YES (YOKO ONO)
* By SEBASTIAN LOPEZ
The stories about this work sum up the critical, historiographical and presentational fate of Yoko Ono. Her pioneering work in such diverse fields as the plastic arts, poetry, and music has been overshadowed by her emotional and artistic relationship with John Lennon, which began during that meeting at the Indica Gallery, and her considerable presence in the media from then on. The exhibition 'Yes' is intended to fill the gap, and it does so amply. Prepared for the Japan Society of New York, where it remains until January 2001, it will travel to five other museums until the year 2002. With more than 150 works and a thoroughly produced catalogue (with contributions by the curator of the exhibition Alexandra Munroe, the Fluxus specialist Jon Hendriks, Murray Sayle, David Ross, Bruce Altshuler and others), the exhibition marks the discovery of her work by the general public and by the specialists.
The apple in question was not just a meeting point of two of the most creative minds in the last fifty years. At the same time, to compound the confusion, it is the global symbol of a period, and the name which was used for the recording company of The Beatles (even though this work has no connection with it), for the renaming of an island (Manhattan), for centres of art (De Appel in Amsterdam), and for urban spaces where the latest things were happening, like Manzana Loca (The Crazy Apple), in Buenos Aires. The Japan Society had packaged the exhibition around the Beatlemania mythology and, to add to the confusion, the green apple was used in a publicity poster. There is no audience without promotion and, it would seem that Lennon still sells more than his famous widow. Such publicity routes are a long way from the solitary ones that Yoko Ono had to follow when, in the fifties, she decided to devote herself to the arts and made a fundamental contribution to a new way of creating, looking, and thinking.
When Yoko Ono made this work, she was in transition between two types of production. On the one hand, there were works using industrial materials, such as 'Pointedness' (1964), a crystal ball on a plexiglas pedestal bearing the words: 'This sphere will be a sharp point when it reaches the far corner of the room in your mind'. On the other hand, the production of 'things' and events that focused on the realignment of perceptions, positions, and actions was taking shape. 'Apple' had been conceived to confront the public with its own life cycle. Its own slow decomposition during the course of the exhibition was a metaphor for decomposition and subsequent regeneration through the seeds contained in the apple. Without a doubt, the period prior to this work is one which contains one of the major contributions of this exhibition a moment at which neither coming from Asia nor being a woman had entered the histories of modernity.
Internationalism
Issues debated in the arts during the past few years have involved a widespread use of concepts like transculturalism and internationalism. If courageous voices from the Caribbean have drawn attention to the extensive use of transculturalism in the artistic debates of the forties in Cuba, Yoko Ono's exhibition can serve to show us how 'internationalism' was used in Japan in the late fifties and sixties. In fact, kokusai-teki dojisei (international contemporaneity) was developed as a concept in artistic circles to refer to the convergence of the international and the local. Reiko Tamii recently reminded us of this situation in the bringing together of a series of 'stylistic parallels between Japan and the Euro-North American tendencies [such as]: gutai vs. informal/abstract expressionism and happening; han-geijutsu (anti-art) vs. nouveau réalisme, neo-Dada and pop; Mono-ha (school of things) vs. arte povera and minimal/process/land art; and conceptualism'. Given these parallels, what remains to be analyzed is the way in which artistic production in Japan since the fifties had entered into a challenging dialogue with both Japanese culture in general and Japan's recent political and military past, and the way in which philosophical positions in the artistic environment that would be called existentialist from a European perspective, although the term used in Japan was 'autonomous subjectivity', combined with the gradual discovery of Marxism. This situation did not pass unnoticed when Yoko Ono became the first female student to enter philosophy classes at Gakushuin University.
Yoko Ono entered the Japanese scene with 'Instructions for Paintings', a series produced during her stay in Tokyo from 1962 to 1964. This provocative series, published later in 1964 in her famous 'Grapefruit' anthology, was based on instructions for 'paintings to be constructed in your head'. One of these works was 'Painting in Three Stanzas', exhibited at the Sogetsy Art Centre in Tokyo in May 1962: 'Make a small hole in the canvas with a cigarette, hang a sack that contains wet cotton and seeds behind the canvas, and water every day. / The first stanza till the canvas is covered by the vine / The second stanza till the vine withers / The third stanza till the canvas is burned to ashes / Photograph the canvas at the end of each stanza'. The 'Instructions for Paintings' were based on works that Yoko Ono had previously carried out in New York as performances. In 1961, the instructions were recited by the artist facing the canvasses: 'It ends when it is covered with leaves, / It ends when the leaves wither, / It ends when it turns to ashes, / And a new vine will grow'.
Painting as problem
Raising the question of the status of the painting is a theme that has been present throughout the history of Japanese art in the twentieth century. What is important to take into account when considering the generation of the fifties and sixties is the fact that Japanese has two words for art. Bijutsu is the descriptive term that includes painting and sculpture; geijutsu is an elusive term that can be translated as 'the arts' when the words descriptively encompass art, music, literature, etc. When the anti-art (anti-geijutsu) movement began in Japan, the elements of 'institutional criticism' it contained did not refer to institutions with specific functions, such as museums and galleries.
The importance of the Japanese perspective lay rooted in the fact that, irrespective of Peter Berger's considerations of art institutions, the Japanese understood that the institution also exists in the expression, in the work, and in the act of creation. Other artists in Japan had been focusing on painting in this new institutional context. The works of On Kawara from 1958-1959 were concerned with the status of art, with painting as an object of communication, and with the space in which this interrelation took place: the gallery. Printing processes in public spaces, which would later be used by Yoko Ono in works like 'War is Over! If you want it', and the importance of operating outside the galleries, were based on those conceptions and discussions circulating in Japan at this time. The 'Instructions for Paintings' are equally important, as they made one of the first statements in what Lucy Lippard was to characterize many years later as 'the dematerialization of the art object'. Yoko Ono had fully developed this concept five years before the New York artists began devoting themselves to converting language as the material base of the new vanguard advance.
The exhibition combines works and documentation on works, performances and films, which are among Yoko Ono's most interesting achievements. In the film 'Fly' (1970), a fly travels over the naked body of a woman; in 'No. 4' (1966), better known as 'Bottoms', the naked buttocks of a group of artists and friends is shown in a sequence of close-ups, presaging Andy Warhol's films of the seventies; and in the documentation of 'Cut Piece', first performed in the Yamaichi Hall in Tokyo in 1964, after coming on stage in her best clothes and carrying a pair of scissors, she squatted on the floor and invited the audience to cut her clothes. The catalogue includes a CD with songs demonstrating, once again, Yoko Ono's extraordinary vocal technique what John Lennon used to call her 16-track voice. *
Exhibition Schedule:
10 March 17 June 2001: Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN (U.S.A.)
13 July 16 September 2001: Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (U.S.A.)
18 October 2001 6 January 2002: MIT List Visual Art Centre, Cambridge, MA (U.S.A.)
22 February 20 May 2002: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON (Canada)
25 October 2002 26 January 2003: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL (U.S.A.)
'Cut
Piece', Yoko Ono (1964) Sebastian Lopez is director of The Gate Foundation, Amsterdam. He is also currently a guest lecturer at the Department of Art History, Leiden University, the Netherlands
E-mail: info@gatefoundation.nl