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Yoko Ono: Painter, Sculptor, Musician, Muse
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/27/arts/27KIMM.html
October 27, 2000
ART REVIEW
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
FORTY years ago, before people started thinking of her as that woman,
Yoko Ono was 27, living in New York and an admirer of John Cage,
creating conceptual art: she made up haiku-like instructions to be
performed or just imagined. "Light a match and watch till it goes
out."
She had a cold-water loft on the top floor at 112 Chambers Street
in Lower Manhattan, art world Siberia in those days, and with La
Monte Young presented a series of performances and other
avant-garde events there. Not many people came. Duchamp did. So did
George Maciunas, an impresario of the avant-garde, a dreamer who
ran the AG Gallery. This being her loft, Ms. Ono had her paintings
around the room. "Smoke Painting" was a canvas people were invited
to burn. "Painting to Be Stepped On" was what it sounded like.
Maciunas noticed the work and invited her to have a show, her
first.
The eye roll, a vestigial reflex, has the effect of not allowing
you to see what is in front of you. It is understandably used these
days to respond to celebrity spectacles passing themselves off as
art events in local cultural establishments. Occasionally, however,
you will miss something.
You should bear this in mind with "Yes Yoko Ono," at the Japan
Society, a retrospective that starts with those early years before
John Lennon wandered into Ms. Ono's show at the Indica Gallery in
London in 1966, climbed the ladder to a panel she had stuck to the
ceiling with "yes" in tiny print on it, and in that instant changed
her from an obscure figure into someone whose principal medium
became celebrity itself.
We see her as she was then, a mischievous, wry conceptual artist
with a canny sensibility, cool but not dry, sometimes sweet, even
corny and way ahead of her time in giving acute visual form to
women's issues. As well as anyone, she encapsulated an evanescent
and shifting moment in art. Fame distorts, and the new show helps
set the record straight.
This is good, of course. Ms. Ono has taken too much abuse. It's
also chastening to encounter someone you thought you knew but
didn't, because in art as in life we should never take anybody for
granted.
Ms. Ono came from a rich Japanese banking family on her mother's
side and aristocracy on her father's. Her great-grandfather was a
viscount. Her grandmother married a samurai who became president of
a bank.
Her father wanted to be a classical pianist before he became a
banker, a revealing fact. Brought up half Buddhist, half
Protestant, she was trained to sing German lieder and Italian opera
and took piano lessons; she went to an exclusive school for
children of the imperial family along with Akihito, Hirohito's son,
now the emperor, and the writer Yukio Mishima. She and her family
moved next to Scarsdale, N.Y., and she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence
College. Culturally speaking, she had extremely mixed experiences,
all privileged and basically traditional.
Her background partly explains radical performance works like "Cut
Piece" (1965), for which she sat impassively, a kind of
bodhisattva, while people slowly cut off her clothes. It was an
amazing feminist manifesto before most people knew what feminism
was.
It's about exhibitionism and about sex, like other works she did,
so in that sense it rebuffed parental mores in a predictable way.
But more important is the element of ritual violence not quite
seppuku, maybe, but some theatrical version of self- sacrifice, a
recurrent theme in Ms. Ono's public life.
When she had her first show at Maciunas's gallery he was coming up
with the idea for Fluxus, his name designating an anarchic
multimedia movement that mixed Cage, happenings, Buddhism,
vaudeville, guerrilla theater basically everything Ms. Ono was up
to then. Her contribution is underestimated. Not that she has been
exactly neglected over the years. But because other artists were
doing similar things at the time and maybe because she was a woman
(the avant-garde was hardly less sexist than the rest of the world
in the 1960's) she hasn't been assigned the role that she deserves
at the conception of Fluxus.
So this exhibition is useful in that sense and in others, too:
attacked by Beatles fans as controlling, she is shown to be cannily
gentle in these early works. They frequently entail her removing
herself, stepping aside, letting someone else take over.
Incompleteness, displacement and whimsy are motifs.
She designed a vending machine to dispense bits of sky. For a show
in Tokyo in 1962, she translated her own earlier works, like "Smoke
Painting," into directions written in Japanese by her husband. (She
was married at the time to the composer Ichiyanagi Toshi.) Ms. Ono
then photocopied what he wrote. So the work became a copy of a
thing written by someone else of an idea that required a different
person to complete.
There's a parallel here: the composer whose work is realized only
by the musicians who play it. Music is a touchstone for Ms. Ono,
clearly, and throughout her career she has tried to blur the
distinctions between music, performance, writing and art.
Music was a connection with Lennon, never mind that her sphere was
less conspicuous than his, and performance as well. It really
wasn't a big leap for her to regard the spectacle of their
relationship as another performance. Only the audience had changed.
In the early 60's she lighted matches onstage in front of a few
dozen art addicts. By the end of the decade she climbed into bed
with her husband, alerted the media and called it a "Bed-In for
Peace."
Celebrity really did become her new medium, a timely one, as it
was for Andy Warhol, who invented his celebrity from scratch while
she acquired it instantly. Like Warhol, she turned to films, and
she made recordings less ephemeral than her earlier work that
allowed her to reach more people.
The music is unbearable, and let's leave it at that. The films,
however, include her best achievements. Lennon collaborated and
acted. They sometimes extended what she had already done: "Film No.
5 (Smile)," in which he simply smiles at the camera in slow motion,
is connected with her earlier sculpture "A Box of Smile." For
"Rape" (it's not in the exhibition but will be screened at Japan
Society), a camera crew followed an unsuspecting woman into her
apartment, to her mounting alarm. Like "Cut Piece" it was about
violation, but now Ms. Ono's and her husband's celebrity was the
obvious subtext.
You either meet this sort of art halfway or fail to see the point.
If you're predisposed to dislike it, maybe because your life has
not been the same since the Beatles busted up, don't bother.
I choose to acquiesce, appreciating the lightness of spirit and
often delicate edge. I halt at the 1980's, when Ms. Ono started
contriving heavy sculptures about death and making bronze casts of
early work, cumbrous retreads of a former gossamer self.
The show ends with precise little drawings, neither here nor
there. The accompanying label explains that they were done to pass
the time on the telephone. Organic shapes composed of hundreds of
dots, they recall the work of early Yayoi Kusama without being on
Ms. Kusama's obsessive level. Celebrity incubates narcissism. It
smacks of narcissism to exhibit telephone doodles in public.
But that's a quibble. Ms. Ono's art is a mirror. We see ourselves
in our reaction to it. "A Box of Smile" (open the hinged top and
find your reflection in the mirror inside) may be a simple, hokey
idea but it's emblematic of her best work. Smile into the mirror.
It is a tiny prod toward personal enlightenment, very Zen.
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