Within the winter of 1971, The Village Voice journal carried a small commercial for Yoko Ono’s exhibition on the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York. Ono produced a listing, and in modern pictures she will be seen posing with some works outdoors the museum. Only one complicating issue: this exhibition didn’t exist. Ono’s accompanying ebook was titled Museum of Trendy (F)artwork.
Within the Japanese artist’s brief movie The Museum of Trendy Artwork Present (1971), a number of disenchanted or oblivious guests are interviewed and sound pretty blithe about her no-show exhibition of the thoughts, which required MoMA to stay a replica of the Voice commercial at reception with a scrawled notice: “this isn’t right here.” Ono’s stunt is “doubtful”, for positive, says one museum-goer, however Yoko can also be “smarter than John [Lennon]”, in keeping with one other. A stunning response, as a result of it’s laborious to consider an artist extra persistently mocked, envied and misrepresented. Can Tate Trendy’s (very actual) survey do justice to her unusual journey between avant-garde renown and a wild, hollowing-out kind of fame?
Yoko Ono: Music of the Thoughts—the title is derived from her concert events in London and Liverpool, in 1966 and 1967—opens with works that appear to depend on Ono’s central presence and laconic persona. In Eye Blink (Fluxfilm No. 15) (1966), the artist’s left eye shuts and opens in a black-and-white, slow-motion close-up. There’s simply sufficient facial data to recognise her and picture you’re looking, for 2 minutes and 40 seconds, at one thing akin to Andy Warhol’s Display Check movie portraits, begun a few years earlier. A staring contest, in different phrases, between topic and medium, a check of self-possession and charisma.
It’s laborious to consider an artist extra persistently mocked, envied and misrepresented
Sounding within the background as you enter the present is Phone Piece (1964): a ringing receiver after which a voice, “hey, that is Yoko.” Sure it assuredly is; however in a manner, as with the movie, she is hardly there in any respect, or fairly irrelevant. These are usually not self-portraits. In her finest work of this era, all is subordinate to motion, not expression.
Assembly one’s match
The verbs are the factor, within the movies, texts and performances of the primary decade or so of Ono’s profession. Within the first room correct of the exhibition, Movie No. 1 (Match) (1966) reveals a match being struck and flaring: a liquid flame, in sluggish movement once more, with visible echoes of Harold Edgerton’s photographic research of motion—and greater than a touch of A-bomb horror. (Ono was 12 years previous, an evacuee within the mountains, when the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
The movie is flanked by pictures of Ono on the Sogetsu Artwork Centre, Tokyo, in 1962: seated on stage at a piano, she strikes a match and lights a cigarette, wanting down all of the whereas. Lighting Piece is initially from 1955, when she had moved to the US and was finding out poetry and composition on the Sarah Lawrence Faculty in New York. In its first iteration it consisted of a easy instruction: “mild a match and watch until it goes out.”
The daring, the wit, the poetry of Ono’s instruction items—lots of them collected in her 1964 ebook Grapefruit—reside within the minimal actions prescribed. At their most diminished, as in a sequence devoted to the composer La Monte Younger, the instruction may devolve to a single phrase: peek, rub, contact, peel, tear.
At Tate Trendy, the textual poverty and materials profusion of such works—traces and grids of typewritten instructions, generally handwritten in Japanese script—might simply give an impression of Ono as an austere however wry conceptualist. Pictures of her performances, alongside collaborators comparable to Younger or John Cage, are sometimes so coolly composed which you could get a deceptive thought of management and course. (A few of the most sheerly stunning pictures have been taken by her Fluxus accomplice George Maciunas: pictures of Ono’s ephemeral work, six darkling, near-abstract research of her enacting Bag Piece in 1965.) Learn or look nearer and extra ranges of antic selection and humour seem—additionally a frivolity that won’t in the long run fairly save her work from sentiment.
The steadiness between poetry and comedy is close to excellent in a piece like Snow Piece (1963), with its instruction to “take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This ought to be achieved within the night.” Snow Piece later gave rise to Soundtape of the Snow Falling at Daybreak, which is to be performed at “any velocity”. The place Cage’s composition 4′ 33″ was meant to foment a delicate riot of sound amid the silence, Ono’s jocoserious gesture turns inwards—the music of the thoughts.
Ono’s efficiency work Bag Piece (1964), wherein members of the general public climb inside a material bag, within the Tate Trendy exhibition
© Tate
Not so clear-cut
Repeatedly on this present, Ono isn’t fairly the artist you might need imagined. Famend works develop into frayed at their “iconic” edges. Take Reduce Piece, her most well-known work (outdoors of sure musical collaborations, that’s). The model within the exhibition was filmed by the documentary makers Albert and David Maysles in 1965 on the Carnegie Recital Corridor in New York. The kneeling, implacable artist; close-ups of scissors and stopwatch; transient shot of the viewers; an undercurrent of laughter; small tentative cuts to her garments by girls, adopted by one man’s astonishing assault on what’s left. Reduce Piece seems to be like its status—a fearless examine of abjection and misogyny—till you might be reminded that Ono additionally envisaged a model wherein the viewers turned on one another with scissors, and solely stopped after they felt prefer it.
Her most notorious provocations are ceaselessly twinned by such comical, extreme options. Because of this it doesn’t precisely work to say that Ono’s artwork declined into whimsy or banality within the late Sixties, across the time her relationship with John Lennon started. Their movie Fly (1970) stays a garish vanitas, a grubby Swiftian riposte to Warhol’s languorous Sleep (1964). As a small listening room with headphones and album covers reminds us, the information they made as Plastic Ono Band and as a duo are generally as daring as something within the noise-rock canon.
However the couple’s Acorn Peace (1968) venture—mailing acorns to world leaders, within the hope of turning them in direction of peace—units the tone for Ono’s later work, and for the ultimate rooms at Tate Trendy. A white boat for refugees, to be inscribed or adorned by gallery-goers. An invite to explain one’s mom. Parts of “sky” in upturned German helmets. The ultimate work within the present, nonetheless, is a video of a efficiency from 2013, when Ono was 80 years previous—a whisper-scream reminder of simply how stringent, to not say heroic, an artist she could possibly be.
Brian Dillon is a author. His newest ebook Affinities is printed by Fitzcarraldo
What the opposite critics mentioned
In The Guardian, Adrian Searle famous that Ono’s work depends typically on sound and voice: “When it hasn’t been derided, Ono’s voice has been in comparison with that of Meredith Monk and Diamanda Galás, and her vocalisations within the movie Fly jogged my memory of listening to a Sámi performer imitating the infuriating noise of a mosquito and the cries of the wolf.” In The New York Instances, Emily LaBarge wrote: “It is perhaps straightforward to hyperlink the austerity of her work to a childhood marked by shortage, homelessness and mass destruction.”
Yoko Ono: Music of the Thoughts, Tate Trendy, London, till 1 SeptemberCurators: Juliet Bingham and Patrizia Dander
