as a vital continuum. It is lived duration,
wherein disorder is merely an order that one did not expect, much like indeter-
minism, entropy, and failure. 为此原因, Bergson (like Sontag) 经过考虑的
automatism to be the essential well-spring of comedy and a biting form of social
critique. Whether mechanical impositions on fluid temporality, involuntary
16 PAJ 118
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Top: Nam June Paik’s flyer for the premiere of Robot Opera at the 2nd Annual New York Avant Garde
Festival, August 30–September 13, 1964. 照片: Courtesy Charlotte Moorman Archive, Charles Deering
McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, 伊利诺伊州.
Bottom: Installation view of the exhibition Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot at Asia Society Museum,
纽约, 九月 5, 2014–January 4, 2015.
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 17
changes to rigid actions or ideas, or the appearance of puppets and replicas, “这
attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion
as that body reminds us of a mere machine,” Bergson wrote.11 Far from reconciling
humans and their inventions, “humanizing technology” functioned like role-
reversal in opera buffa. As Dolar explains, it is a fantasy that opposes the status
quo by presenting a new subjectivity within a new temporality. “Its weapon,”
he writes, “is to ridicule . . . those who do not prove worthy of participating in
the common humanity.”12
Like a candidate on the campaign trail, Robot K-456 stiffly waved, bowed, tipped
its hat, and “spoke” by playing audio tape recordings of speeches, 最为显着地,
约翰·F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. It could also twirl its breasts, gyrate its pelvis,
and “defecate” a smattering of dried, white beans akin to those Paik often tossed
on stage. Before bringing it to New York, Paik removed its sandpaper and flint
penis, inspiring inside jokes all the more. Writing, “the Robot’s shit is white in
shapes suggesting vitamins, deodorants and the droppings of deer; the penis is
the shadow of a finger; the vagina that of a whale,” Cage understood the robot
through nature and drugstore metaphors, along with metonymies for Paik’s entire
body of work.13 (The shadow calls to mind Richard Moore’s iconic photograph of
Zen for Film [1962–64] while the whale’s vagina evokes the instructions for Danger
Music for Dick Higgins [1962].) 换句话说, Robot K-456 was both a biologi-
cally and culturally concocted figure, a portrait of the artist himself. Because Paik
threw beans at the audience during Originale and instructs the performer to do
the same in Simple (1962), the robot’s excretion of beans also suggested that it
was taking over Paik’s job. 的确, Paik had hoped it would.
Jokes about workers replaced by their tools or made robotic tapped an anxiety
circulating since the dawn of industrialization. The rapid and round-the-clock
demands of insatiable productivity had long required conformity to the mechani-
cal movements of industrial machines while new technologies threatened to
replace laborers altogether. In the 1960s, computational machines presented
similar ultimatums. Concurrently, an influx of minority and women workers
(not unlike Paik and Moorman) pressurized the American job market and reig-
nited a Marxist discourse on how capitalism objectifies. But where production
was seen as the agent of transfiguration between humans and objects under
capitalist economics, malfunction was the agent of transfiguration within the
Robot Operas. Emerging from a “renewed ontology” where “surprise a priori” un-
identifies participants, Robot K-456 was all but designed to stop working and it
contributed to the confusion of roles desired by Moorman and Paik when it did.
The robot was scheduled to play a duet of Stockhausen’s notoriously complex
Plus-Minus (1963) with Moorman during an Originale timepoint. Glissandos
18 PAJ 118
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would be played by Moorman; pizzicatos by the robot—but it broke down and
was replaced by Paik on piano. “Stage fright” was the explanation printed in
reviews.14 Substitutions and transfigurations continued throughout their European
tour the following spring. Somewhere along the road, Variations on a Theme by
Saint-Saëns became a piece in which Moorman sat on a kneeling man, draped
in a transparent plastic robe, with the endpin of her cello in the mouth of a
man lying face up on his back. Mid-way through playing The Swan from Saint-
Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (1886), Moorman would turn from acting like her
cellist self to portraying the swan, submerging herself in a barrel of water and
returning to complete the composition dripping wet. Whenever Robot K-456 was
functioning alongside Moorman, the piece was referred to as Robot Opera. 尽管
Moorman played the music until she became the music, the instrumental robot
would jerk to life.
In addition to this arrangement of human seat, human endpin stopper, swan
人类, and robot musician, Moorman and Paik were to perform her increasingly
radical interpretation of 26’1.1499” at 24 Stunden—also referred to as 24 Hour
Happening or 24 Hours and lasting that long at Rolf Jährlings’s Galerie Parnass in
Wuppertal, June 5th through the 6th. Playing Paik as a “human cello” was one of
Moorman’s earliest and most presumptuous annotations to Cage’s composition.
The sequence begins with Moorman ironically reciting a list of children’s pledges
to be well-behaved before executing a rapid series of blunt cello and non-cello
sounds on objects of her choosing. Shortly thereafter, she puts her cello aside
and Paik—bare-chested—steps in as its surrogate. He crouches down facing her,
holding a string taut across his back. Although they maintain a steady, 严肃的
composure while she pantomimes, their bodies emit intimacy. With her arms
around an “objectified” man and the man between her legs, Moorman’s per-
functory body mechanics materialize when they should fade into the invisible
substrata from which sounds arise.
Cage accurately disparaged that the sequence “favored actions rather than sound
events in time.”15 Indeed, by redirecting the performance toward the performer’s
musical training and embodied being, Moorman favored the agency that music
has in opera and the social satire that opera buffa proffers though cases of mistaken
身份. Mistaking a human for an instrument makes a biting analogy between
discipline as a professional field and discipline as late capitalism’s repressive
rules of conduct. Prefaced by the children’s pledge, it equates musicians with
their instruments, workers with the tools of their trade, and musical scores with
other edicts issued to restrain or normalize behavior.
期间 24 Stunden, actions reshuffled even more roles and instruments than
Moorman’s annotated score intended. As Gisela Gronemeyer recalls,
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 19
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Nam June Paik’s body, as a human cello, was an important part of
Moorman’s interpretation of the piece. As part of their first European
tour, the duo participated in the famous twenty-four hour Fluxus Artists
event at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. But when the time came for
Cage’s piece to be performed, Moorman was fast asleep—she had taken
tranquilizers to calm her nerves. And when she woke up at 2 a.m., 她
performed the piece without Paik.16
According to Paik, a Midsummer Night’s Dream–type series of role-reversals turned
the performance into a satire of their own affinities:
Charlotte and I wanted to play a piece by John Cage, but shortly before
we were due to begin, Charlotte fell into a sleep from which she was
reluctant to awake, no matter how much I shouted and shook her. 在
my wit’s end, I pretended to sleep while playing La Monte Young’s piano
件. Charlotte woke up at 2 in the morning, and they tell me she
delivered a wonderful performance.17
Consider the operatic logic: Paik is supposed to perform as Moorman’s instru-
ment but she breaks down, psychologically and then physically. Paik proceeds
to imitate Moorman by pretending to sleep. 同时, he is staging the
musical effect of Minimalist compositions, which were perceived as so powerfully
boring, they could even put the musician to sleep. When Moorman wakes, Paik
is absent (perhaps really sleeping) and so she substitutes his human body for
the real instrument. As in opera buffa, these transpositions make fun of cultural
expectations while modeling the possibility of more equitably unfixed and inter-
changeable subjectivities. And much like Robot K-456’s earlier bout of stage fright,
the performers’ internal indeterminacy rebels against the protocols of production.
In both Plus-Minus and 26’1.1499”, role-reversal occurs when a body is no longer
able to function according to program. The substitutions suggest that bodies are
both expendable and internally powered by a force that is contrary to that which
governs its performance. These attributes are characteristic of what Tomlinson
refers to as “postmetaphysical opera” and contends was a development that deliv-
ered the operatic tradition into the modern age. In such psychologically charged
performances, subjects interact “within a flux of forces that determine and dis-
solve bodies. It is an opera that stages not the invisible soul and its myths, 但
the subject’s embodiment of its most basic, forceful drives,” he writes.18 Although
still aligned with fantasy and the scrim of confusion that dreams drape over
scenarios, sleep in Moorman and Paik’s postmetaphysical operas is not a device
to vindicate the otherworldliness of the supersensible. 相当, in keeping with
Tomlinson’s nomenclature, it is grounded in the intersubjectivity, non-universalist
20 PAJ 118
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心理学, and political sociology of the mundane—and it proves to be an
important actor within everyday power struggles.
Amidst global trends towards round-the-clock consumerism, increased working
小时, constant surveillance, and interminable control, art critic Jonathan Crary,
has recently argued that
In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable
losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, 睡觉
will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 宇宙. The huge por-
tion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated
需要, subsist as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness
of contemporary capitalism.19
The economic history supporting Crary’s conclusion chronicles the forces of
corporeal dissolution that postmetaphysical opera takes as its plot. 他解释说
that when industrialization first replaced artisanal, craft labor, workers could
derive a sense of personal accomplishment from operating machinery despite the
increase in tedium and repetition. Because their satisfaction diminished with the
dawn of large factories, modern cultural values encouraged workers to identify
with machines and take pride in emulating their efficiencies. The machine iden-
tification in Moorman and Paik’s work is a grotesque illustration of this effort.
然而, by imagining the machine to be recklessly unreliable and personified
with subconscious desires, such identification does not guarantee a more instru-
mentalized work force. Rather than dutifully industrious, the subjectivity they
assume is uncanny, unconscious, and dreaming. As Crary’s argument makes clear,
therein lies kernels of resistance. Dreamers cannot be fixed in binaries that erect
impermeable divisions between the individual and the collective, the private and
the public, 或者, one can infer, the subject and the instrument.
But how evasive or disruptive were the artists’ failures to perform when inde-
terminate surprises and redistributed roles are what constitute music’s renewed
ontology? “They thought it was a great Minimal piece,” joked Paik, acknowledg-
ing the impossibility of failing to produce art within the happening’s round-the-
clock conflation of art and life.20 The satisfying resolution to these unpredicted
calamities confirmed Kaprow’s maxim that “when something goes ‘wrong’
[in happenings], something far more ‘right,’ more revelatory, has many times
emerged.”21 This type of resolution reveals absolutism in opera seria because the
power structure remains in place despite role-reversals. 例如, exchanges
of deific acts by humans for humane acts by gods or kings ultimately reinforce
the ruler’s supreme power. The role-reversals in 24 Stunden similarly revealed
an inescapable governing system, suggesting that the contemporary paradigm
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 21
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is comparably absolutist. Yet the disruptive, Bergsonian humor also mocked
the system’s rigidly mechanistic temporality, turning tragedy into a punch line.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL VIEW
Another comically thwarted disruption occurred during the performance of Robot
Opera at Galerie René Block’s Sixth Soirée in Berlin on June 14th. After Moor-
man played The Swan, Robot K-456 lead a procession towards the Berlin Wall and
attempted to enter East Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate. “Oh god, we had
such trouble here!” Moorman recalled,
We were at Brandenburg Gate and we nearly got put in the Russian
prison. The Russians, 英语, and the Germans all control this. . . . 这
Robot took a walk and I played cello and god did they come out with
their machine guns after us!22
A British news report was as unamused as the authorities who saw the artists
through their crosshairs:
Pop Art in Berlin. A robot, broadcasting what is pompously described as
“instructions to humanity.” Can we be so lacking as we need a machine
to give us guidance? Anyway, the robot needed a bit of guidance itself.23
These “instructions to humanity” were but one of Moorman and Paik’s campy
winks to science fiction. Cagean scores performed cacophonously with souped-
up instruments resembled the complicated yet ascetic charts and inscrutable
machines signifying advanced knowledge in movies about warring worlds,
body-snatchers, humanoids, and puppet people. And in sci-fi as in Robot Opera,
anxiety about the instrumentalizing effects of modern life was coupled with
anticipation of our collective extinction. Sontag makes this claim for sci-fi in
“The Imagination of Disaster,” written the year Robot K-456 debuted. In it, 她
fleetingly compares the genre with happenings on the grounds that both revel
in images of havoc. Although her comparison ends there, the rest of her analysis
describes how the most popular form of cinematic terror balances reminders of
nuclear catastrophe with indications that the threat is so present, 它变成了
mundane—while the monotony of life has begun to terrify.
In Sontag’s analysis, sci-fi’s “technological view” of destruction values and empow-
ers scientific invention over people. 通常, scientific inventions (terrestrial or
from another planet) either cause catastrophe or save the day. Whether or not the
enemies of civilization resemble human figures, they are depicted as impersonal,
rigid, and lacking in what Bergson would call “life’s supple nature.” Where previ-
22 PAJ 118
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ous horror stories made metaphor of transformations that unleashed the animal
bloodlust inside us, post-war horror showed people transformed into machine-
like and obedient technocrats or characterless automaton slaves. These narratives
normalize “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror,” while moralizing the
“humane” use of science.24 The persistent cry that Robot Opera “humanized tech-
科学,” echoes the genre’s pop ethics and similarly looks past human agency to
the power of things. 如果 24 Stunden presented a technological view of workaday
tedium and the Sixth Soirée glimpsed the provocation of catastrophe, what then,
is the moral behind this shibboleth?
Here let us recall that Robot-K456’s “instructions” most frequently took the form
of Kennedy’s inaugural address, oration that performatively enacted a regime
改变, a “new endeavor, not a new balance of power” befitting a self-reflective,
renewed musical ontology.25 Its objective was to stay tensions with the Soviet
Union by requesting peace while evoking the absolute supremacy of American
technology and the impossibility of peacefully opting out of capitalist democracy.
Intended for a world audience, it spoke of cultural-commercial innovation and the
arms race as the two sides of America’s ambivalent sword. Deterrence would only
work if its spectacle of power was in no way mistaken as illusion. With that as its
aria, Robot K-456 accordingly displayed its own power in a manner that was both
theatrically spectacular and an expository display of real technology. 然而,
contrary to Kennedy’s vision of art as the alternative to mutual destruction, Paik
asserted that artists were drawn to technology because “technology can bring
disaster. 那是, technology can fail.”26 Of course, so could a purely technocratic
foreign policy, and so Kennedy’s “ask not” concluded the speech with a call for
the self-sacrificial, deific behavior that a humane god rewards with peace and
prosperity in opera seria.
The last time Kennedy’s voice had been heard outside the Berlin Wall, he called
it an “offense against humanity” that evinced “the failures of the Communist
system.”27 Now heard again, the president had been dead for over a year. 美国.
had just begun sustained bombing of North Vietnam and invaded the Dominican
共和国. Representing the forces powering both the animatronics and global
政治, Robot K-456’s human voice was technology’s achievement alone, antago-
nistically broadcast as it advanced drone-like towards the iron curtain. Here was
our deus ex machina, come to resolve the Cold War’s tragic plot. Here was the
“surprise a priori” of a hazardous attempt to save humanity.
NOTES
1. Arata Isozaki, “A Conversation with Nam June Paik,” in Toni Stooss and Thomas Kel-
lein, 编辑。, Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space (纽约, 纽约: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 125.
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 23
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2. Quote reprinted in John G. Hanhardt and Nam June Paik, The Worlds of Nam June
Paik (纽约, 纽约: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 34.
3. Nam June Paik, “New Ontology of Music,” in Postmusic, The Monthly Review of the
University for Avant-Garde Hinduism, FLUXUS publication, 1963.
4. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Against Interpretation
and Other Essays (纽约, 纽约: 法拉尔, 施特劳斯 & 吉鲁, [1966] 2001), 273.
5. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” in Allan Kaprow and Jeff
Kelley, 编辑。, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (伯克利, CA: University of California
按, 1993), 16.
6. A Conversation: Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, and Nam June Paik, videotaped by Bill
Viola, black and white, 声音, 34 minutes (纽约, 纽约: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1974).
7. Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot, 编辑. Melissa Chiu and Michelle Yun (纽约, 纽约:
Asia Society Museum, 2014), 15.
8. Exhibition page for Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot, Asia Society, http://asiasociety.org
/new-york/exhibitions/nam-june-paik-becoming-robot-1#tvasmedium (八月 11, 2017).
9. Quoted in “Nam June Paik: Edited for Television,” interview with Calvin Tompkins,
hosted by Russell Connor (1975; 纽约, 纽约: WNET/Thirteen).
10. Nam June Paik, “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” The ICA Bulletin (Bulletin
of the Institute of Contemporary Art, 伦敦) 不. 172/3 (1967): 8.
11. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Wylie Sypher, 编辑。, Comedy (Garden City, 纽约: Double-
天, 1956), 67.
12. Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (London and New York:
劳特利奇, 2002), 27.
13. John Cage, “Nam June Paik: A Diary,” in Nam June Paik: Electronic Art (纽约,
纽约: Galeria Bonino, Ltd. 1965), n.p.
14. See Leighton Kerner, “Buzz, Buzz,” Village Voice (九月 3, 1964), 15; 和
clipping from The Nation (九月 28, 1964) in Jean Brown papers, Box 265, 研究
Library, Getty Research Institute, 天使们, 加利福尼亚州.
15. John Cage, “On the Work of Nam June Paik,” in Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video
空间, 24.
16. Gisela Gronemeyer, “Seriousness and Dedication. The American Avant-Garde Cellist
Charlotte Moorman,” in Charlotte Moorman, Malcolm Goldstein, and Gabriele Bonomo,
编辑。, Cello Anthology (意大利: Alga Marghen, 2006), n.p.
17. Quoted in “24-Hour Happenings,” credited to Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archive Sohm,
Stuttgart, Medien Kunst Netz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/24-h-happening/
(可能 3, 2013).
18. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学
大学出版社, 1999), 126.
24 PAJ 118
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19. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York:
Verso, 2013), 10.
20. Interview recording M35 in Charlotte Moorman Archive (CMA), McCormick Library
of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, 伊利诺伊州.
21. Kaprow, “Happenings,” 20.
22. Interview recording M33 in CMA.
23. “There’s a Message There Somewhere” (六月 24, 1965), The British Movietone Digital
Newsreel Archive, http://www.movietone.com/N_search.cfm (可能 3, 2013).
24. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 216.
25. 约翰·F. 肯尼迪, “Inaugural Address of President John F. 肯尼迪, 华盛顿,
华盛顿特区, 一月 20, 1961,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://万维网
.jf klibrar y.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/Inaugural
-Address.aspx (十二月 10, 2013).
26. “John Cage and Nam June Paik in Conversation,” University of California San
Diego (circa 1985), Ubu Sound, http://archive.is/20121209125241/www.ubu.com/sound
/paik.html (十月 4, 2016).
27. These quotes are from what is known as Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech,
delivered on June 26, 1963.
SOPHIE LANDRES recently received a PhD in art history and criticism
from Stony Brook University. She is currently curating several projects
in New York City while completing her book on Charlotte Moorman’s
early collaborations with Nam June Paik.
LANDRES / The First Non-Human Action Artist 25
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