Yoko Ono Moma 2015

YOKO ONO

ONE WOMAN SHOW

YOKO ONO

ONE WOMAN SHOW

YOKO ONO: ONE WOMAN SHOW, 1960–1971

YOKO ONO ONE WOMAN SHOW 1960–1971 Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix With contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jon Hendricks, Yoko Ono, Clive Phillpot, David Platzker, Francesca Wilmott, and Midori Yoshimoto

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

6

FOREWORD Glenn D. Lowry

7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

11

YOKO ONO’S LIGHTNING YEARS Christophe Cherix

21

FOR POSTERITY: YOKO ONO Julia Bryan-Wilson

31

ABSENCE AND PRESENCE IN YOKO ONO’S WORK Klaus Biesenbach

1964–1966

126

INTRODUCTION Jon Hendricks

132 134 136 138

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST SKY MACHINE DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS THE STONE

144

YOKO'S VOICE Yoko Ono

148

SELECTED PRESS CLIPPINGS

1966–1969

150

INTRODUCTION Clive Phillpot

156 158 164 168 170

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM YOKO AT INDICA FILM NO. 4 LION WRAPPING EVENT HALF-A-ROOM

1960–1962

42

INTRODUCTION Francesca Wilmott

48 54 58 68

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES TOUCH POEM #5 PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY YOKO ONO WORKS BY YOKO ONO

70

YOKO'S VOICE Yoko On o

174


74


182


1962–1964

1969–1971

78

INTRODUCTION Midori Yoshimoto

188

INTRODUCTION David Platzker

84 92 94 100 106 110

WORKS OF YOKO ONO TOUCH PIECE MORNING PIECE GRAPEFRUIT CUT PIECE BAG PIECE

194 198 200 204 208

PLASTIC ONO BAND BED-INS WAR IS OVER! FLY MUSEUM OF MODERN (F)ART

214 114



224


118

SELECTED PRESS CLIPPINGS 231 234 240

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

6

FOREWORD Glenn D. Lowry

7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

11


21


31

6


1964–1966

126

INTRODUCTION Jon Hendricks

132 134 136 138

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST SKY MACHINE DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS THE STONE

144


148


1966–1969

150

INTRODUCTION Clive Phillpot

156 158 164 168 170

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM YOKO AT INDICA FILM NO. 4 LION WRAPPING EVENT HALF-A-ROOM

1960–1962

42

INTRODUCTION Francesca Wilmott

48 54 58 68

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES TOUCH POEM #5 PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY YOKO ONO WORKS BY YOKO ONO

70


174


74


182


1962–1964

1969–1971

78

INTRODUCTION Midori Yoshimoto

188

INTRODUCTION David Platzker

84 92 94 100 106 110

WORKS OF YOKO ONO TOUCH PIECE MORNING PIECE GRAPEFRUIT CUT PIECE BAG PIECE

194 198 200 204 208

PLASTIC ONO BAND BED-INS WAR IS OVER! FLY MUSEUM OF MODERN (F)ART

214 114



224


118

SELECTED PRESS CLIPPINGS 231 234 240

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

7

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On July 16, 2010, Yoko Ono performed her 1961 work Voice Piece for Soprano at a microphone installed in The Museum of Modern Art’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, as part of the 2010–11 exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, organized by Kathy Halbreich and Christophe Cherix. The artist’s unique, moving vocalizations filled the building, reaching not only the visitors gathered around her but also those in the Museum’s various galleries and other spaces. Throughout the summer and fall, visitors were invited to approach the microphone and realize their own versions of Voice Piece. This was a fitting return to the Museum for the artist, as it linked with a previous project that also involved the entire building—her 1971 One Woman Show , in which, supposedly, flies scented with her perfume dispersed throughout the Museum’s galleries after having been released in the sculpture garden.

Artist, musician, performer, poet, thinker, and activist. For over fifty years, Yoko Ono has defied categorization. Today, Ono’s name is widely known, though the remarkable depth and foresight of her early work has not previously been investigated in a focused exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art’s Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 recognizes the profound achievements of an artist who, over the course of an extraordinary decade, changed our vision of the world. Such an exhibition is in no small part due to the talent and dedication of numerous people within and beyond the Museum.

More than forty years later, we are proud to have worked closely with the artist to present Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971. Focusing on the early years of Ono’s forward-thinking practice, this exhibition is the latest example of the Museum’s recognition of the artist’s pioneering achievements. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of Gilbert and Lila Silverman, a trove of significant works by Ono was added to the Museum’s collection in 2008, allowing us to increasingly position her art in dialogue with that of other figures working in the culturally rich years of the 1960s. None of the Museum’s efforts to engage with this original and important body of work would be possible without the tremendous generosity of the artist herself. Yoko Ono and her remarkable team have worked tirelessly with Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix on the realization of this exhibition. We are most grateful to them, as we are to the lenders to the exhibition, many of whom are longtime supporters of the artist. On behalf of the Trustees and th e staff of The Museum of Modern Art, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Museum’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation; BNP Paribas; The Modern Women’s Fund; and the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund, all of which provided essential support. It is our hope that Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 will add to the growing body of exhibitions and critical literature on Ono’s early work, and will help illuminate her lasting contribution to the art of our time.

— Glenn D. Lowry Director, The Museum of Modern Art

This exhibition and publication are profoundly indebted to the expertise and tireless support of Jon Hendricks, who serves as both Ono’s curator and the Museum’s Fluxus Consulting Curator, and photo archivist Karla Merrifield. Hendricks and Merrifield offered invaluable insight and guidance in every aspect of this project and gave indispensable feedback regarding the exhibition catalogue, while Connor Monahan, with his thorough knowledge of the Ono Archive, enabled us to include materials never before made available to the public. We are tremendously grateful to them and to their colleagues at Studio One, including Marcia Bassett, Sari Henry, Jonas Herbsman, Simon Hilton, Susie Lim, and Michael Sirianni. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the public and pri vate lenders who provided works for the exhibition, inc luding Jon and Joanne Hendricks; Barbara Moore, through Paula Cooper Gall ery, New York; t he Kei ō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo; the museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien; Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Ill.; and The New York Public Library. We are grateful to Tony Marx, President and CEO of The New York Public Library, for his assistance. Gilbert and Lila Silverman not only lent essential works to the show, but their 2008 Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift has allowed the Museum to serve as a leading center for the presentation of Ono’s work. We would also like to thank Á lvaro Rodrí guez Fominaya and his colleagues at the Guggenheim Bilbao for sharing the technical details of their extraordinary presentation of the retrospective Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show in 2014.

The writers in this volume lent their unparalleled expertise to the project. In addition to their essays, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jon Hendricks, Clive Phillpot, David Platzker, and Midori Yoshimoto conducted interviews with key figures from the period, which will appear on the exhibition Web site. We would like to express our appreciation to the interviewees, who shared their recollections of Ono’s work from 1960 to 1971, including John Dunbar, Simone Forti, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Nicholas Logsdail, Jonas Mekas, Gustav Metzger, Jeffrey Perkins, Takahiko iimura, and Klaus Voormann. We also thank Midori for patiently helping us with translations and liaising with contacts in Japan, including Ay-O, Minoru Hirata, and Kōhei Sugiura, who graciously shared their memories of Ono’s time in Tokyo. This catalogue benefits from a number of photographs that have never been published before. We are especially grateful to Barbara Moore—who spent hours poring over Peter Moore’s files with our exhibition team—and to Gloria McDarrah, who generously provided access to Fred McDarrah’s contact sheets. We thank photographer Kishin Shinoyama, who traveled to New York with his assistant to capture the images on the front and back covers of this catalogue.

6

7

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On July 16, 2010, Yoko Ono performed her 1961 work Voice Piece for Soprano at a microphone installed in The Museum of Modern Art’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, as part of the 2010–11 exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, organized by Kathy Halbreich and Christophe Cherix. The artist’s unique, moving vocalizations filled the building, reaching not only the visitors gathered around her but also those in the Museum’s various galleries and other spaces. Throughout the summer and fall, visitors were invited to approach the microphone and realize their own versions of Voice Piece. This was a fitting return to the Museum for the artist, as it linked with a previous project that also involved the entire building—her 1971 One Woman Show , in which, supposedly, flies scented with her perfume dispersed throughout the Museum’s galleries after having been released in the sculpture garden.

Artist, musician, performer, poet, thinker, and activist. For over fifty years, Yoko Ono has defied categorization. Today, Ono’s name is widely known, though the remarkable depth and foresight of her early work has not previously been investigated in a focused exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art’s Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 recognizes the profound achievements of an artist who, over the course of an extraordinary decade, changed our vision of the world. Such an exhibition is in no small part due to the talent and dedication of numerous people within and beyond the Museum. This exhibition and publication are profoundly indebted to the expertise and tireless support of Jon Hendricks, who serves as both Ono’s curator and the Museum’s Fluxus Consulting Curator, and photo archivist Karla Merrifield. Hendricks and Merrifield offered invaluable insight and guidance in every aspect of this project and gave indispensable feedback regarding the exhibition catalogue, while Connor Monahan, with his thorough knowledge of the Ono Archive, enabled us to include materials never before made available to the public. We are tremendously grateful to them and to their colleagues at Studio One, including Marcia Bassett, Sari Henry, Jonas Herbsman, Simon Hilton, Susie Lim, and Michael Sirianni.

More than forty years later, we are proud to have worked closely with the artist to present Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971. Focusing on the early years of Ono’s forward-thinking practice, this exhibition is the latest example of the Museum’s recognition of the artist’s pioneering achievements. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of Gilbert and Lila Silverman, a trove of significant works by Ono was added to the Museum’s collection in 2008, allowing us to increasingly position her art in dialogue with that of other figures working in the culturally rich years of the 1960s.

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the public and pri vate lenders who provided works for the exhibition, inc luding Jon and Joanne Hendricks; Barbara Moore, through Paula Cooper Gall ery, New York; t he Kei ō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo; the museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien; Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Ill.; and The New York Public Library. We are grateful to Tony Marx, President and CEO of The New York Public Library, for his assistance. Gilbert and Lila Silverman not only lent essential works to the show, but their 2008 Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift has allowed the Museum to serve as a leading center for the presentation of Ono’s work. We would also like to thank Á lvaro Rodrí guez Fominaya and his colleagues at the Guggenheim Bilbao for sharing the technical details of their extraordinary presentation of the retrospective Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show in 2014.

None of the Museum’s efforts to engage with this original and important body of work would be possible without the tremendous generosity of the artist herself. Yoko Ono and her remarkable team have worked tirelessly with Klaus Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix on the realization of this exhibition. We are most grateful to them, as we are to the lenders to the exhibition, many of whom are longtime supporters of the artist. On behalf of the Trustees and th e staff of The Museum of Modern Art, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Museum’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation; BNP Paribas; The Modern Women’s Fund; and the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund, all of which provided essential support.

The writers in this volume lent their unparalleled expertise to the project. In addition to their essays, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jon Hendricks, Clive Phillpot, David Platzker, and Midori Yoshimoto conducted interviews with key figures from the period, which will appear on the exhibition Web site. We would like to express our appreciation to the interviewees, who shared their recollections of Ono’s work from 1960 to 1971, including John Dunbar, Simone Forti, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Nicholas Logsdail, Jonas Mekas, Gustav Metzger, Jeffrey Perkins, Takahiko iimura, and Klaus Voormann. We also thank Midori for patiently helping us with translations and liaising with contacts in Japan, including Ay-O, Minoru Hirata, and Kōhei Sugiura, who graciously shared their memories of Ono’s time in Tokyo. This catalogue benefits from a number of photographs that have never been published before. We are especially grateful to Barbara Moore—who spent hours poring over Peter Moore’s files with our exhibition team—and to Gloria McDarrah, who generously provided access to Fred McDarrah’s contact sheets. We thank photographer Kishin Shinoyama, who traveled to New York with his assistant to capture the images on the front and back covers of this catalogue.

It is our hope that Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 will add to the growing body of exhibitions and critical literature on Ono’s early work, and will help illuminate her lasting contribution to the art of our time.

— Glenn D. Lowry Director, The Museum of Modern Art

8 The publication could not have come together without the skill and rigor of the Museum’s Department of Publications. We thank Christopher Hudson, Publisher; David Frankel, Editorial Director; Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher; Marc Sapir, Production Director; and Hannah Kim, Production Coordinator. Editor Kyle Bentley’s meticulous handling of the texts greatly improved the publication. Designer Chad Kloepfer readily embraced our challenge to respond to Ono’s 1971 Museum Of Modern (F)art catalogue, subtly nodding to the period while always looking forward. Our colleagues at the Museum enthusiastically supported and guided the exhibition through its many stages. Director Glenn D. Lowry and Associate Director Kathy Halbreich were committed to the show from the very start. Glenn gave us crucial advice throughout the project, and Kathy was always there for us, sharing her keen understanding of the artist’s work every step of the way. We are grateful for t he steadfast dedication of James Gara, Chief Operating Officer; Ramona Bannayan, Senior Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Collections; Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs; and Todd Bishop, Senior Deputy Director for External Affairs. Our sincere thanks are also due to Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography; Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art; Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film; and Ann Temkin, The Marie-Jos ée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition benefited from the skill of Carlos Yepes, Associate Coordinator, and Erik Patton, Associate Director, Exhibition Planning and Administration; Sacha Eaton, Associate Registrar; Aaron Louis, Director of Audio Visual, and his industrious team; Ingrid Chou, Associate Creative Director, and her colleagues in the Department of Advertising and Graphic Design; Robert Kastler, Studio Production Manager, Thomas Griesel and John Wronn, Collections Photographers, and their associates in Imaging and Digital Resources; Peter Perez, Shop Foreman; and the art handlers under Rob Jung’s leadership. Betty Fisher, Senior Design Manager, with the support of Lana Hum, Director, Exhibition Design and Production, traveled to Europe in order to better understand Ono’s favored modes of display. Patty Lipshutz, General Counsel, and Nancy Adelson, Deputy General Counsel, gave us much-needed support and precious time, always suggesting creative ways to make our project possible. We also thank Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives; Milan Hughston, Chief of Library; Jennifer Tobias, Librarian; Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for Education; Pablo Helguera, Director, Adult and Academic Education; Sara Bodinson, Director, Interpretation and Research; Sarah Kennedy, Associate Educator, Lab Programs; Lizzie Gorfaine, Performance Producer; Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator; Erika Mosier, Conservator; Lauren Stakias, Director of Exhibition and Program Funding; Maggie Lyko, Director, Special Events and Affiliate Programs; Kim Mitchell, Chief Communications Officer; Margaret Doyle, Director of Communications; and Paul Jackson, Communications Manager. The exhibition and publication were truly a shared endeavor by the entire staff of the Department of Drawings and Prints and the Office of the Chief Curator at Large. Department of Drawings and Prints Manager John Prochilo provided key organizational support. Alex Diczok, Assistant to the Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints; Laurel Lange and Renee Jin, Director’s Office, MoMA PS1; and Elizabeth Henderson from the Office of the Chief Curator at Large masterfully handled seemingly irreconcilable schedules. The team responsible for processing the 2008 Fluxus acquisition prepared works for the catalogue and exhibition. For this we thank David Platzker, Curator; Kim Conaty, Assistan t Curator; Katherine Alcauskas, Collection Specialist; Emily Edison, Senior Cataloguer; Rebecca Mei, Cataloguer; Sydney Briggs, Associate Registrar; Peter Butler, Collections Photographer; and Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Interns Heidi Hirschl and Jennie Waldow. In addition, we’d like to extend our gratitude to preparators Jeff White and David Moreno and department assistants L.J. McNerney and Tara Burns for their dedicated assistance.

9 We thank the Modern Women’s Fund for supporting two internships for the Yoko Ono exhibition. Cameron Foote, our first Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern, helped commence the initial phase of research. He s uggested catalogue writers, wrote drafts for most of the art work descriptions, and spent a year fully immersed in every aspect of Ono’s work. He also provided indispensable assistance with Klaus Biesenbach’s essay, as did Julia Lammer in the MoMA PS1 Director’s Office. We thank them for their incredible research and collaboration. Whitney Graham, Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern from 2014 to 2015, deftly helped usher the catalogue and exhibition through to their completion, finalizing the book’s bibliography, writing exhibition wall labels, and assisting with performances. Esther Adler, Assistant Curator, joined the curatorial team midway through the project and offered tremendous insight on the various texts in the catalogue. Neither the exhibition nor its catalogue would have been possible without the extraordinary talent, remarkable intelligence, and tireless energy of Francesca Wilmott, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Francesca lent us her j oie de vivre throughout the many months of our research and enabled us to overcome every one of the many challenges we had to face. This project is as much hers as it is ours. At every moment, those close to us, Amy O’Neill in particular, offered essential support that allowed the project to keep moving forward. Finally, we express our deepest gratitude to Yoko Ono, whose singular vision and unerring generosity has guided us throughout the project. She has been immersed in every stage of this exhibition and catalogue, welcoming us into her home and providing unfettered access to her collection and archive. The poetic and incisive work that Ono created from 1960 to 1971 has remained remarkably contemporary, both attuning us to our present moment and always encouraging us to look toward the future.

— Klaus Biesenbach Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art Director, MoMA PS1 — Christophe Cherix The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art

8

9

The publication could not have come together without the skill and rigor of the Museum’s Department of Publications. We thank Christopher Hudson, Publisher; David Frankel, Editorial Director; Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher; Marc Sapir, Production Director; and Hannah Kim, Production Coordinator. Editor Kyle Bentley’s meticulous handling of the texts greatly improved the publication. Designer Chad Kloepfer readily embraced our challenge to respond to Ono’s 1971 Museum Of Modern (F)art catalogue, subtly nodding to the period while always looking forward.

We thank the Modern Women’s Fund for supporting two internships for the Yoko Ono exhibition. Cameron Foote, our first Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern, helped commence the initial phase of research. He s uggested catalogue writers, wrote drafts for most of the art work descriptions, and spent a year fully immersed in every aspect of Ono’s work. He also provided indispensable assistance with Klaus Biesenbach’s essay, as did Julia Lammer in the MoMA PS1 Director’s Office. We thank them for their incredible research and collaboration. Whitney Graham, Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern from 2014 to 2015, deftly helped usher the catalogue and exhibition through to their completion, finalizing the book’s bibliography, writing exhibition wall labels, and assisting with performances. Esther Adler, Assistant Curator, joined the curatorial team midway through the project and offered tremendous insight on the various texts in the catalogue.

Our colleagues at the Museum enthusiastically supported and guided the exhibition through its many stages. Director Glenn D. Lowry and Associate Director Kathy Halbreich were committed to the show from the very start. Glenn gave us crucial advice throughout the project, and Kathy was always there for us, sharing her keen understanding of the artist’s work every step of the way. We are grateful for t he steadfast dedication of James Gara, Chief Operating Officer; Ramona Bannayan, Senior Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Collections; Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs; and Todd Bishop, Senior Deputy Director for External Affairs. Our sincere thanks are also due to Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography; Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art; Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film; and Ann Temkin, The Marie-Jos ée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

Neither the exhibition nor its catalogue would have been possible without the extraordinary talent, remarkable intelligence, and tireless energy of Francesca Wilmott, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Francesca lent us her j oie de vivre throughout the many months of our research and enabled us to overcome every one of the many challenges we had to face. This project is as much hers as it is ours. At every moment, those close to us, Amy O’Neill in particular, offered essential support that allowed the project to keep moving forward.

The exhibition benefited from the skill of Carlos Yepes, Associate Coordinator, and Erik Patton, Associate Director, Exhibition Planning and Administration; Sacha Eaton, Associate Registrar; Aaron Louis, Director of Audio Visual, and his industrious team; Ingrid Chou, Associate Creative Director, and her colleagues in the Department of Advertising and Graphic Design; Robert Kastler, Studio Production Manager, Thomas Griesel and John Wronn, Collections Photographers, and their associates in Imaging and Digital Resources; Peter Perez, Shop Foreman; and the art handlers under Rob Jung’s leadership. Betty Fisher, Senior Design Manager, with the support of Lana Hum, Director, Exhibition Design and Production, traveled to Europe in order to better understand Ono’s favored modes of display. Patty Lipshutz, General Counsel, and Nancy Adelson, Deputy General Counsel, gave us much-needed support and precious time, always suggesting creative ways to make our project possible. We also thank Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives; Milan Hughston, Chief of Library; Jennifer Tobias, Librarian; Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for Education; Pablo Helguera, Director, Adult and Academic Education; Sara Bodinson, Director, Interpretation and Research; Sarah Kennedy, Associate Educator, Lab Programs; Lizzie Gorfaine, Performance Producer; Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator; Erika Mosier, Conservator; Lauren Stakias, Director of Exhibition and Program Funding; Maggie Lyko, Director, Special Events and Affiliate Programs; Kim Mitchell, Chief Communications Officer; Margaret Doyle, Director of Communications; and Paul Jackson, Communications Manager.

Finally, we express our deepest gratitude to Yoko Ono, whose singular vision and unerring generosity has guided us throughout the project. She has been immersed in every stage of this exhibition and catalogue, welcoming us into her home and providing unfettered access to her collection and archive. The poetic and incisive work that Ono created from 1960 to 1971 has remained remarkably contemporary, both attuning us to our present moment and always encouraging us to look toward the future.

— Klaus Biesenbach Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art Director, MoMA PS1 — Christophe Cherix The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition and publication were truly a shared endeavor by the entire staff of the Department of Drawings and Prints and the Office of the Chief Curator at Large. Department of Drawings and Prints Manager John Prochilo provided key organizational support. Alex Diczok, Assistant to the Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints; Laurel Lange and Renee Jin, Director’s Office, MoMA PS1; and Elizabeth Henderson from the Office of the Chief Curator at Large masterfully handled seemingly irreconcilable schedules. The team responsible for processing the 2008 Fluxus acquisition prepared works for the catalogue and exhibition. For this we thank David Platzker, Curator; Kim Conaty, Assistan t Curator; Katherine Alcauskas, Collection Specialist; Emily Edison, Senior Cataloguer; Rebecca Mei, Cataloguer; Sydney Briggs, Associate Registrar; Peter Butler, Collections Photographer; and Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Interns Heidi Hirschl and Jennie Waldow. In addition, we’d like to extend our gratitude to preparators Jeff White and David Moreno and department assistants L.J. McNerney and Tara Burns for their dedicated assistance.

11


In 1955–56, while studying at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York, an institution at the time devoted solely to the education of women, Yoko Ono published short texts and poems in the school newspaper, The Campus. One of these contributions was a story titled “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park” (figs. 2, 3), which appeared in the October 26, 1955, issue and would be of considerable importance to the development of her work in the years to come. 1 Ono left Sarah Lawrence in the s pring of 1956, after meeting experimental composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, whom she married later that year. She kept working on the text in the subsequent years and, through successive versions, developed it into a score for a performance work titled A Grapefruit in the World of Park . The work was first presented in a group evening of music and poetry, in April 1961, at the Village Gate in New York. Other interpretations of the piece followed, including in the artist’s performance at t he Semaine Internationale de Musique Actuelle, Montreal, in August 1961, and in her first two solo concerts, held at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, in November 1961 (fig. 1, pp. 68–69) and at the S ōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in May 1962 (pp. 84–91). In these events, A G rapefruit in the World of Park , whose manuscript had been written by a twenty-two-year-old student still very much unaware of what was happening around her, 2 was presented alongside other works by Ono, in which key figures of the period, such as Yvonne Rainer and Tatsumi Hijikata, participated. Bridging Ono’s early years, from 1955 to 1962, A Grapefruit in the World of Park provides an opportunity to better understand both the unfolding and the singularity of her practice. The original story, which calls to mind a theater piece, features a small group of mostly undefined characters in a park at the end of a company picnic, including a tall girl, a beautiful boy, an old, fat man, and a little girl. The plot centers on an unwanted grapefruit. The fruit cannot be thrown away, the reader is told, as food should not be wasted and the wastebasket is already full. The story quickly turns to the quandary of what can be done with the grapefruit. The beautiful boy starts by throwing the fruit into the air, and, when the tall girl asks him what else can be done with it, he sticks a pencil into it. Perhaps reacting against such a wasteful gesture, the girl laments about how she had only ten dollars to buy the food for the picnic. The boy, under the girl’s gaze, then enacts a series of actions that today might evoke the staging of a performance: first peeling the grapefruit’s skin, then dividing it into portions, and finally s queezing its flesh. Without being explicitly ordered to, the boy is led to destroy the fruit with his own fingers after having painstakingly prepared it, thus adding an unexpected dramatic ending to a story that began in the most mundane way. “His nostrils were slightly expanded, and his breath was quiet but violent ,” according to the narrator, describi ng the boy after he had completed the act.

The association between violence and the everyday, often revealed through people’s interactions with one another, is a theme that would remain central to Ono’s work in the following decade, from Voice Piece for Soprano (1961), which asked participants to scream against the wind, the wall, and the sky, to Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), in which the members of the audience are invited to cut away the performer’s clothing. Ono’s 1955 story also includes other elements that would later play an important

11


In 1955–56, while studying at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York, an institution at the time devoted solely to the education of women, Yoko Ono published short texts and poems in the school newspaper, The Campus. One of these contributions was a story titled “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park” (figs. 2, 3), which appeared in the October 26, 1955, issue and would be of considerable importance to the development of her work in the years to come. 1 Ono left Sarah Lawrence in the s pring of 1956, after meeting experimental composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, whom she married later that year. She kept working on the text in the subsequent years and, through successive versions, developed it into a score for a performance work titled A Grapefruit in the World of Park . The work was first presented in a group evening of music and poetry, in April 1961, at the Village Gate in New York. Other interpretations of the piece followed, including in the artist’s performance at t he Semaine Internationale de Musique Actuelle, Montreal, in August 1961, and in her first two solo concerts, held at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, in November 1961 (fig. 1, pp. 68–69) and at the S ōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in May 1962 (pp. 84–91). In these events, A G rapefruit in the World of Park , whose manuscript had been written by a twenty-two-year-old student still very much unaware of what was happening around her, 2 was presented alongside other works by Ono, in which key figures of the period, such as Yvonne Rainer and Tatsumi Hijikata, participated. Bridging Ono’s early years, from 1955 to 1962, A Grapefruit in the World of Park provides an opportunity to better understand both the unfolding and the singularity of her practice. The original story, which calls to mind a theater piece, features a small group of mostly undefined characters in a park at the end of a company picnic, including a tall girl, a beautiful boy, an old, fat man, and a little girl. The plot centers on an unwanted grapefruit. The fruit cannot be thrown away, the reader is told, as food should not be wasted and the wastebasket is already full. The story quickly turns to the quandary of what can be done with the grapefruit. The beautiful boy starts by throwing the fruit into the air, and, when the tall girl asks him what else can be done with it, he sticks a pencil into it. Perhaps reacting against such a wasteful gesture, the girl laments about how she had only ten dollars to buy the food for the picnic. The boy, under the girl’s gaze, then enacts a series of actions that today might evoke the staging of a performance: first peeling the grapefruit’s skin, then dividing it into portions, and finally s queezing its flesh. Without being explicitly ordered to, the boy is led to destroy the fruit with his own fingers after having painstakingly prepared it, thus adding an unexpected dramatic ending to a story that began in the most mundane way. “His nostrils were slightly expanded, and his breath was quiet but violent ,” according to the narrator, describi ng the boy after he had completed the act.

The association between violence and the everyday, often revealed through people’s interactions with one another, is a theme that would remain central to Ono’s work in the following decade, from Voice Piece for Soprano (1961), which asked participants to scream against the wind, the wall, and the sky, to Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), in which the members of the audience are invited to cut away the performer’s clothing. Ono’s 1955 story also includes other elements that would later play an important

YOKO ONO’S LIGHTNING YEARS

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role in her work. The text starts, for instance, with people turning their bodies to the sky—a sky “too high,” the narrator puzzlingly observes—and ends with an almost magical wind, which “crossed over the table, and gradually dried up the pasted skin and the row of the [grapefruit’s] seeds.” These motifs of the sky and the wind reappeared with force in the 1960s in a number of Ono’s works, such as Painting for the Wind (1961) and the media installation Sky TV (1966), which broadcasts in real time an image of the sky on a television monitor. “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” in which nature, through the sky and the wind, bookends the story, shows that already in the mid-1950s Ono counterbalanced images of violence and darkness—the closing, for instance, tells us that “all vanished together into darkness”—with moments of pure contemplation and utter serenity. Around the time t hat Ono wrote “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” she also started performing, privately and among friends, one of her oldest recorded works, Lighting Piece (pl. 25). The piece, which was not publicly presented until the 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall concert, 3 similarly brings together elements of plain beauty and latent violence. The instruction simply states: “Light a match and watch till it goes o ut.”4 One of the overarching characteristics of Ono’s work is that it doesn’t always require a public setting, such as a gallery, a museum, or a theater, to exist. It represents a notable shift from a past generation of artists dealing with the readymade and the everyday. Some of the most daring works of the twentieth century, from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal on a pedestal) to John Cage’s 4 33 (a musical score according to which performers are required not to play their instruments), are difficult to understand without taking into account the public nature of their presentation. 5 '

"

When A Grapefruit in the World of Park was presented to the public in 1961, the text (figs. 4–15) was significantly different, both in its syntactic structure and its symbolic connotations, from the earlier version. Ono preserved details from the original—such as the sky’s being too high and the need to purchase all the picnic’s food with ten dollars—but edited the wording, redistributing the material and intertwining it with new text. The piece, now divided into twelve parts, reads not as a story but rather as a long freeform poem. The grapefruit itself takes on new significance with the added verses. The fruit is no longer fresh and juicy, but dry and wrinkled. The phrase “baby carriage” appears isolated in a strophe, devoid of any connection to the rest of the poem, and a chorus emphasizes even further the poem’s morbid tone: let’s count the hairs of the dead child let’s count the hairs of the dead child At the Village Gate, Ono read the text onstage, while various contributors—Cage, Ichiyanagi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young, among others 6—performed according to her instructions, for instance by laughing aloud or playing atonal music. The piece fit well into the New York avant-gardist atmosphere of the moment. At times, the work was irreverent—as when a toilet was heard flushing during the action— and at others somber and dark, but as a whole it was deeply personal and experimental in its attempt to bring together poetry, music, theater, and performance.

1. Photograph conceived as poster for Works by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall,

New York. 1961. Gelatin silver print, 9 15 ⁄ 16 x 7 15 ⁄ 16" (25.3 x 20.2 cm). Poster: Yoko Ono. Photograph: George Maciunas

The grapefruit, a citrus hybrid, would soon become a metaphor for hybridity in Ono’s work, conveying both a personal point of view—her crossing of the Eastern and Western worlds—and a new artistic approach able to combine existing disciplines. When, in 1964, Ono self-published a collection of her instruction works in Japan, a book of prophetic importance to the art of the 1960s, she titled it Grapefruit , capturing in a si ngle word a period of her life. Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) is divided into five chapters. One of them, the second, is devoted to painting. The emphasis is surprising for an artist who had previously


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role in her work. The text starts, for instance, with people turning their bodies to the sky—a sky “too high,” the narrator puzzlingly observes—and ends with an almost magical wind, which “crossed over the table, and gradually dried up the pasted skin and the row of the [grapefruit’s] seeds.” These motifs of the sky and the wind reappeared with force in the 1960s in a number of Ono’s works, such as Painting for the Wind (1961) and the media installation Sky TV (1966), which broadcasts in real time an image of the sky on a television monitor. “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” in which nature, through the sky and the wind, bookends the story, shows that already in the mid-1950s Ono counterbalanced images of violence and darkness—the closing, for instance, tells us that “all vanished together into darkness”—with moments of pure contemplation and utter serenity. Around the time t hat Ono wrote “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” she also started performing, privately and among friends, one of her oldest recorded works, Lighting Piece (pl. 25). The piece, which was not publicly presented until the 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall concert, 3 similarly brings together elements of plain beauty and latent violence. The instruction simply states: “Light a match and watch till it goes o ut.”4 One of the overarching characteristics of Ono’s work is that it doesn’t always require a public setting, such as a gallery, a museum, or a theater, to exist. It represents a notable shift from a past generation of artists dealing with the readymade and the everyday. Some of the most daring works of the twentieth century, from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal on a pedestal) to John Cage’s 4 33 (a musical score according to which performers are required not to play their instruments), are difficult to understand without taking into account the public nature of their presentation. 5 '

"

When A Grapefruit in the World of Park was presented to the public in 1961, the text (figs. 4–15) was significantly different, both in its syntactic structure and its symbolic connotations, from the earlier version. Ono preserved details from the original—such as the sky’s being too high and the need to purchase all the picnic’s food with ten dollars—but edited the wording, redistributing the material and intertwining it with new text. The piece, now divided into twelve parts, reads not as a story but rather as a long freeform poem. The grapefruit itself takes on new significance with the added verses. The fruit is no longer fresh and juicy, but dry and wrinkled. The phrase “baby carriage” appears isolated in a strophe, devoid of any connection to the rest of the poem, and a chorus emphasizes even further the poem’s morbid tone: let’s count the hairs of the dead child let’s count the hairs of the dead child At the Village Gate, Ono read the text onstage, while various contributors—Cage, Ichiyanagi, David Tudor, and La Monte Young, among others 6—performed according to her instructions, for instance by laughing aloud or playing atonal music. The piece fit well into the New York avant-gardist atmosphere of the moment. At times, the work was irreverent—as when a toilet was heard flushing during the action— and at others somber and dark, but as a whole it was deeply personal and experimental in its attempt to bring together poetry, music, theater, and performance. The grapefruit, a citrus hybrid, would soon become a metaphor for hybridity in Ono’s work, conveying both a personal point of view—her crossing of the Eastern and Western worlds—and a new artistic approach able to combine existing disciplines. When, in 1964, Ono self-published a collection of her instruction works in Japan, a book of prophetic importance to the art of the 1960s, she titled it Grapefruit , capturing in a si ngle word a period of her life.

1. Photograph conceived as poster for Works by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall,

New York. 1961. Gelatin silver print, 9 15 ⁄ 16 x 7 15 ⁄ 16" (25.3 x 20.2 cm). Poster: Yoko Ono. Photograph: George Maciunas


2 and 3. “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” The Campus (Bronxville, N.Y.: Sarah Lawrence College), October 26, 1955: 9–10

Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) is divided into five chapters. One of them, the second, is devoted to painting. The emphasis is surprising for an artist who had previously

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2 and 3. “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” The Campus (Bronxville, N.Y.: Sarah Lawrence College), October 26, 1955: 9–10


shown little interest in traditional painting. Rather than images of paintings, the publication offers instructions for paintings in which the paint and brush are often relegated to a secondary role. A number of these instructions were realized on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at AG Gallery, New York, in July 1961 (pp. 58–67). At least three of them had already been enacted a few months earlier, during the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53), a run of performances and concerts held in Ono’s loft. At AG Gallery, in at least two instances, Ono presented a text written on a sheet of paper next to an exhibited work. In 2008, she mentioned that she had “asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write out cards explaining the functions to display on the side of each painting . . . [but] he managed to write [only] two cards.”7 The text, from 1960, for Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) states:

alterations to the space in order to turn it into a gallery environment. He removed the plaster from some of the walls, thus exposing the original bricks, and altered the ceiling. The Fluxus archivist Barbara Moore, who didn’t see Ono’s installation but came to the gallery early on, remembers that Maciunas had “arch[ed] large sheets of semi-translucent heavy paper stock between the [ceiling] beams.” 12 Ono installed her works without frames or pedestals. The pieces of canvas and sheets of paper were simply affixed to the walls or to a translucent screen installed in front of the gallery’s front windows (pl. 16). Painting to Be Stepped On, Waterdrop Painting (Version 1), and Waterdrop Painting (Version 2) were on the floor, in locations that vary from photograph to photograph, suggesting that some works were moved over the course of the exhibition. A long table stood before the window screen with additional items displayed on it, including Painting Until It Becomes Marble.

A WORK TO BE STEPPED ON For Painting in Three Stanzas (1961; pl. 11), a piece of canvas with a vine stuck through it, we read: It ends when its covered with leaves, It ends when the leaves wither, It ends when it turns to ashes, And a new vine will grow, __________ The first text offers the viewer the opportunity to physically interact with the work— even at the risk of damaging it—while the other implies that a number of upcoming changes in the painting, not explicitly dependent on the participation of the viewers, need to happen for the work to be complete. According to Ono’s explanation, these texts state the “functions” of the exhibited works—so, in other words, the particular activities intended for each painting. “The works on display all had some functi on,” Ono further explicated. 8 Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through (1961) filtered the light at the end of day, while two pieces titled Waterdrop Painting (1961; pl. 14) received drops of water. The status of the texts displayed in the exhibition, or of the verbal commentaries that replaced them when no text was given, is different from that of the instructions shown by the artist the following year, at S ōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo. On this occasion, the instructions, composed and translated by Ono and handwritten in Japanese by Ichiyanagi, were simply hung on the walls, clearly meant to be considered works themselves (pls. 28– 31). In 1995, Ono explained: “I did a show of instruction paintings at AG Gallery in New York, but that was exhibiting canvases with instructions attached to them. Displaying just the instructions as paintings was going one step further, pushing visual art to its optimum conceptuali sm.” 9 Most of the works shown at the AG Gallery are presumed to be lost, and only a few have been realized again by the artist since the exhibition. We know the content of the show thanks to photographs taken by one of the gallery’s founders, George Maciunas. Maciunas treated photography as a means “to create an inventory of world art,” 10 photographing, for instance, building facades, details of sculptures, and city views “with a very sharp focus in the depths of the image, devoid of human beings and traffic.” 11 He shot Ono’s exhibition with the same eye toward intelligibility and comprehensiveness that he demonstrated in his previous photo campaigns. The works are unexpectedly documented at close range, with only a few overall installation shots, as if the photographer considered the paintings to exist primarily on their own and not necessarily in their relationship to the visitors. The AG Gallery was located on the second floor of a small building on Madison Avenue, on New York’s Upper East Side. Maciunas made a number of significant

Overall, the works didn’t compete with the architecture but let themselves be absorbed by it. Ono seems to have intentionally positioned her paintings, made of unprepared canvas, against the rough brick walls and on the worn tiled floor, and her drawings, consisting of black ink on white paper, on the plastered white walls. The impression of the work merging with its surroundings was reinforced by the hanging of ink drawings on both sides of the t ranslucent screen, two on the front side and one on the back. At AG Gallery, the feeling of a unified display was further reinforced by the fact that all the pieces of canvas had been cut from the same roll, which Ono had acquired a few months earlier from an army surplus shop during the Chambers Street Loft Series. A photograph shows that a large portion of canvas had been hung in the loft, essentially creating a makeshift backdrop and surface for actions performed by the artist. Ono’s contributions to the Chambers Street Loft Series and the staging of her first exhibition attest to how crucial a role the environment plays in the conception of her work. A similar interest is seen in a body of work made a decade earlier: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, created at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, during the summer of 1951. Cage, who was a friend and supporter of Ono, first captured the groundbreaking nature of Rauschenberg’s achievement, when, in 1961, he described the monochromatic panels as “airports for the lights, shadows, and particl es.”13 Neither Ono’s early paintings nor Rauschenberg’s White Paintings are to be understood solely in relation to their materiality. What gives them the status of works of art is less the canvases that constitute them than the process of interaction and change triggered by their display. In some ways, they exist only while they are being experienced, very much as live performances would. As Rauschenberg explained, “My black paintings and my white paintings are either too full or too empty to be thought—thereby they remain visual experiences. These pictures are not Art.” 14 Similarly, Ono’s works are not intended as art in and of themselves. Painting to Be Stepped On, for instance, does not have to be stepped on, but it must be placed on the floor, within reach of visitors. Its materiality remains secondary to its ability to generate potential activities in the viewer’s mind. Perhaps like nothing before it—Rauschenberg’s White Paintings included—Ono’s works are performative by nature. They exist primarily by means of their being shown to the viewer. In November 1966, five years after the AG Gallery exhibition, Ono opened a show at Indica Gallery in London (pp. 158–63), only her second solo gallery exhibition to date. The presentation featured Ono’s first body of sculptures. For one of these, she placed a fresh apple on a tall transparent pedestal that had been specially designed for it (pl. 70). The work comes with no instruction: the engraved plate affixed to the pedestal contains only a title, Apple . If Apple can be seen as


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shown little interest in traditional painting. Rather than images of paintings, the publication offers instructions for paintings in which the paint and brush are often relegated to a secondary role. A number of these instructions were realized on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at AG Gallery, New York, in July 1961 (pp. 58–67). At least three of them had already been enacted a few months earlier, during the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53), a run of performances and concerts held in Ono’s loft.

CHRISTOPHE CHERIX

alterations to the space in order to turn it into a gallery environment. He removed the plaster from some of the walls, thus exposing the original bricks, and altered the ceiling. The Fluxus archivist Barbara Moore, who didn’t see Ono’s installation but came to the gallery early on, remembers that Maciunas had “arch[ed] large sheets of semi-translucent heavy paper stock between the [ceiling] beams.” 12 Ono installed her works without frames or pedestals. The pieces of canvas and sheets of paper were simply affixed to the walls or to a translucent screen installed in front of the gallery’s front windows (pl. 16). Painting to Be Stepped On, Waterdrop Painting (Version 1), and Waterdrop Painting (Version 2) were on the floor, in locations that vary from photograph to photograph, suggesting that some works were moved over the course of the exhibition. A long table stood before the window screen with additional items displayed on it, including Painting Until It Becomes Marble.

At AG Gallery, in at least two instances, Ono presented a text written on a sheet of paper next to an exhibited work. In 2008, she mentioned that she had “asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write out cards explaining the functions to display on the side of each painting . . . [but] he managed to write [only] two cards.”7 The text, from 1960, for Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) states: A WORK TO BE STEPPED ON

Overall, the works didn’t compete with the architecture but let themselves be absorbed by it. Ono seems to have intentionally positioned her paintings, made of unprepared canvas, against the rough brick walls and on the worn tiled floor, and her drawings, consisting of black ink on white paper, on the plastered white walls. The impression of the work merging with its surroundings was reinforced by the hanging of ink drawings on both sides of the t ranslucent screen, two on the front side and one on the back.

For Painting in Three Stanzas (1961; pl. 11), a piece of canvas with a vine stuck through it, we read: It ends when its covered with leaves, It ends when the leaves wither, It ends when it turns to ashes, And a new vine will grow, __________

At AG Gallery, the feeling of a unified display was further reinforced by the fact that all the pieces of canvas had been cut from the same roll, which Ono had acquired a few months earlier from an army surplus shop during the Chambers Street Loft Series. A photograph shows that a large portion of canvas had been hung in the loft, essentially creating a makeshift backdrop and surface for actions performed by the artist.

The first text offers the viewer the opportunity to physically interact with the work— even at the risk of damaging it—while the other implies that a number of upcoming changes in the painting, not explicitly dependent on the participation of the viewers, need to happen for the work to be complete. According to Ono’s explanation, these texts state the “functions” of the exhibited works—so, in other words, the particular activities intended for each painting. “The works on display all had some functi on,” Ono further explicated. 8 Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through (1961) filtered the light at the end of day, while two pieces titled Waterdrop Painting (1961; pl. 14) received drops of water.

Ono’s contributions to the Chambers Street Loft Series and the staging of her first exhibition attest to how crucial a role the environment plays in the conception of her work. A similar interest is seen in a body of work made a decade earlier: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, created at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, during the summer of 1951. Cage, who was a friend and supporter of Ono, first captured the groundbreaking nature of Rauschenberg’s achievement, when, in 1961, he described the monochromatic panels as “airports for the lights, shadows, and particl es.”13

The status of the texts displayed in the exhibition, or of the verbal commentaries that replaced them when no text was given, is different from that of the instructions shown by the artist the following year, at S ōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo. On this occasion, the instructions, composed and translated by Ono and handwritten in Japanese by Ichiyanagi, were simply hung on the walls, clearly meant to be considered works themselves (pls. 28– 31). In 1995, Ono explained: “I did a show of instruction paintings at AG Gallery in New York, but that was exhibiting canvases with instructions attached to them. Displaying just the instructions as paintings was going one step further, pushing visual art to its optimum conceptuali sm.” 9

Neither Ono’s early paintings nor Rauschenberg’s White Paintings are to be understood solely in relation to their materiality. What gives them the status of works of art is less the canvases that constitute them than the process of interaction and change triggered by their display. In some ways, they exist only while they are being experienced, very much as live performances would. As Rauschenberg explained, “My black paintings and my white paintings are either too full or too empty to be thought—thereby they remain visual experiences. These pictures are not Art.” 14 Similarly, Ono’s works are not intended as art in and of themselves. Painting to Be Stepped On, for instance, does not have to be stepped on, but it must be placed on the floor, within reach of visitors. Its materiality remains secondary to its ability to generate potential activities in the viewer’s mind. Perhaps like nothing before it—Rauschenberg’s White Paintings included—Ono’s works are performative by nature. They exist primarily by means of their being shown to the viewer.

Most of the works shown at the AG Gallery are presumed to be lost, and only a few have been realized again by the artist since the exhibition. We know the content of the show thanks to photographs taken by one of the gallery’s founders, George Maciunas. Maciunas treated photography as a means “to create an inventory of world art,” 10 photographing, for instance, building facades, details of sculptures, and city views “with a very sharp focus in the depths of the image, devoid of human beings and traffic.” 11 He shot Ono’s exhibition with the same eye toward intelligibility and comprehensiveness that he demonstrated in his previous photo campaigns. The works are unexpectedly documented at close range, with only a few overall installation shots, as if the photographer considered the paintings to exist primarily on their own and not necessarily in their relationship to the visitors.

In November 1966, five years after the AG Gallery exhibition, Ono opened a show at Indica Gallery in London (pp. 158–63), only her second solo gallery exhibition to date. The presentation featured Ono’s first body of sculptures. For one of these, she placed a fresh apple on a tall transparent pedestal that had been specially designed for it (pl. 70). The work comes with no instruction: the engraved plate affixed to the pedestal contains only a title, Apple . If Apple can be seen as

The AG Gallery was located on the second floor of a small building on Madison Avenue, on New York’s Upper East Side. Maciunas made a number of significant


4–15. Typescript for A Grapefruit in the World of Park . 1955/c. 1961. Twelve typewritten pages, each 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

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4–15. Typescript for A Grapefruit in the World of Park . 1955/c. 1961. Twelve typewritten pages, each 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)


sculpture, then it’s because of its mode of display—inviting viewers to go around it—and its three-dimensionality. The work is also, however, a readymade item—an object chosen, rather than created, by the artist. To complicate things further, it is a perishable item that requires replacement with every new showing. Not only does the fruit-as-artwork thus resist fetishization and commodification, but our focus shifts from the apple to the action of choosing it and displaying it to the public. As a result, each presentation of Apple should be regarded as a unique and singular performance of the work. The piece encapsulates precisely what makes Ono’s art so essential to our time: its capacity to always be in the present and to never make us look back.


POSTERIORS

NOTES

7.

1.

Ono contributed to four other issues of The Campus : those dated May 4, 1955; May 11, 1955; September 28, 1955; and April 25, 1956.

2.

See Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 237n9.

8. 9.

3.

In the Carnegie Recital Hall concert, Ono performed the piece, albeit without calling it by name, as part of AOS—To David Tudor .

10.

4.

YokoOno, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. Duchamp first proposed Fountain to the American Society

11. 12.

5.

of Independent Artists for inclusion in their inaugural exhibition, in 1917. The work was rejected. Cage’s 4 33 debuted at Woodstock’s Maverick Concert Hall in 1952. About the participation of Cage and Young, not listed in the program, see the 1971 letter from Yoko Ono to George Maciunas excerpted in the present volume, p. 70. '

6.

"

13. 14.

Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Jon Hendricks, ed., with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, and Roskilde, Denmark: Museum of Contermporary Art, 2008), p. 40. This volume, p. 72. Ibid. Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings (New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1995), p. 5. Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas, An Art ist’s Biograp hy (London and Bangkok: Edition Hansjörg Mayer), p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Barbara Moore, e-mail to Francesca Wilmott, August 6, 2014. John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” Metro 2 (May 1961): 43. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Hubert Crehan, “The See Change: Raw Duck,” Art Digest 27, no. 20 (September 15, 1953): 25.

In a sketch from 1971, part of a book of ideas for a possible one-woman intervention at The Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono drew images and wrote directives for an imagined exhibition called Posterity Show (fig. 1).1 Over the course of four frames and in the description that accompanies the drawings, Ono lays out her vision for a participatory work that would progress as the evening unfolded, in which “the backside of every person who attended the opening was photographed for world peace.” Illustrated by renderings of a variety of cropped cheeks hung on a wall, the text continues, “They were instantly blown up to appropriate size and exhibited in the posterity showroom.” Ono’s speculative piece (written in the past tense, as if it had already happened) incorporates and annexes the presumed spectators of the show, putting them, and their vulnerable bodies, on display. Along with providing simple renderings of their naked forms from behind, she labels some of her potential subjects: Salvador Dal í , Truman Capote, Jacqueline Onassis. One frame shows a photographer at work with his camera and tripod, and Ono explains that the pictures would later be aggregated into wallpaper for purchase, with proceeds benefiting the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, here spelled UNISEF). 2 With this unrealized project, Ono crystallizes her unique brand of corporeal institutional critique—akin to what Chrissie Iles has dubbed the “erotic conceptualism” in Ono’s film works 3—as she conjoins bared buttocks, upended museum protocol, and global politics. Playing on the close proximity of the words posterity and posterior , Ono offers a raucous alternative vision of a future art world that is concerned with de-hierarchizing the artist, stri pping down the audience, and securing world peace. These were issues she dealt with often, as in previous works like her instruction paintings and scores; her billboard project WAR IS OVER! (1969– ; pp. 200–203), conceived with John Lennon; and films including the two works titled Film No. 4 (1966–67; pp. 164–67), c ompilations of ambulating asses that she considere d “a petition for peace.” 4 In Posterity Show , Ono blurs the public/private division, honing in on, uncovering, and celebrating a body part often associated with shame, excrement, and scatology; the divide is further complicated when, according to Ono’s plan, the butt pictures enter the realm of the domestic as decorative wallpaper. Art historian Mignon Nixon astutely grasps the double nature of Ono’s utilization of the derri ère, noting that Film No. 4 is both “hypnotic and sweetly sixties” as a reminder of “a decade of love” as well as a “performa nce of a mock marc h.” 5 Infantile but also militarized, the trooping backsides are a fraught locus of innocence, pleasure, and sensuality, but also disgrace, t raining, and parental discipline. In Freudian language, a fixation on the anal is an i ndication of psychological devolution or a “return from a higher to a lower state of devel opment.”6 Ono’s bodies advance as they regress, a rejection of Freud’s terms and an implicit embrace of one of the least gender-specific erogenous zones (neither breast nor genitalia). Evoking looping bodily rhythms, oscillations between past and present, swerves away from strict linearity, fleshy reminders of physical processes that are not predicated on a male/female binary, Ono’s forward march of behinds prefigures and modulates what French theorist Julia Kristeva would, later that decade, call “women’s time.” 7


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sculpture, then it’s because of its mode of display—inviting viewers to go around it—and its three-dimensionality. The work is also, however, a readymade item—an object chosen, rather than created, by the artist. To complicate things further, it is a perishable item that requires replacement with every new showing. Not only does the fruit-as-artwork thus resist fetishization and commodification, but our focus shifts from the apple to the action of choosing it and displaying it to the public. As a result, each presentation of Apple should be regarded as a unique and singular performance of the work. The piece encapsulates precisely what makes Ono’s art so essential to our time: its capacity to always be in the present and to never make us look back.


POSTERIORS

NOTES

7.

1.

Ono contributed to four other issues of The Campus : those dated May 4, 1955; May 11, 1955; September 28, 1955; and April 25, 1956.

2.

See Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 237n9.

8. 9.

3.

In the Carnegie Recital Hall concert, Ono performed the piece, albeit without calling it by name, as part of AOS—To David Tudor .

10.

4.

YokoOno, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. Duchamp first proposed Fountain to the American Society

11. 12.

5.

of Independent Artists for inclusion in their inaugural exhibition, in 1917. The work was rejected. Cage’s 4 33 debuted at Woodstock’s Maverick Concert Hall in 1952. About the participation of Cage and Young, not listed in the program, see the 1971 letter from Yoko Ono to George Maciunas excerpted in the present volume, p. 70. '

6.

13.

"

14.

In a sketch from 1971, part of a book of ideas for a possible one-woman intervention at The Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono drew images and wrote directives for an imagined exhibition called Posterity Show (fig. 1).1 Over the course of four frames and in the description that accompanies the drawings, Ono lays out her vision for a participatory work that would progress as the evening unfolded, in which “the backside of every person who attended the opening was photographed for world peace.” Illustrated by renderings of a variety of cropped cheeks hung on a wall, the text continues, “They were instantly blown up to appropriate size and exhibited in the posterity showroom.” Ono’s speculative piece (written in the past tense, as if it had already happened) incorporates and annexes the presumed spectators of the show, putting them, and their vulnerable bodies, on display. Along with providing simple renderings of their naked forms from behind, she labels some of her potential subjects: Salvador Dal í , Truman Capote, Jacqueline Onassis. One frame shows a photographer at work with his camera and tripod, and Ono explains that the pictures would later be aggregated into wallpaper for purchase, with proceeds benefiting the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, here spelled UNISEF). 2

Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Jon Hendricks, ed., with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, and Roskilde, Denmark: Museum of Contermporary Art, 2008), p. 40. This volume, p. 72. Ibid. Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings (New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1995), p. 5. Thomas Kellein, The Dream of Fluxus: George Maciunas, An Art ist’s Biograp hy (London and Bangkok: Edition Hansjörg Mayer), p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Barbara Moore, e-mail to Francesca Wilmott, August 6, 2014. John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” Metro 2 (May 1961): 43. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Hubert Crehan, “The See Change: Raw Duck,” Art Digest 27, no. 20 (September 15, 1953): 25.

With this unrealized project, Ono crystallizes her unique brand of corporeal institutional critique—akin to what Chrissie Iles has dubbed the “erotic conceptualism” in Ono’s film works 3—as she conjoins bared buttocks, upended museum protocol, and global politics. Playing on the close proximity of the words posterity and posterior , Ono offers a raucous alternative vision of a future art world that is concerned with de-hierarchizing the artist, stri pping down the audience, and securing world peace. These were issues she dealt with often, as in previous works like her instruction paintings and scores; her billboard project WAR IS OVER! (1969– ; pp. 200–203), conceived with John Lennon; and films including the two works titled Film No. 4 (1966–67; pp. 164–67), c ompilations of ambulating asses that she considere d “a petition for peace.” 4 In Posterity Show , Ono blurs the public/private division, honing in on, uncovering, and celebrating a body part often associated with shame, excrement, and scatology; the divide is further complicated when, according to Ono’s plan, the butt pictures enter the realm of the domestic as decorative wallpaper. Art historian Mignon Nixon astutely grasps the double nature of Ono’s utilization of the derri ère, noting that Film No. 4 is both “hypnotic and sweetly sixties” as a reminder of “a decade of love” as well as a “performa nce of a mock marc h.” 5 Infantile but also militarized, the trooping backsides are a fraught locus of innocence, pleasure, and sensuality, but also disgrace, t raining, and parental discipline. In Freudian language, a fixation on the anal is an i ndication of psychological devolution or a “return from a higher to a lower state of devel opment.”6 Ono’s bodies advance as they regress, a rejection of Freud’s terms and an implicit embrace of one of the least gender-specific erogenous zones (neither breast nor genitalia). Evoking looping bodily rhythms, oscillations between past and present, swerves away from strict linearity, fleshy reminders of physical processes that are not predicated on a male/female binary, Ono’s forward march of behinds prefigures and modulates what French theorist Julia Kristeva would, later that decade, call “women’s time.” 7

FOR POSTERITY: YOKO ONO

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In another drawing from Ono’s 1971 sketchbook (fig. 2), labeled “people who attended the opening,” we see a cast of celebrity characters that includes Jackie O flanked by two bodyguards, Dal í and two female friends (the three appearing to have arrived already naked), Richard Nixon smiling from his presidential car, and Andy Warhol surrounded by his superstars. A flag reading “Museum” delimits the otherwise unelaborated setting. The notebook is brimming with musings on how to make the Museum’s architecture and contents more irreverent, with a decidedly feminist bent, including thoughts about using art as a household object (making a Henry Moore piece into a diaper hanger, for instance, a version of Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion to turn a Rembrandt into an ironing board), dressing sculptures in drag, and staging a large-scale adaptation of Ono’s legendary performance Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), in which the audience would cut off each other’s clothes.8 These drawings provide a glimpse into Ono’s own process, with her wide-ranging ability to reimagine assumptions about how both art objects and spectators are expected to function within instit utional contexts. They also indicate that The Museum of Modern Art, in 1971, was understood (not least at its exclusive openings) as a gathering place for the rich, the famous, and the powerful, a destination for those renowned in culture as well as in politics, who came to be seen as much as to see the art . “Clever move,” Ono notes about Nixon, w hose arm is raised in his signature gesture. FARTS In November 1971, Ono launched her piece Museum Of Modern (F)art (pp. 208– 13), which centered on a conceptual exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. She advertised the show in The Village Voice and the New York Times, including a mailorder form for the catalogue, priced at one dollar. 9 The ad (fig. 3), reproduced on the cover of the catalogue, features a manipulated photo in which Ono has placed the Museum’s name on an awning above the main entrance, using a structural indentation to create a large gap between the last two words. The image appears to catch the artist at a moment when she strolls by below the gap, which is symbolically filled by the big “F” on a shopping bag she carries—the institution thus being renamed the Museum of Modern Fart.

1. Page from an idea book by Yoko Ono. c. 1971. Felt-tip pen on paper, 8 1 ⁄ 2 x 11 1 ⁄ 2" (21.6 x 29.2 cm)


Held from December 1 to 15, 1971, without the Museum’s consent, the exhibition involved a man wearing a sandwich board who walked outside the entrance on 53rd Street from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. wearing a sign that read: flies were put in a glass container the same volume as yoko’s body the same perfume as the one yoko uses was put in the glass container the container was then placed in the exact center of the museum the lid was opened the flies were released photographer who has been invited over from england specially for the task is now going around the city to see how far the flies flew the flies are distinguishable by the odour which is equivalent to yokos join us in the search observation & flight 12/71. 10 Midway through the two-week duration of the piece, the man wrote to Ono cataloguing some of the reactions he received, noting that “the majority of believers were between ages 17–25, the majority of skeptics are bet ween 35–55.” 11 He included a more detailed breakdown of age groups and their responses, mentioning, for instance, that those between twenty-five and thirty-five were “the most violent . . . i ndeed quite lavish with their ripe expletives as I tried to explain. Indeed, one even tried to put me through the window before I cleverly muttered some nonsense about karate.” 12 The correspondence indicates a couple of things: one, that this man, perhaps predictably, met with a spectrum of sympathies and hostilities toward Ono (or, more precisely, toward a nonexistent show by Ono that was advertised as actual), and two, that he was not a passive or silent sign-carrier but an active part of the reception of the piece as he conversed with those on the

3. Advertisement for Museum Of Modern (F)art in The Village Voice, November 25, 1971: 30.


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In another drawing from Ono’s 1971 sketchbook (fig. 2), labeled “people who attended the opening,” we see a cast of celebrity characters that includes Jackie O flanked by two bodyguards, Dal í and two female friends (the three appearing to have arrived already naked), Richard Nixon smiling from his presidential car, and Andy Warhol surrounded by his superstars. A flag reading “Museum” delimits the otherwise unelaborated setting. The notebook is brimming with musings on how to make the Museum’s architecture and contents more irreverent, with a decidedly feminist bent, including thoughts about using art as a household object (making a Henry Moore piece into a diaper hanger, for instance, a version of Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion to turn a Rembrandt into an ironing board), dressing sculptures in drag, and staging a large-scale adaptation of Ono’s legendary performance Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), in which the audience would cut off each other’s clothes.8 These drawings provide a glimpse into Ono’s own process, with her wide-ranging ability to reimagine assumptions about how both art objects and spectators are expected to function within instit utional contexts. They also indicate that The Museum of Modern Art, in 1971, was understood (not least at its exclusive openings) as a gathering place for the rich, the famous, and the powerful, a destination for those renowned in culture as well as in politics, who came to be seen as much as to see the art . “Clever move,” Ono notes about Nixon, w hose arm is raised in his signature gesture. FARTS In November 1971, Ono launched her piece Museum Of Modern (F)art (pp. 208– 13), which centered on a conceptual exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. She advertised the show in The Village Voice and the New York Times, including a mailorder form for the catalogue, priced at one dollar. 9 The ad (fig. 3), reproduced on the cover of the catalogue, features a manipulated photo in which Ono has placed the Museum’s name on an awning above the main entrance, using a structural indentation to create a large gap between the last two words. The image appears to catch the artist at a moment when she strolls by below the gap, which is symbolically filled by the big “F” on a shopping bag she carries—the institution thus being renamed the Museum of Modern Fart.



Held from December 1 to 15, 1971, without the Museum’s consent, the exhibition involved a man wearing a sandwich board who walked outside the entrance on 53rd Street from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. wearing a sign that read: flies were put in a glass container the same volume as yoko’s body the same perfume as the one yoko uses was put in the glass container the container was then placed in the exact center of the museum the lid was opened the flies were released photographer who has been invited over from england specially for the task is now going around the city to see how far the flies flew the flies are distinguishable by the odour which is equivalent to yokos join us in the search observation & flight 12/71. 10 Midway through the two-week duration of the piece, the man wrote to Ono cataloguing some of the reactions he received, noting that “the majority of believers were between ages 17–25, the majority of skeptics are bet ween 35–55.” 11 He included a more detailed breakdown of age groups and their responses, mentioning, for instance, that those between twenty-five and thirty-five were “the most violent . . . i ndeed quite lavish with their ripe expletives as I tried to explain. Indeed, one even tried to put me through the window before I cleverly muttered some nonsense about karate.” 12 The correspondence indicates a couple of things: one, that this man, perhaps predictably, met with a spectrum of sympathies and hostilities toward Ono (or, more precisely, toward a nonexistent show by Ono that was advertised as actual), and two, that he was not a passive or silent sign-carrier but an active part of the reception of the piece as he conversed with those on the


sidewalk, eliciting their responses. A seven-minute documentary, The Museum of Modern Art Show (1971), captures responses of pedestrians who thought they might see Ono’s exhibition, and contains brief interviews with visitors amused, angry, and perplexed to discover that no physical show existed. The content of the exhibition was in fact the sum of these wide-ranging responses—the audience’s comments, as much as the artist’s intervention, were the work—with Ono suggesting that the line between artist and audience is arbitrary, and attempting to level the discrepant valuations it produces. “Democratization was a goal as well as a starti ng point for Ono’s art,” observes Midor i Yoshimoto. 13 The New Yorker referred to the ad and signboard, with their “mixture of cleverness, sentimentality, coyness, sweetness, satire, and mystification,” as “ty pical of her work.” 14 But far from merely iterating her own ethos, Ono was working within arenas of Conceptualism that sought to move art beyond the walls of the institution by turning to advertising, fake or inaccessible exhibitions, and signage worn on the body. Such arenas included Dan Graham’s and Adrian Piper’s uses of the magazine page, Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969), and Daniel Buren’s striped Sandwich Men walking the streets of Paris in 1968. 15 Like Ono, Piper chose The Village Voice as her venue, placing her first ad in 1969 and in 1973 commencing a project in which she published a series of almost-monthly ads that interrupted the announcements of gallery exhibitions to broadcast her internal (ostensibly private) thoughts, including enigmatic disclosures of desire. Dressed in sunglasses, a mustache, and a wig, Piper appears in the guise of her persona the Mythic Being, with hand-drawn thought bubbles containing excerpts from her personal journal floating up from her head.16

In addition, throughout the preceding decade, artists had taken up signs and posters outside of museums to make critical points about the role of taste-making and exclusionary practices. In 1963, artist Henry Flynt and filmmaker Jack Smith picketed The Museum of Modern Art (as well as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center) with demands to “ DEMOLISH ART MUSEUMS” and “ DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE ” (fig. 4), part of Flynt’s campaign to recalibrate individual assessments about art and throw off what he considered dictatorial decisions made by elite curators. Starting in February 1968, art critic Gene Swenson marched daily in front of MoMA, alone, holding up a blue question mark to signify his discontent with the institution’s policies and ideologies. 17 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the museum—MoMA in particular—was a charged and contentious site of political activism, understood as one of the f ront lines of leftist organizing against racism, sexism, classism, and the war in Vietnam. Critic Hilton Kramer summarized the situation in 1974, saying: “Of all the institutions that currently preside over the conduct of our cultural affairs, none confronts more vexing problems than our major art museums. . . . The museum has more and more become one of the crucial battlegrounds upon which the problem s of democratic cultur e are being decided.” 18 At various moments during this era, the sidewalk outside MoMA seethed with demonstrators, including women artists marching for greater gender inclusion; members of the Black and Puerto Rican Emergency Cultural Coalition, calling out the Museum for its racist policies and proposing that a new wing dedicated to nonwhite artists be built; participants in the first strike of the Professional and Administrative Staff Association (PASTA-MoMA); and members of the Art Workers’ Coalition protesting against the role played by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Museum board member, in the brutal suppression of the Attica prison riots (fig. 5). Some of these artists wanted representation, but they also wanted to change the entire system of valuation upon which the Museum rested (and many went on to form alternative art organizations). To what extent Ono, an antiwar, nonwhite feminist, might have sensed affinity or solidarity with these various causes is an open question, but it is nonetheless notable that her sandwich-board man came on the heels of this intense period of agitation at the foot of the Museum’s door, and thus the work is in dialogue with

3. Advertisement for Museum Of Modern (F)art in The Village Voice, November 25, 1971: 30.

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the visual rhetoric not only of advertising but also of dissent. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Ono made a number of bold feminist statements in a variety of mediums, including her 1969 film “Rape” (a collaboration with Lennon); her song “Sisters, O Sisters” (performed in December 1971 at a benefit concert for the Attica uprising); and her 1972 text “The Feminizati on of Society,” published in the New York Times.19 Her defiant claim to a solo exhibition stood in stark c ontrast to the Museum’s walls, which were, then as now, filled mostly with works by white men. 20 Had she actually had a one-woman show in 1971, it would have been one of very few solo shows at the Museum to feature a woman, as well as the first by an Asian woman—Yayoi Kusama’s naked dancers infiltrating the Sculpture Garden in 1969, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA, which, akin to works by Ono, concerned stripped bodies and antiwar proclamations, was not an officially sanctioned exhibition.

Indeed, Ono’s exhibition, read as a guerilla insertion by a woman of color with a white man standing in as her paid surrogate to deflect blows and absorb compliments, was like a fart: an unwelcome emission, a vulgar, odorous eruption that violates standard practices of museum respectability. With her Museum Of Modern (F)art project, Ono, as matter “out of place” in the institution, harks back to the asses of Posterity Show , reveling in the base, messy, embarrassing, and personal, and demonstrating the opposite of prim art-world comportment. Ono’s interest in low bodily functions has been linked to Fluxus impresario George Maciunas’s own scatological inclinations, as seen in his design for her thirteen-day dance festival in 1966 (pl. 59). This grid of images includes, among other vignettes, a man either farting or shitting out the words “DO IT YOURSELF FLUXFEST PRESENTS” and a finger inserted into an anus. However, Ono’s embrace of leaking, inappropriate bodies can also be placed in dialogue with other explicitly feminist practices of around the same time that were concerned with excretions, such as Judy Chicago’s Red Flag of 1971, a photolithograph of a woman pulling a red-hued tampon out of her vagina. Though farting is gender-neutral (and prohibitions about passing gas in public apply to all), menstruation is not, and Chicago’s work startlingly exposes a ritual that is constantly performed by women but very rarely depicted. “Menstruation has been so concealed as to invite the violation of the taboo,” notes feminist critic Lisa Tickner.21 FLIES The polluting cloud of gaseous bad air proposed by Ono’s “fart” is riffed on, and inverted, by photographs taken by Iain Macmillan and the artist and compiled in the accompanying catalogue, which claim to document the perfumed flies that Ono has released in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. An image constructed by photomontage depicts Ono standing in the garden beside a large glass container dense with insects. (The portrait component of this image had been cut from the catalogue for her 1966 exhibition at Indica Gallery, London [pp. 158–63].) In the next image, she is nowhere to be found, and the container is almost empty, with flies trickling out of its thin neck (pl. 96). Instead of carrying associations of waste and bad smells, the flies Ono imagines releasing are sweetly scented with Ma Griffe (the perfume bottle is shown nearly half-full in one photograph and closer to empty in another, as if to constitute proof that it was used to anoint the flies), as they alight within and beyond the museum building. Flight, flying, and the wordplay possible between the noun and verb forms of “fly” had long fascinated Ono, as evidenced by works including her 1963 instruction that states, simply, “fly” and her 1970 film Fly (pp. 204–7), which shows flies landing on and navigating a woman’s body. In the Museum Of Modern (F)art catalogue, she uses flies as a narrative device for a series of 138 photographs that acts as a rambling travelogue through the city, with the fly in each frame pointed out with a crisp white or black arrow (pl. 97). (That they are in the photographs at all is as much a matter of faith as the rest of the project; purporting to release something that is unseen in the final images, Ono’s piece can be compared to Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series from 1969.) The flies meander through the galleries, flitting near works by Picasso and Matisse, and


24

25

the visual rhetoric not only of advertising but also of dissent. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Ono made a number of bold feminist statements in a variety of mediums, including her 1969 film “Rape” (a collaboration with Lennon); her song “Sisters, O Sisters” (performed in December 1971 at a benefit concert for the Attica uprising); and her 1972 text “The Feminizati on of Society,” published in the New York Times.19 Her defiant claim to a solo exhibition stood in stark c ontrast to the Museum’s walls, which were, then as now, filled mostly with works by white men. 20 Had she actually had a one-woman show in 1971, it would have been one of very few solo shows at the Museum to feature a woman, as well as the first by an Asian woman—Yayoi Kusama’s naked dancers infiltrating the Sculpture Garden in 1969, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA, which, akin to works by Ono, concerned stripped bodies and antiwar proclamations, was not an officially sanctioned exhibition.

sidewalk, eliciting their responses. A seven-minute documentary, The Museum of Modern Art Show (1971), captures responses of pedestrians who thought they might see Ono’s exhibition, and contains brief interviews with visitors amused, angry, and perplexed to discover that no physical show existed. The content of the exhibition was in fact the sum of these wide-ranging responses—the audience’s comments, as much as the artist’s intervention, were the work—with Ono suggesting that the line between artist and audience is arbitrary, and attempting to level the discrepant valuations it produces. “Democratization was a goal as well as a starti ng point for Ono’s art,” observes Midor i Yoshimoto. 13 The New Yorker referred to the ad and signboard, with their “mixture of cleverness, sentimentality, coyness, sweetness, satire, and mystification,” as “ty pical of her work.” 14 But far from merely iterating her own ethos, Ono was working within arenas of Conceptualism that sought to move art beyond the walls of the institution by turning to advertising, fake or inaccessible exhibitions, and signage worn on the body. Such arenas included Dan Graham’s and Adrian Piper’s uses of the magazine page, Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969), and Daniel Buren’s striped Sandwich Men walking the streets of Paris in 1968. 15 Like Ono, Piper chose The Village Voice as her venue, placing her first ad in 1969 and in 1973 commencing a project in which she published a series of almost-monthly ads that interrupted the announcements of gallery exhibitions to broadcast her internal (ostensibly private) thoughts, including enigmatic disclosures of desire. Dressed in sunglasses, a mustache, and a wig, Piper appears in the guise of her persona the Mythic Being, with hand-drawn thought bubbles containing excerpts from her personal journal floating up from her head.16

Indeed, Ono’s exhibition, read as a guerilla insertion by a woman of color with a white man standing in as her paid surrogate to deflect blows and absorb compliments, was like a fart: an unwelcome emission, a vulgar, odorous eruption that violates standard practices of museum respectability. With her Museum Of Modern (F)art project, Ono, as matter “out of place” in the institution, harks back to the asses of Posterity Show , reveling in the base, messy, embarrassing, and personal, and demonstrating the opposite of prim art-world comportment. Ono’s interest in low bodily functions has been linked to Fluxus impresario George Maciunas’s own scatological inclinations, as seen in his design for her thirteen-day dance festival in 1966 (pl. 59). This grid of images includes, among other vignettes, a man either farting or shitting out the words “DO IT YOURSELF FLUXFEST PRESENTS” and a finger inserted into an anus. However, Ono’s embrace of leaking, inappropriate bodies can also be placed in dialogue with other explicitly feminist practices of around the same time that were concerned with excretions, such as Judy Chicago’s Red Flag of 1971, a photolithograph of a woman pulling a red-hued tampon out of her vagina. Though farting is gender-neutral (and prohibitions about passing gas in public apply to all), menstruation is not, and Chicago’s work startlingly exposes a ritual that is constantly performed by women but very rarely depicted. “Menstruation has been so concealed as to invite the violation of the taboo,” notes feminist critic Lisa Tickner.21

In addition, throughout the preceding decade, artists had taken up signs and posters outside of museums to make critical points about the role of taste-making and exclusionary practices. In 1963, artist Henry Flynt and filmmaker Jack Smith picketed The Museum of Modern Art (as well as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center) with demands to “ DEMOLISH ART MUSEUMS” and “ DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE ” (fig. 4), part of Flynt’s campaign to recalibrate individual assessments about art and throw off what he considered dictatorial decisions made by elite curators. Starting in February 1968, art critic Gene Swenson marched daily in front of MoMA, alone, holding up a blue question mark to signify his discontent with the institution’s policies and ideologies. 17 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the museum—MoMA in particular—was a charged and contentious site of political activism, understood as one of the f ront lines of leftist organizing against racism, sexism, classism, and the war in Vietnam. Critic Hilton Kramer summarized the situation in 1974, saying: “Of all the institutions that currently preside over the conduct of our cultural affairs, none confronts more vexing problems than our major art museums. . . . The museum has more and more become one of the crucial battlegrounds upon which the problem s of democratic cultur e are being decided.” 18 At various moments during this era, the sidewalk outside MoMA seethed with demonstrators, including women artists marching for greater gender inclusion; members of the Black and Puerto Rican Emergency Cultural Coalition, calling out the Museum for its racist policies and proposing that a new wing dedicated to nonwhite artists be built; participants in the first strike of the Professional and Administrative Staff Association (PASTA-MoMA); and members of the Art Workers’ Coalition protesting against the role played by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Museum board member, in the brutal suppression of the Attica prison riots (fig. 5). Some of these artists wanted representation, but they also wanted to change the entire system of valuation upon which the Museum rested (and many went on to form alternative art organizations).

FLIES The polluting cloud of gaseous bad air proposed by Ono’s “fart” is riffed on, and inverted, by photographs taken by Iain Macmillan and the artist and compiled in the accompanying catalogue, which claim to document the perfumed flies that Ono has released in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. An image constructed by photomontage depicts Ono standing in the garden beside a large glass container dense with insects. (The portrait component of this image had been cut from the catalogue for her 1966 exhibition at Indica Gallery, London [pp. 158–63].) In the next image, she is nowhere to be found, and the container is almost empty, with flies trickling out of its thin neck (pl. 96). Instead of carrying associations of waste and bad smells, the flies Ono imagines releasing are sweetly scented with Ma Griffe (the perfume bottle is shown nearly half-full in one photograph and closer to empty in another, as if to constitute proof that it was used to anoint the flies), as they alight within and beyond the museum building. Flight, flying, and the wordplay possible between the noun and verb forms of “fly” had long fascinated Ono, as evidenced by works including her 1963 instruction that states, simply, “fly” and her 1970 film Fly (pp. 204–7), which shows flies landing on and navigating a woman’s body. In the Museum Of Modern (F)art catalogue, she uses flies as a narrative device for a series of 138 photographs that acts as a rambling travelogue through the city, with the fly in each frame pointed out with a crisp white or black arrow (pl. 97). (That they are in the photographs at all is as much a matter of faith as the rest of the project; purporting to release something that is unseen in the final images, Ono’s piece can be compared to Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series from 1969.) The flies meander through the galleries, flitting near works by Picasso and Matisse, and

To what extent Ono, an antiwar, nonwhite feminist, might have sensed affinity or solidarity with these various causes is an open question, but it is nonetheless notable that her sandwich-board man came on the heels of this intense period of agitation at the foot of the Museum’s door, and thus the work is in dialogue with


JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

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eventually head out to the street, making appearances at public parks, churches, office buildings, bridges, empty lots, artists’ studios, and construction sites. Some of the images are off-kilter postcard views of New York, showing familiar sites, such as the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, the twin towers of the World Trade Center nearing completion. Others portray less “picture perfect” aspects of city life, with men sleeping on benches, graffiti, firefighters gathering at a crisis, and crowded shop windows on Canal Street and in Chinatown. One exceptional sequence of five photos focuses on a group of young boys posing with f ull awareness of the camera as they cluster around a wooden cross and mug for the lens (arrows directing us to the flies appear only in the last frame), but most pictures seem to have been taken candidly, unbeknownst to the people in them.

4. Jack Smith and Henry Flynt picketing in front of The Museum of Modern Art, 1963. Photograph: Tony Conrad

5. Yvonne Rainer, May Stevens, and Rudolf Baranik in The Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden during an Art Workers’ Coalition protest against the police action at Attica prison, 1971. Photograph: Jan van Raay

Each photo with an arrow is adjacent to a postcard that shows a detail of a fly (numbered), so that the viewer might send the fli es even further, beyond the bounds of the book. As Ono put it, “All the pages are postcards that you could mail, so the catalogue and Fly piece could fly al l over the place.”22 Given its varied affective tone, its persistent return to some l ocations, and its hybrid inclusion of everything from considered landscapes to intimate interiors to street snapshots, the photo book might be situated somewhat uneasily within what has been perceived to be the central rubric of conceptual photography, such as that of Douglas Huebler or Hans Haacke, in which the camera is used to record in as “straightforward” a manner as possible. 23 Yet now-dated assertions of the ostensible neutrality of the documentary image in conceptual photography have been challenged on multiple fronts (as if any image could be neutral), and Ono’s book, with its focus on mapping and spatiality, its pursuit of an arbitrary structure, and its inclusion of the graphic elements of the arrow and the postcard format, in fact emblematizes many of the themes and aesthetics of conceptual photography. Museum Of Modern (F)art calls to mind 100 Boots, the mail-art project begun by Eleanor Antin in 1971, in which a troupe of boots carried out an epic journey across the country. They went to work, went to war, went shopping, and more, and their adventures were documented in a series of postcards mailed to about a thousand recipients, culminating in 1973 when, en masse, the boots entered the front doors of—where else?—The Museum of Modern Art.

The overall tenor of Ono’s book is one of high and low mixing, in which the most refined sites are juxtaposed with some of the most ordinary, all of them marked by the presence of the common irritant, the fly. Not unlike farts, flies are often perceived as unhygienic; they are hallmarks of unsanitary conditions, swarming around refuse and transmitting disease. Yet Ono suggests that flies, with their compound eyes that see many perspectives at once, might be model viewers, offering a different scopic regime for confronting multifaceted art. In addition, the photos follow flies as they take a welcome, unpredictable path through the Museum—seeing paintings, yes, but also wandering through corridors. As the flies easily traverse the inside and the outside, they reveal the porousness of the Museum and the city.

6. Advertisement for Museum Of Modern (F)art taped to the Museum of Modern Art ticket window, 1971. From Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971 (pp. 208–13 in the present volume)

7. Two performers kidnapping a Trustee at The Museum of Modern Art as part of Marta Minuj í n’s Kidnappening, August 1973. Photograph: unknown

The penultimate photo (taken by Ono herself) is of a sleeping John Lennon, an arrow pointing to an invisible fly near his ear. The book concludes with a picture of the Museum’s ticket counter, where the Village Voice ad has been displayed with a handwritten addendum—“ THIS IS NOT HERE”—presumably affixed to the glass to set straight confused visitors coming to purchase admission for a show that was not on view (fig. 6). As Kevin Concannon comments, the statement itself could have contributed to the confusion, as the wording of Art echoes exactly the title of her thenrecent retrospective at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse.24 Ono’s exhibitionas-proposition forced the Museum into the awkward position of having to clarify what it was not doing. Her assertion that she belonged, and that her show could and should be in the Museum, resonated beyond New York and shared affinities with strategies pursued by other underrepresented artists, as when the Chicano collective Asco signed their names to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,


26

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eventually head out to the street, making appearances at public parks, churches, office buildings, bridges, empty lots, artists’ studios, and construction sites. Some of the images are off-kilter postcard views of New York, showing familiar sites, such as the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, the twin towers of the World Trade Center nearing completion. Others portray less “picture perfect” aspects of city life, with men sleeping on benches, graffiti, firefighters gathering at a crisis, and crowded shop windows on Canal Street and in Chinatown. One exceptional sequence of five photos focuses on a group of young boys posing with f ull awareness of the camera as they cluster around a wooden cross and mug for the lens (arrows directing us to the flies appear only in the last frame), but most pictures seem to have been taken candidly, unbeknownst to the people in them.

4. Jack Smith and Henry Flynt picketing in front of The Museum of Modern Art, 1963. Photograph: Tony Conrad

Each photo with an arrow is adjacent to a postcard that shows a detail of a fly (numbered), so that the viewer might send the fli es even further, beyond the bounds of the book. As Ono put it, “All the pages are postcards that you could mail, so the catalogue and Fly piece could fly al l over the place.”22 Given its varied affective tone, its persistent return to some l ocations, and its hybrid inclusion of everything from considered landscapes to intimate interiors to street snapshots, the photo book might be situated somewhat uneasily within what has been perceived to be the central rubric of conceptual photography, such as that of Douglas Huebler or Hans Haacke, in which the camera is used to record in as “straightforward” a manner as possible. 23 Yet now-dated assertions of the ostensible neutrality of the documentary image in conceptual photography have been challenged on multiple fronts (as if any image could be neutral), and Ono’s book, with its focus on mapping and spatiality, its pursuit of an arbitrary structure, and its inclusion of the graphic elements of the arrow and the postcard format, in fact emblematizes many of the themes and aesthetics of conceptual photography. Museum Of Modern (F)art calls to mind 100 Boots, the mail-art project begun by Eleanor Antin in 1971, in which a troupe of boots carried out an epic journey across the country. They went to work, went to war, went shopping, and more, and their adventures were documented in a series of postcards mailed to about a thousand recipients, culminating in 1973 when, en masse, the boots entered the front doors of—where else?—The Museum of Modern Art.

5. Yvonne Rainer, May Stevens, and Rudolf Baranik in The Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden during an Art Workers’ Coalition protest against the police action at Attica prison, 1971. Photograph: Jan van Raay

The overall tenor of Ono’s book is one of high and low mixing, in which the most refined sites are juxtaposed with some of the most ordinary, all of them marked by the presence of the common irritant, the fly. Not unlike farts, flies are often perceived as unhygienic; they are hallmarks of unsanitary conditions, swarming around refuse and transmitting disease. Yet Ono suggests that flies, with their compound eyes that see many perspectives at once, might be model viewers, offering a different scopic regime for confronting multifaceted art. In addition, the photos follow flies as they take a welcome, unpredictable path through the Museum—seeing paintings, yes, but also wandering through corridors. As the flies easily traverse the inside and the outside, they reveal the porousness of the Museum and the city.

6. Advertisement for Museum Of Modern (F)art taped to the Museum of Modern Art ticket window, 1971. From Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971 (pp. 208–13 in the present volume)

The penultimate photo (taken by Ono herself) is of a sleeping John Lennon, an arrow pointing to an invisible fly near his ear. The book concludes with a picture of the Museum’s ticket counter, where the Village Voice ad has been displayed with a handwritten addendum—“ THIS IS NOT HERE”—presumably affixed to the glass to set straight confused visitors coming to purchase admission for a show that was not on view (fig. 6). As Kevin Concannon comments, the statement itself could have contributed to the confusion, as the wording of Art echoes exactly the title of her thenrecent retrospective at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse.24 Ono’s exhibitionas-proposition forced the Museum into the awkward position of having to clarify what it was not doing. Her assertion that she belonged, and that her show could and should be in the Museum, resonated beyond New York and shared affinities with strategies pursued by other underrepresented artists, as when the Chicano collective Asco signed their names to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

7. Two performers kidnapping a Trustee at The Museum of Modern Art as part of Marta Minuj í n’s Kidnappening, August 1973. Photograph: unknown


28

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effectively appropriating the entire building as their own readymade Conceptual art piece, in Spray Paint LACMA (Project Pie in De/Face) (1972). FEMINISMS Ono was not alone in conceiving a feminist critique of art-world conventions and enacting it within the museum space itself. Mierle Laderman Ukeles carried out her Hartford Wash: Washing Tracks, Maintenance performance in 1973, laboring publicly to clean the floors and vitrines of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and thus drawing attention to the invisibility of women’s work both in the domestic sphere and elsewhere. That same year, Argentine artist Marta Minují n orchestrated her Kidnappening , in which preselected visitors at a Museum of Modern Art cocktail party were kidnapped by conspirators—whose faces were made-up to resemble those of Picasso’s Cubist figures—and taken to different locations (fig. 7). Ono has long been recognized as an important figure in both feminist and Concept ual art. Her work was included in the film program and catalogue for Information, the early survey of Conceptual art held at MoMA in 1970, and in the pioneering 1999 show Global Conceptualism, organized by the Queens Museum of Art. 25 The catalogue for the latter show mentions Ono as a forerunner in both Japan and the United States. 26 Ono moved between London, Japan, and the United States for decades (though she has been settled in New York since 1971); she is thus an interesting test case for Terry Smith’s proposition that “conceptualism was an outcome of some artists’ increas ed global mobility.” 27 However, though her work was formally and conceptually groundbreaking, she continues to be under-recognized as a significant influence on her contemporaries. Unlike most other artists, Ono had to contend with and respond to the special scrutiny of being thrust onto an international stage and subject to the harsh glare of the media spotlight. She was watched, admired, and despised in her many roles as artist, performer, musician, mother, and wife. 28 Art historian Joan Kee writes that “for women artists from Asia who exhibit in the US and Europe, the emphasis on the individual . . . results in the subordinati on of the work to a host of other concerns .” 29 In Ono’s case, the prominence of her personal story continues to outstrip attention to the work itself. Yet there is always something about Ono’s oeuvre that has not sat easily within canonical tales of contemporary art; perhaps it is her persistent interest in the unmentionable aspects of bodies, with their excesses and strangeness. In some of the most profound images of her at work, s he is sheathed in a bag, a shapeless and uncanny lump. First performed in 1964, it is Bag Piece (fig. 8, pp. 110–13) in all its iterations to which she has returned most frequently (its earliest incarnation was as a related work seen at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961). Bag Piece presents body as stuff, as matter, as a heap of meat that emerges from a sac and from then on must be tended to and cared for, that shits and laughs and cries until the end, when, in some instances (including, notably, war casualties), it ends up in a bag. It is here that her conception of t he body as a permeable bag is at its most evident.

8. Yoko Ono performing Bag Piece (1964) at the Peace for Christmas UNICEF concert, with John Lennon at the microphone, Lyceum Ballroom, London, December 15, 1969. Photograph: Ray Weaver

By focusing on rear ends, flies, and farts within the decorous space of the art institution, and asserting that her actions serve as a call for peace, Ono links her interest in sexual freedom and “body innocence” with larger issues of liberation. 30 She also scrambles temporalities by moving between a backward look to the what has been (the literally behind) and the potential of the what could be. In some respects, museums act as guarantors of history while also addressing themselves to and securing the future, holding a carefully selected narrative of the past within their walls to lend shape and meaning to the present. In the early 1970s, Ono and others sought to expose how flawed and incomplete such accounts of history are. Marrying the temporality of posterity with the materiality of the posterior, Ono created her own version of institutional critique informed by feminism, at a moment when both of these contested categories were being consolidated within the art world.


28

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effectively appropriating the entire building as their own readymade Conceptual art piece, in Spray Paint LACMA (Project Pie in De/Face) (1972). FEMINISMS Ono was not alone in conceiving a feminist critique of art-world conventions and enacting it within the museum space itself. Mierle Laderman Ukeles carried out her Hartford Wash: Washing Tracks, Maintenance performance in 1973, laboring publicly to clean the floors and vitrines of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and thus drawing attention to the invisibility of women’s work both in the domestic sphere and elsewhere. That same year, Argentine artist Marta Minují n orchestrated her Kidnappening , in which preselected visitors at a Museum of Modern Art cocktail party were kidnapped by conspirators—whose faces were made-up to resemble those of Picasso’s Cubist figures—and taken to different locations (fig. 7). Ono has long been recognized as an important figure in both feminist and Concept ual art. Her work was included in the film program and catalogue for Information, the early survey of Conceptual art held at MoMA in 1970, and in the pioneering 1999 show Global Conceptualism, organized by the Queens Museum of Art. 25 The catalogue for the latter show mentions Ono as a forerunner in both Japan and the United States. 26 Ono moved between London, Japan, and the United States for decades (though she has been settled in New York since 1971); she is thus an interesting test case for Terry Smith’s proposition that “conceptualism was an outcome of some artists’ increas ed global mobility.” 27 However, though her work was formally and conceptually groundbreaking, she continues to be under-recognized as a significant influence on her contemporaries. Unlike most other artists, Ono had to contend with and respond to the special scrutiny of being thrust onto an international stage and subject to the harsh glare of the media spotlight. She was watched, admired, and despised in her many roles as artist, performer, musician, mother, and wife. 28 Art historian Joan Kee writes that “for women artists from Asia who exhibit in the US and Europe, the emphasis on the individual . . . results in the subordinati on of the work to a host of other concerns .” 29 In Ono’s case, the prominence of her personal story continues to outstrip attention to the work itself. Yet there is always something about Ono’s oeuvre that has not sat easily within canonical tales of contemporary art; perhaps it is her persistent interest in the unmentionable aspects of bodies, with their excesses and strangeness. In some of the most profound images of her at work, s he is sheathed in a bag, a shapeless and uncanny lump. First performed in 1964, it is Bag Piece (fig. 8, pp. 110–13) in all its iterations to which she has returned most frequently (its earliest incarnation was as a related work seen at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961). Bag Piece presents body as stuff, as matter, as a heap of meat that emerges from a sac and from then on must be tended to and cared for, that shits and laughs and cries until the end, when, in some instances (including, notably, war casualties), it ends up in a bag. It is here that her conception of t he body as a permeable bag is at its most evident. By focusing on rear ends, flies, and farts within the decorous space of the art institution, and asserting that her actions serve as a call for peace, Ono links her interest in sexual freedom and “body innocence” with larger issues of liberation. 30 She also scrambles temporalities by moving between a backward look to the what has been (the literally behind) and the potential of the what could be. In some respects, museums act as guarantors of history while also addressing themselves to and securing the future, holding a carefully selected narrative of the past within their walls to lend shape and meaning to the present. In the early 1970s, Ono and others sought to expose how flawed and incomplete such accounts of history are. Marrying the temporality of posterity with the materiality of the posterior, Ono created her own version of institutional critique informed by feminism, at a moment when both of these contested categories were being consolidated within the art world.

8. Yoko Ono performing Bag Piece (1964) at the Peace for Christmas UNICEF concert, with John Lennon at the microphone, Lyceum Ballroom, London, December 15, 1969. Photograph: Ray Weaver


NOTES

1.

These sketches are found in her unpublished booklet “Yoko Ono, Title Wanted, One-Woman Show, guest arti st—John Lennon” (c. 1971), Lenono Archive, New York. Though not a radical antiwar group, UNICEF was widely respected for its humanitarian aid efforts, and Plastic Ono Band (pp. 194–97) had played at their Peace for Christmas benefit concert at the Lyceum Ballroom, London, in 1969. In 1971, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar partnered with UNICEF to organize the high-profile Concert for Bangladesh , held in August at Madison Square Garden, New York, benefiting refugee children and families fleeing the Bangladesh Liberation War. (Ono and John Lennon were not involved in the concert.) Attended by over forty thousand people, it is considered one of the most successful and influential benefits of its kind. The concert serves as a reminder that activist efforts for peace in the early 1970s were not focused solely on the war in Vietnam, but also on other conflicts around the globe. See Chrissie Iles, “Erotic Conceptualism:The Films of Yoko Ono,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendric ks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 200 –207. Yoko Ono, “On Film No.Four,” in Thirteen Film Scores by Yoko Ono,London,’68 , reprinted in Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions (London: Peter Owen, 1970), n.p.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

Mignon Ni xon, “After Images,” October 83 (Winter 1998): 114.

Sigmund Freud,“Theories of Development and Regression: Etiology,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysi s , trans. G. Stanley Hall (New York: H. Liveright, 1920), p. 297. Julia Kristeva, “Les Temps des Femmes,” 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de Sciences des textes et documents , no. 5 (Winter 1979): 5–19. Kristeva notes at the outset of her essay that her thoughts on different conceptions of temporality within several generations of the feminist movement are specific to European women, but they also resonate beyond her expressed purview. For more on the complex feminist valences of Cut Piece as performed by Ono, see my “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 99–123. As recently as 1992, Ono “couldn’t sell the book anywhere” and so had “piles” of them still lying around. Yoko Ono, quoted in Scott MacDonald, “Yoko Ono,” A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 154. Ono’s book has since become a sought-after collector’s item; as of this writing, it retails on e-commerce sites for around $1,000 per copy.

10. “The Message the Sandwichman Carried in Front of the Museum from 9 to 6 Everyday of t he Show,” in Yoko Ono, Museum Of Modern (F)art (self-published, New York, 1971), n.p. 11. Letter to Yoko Ono, December 6,1971 , in the Lenono Archive, New York. 12. List of responses sent to Yoko Ono, December 6, 1971, in the Lenono Archive, New York. 13. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists i n New York (Rutgers, New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 85. 14. Hendrik Hertzberg, “A Reporter at Large: Poetic Larks Bid Bald Eagle Welcome Swan of Liverpool,” NewYorker 48, no. 42 (December 9, 1972): 141. 15. For a comprehensive overview of Ono’s use of advertising, see Kevin Concannon, “Nothing IsReal: Yoko Ono’s Advertising Art,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, pp. 176–81. For more on magazines and newspapers as a display structure in Conceptual art, see Anne Rorimer, “Siting the Page: Exhibiting Work in Publications—Some Examples of Conceptual Art in the USA,” in Michael Newman and Jon Bird, eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 11–26.

16. For more on Piper’s advertisements, see John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender,and Embodi ment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 17. See Scott Rothkopf, “Banned and Determined,” Artforum 40, no. 10 (Summer 2002): 142–45, 194. 18. Hilton Kramer, “The National Gallery Is Growing: Risks and Promises,” New York Times, June 9, 1974. 19. Yoko Ono, “The Feminiz ation of Society,” New York Times, February 23, 1972. In this text, a revised version of which appears in the present catalogue (pp. 217–18), she calls on the feminist movement to transform itself into “a serious revolution” and discusses lesbianism, the gendered division of domestic labor, and the “performance” of childcare. For a close reading of “Rape” as both enacting and troubling an exploitative cinematic gaze, see Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific AvantGarde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 117–40. 20. The year 1971 also saw the publication of Linda Nochlin’s classic feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Art News 69, no. 9 (January 1971): 22–39.

21. Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970,” Art Hi story 1, no. 2 (June 1978): 245. 22. Yoko Ono, quoted in MacDonald, “Yoko Ono,” p. 154. 23. For one refutation of this assessment vis- à-vis Huebler, see Gordon Hughes, “Exit Ghost: D ouglas Huebler’s Face Value,” in Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, eds., Photography After Conceptual Art (Oxford, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2010), pp. 70–85. Five photographs laid out sequentially in Ono’s book depict the facades of New York apartment buildings and bear a formal resemblance to the photos in Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,A Real-Time Social System,as of May 1,1971 , from 1971. 24. Kevin Concannon, “Museum of Modern [F]art,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 194. 25. See Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 106. 26. See Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” and Peter Wollen, “Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999). 27. Terry Smith, “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” e-flux 29 (2011); available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/one-and-three-ideasconceptualism-before-during-and-after-conceptual-art/. 28. For a nuanced take on how to measure the methodological weight of Ono’s biography, see Kristine Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience,” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–52. 29. Joan Kee, “What Is Feminist about Contemporary Asian Women’s Art?,” in Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art

(New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2007), p. 117. 30. For more on Ono’s “body innocenc e,” see Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt, Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith Books, 1991), pp. 98–105.

30

31


A photograph shows Yoko Ono standing at the center of The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden. Beside her on the ground is a large glass jar teeming with black flies and a few drops of Ono’s perfume, Ma Griffe. In the next image Ono is absent and the jar is almost empty, as the flies dissipate into the environment (pl. 96). These two photographs were published in a catalogue for the artist’s 1971 exhibition Museum Of Modern (F)art at MoMA, a show that in fact never happened—at least not in any conventional sense. Ono had advertised the show in The Village Voice and the New York Times , and some people even traveled to the Museum to see the art of this already widely recognized avant-garde figure. Yet the exhibition was a conceptual artwork by Ono—no pieces by her were on view in the galleries, and the show was not sanctioned by the Museum. The photographs of the flies being released in the Sculpture Garden were not straight documentary images but photomontages; Ono’s figure, for instance, had been cut out from a photograph published in another exhibition catalogue five years earlier, and had been collaged by Ono into the garden setting. 1 The 1971 self-published catalogue also contained photographs, taken throughout the Museum and New York City, on which superimposed arrows indicated spots where flies had supposedly landed. A few short texts by Ono described her work and indicated that readers could chart the progress of the flies in a list, or could cut out postcards from the book to send to their friends. More than four decades after Ono carried out her conceptual project, she has now been given a solo exhibition at the Museum, focusing on the period between 1960 and the year of her conceptual show. Ono’s art from this period is run through with a complex interplay between her own absence and presence. At times, she created purely conceptual works, such as her instruction pieces, which are often just that—instructions that can be executed by whoever reads them. She kept these texts free of her hand—typing them or having them handwritten by someone else—and their enactments do not necessarily require her to be present, or can be enacted in one’s imagination. Performance, as an art medium, often requires an artist’s physical presence as part of its meaning and effects; even here, though, Ono’s landmark 1964 works included performances as different as Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), to which her appearance was initially central, and Bag Piece (pp. 110–13), in which she was present but hidden in a bag, and which can also be performed by other people. Over time, Ono was able to turn her complex handling of artistic presence and absence into a sophisticated treatment of a public image, which allowed her to reach a broad audience with her artistic and political messages. By the early 1950s, Ono had come up with a radically different form of expression. Her earliest conceptual artworks were instruction pieces, which, drawing inspiration from music, separated scores from performances. Rather than putting her own self at the center of the artwork, Ono wrote instructions that could be interpreted by anyone, even in her absence. Ono recalls making her first conceptual piece in the backyard of her parents’ house in Scarsdale in 1953. She remembered a musical composition exercise that she had been given in kindergarten in Japan, and it became her habit to


NOTES

1.

These sketches are found in her unpublished booklet “Yoko Ono, Title Wanted, One-Woman Show, guest arti st—John Lennon” (c. 1971), Lenono Archive, New York. Though not a radical antiwar group, UNICEF was widely respected for its humanitarian aid efforts, and Plastic Ono Band (pp. 194–97) had played at their Peace for Christmas benefit concert at the Lyceum Ballroom, London, in 1969. In 1971, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar partnered with UNICEF to organize the high-profile Concert for Bangladesh , held in August at Madison Square Garden, New York, benefiting refugee children and families fleeing the Bangladesh Liberation War. (Ono and John Lennon were not involved in the concert.) Attended by over forty thousand people, it is considered one of the most successful and influential benefits of its kind. The concert serves as a reminder that activist efforts for peace in the early 1970s were not focused solely on the war in Vietnam, but also on other conflicts around the globe. See Chrissie Iles, “Erotic Conceptualism:The Films of Yoko Ono,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendric ks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 200 –207. Yoko Ono, “On Film No.Four,” in Thirteen Film Scores by Yoko Ono,London,’68 , reprinted in Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions (London: Peter Owen, 1970), n.p.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

Mignon Ni xon, “After Images,” October 83 (Winter 1998): 114.

Sigmund Freud,“Theories of Development and Regression: Etiology,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysi s , trans. G. Stanley Hall (New York: H. Liveright, 1920), p. 297. Julia Kristeva, “Les Temps des Femmes,” 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de Sciences des textes et documents , no. 5 (Winter 1979): 5–19. Kristeva notes at the outset of her essay that her thoughts on different conceptions of temporality within several generations of the feminist movement are specific to European women, but they also resonate beyond her expressed purview. For more on the complex feminist valences of Cut Piece as performed by Ono, see my “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 99–123. As recently as 1992, Ono “couldn’t sell the book anywhere” and so had “piles” of them still lying around. Yoko Ono, quoted in Scott MacDonald, “Yoko Ono,” A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 154. Ono’s book has since become a sought-after collector’s item; as of this writing, it retails on e-commerce sites for around $1,000 per copy.

10. “The Message the Sandwichman Carried in Front of the Museum from 9 to 6 Everyday of t he Show,” in Yoko Ono, Museum Of Modern (F)art (self-published, New York, 1971), n.p. 11. Letter to Yoko Ono, December 6,1971 , in the Lenono Archive, New York. 12. List of responses sent to Yoko Ono, December 6, 1971, in the Lenono Archive, New York. 13. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists i n New York (Rutgers, New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 85. 14. Hendrik Hertzberg, “A Reporter at Large: Poetic Larks Bid Bald Eagle Welcome Swan of Liverpool,” NewYorker 48, no. 42 (December 9, 1972): 141. 15. For a comprehensive overview of Ono’s use of advertising, see Kevin Concannon, “Nothing IsReal: Yoko Ono’s Advertising Art,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, pp. 176–81. For more on magazines and newspapers as a display structure in Conceptual art, see Anne Rorimer, “Siting the Page: Exhibiting Work in Publications—Some Examples of Conceptual Art in the USA,” in Michael Newman and Jon Bird, eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 11–26.

30

31

16. For more on Piper’s advertisements, see John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender,and Embodi ment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 17. See Scott Rothkopf, “Banned and Determined,” Artforum 40, no. 10 (Summer 2002): 142–45, 194. 18. Hilton Kramer, “The National Gallery Is Growing: Risks and Promises,” New York Times, June 9, 1974. 19. Yoko Ono, “The Feminiz ation of Society,” New York Times, February 23, 1972. In this text, a revised version of which appears in the present catalogue (pp. 217–18), she calls on the feminist movement to transform itself into “a serious revolution” and discusses lesbianism, the gendered division of domestic labor, and the “performance” of childcare. For a close reading of “Rape” as both enacting and troubling an exploitative cinematic gaze, see Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific AvantGarde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 117–40. 20. The year 1971 also saw the publication of Linda Nochlin’s


A photograph shows Yoko Ono standing at the center of The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden. Beside her on the ground is a large glass jar teeming with black flies and a few drops of Ono’s perfume, Ma Griffe. In the next image Ono is absent and the jar is almost empty, as the flies dissipate into the environment (pl. 96). These two photographs were published in a catalogue for the artist’s 1971 exhibition Museum Of Modern (F)art at MoMA, a show that in fact never happened—at least not in any conventional sense. Ono had advertised the show in The Village Voice and the New York Times , and some people even traveled to the Museum to see the art of this already widely recognized avant-garde figure. Yet

classic feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Art News 69, no. 9 (January 1971): 22–39.

21. Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970,” Art Hi story 1, no. 2 (June 1978): 245. 22. Yoko Ono, quoted in MacDonald, “Yoko Ono,” p. 154. 23. For one refutation of this assessment vis- à-vis Huebler, see Gordon Hughes, “Exit Ghost: D ouglas Huebler’s Face Value,” in Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, eds., Photography After Conceptual Art (Oxford, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2010), pp. 70–85. Five photographs laid out sequentially in Ono’s book depict the facades of New York apartment buildings and bear a formal resemblance to the photos in Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,A Real-Time Social System,as of May 1,1971 , from 1971. 24. Kevin Concannon, “Museum of Modern [F]art,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 194. 25. See Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 106. 26. See Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” and Peter Wollen, “Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999). 27. Terry Smith, “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” e-flux 29 (2011); available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/one-and-three-ideasconceptualism-before-during-and-after-conceptual-art/. 28. For a nuanced take on how to measure the methodological weight of Ono’s biography, see Kristine Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience,” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–52. 29. Joan Kee, “What Is Feminist about Contemporary Asian Women’s Art?,” in Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds.,

the exhibition was a conceptual artwork by Ono—no pieces by her were on view in the galleries, and the show was not sanctioned by the Museum. The photographs of the flies being released in the Sculpture Garden were not straight documentary images but photomontages; Ono’s figure, for instance, had been cut out from a photograph published in another exhibition catalogue five years earlier, and had been collaged by Ono into the garden setting. 1 The 1971 self-published catalogue also contained photographs, taken throughout the Museum and New York City, on which superimposed arrows indicated spots where flies had supposedly landed. A few short texts by Ono described her work and indicated that readers could chart the progress of the flies in a list, or could cut out postcards from the book to send to their friends. More than four decades after Ono carried out her conceptual project, she has now been given a solo exhibition at the Museum, focusing on the period between 1960 and the year of her conceptual show. Ono’s art from this period is run through with a complex interplay between her own absence and presence. At times, she created purely conceptual works, such as her instruction pieces, which are often just that—instructions that can be executed by whoever reads them. She kept these texts free of her hand—typing them or having them handwritten by someone else—and their enactments do not necessarily require her to be present, or can be enacted in one’s imagination. Performance, as an art medium, often requires an artist’s physical presence as part of its meaning and effects; even here, though, Ono’s landmark 1964 works included performances as different as Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), to which her appearance was initially central, and Bag Piece (pp. 110–13), in which she was present but hidden in a bag, and which can also be performed by other people. Over time, Ono was able to turn her complex handling of artistic presence and absence into a sophisticated treatment of a public image, which allowed her to reach a broad audience with her artistic and political messages.

Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art

(New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2007), p. 117. 30. For more on Ono’s “body innocenc e,” see Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt, Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith Books, 1991), pp. 98–105.

ABSENCE AND PRESENCE IN YOKO ONO’S WORK

By the early 1950s, Ono had come up with a radically different form of expression. Her earliest conceptual artworks were instruction pieces, which, drawing inspiration from music, separated scores from performances. Rather than putting her own self at the center of the artwork, Ono wrote instructions that could be interpreted by anyone, even in her absence. Ono recalls making her first conceptual piece in the backyard of her parents’ house in Scarsdale in 1953. She remembered a musical composition exercise that she had been given in kindergarten in Japan, and it became her habit to

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translate sounds into musical notes. She soon realized, however, that the complicated patterns that she heard could never be captured exactly. Confronted with the beauty of experience, she felt, “You don’t have to transpose. There is another way of doing it.” 2 Ono would write many instruction works over the coming years, assembling them in 1964 in the book Grapefruit (pp. 100–5), which served as a kind of portable museum of her artwork to date. Beginning in 1970, new editions of the book ran into the hundreds of thousands of copies and were widely distributed. The instructions in the book’s first edition are difficult to characterize; some are relatively straightforward to carry out, others are more enigmatic, and suggest the artist’s emotional life. Hinting at her complex relationship to notions of presence and absence, to revealing versus concealing, Mask Piece I instructs: Make a mask larger than your face. Polish the mask every day. In the morning, wash the mask instead of your face. When somebody wants to kiss you, let the person kiss the mask instead. —1961 winter Mask Piece I is about more than the enacting of an instruction: it speaks to the notion of persona, alluding to the distance between a person/artist and the public image that she or he performs. As such, it predicts Ono’s work as she went on to become a globally recognized figure, developing a fame and stature that allowed her to disseminate her ideas more widely.

Around the time Ono wrote Mask Piece I, she made her own presence and voice a crucial part of her performance work. Her first solo concert was held at Carnegie Recital Hall in November 1961 (pp. 68–69). Consisting of a series of pieces, the evening combined music, theater, improvisation, movement, and poetry. A few days before the event, Ono noticed a professional Nagra tape recorder in the office of the concert’s producer, Norman Seaman. With his permission, she used it to record short segments of her vocalized poetry. The tape deck produced some unexpected sounds, which she decided to pursue further, manipulating the machine. “For some reason,” she said, “I turned it around so that . . . the ta pe was going backwards, in reverse. . . . I t hought, this is so beautiful, I better copy this.”3 In the concert, Ono layered the resulting recording over poetry that she read live into a mic rophone, creati ng a texture of “mumbled words and wild lau ghter.” 4 This interaction of Ono’s live voice and her recorded voice served to merge her physical presence with a more conceptual, and physically absent, version of herself—a mediated self, though one carried by her own, recognizable voice and no one else’s. Composers such as Richard Maxfield and John Cage had used tape recordings, but Ono was unique in combining technology with expressive vocalization.5 She explained that in her musical output she always aimed to reach “a pure, spiritual sound . . . [that] goes beyond music in a way. . . . I was always thinking in terms of inner s truggle and creating things that are interesting because of that inner stru ggle.” 6

1. Images from Yoko Ono’s Instagram account, @yokoonoofficial. 2012–15. Photographs: Studio One

Ono began to attract more public attention with the Carnegie Recital Hall concert, receiving reviews in the mainstream New York press. 7 In 1962, she moved back to Japan, where she would stay for the next 2 1/2 years. She conceived many of her most iconic performance works during this period, including Bag Piece and Cut Piece, which she publicly debuted in a solo concert in July 1964 at Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto.


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translate sounds into musical notes. She soon realized, however, that the complicated patterns that she heard could never be captured exactly. Confronted with the beauty of experience, she felt, “You don’t have to transpose. There is another way of doing it.” 2 Ono would write many instruction works over the coming years, assembling them in 1964 in the book Grapefruit (pp. 100–5), which served as a kind of portable museum of her artwork to date. Beginning in 1970, new editions of the book ran into the hundreds of thousands of copies and were widely distributed. The instructions in the book’s first edition are difficult to characterize; some are relatively straightforward to carry out, others are more enigmatic, and suggest the artist’s emotional life. Hinting at her complex relationship to notions of presence and absence, to revealing versus concealing, Mask Piece I instructs: Make a mask larger than your face. Polish the mask every day. In the morning, wash the mask instead of your face. When somebody wants to kiss you, let the person kiss the mask instead. —1961 winter Mask Piece I is about more than the enacting of an instruction: it speaks to the notion of persona, alluding to the distance between a person/artist and the public image that she or he performs. As such, it predicts Ono’s work as she went on to become a globally recognized figure, developing a fame and stature that allowed her to disseminate her ideas more widely.

Around the time Ono wrote Mask Piece I, she made her own presence and voice a crucial part of her performance work. Her first solo concert was held at Carnegie Recital Hall in November 1961 (pp. 68–69). Consisting of a series of pieces, the evening combined music, theater, improvisation, movement, and poetry. A few days before the event, Ono noticed a professional Nagra tape recorder in the office of the concert’s producer, Norman Seaman. With his permission, she used it to record short segments of her vocalized poetry. The tape deck produced some unexpected sounds, which she decided to pursue further, manipulating the machine. “For some reason,” she said, “I turned it around so that . . . the ta pe was going backwards, in reverse. . . . I t hought, this is so beautiful, I better copy this.”3 In the concert, Ono layered the resulting recording over poetry that she read live into a mic rophone, creati ng a texture of “mumbled words and wild lau ghter.” 4 This interaction of Ono’s live voice and her recorded voice served to merge her physical presence with a more conceptual, and physically absent, version of herself—a mediated self, though one carried by her own, recognizable voice and no one else’s. Composers such as Richard Maxfield and John Cage had used tape recordings, but Ono was unique in combining technology with expressive vocalization.5 She explained that in her musical output she always aimed to reach “a pure, spiritual sound . . . [that] goes beyond music in a way. . . . I was always thinking in terms of inner s truggle and creating things that are interesting because of that inner stru ggle.” 6 Ono began to attract more public attention with the Carnegie Recital Hall concert, receiving reviews in the mainstream New York press. 7 In 1962, she moved back to Japan, where she would stay for the next 2 1/2 years. She conceived many of her most iconic performance works during this period, including Bag Piece and Cut Piece, which she publicly debuted in a solo concert in July 1964 at Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto.

1. Images from Yoko Ono’s Instagram account, @yokoonoofficial. 2012–15. Photographs: Studio One


Although Ono treated these works like musical scores, varying them with each performance, a persistent theme was a contrast between the artist’s absence and her presence. Bag Piece emphasizes a sense of hiding, of wanting not to be visible, and also a sense of humor. For the Kyoto performance, Ono and her then husband, Anthony Cox, went onstage carrying a large black bag and got inside. For several minutes, the audience viewed a dark lumbering form, as the performers appeared to be removing their clothes inside the bag and then putting them back on. Finally, they climbed out, looking more ruffled than they had before entering the bag, and walked silently offstage. Although some sort of transformation had taken place in front of the audience, its exact nature was unclear, as it was concealed from view. At the opposite end of the spectrum that evening was Cut Piece, which was completely dependent on Ono’s visible presence. Kneeling at the center of the stage, Ono set a pair of scissors on the floor in front of her. The audience was instructed to come onstage, one by one, and cut off a piece of her black clothing. Each person was permitted to keep his or her scrap of fabric. Powerful ideas were made relatable through the sound of the cold metal scissors, the starkness of Ono’s body, and the touch of fabric held in the pocket as a reminder of the act. 8 For Ono, her physical body itself contributed a layer of meaning to Cut Piece. She recently said of the 1964 performance of the work, “I was very aware that I was not in my best condition, bodily, and I thought that was good, you know, instead of showing very ‘beautiful me’ or something. I was there, a woman, who already had a baby.” 9 Ono realized the work several times over the next three years. She would recall, I went onto the stage wearing the best suit I had. To think that it would be OK to use the cheapest clothes because it was going to be cut anyway would be wrong; it’s against my intentions. I was poor at the time, and it was hard. This event I repeated in several different places, and my wardrobe got smaller and smaller. However, when I sat on stage in front of the audience, I felt that this was my genuine contribution. 10 This stunning act of offering up her best clothes and being absolutely bodily present—contributing her own self to the work—stands in contrast to the conceptual and free-flowing instruction pieces and to a work like Bag Piece, the one relying on the artist’s presence, the others on a kind of absence. Cut Piece, though, has since taken various forms, with Ono encouraging other people to carry it out. The artist and musician Charlotte Moorman performed the work from the 1960s into the ’90s. Others, including men, have performed it as well, the work changing each time depending on the context—just like a piece of music. In such cases, the artist herself is absent, but the work remains powerful. 11 Ono encouraged the spread of her performance works by engaging with the press. The transformation, rumor, and commentary that press coverage facilitated gave her pieces a life beyond the moments when they were performed. Albert and David Maysles filmed Ono’s performance of Cut Piece in her second concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, on March 21, 1965. In 2003, Ono herself performed Cut Piece again, in Paris, for the first time since the 1960s. A full-page advertisement in the newspaper Libération, written by Ono, explained the work in the context of the global conflict in the wake of 9/11. 12 She explained more recently, “I thought it was good to show that an artist can be serious about it, that an artist can put their life . . . on the table.” 13 A significant change between Ono’s 1960s performances of Cut Piece and her 2003 performance was the immense growth in her global fame, and the vulnerability that came with it.

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Through the modern media, Ono’s complex approach to issues of presence and absence grew into a sophisticated handling of a public image, which allowed her to advance her artistic and political messages. Her access to the press, and the growth of her persona, were enhanced by her relationship with John Lennon. Ono first met Lennon at the Indica Gallery, London, on November 8, 1966, while preparing for the opening of her solo show there the following day. Lennon sponsored Ono’s next exhibition, at the Lisson Gallery, London, from October to November 1967, even contributing an idea to the project. By 1968, the two had become romantic and artistic partners. Ono encouraged Lennon to pursue artmaking, and in July 1968 he opened his first exhibition, You Are Here, at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London. Ono recently recalled the experience of press exposure at the opening: There were fifty or so reporters, and I thought we were just going to go to the back room. But he said, “No, we will just stand here and let them take photos.” . . . I think avant-garde artists, maybe hypocritically, would just take the position that they would ignore the journalists . . . And I thought that John is such a big person, he is certainly not going to accommodate, but that’s what he did. And I thought, “That’s what you do, that’s very interesting.” 14 Although Ono has always had a layered and thoughtful relationship to her public image, her collaborations and relationship with Lennon challenged her previous approach. She notes, “I didn’t think of myself as an image. John was an image. And I thought, . . . it’s good to show that a woman is there too.”15 The media became a useful element in Ono and Lennon’s collaborations. In 1969, they staged two widely reported week-long events that they called Bed-Ins (pp. 198–99), employing music, humor, and other means to protest the war in Vietnam. The first of these events took place at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, in March, shortly after the artists’ wedding. Reporters from around the world were invited into the couple’s honeymoon suite and attended gladly, perhaps expecting some scandal; instead they were asked to participate in a conversation about peace. Lennon explained the tactic: We did the Bed-In in Amsterdam just to give people the idea that there are many ways of protest. . . . Protest for peace in any way, but peacefully, ’cause we think that peace is only got by peaceful methods, and that to fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good because they always win, and they’ve been winning for thousands of years. They know how to play the game of violence. But they don’t know how to handle humor, and peaceful humor— and that’s our message really. 16 During the Bed-Ins, the couple began to discuss new ways in which to use their global celebrity for social causes. One result came in December 1969, when they initiated Ono’s idea of the WAR IS OVER! advertising campaign (pp. 200–203): like the name of an international product brand, the phrase “WAR IS OVER!,” with “IF YOU WANT IT” in smaller type below, appeared in twelve cities around the world, through posters, billboards, newspaper advertisements, and fliers. An airplane was even hired to write the message in smoke in the sky above Toronto, in advance of a press conference there that month. Ono continues to use a variety of commercial advertising spaces as a medium.17 While Lennon may have increased Ono’s access to press outlets, it is important to recognize that she employed the media before her encounter with the famous Beatle. In the summer and fall of 1966, for example, in three consecutive issues


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35

Although Ono treated these works like musical scores, varying them with each performance, a persistent theme was a contrast between the artist’s absence and her presence. Bag Piece emphasizes a sense of hiding, of wanting not to be visible, and also a sense of humor. For the Kyoto performance, Ono and her then husband, Anthony Cox, went onstage carrying a large black bag and got inside. For several minutes, the audience viewed a dark lumbering form, as the performers appeared to be removing their clothes inside the bag and then putting them back on. Finally, they climbed out, looking more ruffled than they had before entering the bag, and walked silently offstage. Although some sort of transformation had taken place in front of the audience, its exact nature was unclear, as it was concealed from view.

Through the modern media, Ono’s complex approach to issues of presence and absence grew into a sophisticated handling of a public image, which allowed her to advance her artistic and political messages. Her access to the press, and the growth of her persona, were enhanced by her relationship with John Lennon. Ono first met Lennon at the Indica Gallery, London, on November 8, 1966, while preparing for the opening of her solo show there the following day. Lennon sponsored Ono’s next exhibition, at the Lisson Gallery, London, from October to November 1967, even contributing an idea to the project. By 1968, the two had become romantic and artistic partners. Ono encouraged Lennon to pursue artmaking, and in July 1968 he opened his first exhibition, You Are Here, at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London. Ono recently recalled the experience of press exposure at the opening:

At the opposite end of the spectrum that evening was Cut Piece, which was completely dependent on Ono’s visible presence. Kneeling at the center of the stage, Ono set a pair of scissors on the floor in front of her. The audience was instructed to come onstage, one by one, and cut off a piece of her black clothing. Each person was permitted to keep his or her scrap of fabric. Powerful ideas were made relatable through the sound of the cold metal scissors, the starkness of Ono’s body, and the touch of fabric held in the pocket as a reminder of the act. 8

There were fifty or so reporters, and I thought we were just going to go to the back room. But he said, “No, we will just stand here and let them take photos.” . . . I think avant-garde artists, maybe hypocritically, would just take the position that they would ignore the journalists . . . And I thought that John is such a big person, he is certainly not going to accommodate, but that’s what he did. And I thought, “That’s what you do, that’s very interesting.” 14

For Ono, her physical body itself contributed a layer of meaning to Cut Piece. She recently said of the 1964 performance of the work, “I was very aware that I was not in my best condition, bodily, and I thought that was good, you know, instead of showing very ‘beautiful me’ or something. I was there, a woman, who already had a baby.” 9 Ono realized the work several times over the next three years. She would recall,

Although Ono has always had a layered and thoughtful relationship to her public image, her collaborations and relationship with Lennon challenged her previous approach. She notes, “I didn’t think of myself as an image. John was an image. And I thought, . . . it’s good to show that a woman is there too.”15

I went onto the stage wearing the best suit I had. To think that it would be OK to use the cheapest clothes because it was going to be cut anyway would be wrong; it’s against my intentions. I was poor at the time, and it was hard. This event I repeated in several different places, and my wardrobe got smaller and smaller. However, when I sat on stage in front of the audience, I felt that this was my genuine contribution. 10

The media became a useful element in Ono and Lennon’s collaborations. In 1969, they staged two widely reported week-long events that they called Bed-Ins (pp. 198–99), employing music, humor, and other means to protest the war in Vietnam. The first of these events took place at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, in March, shortly after the artists’ wedding. Reporters from around the world were invited into the couple’s honeymoon suite and attended gladly, perhaps expecting some scandal; instead they were asked to participate in a conversation about peace. Lennon explained the tactic:

This stunning act of offering up her best clothes and being absolutely bodily present—contributing her own self to the work—stands in contrast to the conceptual and free-flowing instruction pieces and to a work like Bag Piece, the one relying on the artist’s presence, the others on a kind of absence. Cut Piece, though, has since taken various forms, with Ono encouraging other people to carry it out. The artist and musician Charlotte Moorman performed the work from the 1960s into the ’90s. Others, including men, have performed it as well, the work changing each time depending on the context—just like a piece of music. In such cases, the artist herself is absent, but the work remains powerful. 11

We did the Bed-In in Amsterdam just to give people the idea that there are many ways of protest. . . . Protest for peace in any way, but peacefully, ’cause we think that peace is only got by peaceful methods, and that to fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good because they always win, and they’ve been winning for thousands of years. They know how to play the game of violence. But they don’t know how to handle humor, and peaceful humor— and that’s our message really. 16

Ono encouraged the spread of her performance works by engaging with the press. The transformation, rumor, and commentary that press coverage facilitated gave her pieces a life beyond the moments when they were performed. Albert and David Maysles filmed Ono’s performance of Cut Piece in her second concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, on March 21, 1965.

During the Bed-Ins, the couple began to discuss new ways in which to use their global celebrity for social causes. One result came in December 1969, when they initiated Ono’s idea of the WAR IS OVER! advertising campaign (pp. 200–203): like the name of an international product brand, the phrase “WAR IS OVER!,” with “IF YOU WANT IT” in smaller type below, appeared in twelve cities around the world, through posters, billboards, newspaper advertisements, and fliers. An airplane was even hired to write the message in smoke in the sky above Toronto, in advance of a press conference there that month. Ono continues to use a variety of commercial advertising spaces as a medium.17

In 2003, Ono herself performed Cut Piece again, in Paris, for the first time since the 1960s. A full-page advertisement in the newspaper Libération, written by Ono, explained the work in the context of the global conflict in the wake of 9/11. 12 She explained more recently, “I thought it was good to show that an artist can be serious about it, that an artist can put their life . . . on the table.” 13 A significant change between Ono’s 1960s performances of Cut Piece and her 2003 performance was the immense growth in her global fame, and the vulnerability that came with it.


KLAUS BIESENBACH

While Lennon may have increased Ono’s access to press outlets, it is important to recognize that she employed the media before her encounter with the famous Beatle. In the summer and fall of 1966, for example, in three consecutive issues

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of the London-based arts periodical Art and Artists, she placed among the gallery listings small, humorous instruction pieces encouraging readers to engage in playful actions—“Go to Eros fountain and throw in all your jewelleries,” for example. 18 Ono is now the most publicly visible of the 1960s generation of experimental artists. At the time of writing, she has 4.72 million Twitter followers. Since her first post on Instagram, on May 12, 2012, she has developed a strik ing visual signature there: in many of her posts she is shown from the back, in silhouette (recalling her image on the 1964 poster for Three Kyoto Events), wearing one of her characteristic hats (fig. 1). Ono says that her assistant took the first of these photographs without her knowledge, but she allowed him to continue to record these moments, as they are a new realization of her 1961 Hide Piece. From 1968 onward, Ono and Lennon collaborated on musical productions that merged Ono’s conceptual art and radical politics with her and Lennon’s musical sensibilities and celebrity appeal. In the words of cultural critic J örg Heiser, the collaborations “transformed experimental avant-garde improvisation into a pop product.” 19 Released in November 1968, and titled by Ono Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, their debut album together was edited from recordings produced in a single night of loosely structured experimentation. Lennon seems to uncover new guitar tonalities that respond to and interweave with Ono’s primal vocal sounds. The album-cover photograph depicts the couple facing the camera naked, at each other’s side, while the back cover shows them from the rear, again naked. The images and album title convey a sense of innocence; conceptually they also recall Ono’s Cut Piece and Bag Piece, which toyed with the idea of the striptease and the audience’s expectation of bare flesh. In fact, after censorship issues arose over the pair’s nudity, the album had to be covered by a brown paper wrapper—a small hole revealing the faces of the “two virgins” and the title—providing a further, serendipitous collision with Bag Piece, as well as wi th Lennon and Ono’s idea of “Bagism,” which proposed that everyone should wear a bag over themselves, circumventing potential prejudices and allowing people to listen to one another better.

In 1968–69, Ono and Lennon created the Plastic Ono Band, based on her idea of a conceptual band (pp. 194–97). With this idea in mind, Lennon made a small model that included a cassette case, the plastic cover of a vinyl-record cleaning brush, and other domestic plastic objects, as if the plastic objects were replacing the musicians, like robots replacing human beings. The single “Give Peace a Chance”—written by Lennon and Ono during the 1969 Bed-In in Montreal—was released under the Plastic Ono Band name and became an antiwar anthem. The song was among those performed at a December 1969 benefit concert in London for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) titled “Peace for Christmas,” which launched Ono’s and Lennon’s WAR IS OVER! campaign. Here, Ono and Lennon coordinated a large group of musician friends to perform under the name Plastic Ono Supergroup.20 The stage was decked with posters displaying their WAR IS OVER! message, which was also printed on a huge fabric backdrop to the stage. The event pioneered the now familiar form of the benefit concert with a social message. The Plastic Ono Band’s first studio albums were released in 1970 and titled Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band and John Lennon/Pl astic Ono Band. The cover photo on Ono’s album s hows the artist sitting under a tree in Lennon’s arms. Lennon’s album cover had an almost identical photograph, but with the figures reversed. In 1971 Lennon and Ono coproduced the biggest hit of Lennon’s solo career, the song “Imagine” (pl. 85), inspired by Ono’s concept of “imagine” in her work. The importance of the song as a message for peace and hope cannot be overestimated, and it has taken on new meanings in the context of later global conflicts. The first incarnation of the Plastic Ono Band came to an end in 1974. Through the rest of the decade, Ono continued to create music on her own and with Lennon. In December 1980, the pair were collaborating on the song “Walking

2. A Story . Recorded 1974–75, released 1997. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Rykodisc (est. 1983) 3. Season of Glass. 1981. Vinyl LP, 12 3 ⁄ 8 x 12 3 ⁄ 8" (31.4 x 31.4 cm). Geffen Records (est. 1980) 4. Walking on Thin Ice. 1992. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Rykodisc (est. 1983) 5. Open Your Box . 2007. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Astralwerks (est. 1993)


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of the London-based arts periodical Art and Artists, she placed among the gallery listings small, humorous instruction pieces encouraging readers to engage in playful actions—“Go to Eros fountain and throw in all your jewelleries,” for example. 18 Ono is now the most publicly visible of the 1960s generation of experimental artists. At the time of writing, she has 4.72 million Twitter followers. Since her first post on Instagram, on May 12, 2012, she has developed a strik ing visual signature there: in many of her posts she is shown from the back, in silhouette (recalling her image on the 1964 poster for Three Kyoto Events), wearing one of her characteristic hats (fig. 1). Ono says that her assistant took the first of these photographs without her knowledge, but she allowed him to continue to record these moments, as they are a new realization of her 1961 Hide Piece. From 1968 onward, Ono and Lennon collaborated on musical productions that merged Ono’s conceptual art and radical politics with her and Lennon’s musical sensibilities and celebrity appeal. In the words of cultural critic J örg Heiser, the collaborations “transformed experimental avant-garde improvisation into a pop product.” 19 Released in November 1968, and titled by Ono Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, their debut album together was edited from recordings produced in a single night of loosely structured experimentation. Lennon seems to uncover new guitar tonalities that respond to and interweave with Ono’s primal vocal sounds. The album-cover photograph depicts the couple facing the camera naked, at each other’s side, while the back cover shows them from the rear, again naked. The images and album title convey a sense of innocence; conceptually they also recall Ono’s Cut Piece and Bag Piece, which toyed with the idea of the striptease and the audience’s expectation of bare flesh. In fact, after censorship issues arose over the pair’s nudity, the album had to be covered by a brown paper wrapper—a small hole revealing the faces of the “two virgins” and the title—providing a further, serendipitous collision with Bag Piece, as well as wi th Lennon and Ono’s idea of “Bagism,” which proposed that everyone should wear a bag over themselves, circumventing potential prejudices and allowing people to listen to one another better.

In 1968–69, Ono and Lennon created the Plastic Ono Band, based on her idea of a conceptual band (pp. 194–97). With this idea in mind, Lennon made a small model that included a cassette case, the plastic cover of a vinyl-record cleaning brush, and other domestic plastic objects, as if the plastic objects were replacing the musicians, like robots replacing human beings. The single “Give Peace a Chance”—written by Lennon and Ono during the 1969 Bed-In in Montreal—was released under the Plastic Ono Band name and became an antiwar anthem. The song was among those performed at a December 1969 benefit concert in London for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) titled “Peace for Christmas,” which launched Ono’s and Lennon’s WAR IS OVER! campaign. Here, Ono and Lennon coordinated a large group of musician friends to perform under the name Plastic Ono Supergroup.20 The stage was decked with posters displaying their WAR IS OVER! message, which was also printed on a huge fabric backdrop to the stage. The event pioneered the now familiar form of the benefit concert with a social message. The Plastic Ono Band’s first studio albums were released in 1970 and titled Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band and John Lennon/Pl astic Ono Band. The cover photo on Ono’s album s hows the artist sitting under a tree in Lennon’s arms. Lennon’s album cover had an almost identical photograph, but with the figures reversed. In 1971 Lennon and Ono coproduced the biggest hit of Lennon’s solo career, the song “Imagine” (pl. 85), inspired by Ono’s concept of “imagine” in her work. The importance of the song as a message for peace and hope cannot be overestimated, and it has taken on new meanings in the context of later global conflicts. 2. A Story . Recorded 1974–75, released 1997. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Rykodisc (est. 1983) 3. Season of Glass. 1981. Vinyl LP, 12 3 ⁄ 8 x 12 3 ⁄ 8" (31.4 x 31.4 cm). Geffen Records (est. 1980) 4. Walking on Thin Ice. 1992. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Rykodisc (est. 1983) 5. Open Your Box . 2007. CD, 4 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 4" (12 x 12 cm). Astralwerks (est. 1993)

The first incarnation of the Plastic Ono Band came to an end in 1974. Through the rest of the decade, Ono continued to create music on her own and with Lennon. In December 1980, the pair were collaborating on the song “Walking


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on Thin Ice.” Following a productive day in the studio, they were walking into their New York apartment buil ding, the Dakota, when Lennon was shot dead. I n Ono’s music video for “Walking on Thin Ice,” images of a lake grow brighter and brighter into all white and darker and darker into all black, making what you see brighten until it is blindly empty and darken until it is a void. This too is a strategy of absence and presence. Ono’s next album, the LP Season of Glass, was released in 1981, with its cover image by Ono showing Lennon’s bloodstained glasses beside a glass half-full or half-empty of water, a view over Central Park in the background (fig. 3). Here, Ono is absent, removed from the frame, yet the two objects seem to stand in for the couple. Following a series of releases throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Ono revived the Plastic Ono Band in 2009 with the album Between My Head and the Sky , which featured Sean Lennon and recording artists Cornelius and Yuka Honda. She has since performed with the Plastic Ono Band a number of times, in line-ups including Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Peaches, Iggy Pop, Lady Gaga, and many more. For over five decades, Ono has created works that are political and critical while also managing to be beautiful and optimistic. When looking toward the future, and thinkin g of how we can move forward, she refers to the act of “uncoveri ng,” which she places i n contrast to t hat of “discoveri ng.” In a 2014 text she wrote, Everything that is around us all has miracles inside, if you just uncover them. But uncovering does not come with prestige. You don’t get an award for uncovering things. To discover something, you may need a s pecial skill, even some credentials. You may have to compete with a fellow man to achieve it. Uncovering can be done even by your teenage son. So you may still prefer the drama of discovering. Since there’s no glory in uncovering. 21 Uncovering is a game of absence and presence. Ono’s art has uncovered not only often concealed aspects of the act of engaging with an artwork (revealing, for instance, the central role the viewer plays in its creation) but also the ways in which cultural, social, and political life influence and affect each other. Looking back on her conceptual 1971 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, we see that she knew long ago that her groundbreaking practice warranted a solo exhibition there. Forty-four years later, that show is finally a reality, with the same radicality and presence it had when she first imagined it.

6. Yoko Ono performing at Glastonbury Festival, Somerset, U.K., June 29, 2014. Photograph: Simon Hilton


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on Thin Ice.” Following a productive day in the studio, they were walking into their New York apartment buil ding, the Dakota, when Lennon was shot dead. I n Ono’s music video for “Walking on Thin Ice,” images of a lake grow brighter and brighter into all white and darker and darker into all black, making what you see brighten until it is blindly empty and darken until it is a void. This too is a strategy of absence and presence. Ono’s next album, the LP Season of Glass, was released in 1981, with its cover image by Ono showing Lennon’s bloodstained glasses beside a glass half-full or half-empty of water, a view over Central Park in the background (fig. 3). Here, Ono is absent, removed from the frame, yet the two objects seem to stand in for the couple. Following a series of releases throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Ono revived the Plastic Ono Band in 2009 with the album Between My Head and the Sky , which featured Sean Lennon and recording artists Cornelius and Yuka Honda. She has since performed with the Plastic Ono Band a number of times, in line-ups including Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Peaches, Iggy Pop, Lady Gaga, and many more. For over five decades, Ono has created works that are political and critical while also managing to be beautiful and optimistic. When looking toward the future, and thinkin g of how we can move forward, she refers to the act of “uncoveri ng,” which she places i n contrast to t hat of “discoveri ng.” In a 2014 text she wrote, Everything that is around us all has miracles inside, if you just uncover them. But uncovering does not come with prestige. You don’t get an award for uncovering things. To discover something, you may need a s pecial skill, even some credentials. You may have to compete with a fellow man to achieve it. Uncovering can be done even by your teenage son. So you may still prefer the drama of discovering. Since there’s no glory in uncovering. 21 Uncovering is a game of absence and presence. Ono’s art has uncovered not only often concealed aspects of the act of engaging with an artwork (revealing, for instance, the central role the viewer plays in its creation) but also the ways in which cultural, social, and political life influence and affect each other. Looking back on her conceptual 1971 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, we see that she knew long ago that her groundbreaking practice warranted a solo exhibition there. Forty-four years later, that show is finally a reality, with the same radicality and presence it had when she first imagined it.

6. Yoko Ono performing at Glastonbury Festival, Somerset, U.K., June 29, 2014. Photograph: Simon Hilton


NOTES The author wishes to thank Cameron Foote, Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern,The Museum of Modern Art,and Julia Lammer,Director’s Office and Development Assistant, MoMA PS1, for their valuable assi stance with this text.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

This photograph appears on the inside cover of YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica Gallery, 1966). Yoko Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. Ibid. Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegi e,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This volume, p. 76. See Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 91. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. E.g., Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” and Jil l Johnston, “Life and Art,” The Village Voice , December 7, 1961, p. 10. This volume, p. 77. Aside from group concert reviews, her only previous press had been a short paragraph by Gene Swenson on her exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961: “Smoke Painting,” Artnews 60, no. 5 (September 1961). This volume, p. 75. For a detailed study of Cut Piece see Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece ,” Oxford Art Journal

26, no. 1 (2003):99–123. 9. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. 10. Ono, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 89. 11. In 2008, for instance, the artist Jimmy Robert performed Cut Piece at the Yokohama Triennale in Japan. Rather than cutting off pieces of clothing, audience members had to tear pieces of duct tape from the artist’s skin. The performace complicated notions of race and gender in the work, allowing for new interpretations.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

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Libération, September 2003. This volume, p. 117. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. Ibid. Ibid. John Lennon, in “Amsterdam,” side two of The Wedding Album (Apple Records, 1969). In 2002, for instance, Ono paid for a billboard stating “Imagine all the people living life in peace” in London’s Piccadilly Circus. See “Yoko brings peace message to UK,” BBC News, March 5, 2002, available online at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1855507.stm (consulted January 22, 2015). Art and Artists 1, no. 7 ( October 1966), p. 44. Jörg Heiser, “Against the Wind, against the Wall,” in Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show.A Retrospective (New York: Prestel, 2013), p. 169. The full line-up comprised Ono, Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, Alan White, Jim Gordon, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price. Ono, “Uncover,” July 24, 2014, available online at http:// imaginepeace.com/archives/20557 (consultedJanuary 22, 2015), and in the present volume, p. 222.

1960–1971


NOTES The author wishes to thank Cameron Foote, Modern Women’s Fund 12-Month Intern,The Museum of Modern Art,and Julia Lammer,Director’s Office and Development Assistant, MoMA PS1, for their valuable assi stance with this text.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

This photograph appears on the inside cover of YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica Gallery, 1966). Yoko Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. Ibid. Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegi e,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This volume, p. 76. See Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 91. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. E.g., Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” and Jil l Johnston, “Life and Art,” The Village Voice , December 7, 1961, p. 10. This volume, p. 77. Aside from group concert reviews, her only previous press had been a short paragraph by Gene Swenson on her exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961: “Smoke Painting,” Artnews 60, no. 5 (September 1961). This volume, p. 75. For a detailed study of Cut Piece see Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece ,” Oxford Art Journal

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

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Libération, September 2003. This volume, p. 117. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. Ibid. Ibid. John Lennon, in “Amsterdam,” side two of The Wedding Album (Apple Records, 1969). In 2002, for instance, Ono paid for a billboard stating “Imagine all the people living life in peace” in London’s Piccadilly Circus. See “Yoko brings peace message to UK,” BBC News, March 5, 2002, available online at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1855507.stm (consulted January 22, 2015). Art and Artists 1, no. 7 ( October 1966), p. 44. Jörg Heiser, “Against the Wind, against the Wall,” in Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show.A Retrospective (New York: Prestel, 2013), p. 169. The full line-up comprised Ono, Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, Alan White, Jim Gordon, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price. Ono, “Uncover,” July 24, 2014, available online at http:// imaginepeace.com/archives/20557 (consultedJanuary 22, 2015), and in the present volume, p. 222.

26, no. 1 (2003):99–123. 9. Ono, interview with the author, August 2014. 10. Ono, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 89. 11. In 2008, for instance, the artist Jimmy Robert performed Cut Piece at the Yokohama Triennale in Japan. Rather than cutting off pieces of clothing, audience members had to tear pieces of duct tape from the artist’s skin. The performace complicated notions of race and gender in the work, allowing for new interpretations.

1960–1971

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1960 –1962

On Sunday, December 18, 1960, Yoko Ono opened the doors of her New York loft, at 112 Chambers Street, for an evening of piano and saxophone music headlined by California composer Terry Jennings. It was the inaugural event in what became known as the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). Organized by Ono and La Monte Young, a composer who had recently relocated from California, the series featured programs by notable artists, musicians, and dancers, such as Henry Flynt, Simone Forti, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Robert Morris, and Young himself. On that brisk winter evening, at the threshold of the new decade, Ono helped initiate a six-month series that was to significantly shape the direction of art in the 1960s. Ono had discovered the fourth-floor walk-up through Japanese artist Minoru Niizuma two months earlier, while visiting downtown Manhattan. 1 Ono and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, her husband at the time, were living on the Upper West Side, working various jobs and conducting cultural demonstrations for New York’s Japan Society. Born in 1933 in Tokyo, Ono had moved to New York State and enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in 1953. She had previous ly been studyi ng at Tokyo’s Gakushu¯ in University, but wanted to be closer to her family, which had relocated to Scarsdale. In 1956, Ono left her music composition and literature studies at Sarah Lawrence to marry Ichiyanagi and pursue a life in New York City as an artist. During the 1950s, Ono and Ichiyanagi established relationships with critical figures in the New York art scene, including John Cage, whose class in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research inspired an interest in chance and improvisation in the rising generation of artists and musicians.2 Although Ono and her friends were beginning to find venues in which they could perform and exhibit their work, opportunities were limited. When Niizuma learned that Ono was looking for an affordable space in which to present both her work and the work of others, he suggested renting a loft in downtown Manhattan’s warehouse district. 3 Greenwich Village, approximately twenty blocks uptown, had been the stomping ground of artists and musicians since the Beat Generation colonized it in the mid-1950s. Midtown, meanwhile, housed New York’s blue-chip concert halls. Though it seemed illogical to open her space so far south, Ono, after seeing the loft on Chambers Street, whose rent was $50.50 per month, envisioned a new frontier in which artists could present their work without the constraints of established institutions. “The night after I looked at that space,” she recalled, “I felt my whole fate was sealed.” 4 Ono transformed the low-ceilinged, gray-paneled loft into a vibrant meeting place for artists. She borrowed a baby grand piano from a friend and created makeshift furniture with fruit crates.5 Her favorite feature of the space was its skylight. “When you were in the loft,” she explained, “you almost felt more connected to the sky than to the city outs ide.” 6

1. Yoko Ono with Figure (1926–30, cast 1937) by Jacques Lipchitz, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, c. 1961. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

Jennings’s program inaugurating the loft series extended over two evenings and included multiple performers, setting a precedent for the ten events that followed. Though the series skewed toward experimental music, a number of programs also incorporated visual art, dance, and performance, such as Forti’s Five

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1960 –1962

On Sunday, December 18, 1960, Yoko Ono opened the doors of her New York loft, at 112 Chambers Street, for an evening of piano and saxophone music headlined by California composer Terry Jennings. It was the inaugural event in what became known as the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). Organized by Ono and La Monte Young, a composer who had recently relocated from California, the series featured programs by notable artists, musicians, and dancers, such as Henry Flynt, Simone Forti, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Robert Morris, and Young himself. On that brisk winter evening, at the threshold of the new decade, Ono helped initiate a six-month series that was to significantly shape the direction of art in the 1960s. Ono had discovered the fourth-floor walk-up through Japanese artist Minoru Niizuma two months earlier, while visiting downtown Manhattan. 1 Ono and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, her husband at the time, were living on the Upper West Side, working various jobs and conducting cultural demonstrations for New York’s Japan Society. Born in 1933 in Tokyo, Ono had moved to New York State and enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in 1953. She had previous ly been studyi ng at Tokyo’s Gakushu¯ in University, but wanted to be closer to her family, which had relocated to Scarsdale. In 1956, Ono left her music composition and literature studies at Sarah Lawrence to marry Ichiyanagi and pursue a life in New York City as an artist. During the 1950s, Ono and Ichiyanagi established relationships with critical figures in the New York art scene, including John Cage, whose class in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research inspired an interest in chance and improvisation in the rising generation of artists and musicians.2 Although Ono and her friends were beginning to find venues in which they could perform and exhibit their work, opportunities were limited. When Niizuma learned that Ono was looking for an affordable space in which to present both her work and the work of others, he suggested renting a loft in downtown Manhattan’s warehouse district. 3 Greenwich Village, approximately twenty blocks uptown, had been the stomping ground of artists and musicians since the Beat Generation colonized it in the mid-1950s. Midtown, meanwhile, housed New York’s blue-chip concert halls. Though it seemed illogical to open her space so far south, Ono, after seeing the loft on Chambers Street, whose rent was $50.50 per month, envisioned a new frontier in which artists could present their work without the constraints of established institutions. “The night after I looked at that space,” she recalled, “I felt my whole fate was sealed.” 4 Ono transformed the low-ceilinged, gray-paneled loft into a vibrant meeting place for artists. She borrowed a baby grand piano from a friend and created makeshift furniture with fruit crates.5 Her favorite feature of the space was its skylight. “When you were in the loft,” she explained, “you almost felt more connected to the sky than to the city outs ide.” 6 Jennings’s program inaugurating the loft series extended over two evenings and included multiple performers, setting a precedent for the ten events that followed. Though the series skewed toward experimental music, a number of programs also incorporated visual art, dance, and performance, such as Forti’s Five

1. Yoko Ono with Figure (1926–30, cast 1937) by Jacques Lipchitz, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, c. 1961. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

1960–1962

Dance Constructions & Some Other Things and Morris’s large-scale installation An Environment . Notable art-world personalities attended the series, including Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi, Peggy Guggenheim, and Max Ernst, who visited around the time of his spring 1961 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Ono, however, grew frustrated with her male peers, who expressed little interest in her work. She reflected, “There was no mention that I should have a concert there, and I wasn’t going to be the one to mention i t.” 7 Despite never featuring in a program of her own, Ono participated in the works of others and presented, unannounced, at least six new pieces in the loft: Kitchen Piece, Smoke Painting, Pea Piece, Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13), Shadow Painting (pl. 15), and Add Color Painting.8

Ono’s lease for 112 Chambers Street contained a typewritten addition stating that the unit would serve as “an art studio for painting on canvas and like material.”9 Though the lease neglected to specify the loft’s various other functions, it did note Ono’s use of canvas, which figured prominently in her work at the time. Ono purchased a large amount of the material from an army surplus store and used it to create the majority of her above-mentioned pieces at the loft. A number of these were carried out on a long stretch of the canvas that—as seen in a few of the existing photographs from the time (see, for example, pl. 3)—Ono had hung along one wall of the space. The six pieces she created for the loft series represent some of the earlies t public enactments of her “instructions,” which she had been conceiving since the mid-1950s. Such instructions generally consist of short written directives specifying actions to be carried out by Ono, by other participants, or by natural phenomena like sunlight. At Chambers Street, the artist realized many of the instructions herself. The instruction for Kitchen Piece reads: “Hang a canvas on a wall. Throw all the leftovers you have in the kitchen that day on the canvas. You may prepare special food for the piece.” 10 Beate Sirota Gordon, who in 1958 became the first performing arts director of the Japan Society, recalled witnessing Ono’s performance of Kitchen Piece and Smoke Painting in the Chambers Street loft: Yoko ran to the refrigerator, took out some eggs, ran to a wall covered with a huge piece of white [canvas] and hurled the eggs onto the [canvas]. Then she ran back and got some jello which she also threw at the wall. Then she splattered some sumi-ink on the [canvas] and used her hands as paint brushes. When the painting was completed, she took a match and set fire to the [canvas]. . . . Luckily, John Cage had warned Yoko to put a fire retardant on the [canvas] so it burned slowly, and we escaped a fiery death. 11 In the midst of the Chambers Street Loft Series, Ono was preparing for a threeperson program, An Evening of Contemporary Japanese Music & Poetry , with Ichiyanagi and Toshiro Mayuzumi at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village. In anticipation of the concert, which took place on April 3, 1961, the three performers worked with Niizuma to create a series of publicity images. Along with traditional head-shots, Niizuma took photographs of the smartly dressed trio positioned around the baby grand piano in Ono’s loft. When the New York Times published one of Niizuma’s images alongside a review of the concert, however, Ono had been cropped out of the group (p. 74). 12 Although she was one of the headlining artists, the article only cursorily discussed her contributions, focusing mainly on the performances of her male counterparts. Ono’s primary contribution to the Village Gate concert was an adaptation of her short stor y “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” which had first appeared in the Sarah Lawrence College newspap er in 1955 (pp. 14–15). 13 The original narrative revolved around a grapefruit, abandoned on a park table after a picnic. The 1961 performance script introduced darker elements, including the lines, “Would you like to speak to the dead?” and “Is he the one who killed you?” 14 In the performance,

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Cage, Ichiyanagi, Young, and other musicians responded to Ono’s spoken recitations, creating a jarring soundscape. The Times reported that the composition “called for instrumentalists to improvise sounds according to written, rather than notated, instructions, and their effects were supplemented by the amplified flushing of a sanitary faci lity.”15 In the spring of 1961, Ono learned that Lithuanian architect and designer George Maciunas, inspired by the concerts he had attended at her Chambers Street loft, was developing a performance program for his Upper East Side gallery, located at 925 Madison Avenue. Maciunas ran the gallery with his friend Almus Salcius, who had been operating his own space in Great Neck, Long Island. They called their gallery the AG Gallery, at once combining the initials of their first names and referencing the avant-garde. Maciunas oversaw the gallery’s concert program, while Salcius organized visual art presentations. 16 Maciunas also programmed a few exhibitions and invited Ono to present her first solo show in the s pace. Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono (pp. 58–67) ran from July 17 to July 30, 1961. Ono recalled that attendance was slim, as many New Yorkers had vacated the city for the summer.17 Nonetheless, a number of important figures visited the show, including Cage, Flynt, Gordon, and Noguchi. The presentation centered on a group of instruction paintings, consisting of at least twelve canvases, and a small accordion-fold book, Painting Until It Becomes Marble. (The book by that title illustrated in pls. 17 and 18 may not be the same version shown at AG.) Ono also exhibited a selection of calligraphic ink drawings on paper. At least three of the instruction paintings, Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13), Shadow Painting (pl. 15), and Smoke Painting, had been realized in her loft, though it is possible that new versions of them were shown at AG. Whereas Ono had enacted some of the instructions herself at Chambers Street, here she distanced herself from the work by calling for viewer participation.

Each canvas was assigned an instruction that Ono communicated to visitors verbally or, in a few cases, on adjoining handwritten cards. For example, next to Painting in Three Stanzas (1961; pl. 11)—a canvas punctured by a vine—a short text encouraged viewers to imagine the work undergoing a cycle of death and rebirth (pl. 12). Such division bet ween a work’s physical and conceptual manifestations was acutely expressed in t he catalogue for Ono’s 1966 London exhibition YOKO at INDICA: “Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot forsee, and brings the concept of ‘time’ into painting.” 18 Ono viewed her paintings not as finished works of art, but rather as mutable propositions dependent upon external conditions and the ways in which viewers interpreted her instructions. At the time of Ono’s show, Maciunas could no longer afford to pay the gallery’s electricity bill, and thus, in a break from his usual evening hours, kept the exhibition open only during the daytime. Ono reflected, “Sunlight streaming through the gallery windows cast shadows on the canvases—making beautiful, natural changes to them thr oughout the day.” 19 Indeed, the realization of one work, Shadow Painting (pl. 15), relied entirely on that play of shadows over its surface. The AG Gallery exhibition marked the first time that Ono’s instruction paintings were presented together as a gro up. Only one year later, at the So¯ getsu Art Center in Tokyo, she exhibited just the text-based instructions (pls. 29–31), encouraging visitors to realize the paintings in their minds without her direct supervision or her canvases as a guide. By renouncing her artistic authority and privileging a work’s idea over its material form, Ono anticipated developments in Conceptual art.

1960–1962

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Cage, Ichiyanagi, Young, and other musicians responded to Ono’s spoken recitations, creating a jarring soundscape. The Times reported that the composition “called for instrumentalists to improvise sounds according to written, rather than notated, instructions, and their effects were supplemented by the amplified flushing of a sanitary faci lity.”15

Dance Constructions & Some Other Things and Morris’s large-scale installation An Environment . Notable art-world personalities attended the series, including Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi, Peggy Guggenheim, and Max Ernst, who visited around the time of his spring 1961 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Ono, however, grew frustrated with her male peers, who expressed little interest in her work. She reflected, “There was no mention that I should have a concert there, and I wasn’t going to be the one to mention i t.” 7 Despite never featuring in a program of her own, Ono participated in the works of others and presented, unannounced, at least six new pieces in the loft: Kitchen Piece, Smoke Painting, Pea Piece, Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13), Shadow Painting (pl. 15), and Add Color Painting.8

In the spring of 1961, Ono learned that Lithuanian architect and designer George Maciunas, inspired by the concerts he had attended at her Chambers Street loft, was developing a performance program for his Upper East Side gallery, located at 925 Madison Avenue. Maciunas ran the gallery with his friend Almus Salcius, who had been operating his own space in Great Neck, Long Island. They called their gallery the AG Gallery, at once combining the initials of their first names and referencing the avant-garde. Maciunas oversaw the gallery’s concert program, while Salcius organized visual art presentations. 16 Maciunas also programmed a few exhibitions and invited Ono to present her first solo show in the s pace.

Ono’s lease for 112 Chambers Street contained a typewritten addition stating that the unit would serve as “an art studio for painting on canvas and like material.”9 Though the lease neglected to specify the loft’s various other functions, it did note Ono’s use of canvas, which figured prominently in her work at the time. Ono purchased a large amount of the material from an army surplus store and used it to create the majority of her above-mentioned pieces at the loft. A number of these were carried out on a long stretch of the canvas that—as seen in a few of the existing photographs from the time (see, for example, pl. 3)—Ono had hung along one wall of the space. The six pieces she created for the loft series represent some of the earlies t public enactments of her “instructions,” which she had been conceiving since the mid-1950s. Such instructions generally consist of short written directives specifying actions to be carried out by Ono, by other participants, or by natural phenomena like sunlight. At Chambers Street, the artist realized many of the instructions herself. The instruction for Kitchen Piece reads: “Hang a canvas on a wall. Throw all the leftovers you have in the kitchen that day on the canvas. You may prepare special food for the piece.” 10 Beate Sirota Gordon, who in 1958 became the first performing arts director of the Japan Society, recalled witnessing Ono’s performance of Kitchen Piece and Smoke Painting in the Chambers Street loft:

Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono (pp. 58–67) ran from July 17 to July 30, 1961. Ono recalled that attendance was slim, as many New Yorkers had vacated the city for the summer.17 Nonetheless, a number of important figures visited the show, including Cage, Flynt, Gordon, and Noguchi. The presentation centered on a group of instruction paintings, consisting of at least twelve canvases, and a small accordion-fold book, Painting Until It Becomes Marble. (The book by that title illustrated in pls. 17 and 18 may not be the same version shown at AG.) Ono also exhibited a selection of calligraphic ink drawings on paper. At least three of the instruction paintings, Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13), Shadow Painting (pl. 15), and Smoke Painting, had been realized in her loft, though it is possible that new versions of them were shown at AG. Whereas Ono had enacted some of the instructions herself at Chambers Street, here she distanced herself from the work by calling for viewer participation.

Each canvas was assigned an instruction that Ono communicated to visitors verbally or, in a few cases, on adjoining handwritten cards. For example, next to Painting in Three Stanzas (1961; pl. 11)—a canvas punctured by a vine—a short text encouraged viewers to imagine the work undergoing a cycle of death and rebirth (pl. 12). Such division bet ween a work’s physical and conceptual manifestations was acutely expressed in t he catalogue for Ono’s 1966 London exhibition YOKO at INDICA: “Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot forsee, and brings the concept of ‘time’ into painting.” 18 Ono viewed her paintings not as finished works of art, but rather as mutable propositions dependent upon external conditions and the ways in which viewers interpreted her instructions.

Yoko ran to the refrigerator, took out some eggs, ran to a wall covered with a huge piece of white [canvas] and hurled the eggs onto the [canvas]. Then she ran back and got some jello which she also threw at the wall. Then she splattered some sumi-ink on the [canvas] and used her hands as paint brushes. When the painting was completed, she took a match and set fire to the [canvas]. . . . Luckily, John Cage had warned Yoko to put a fire retardant on the [canvas] so it burned slowly, and we escaped a fiery death. 11 In the midst of the Chambers Street Loft Series, Ono was preparing for a threeperson program, An Evening of Contemporary Japanese Music & Poetry , with Ichiyanagi and Toshiro Mayuzumi at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village. In anticipation of the concert, which took place on April 3, 1961, the three performers worked with Niizuma to create a series of publicity images. Along with traditional head-shots, Niizuma took photographs of the smartly dressed trio positioned around the baby grand piano in Ono’s loft. When the New York Times published one of Niizuma’s images alongside a review of the concert, however, Ono had been cropped out of the group (p. 74). 12 Although she was one of the headlining artists, the article only cursorily discussed her contributions, focusing mainly on the performances of her male counterparts.

At the time of Ono’s show, Maciunas could no longer afford to pay the gallery’s electricity bill, and thus, in a break from his usual evening hours, kept the exhibition open only during the daytime. Ono reflected, “Sunlight streaming through the gallery windows cast shadows on the canvases—making beautiful, natural changes to them thr oughout the day.” 19 Indeed, the realization of one work, Shadow Painting (pl. 15), relied entirely on that play of shadows over its surface. The AG Gallery exhibition marked the first time that Ono’s instruction paintings were presented together as a gro up. Only one year later, at the So¯ getsu Art Center in Tokyo, she exhibited just the text-based instructions (pls. 29–31), encouraging visitors to realize the paintings in their minds without her direct supervision or her canvases as a guide. By renouncing her artistic authority and privileging a work’s idea over its material form, Ono anticipated developments in Conceptual art.

Ono’s primary contribution to the Village Gate concert was an adaptation of her short stor y “Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park,” which had first appeared in the Sarah Lawrence College newspap er in 1955 (pp. 14–15). 13 The original narrative revolved around a grapefruit, abandoned on a park table after a picnic. The 1961 performance script introduced darker elements, including the lines, “Would you like to speak to the dead?” and “Is he the one who killed you?” 14 In the performance,

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to Japan the previous summer. Though she planned to stay for only two weeks to do a concert, she remained until September 1964.24

Around the time of Ono’s AG show, Maciunas asked her if she could think of a name for the circle of artists, musicians, and dancers who had exhibited and performed together at venues like 112 Chambers Street and his gallery. Ono, however, had little interest in being subsumed under an artistic movement. She recalled: “The next day, George s aid ‘Yoko, look.’ He showed me “the word ‘Fl uxus’ in a huge dictionary. It had many meanings, but he pointed to ‘flushing’. . . . thinking it was a good name for the movement. ‘This is the name,’ he said. I just shrugged my shoulders in my mind.” 20 Maciunas went on to establish Fluxus as an international group, in part inspired by the instructions, scores, and events that he first saw in the work of Ono and her peers. Just days after her AG exhibition closed, Ono traveled to Montreal to perform A Grapefruit in the World of Park in the Semaine Internationale de Musique Actuelle—a weeklong festival of new music and performance, organized by Canadian composer Pierre Mercure. As with her instruction paintings, A Grapefruit in the World of Park took a different form each time it was carried out, and in this performance Ono introduced props, including a garden hat hanging twenty feet above the stage. The Montreal Star recounted this latest incarnation as follows: “As Miss Ono read her lines (picked at random from the script), she was accompanied by a large number of loudspeakers through which was played a tape recording of what might have been the cries of some creature in a terminal stage of idiocy. Sample lines from Miss Ono’s script : ‘Let’s count the hairs of the dead child.’ ‘Drink Pepsi-Cola.’”21 A few months later, on November 24, 1961, Ono presented another version of A Grapefruit in the World of Park during her first solo concert, Works by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall (pp. 68–69). Approximately twenty artists, musicians, and dancers participated in the performances, including Byrd, Jennings, Mac Low, Yvonne Rainer, and Young. Carnegie Recital Hall seated 299 people at the time, and, according to an account in the New York Times, the venue “was packed” for the concert.22 Throughout the evening, Ono used various strategies to engage her audience, such as turning the lights on and off, using microphones to amplify the sound of performers, and positioning a man at the back of the room in order to elicit fear in the audience that someone was behind them. 23 As with the Village Gate concert, Ono carefully considered publicity for the event. She created a poster by piecing together newspaper pages, over which she handpainted the concert details in large text. Maciunas, ever a master of marketing, photographed Ono with the poster in a series of promotional images that were ultimately never distributed (p. 12, fig. 1). The official concert program featured an image by Niizuma of Ono standing in MoMA’s sculpture garden alongside what appears to be Germaine Richier’s 1952 bronze The Devil with Claws (pl. 19). Other images from the session show Ono jovially posed with works including Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman (1932), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Washerwoman (1917), and Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure (1926–30, cast 1937; pl. 1). On January 8, 1962, Ono participated in a benefit to raise money for a publication titled An Anthology . Published by Young and Mac Low and designed by Maciunas, An Anthology brought together poetry, instructions, scores, and other texts by over twenty artists, including Ono. Many of the contributors would soon become identified with Fluxus. Maciunas moved to Germany in late fall 1961 and continued to send his designs back to Young and Mac Low in the United States, while they worked on raising the funds necessary to print and assemble the volume. Held at the Living Theatre, the January event featured Ono’s Touch Poem #5 (c. 1960; pp. 54–57)—a small booklet containing hair and collaged pieces of paper—in the lobby and The Chair #1, a performance in which Ono interacted with a chair on the dramatically lit theater stage.

As Fluxus gained momentum, many of Ono’s friends began to disperse internationally. On March 3, 1962, Ono departed for Tokyo, joining Ichiyanagi, who had returned

In the roughly sixteen months leading up to her departure from New York, Ono had not only co-organized the highly influential Chambers Street Loft Series, presented her first one-woman exhibition, and performed her first solo concert, but had also nurtured ideas and relationships that would more fully develop during the decade ahead. The collaborative, process-oriented artworks that Ono and her peers boldly put forward during these early years set the tone for their work i n the remainder of the ’60s. And yet, Ono was also unafraid to stand alone. She brazenly imagined a future in which she—a Japanese woman whose often immaterial artworks contrasted starkly with modernist precedents like the sculptural giants she had posed beside at MoMA—would expand the scope of our institutions to accommodate works that exist primarily in t he mind.

—Francesca Wilmott

1.

NOTES

See Yoko Ono, interview by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Yoko Ono: To The Light (London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2012), p. 37. 2. Ono and Ichiyanagi attended just one of Cage’s classes. See Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 237n12. 3. See Yoko Ono, interview by Peyton-Jones and Obrist, p. 37. 4. Yoko Ono, quoted in Nell Beram and Carolyn BorissKrimsky, Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013), p. 37. 5. Robert Palmer, “On Thin Ice—The Music of Yoko Ono,” in liner notes to Onobox , six compact discs, Rykodisc RCD 10224/29, 1992. 6. Yoko Ono, quoted in Beram and Boriss-Kr imsky, Yoko Ono, p. 38. 7. Yoko Ono, quoted in Jonathan Cott, “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,” Rolling Stone, no. 78 (March 18, 1971): 26. 8. See Jon Hendricks, “Yoko Onoand Fluxus,” inMunroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 39; and Yoko Ono, interview by Liza Cowan and Jan Alpert, September 11, 1971, audiotape, Pacifica Radio Archives, Los Angeles. 9. Standard Form of Loft Lease, December 1, 1960, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, IV.B.1., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 10. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964): n.p. 11. Beate Sirota Gordon, “The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir” (manuscript, 1997), pp. 175–76, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, IV.B.1., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Published by Kodansha International in 1998. The manuscript version of the text has been quoted here, as it contains greater detail than the published version. Gordon mistakenly refers to the canvas as paper in this passage.

12. Ross Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering at the Village Gate Proves Unusual Fare,” New York Times , April 4, 1961. This volume, p. 74. 13. The Village Gate concert programadditionally listed Ono’s composition AOS, with vocals by Simone Forti, though it was attributed to Toshi Ichiyanagi. It is unknown whether Ichiyanagi performed an interpretation of Ono’s work at the concert. 14. The original typescript score is reproduced in this volume, pp. 18–19. 15. Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering.” 16. Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), p. 33. 17. Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Jon Hendricks, ed., with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, and Roskilde, D enmark: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), p. 40. This volume, p. 73. Subsequent citations are to the text’s appearance in this volume. 18. YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica Gallery, 1966), n.p. The quote cited here is unattributed in the original text but is considered to have been Ono’s, and retains the spelling from the original source. 19. Ono, “Summer of 1961,” p. 72. 20. Ibid., p. 73. 21. Eric McLean, “Novelty in Sound Motif of Festival,” Montreal Star , August 7, 1961. 22. Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This v olume, p. 76. The hall capacity was confirmed in an e-mail to the author from Robert Hudson, associate archivist, Carnegie Hall, June 19, 2014. 23. Cott, “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,” p. 26. 24. Ono, interview by Cowan and Alpert.

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to Japan the previous summer. Though she planned to stay for only two weeks to do a concert, she remained until September 1964.24

Around the time of Ono’s AG show, Maciunas asked her if she could think of a name for the circle of artists, musicians, and dancers who had exhibited and performed together at venues like 112 Chambers Street and his gallery. Ono, however, had little interest in being subsumed under an artistic movement. She recalled: “The next day, George s aid ‘Yoko, look.’ He showed me “the word ‘Fl uxus’ in a huge dictionary. It had many meanings, but he pointed to ‘flushing’. . . . thinking it was a good name for the movement. ‘This is the name,’ he said. I just shrugged my shoulders in my mind.” 20 Maciunas went on to establish Fluxus as an international group, in part inspired by the instructions, scores, and events that he first saw in the work of Ono and her peers.

In the roughly sixteen months leading up to her departure from New York, Ono had not only co-organized the highly influential Chambers Street Loft Series, presented her first one-woman exhibition, and performed her first solo concert, but had also nurtured ideas and relationships that would more fully develop during the decade ahead. The collaborative, process-oriented artworks that Ono and her peers boldly put forward during these early years set the tone for their work i n the remainder of the ’60s. And yet, Ono was also unafraid to stand alone. She brazenly imagined a future in which she—a Japanese woman whose often immaterial artworks contrasted starkly with modernist precedents like the sculptural giants she had posed beside at MoMA—would expand the scope of our institutions to accommodate works that exist primarily in t he mind.

Just days after her AG exhibition closed, Ono traveled to Montreal to perform A Grapefruit in the World of Park in the Semaine Internationale de Musique Actuelle—a weeklong festival of new music and performance, organized by Canadian composer Pierre Mercure. As with her instruction paintings, A Grapefruit in the World of Park took a different form each time it was carried out, and in this performance Ono introduced props, including a garden hat hanging twenty feet above the stage. The Montreal Star recounted this latest incarnation as follows: “As Miss Ono read her lines (picked at random from the script), she was accompanied by a large number of loudspeakers through which was played a tape recording of what might have been the cries of some creature in a terminal stage of idiocy. Sample lines from Miss Ono’s script : ‘Let’s count the hairs of the dead child.’ ‘Drink Pepsi-Cola.’”21

—Francesca Wilmott

NOTES

1.

See Yoko Ono, interview by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Yoko Ono: To The Light (London: Koenig Books Ltd., 2012), p. 37. 2. Ono and Ichiyanagi attended just one of Cage’s classes. See Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 237n12. 3. See Yoko Ono, interview by Peyton-Jones and Obrist, p. 37. 4. Yoko Ono, quoted in Nell Beram and Carolyn BorissKrimsky, Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013), p. 37. 5. Robert Palmer, “On Thin Ice—The Music of Yoko Ono,” in liner notes to Onobox , six compact discs, Rykodisc RCD 10224/29, 1992. 6. Yoko Ono, quoted in Beram and Boriss-Kr imsky, Yoko Ono, p. 38. 7. Yoko Ono, quoted in Jonathan Cott, “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,” Rolling Stone, no. 78 (March 18, 1971): 26. 8. See Jon Hendricks, “Yoko Onoand Fluxus,” inMunroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 39; and Yoko Ono, interview by Liza Cowan and Jan Alpert, September 11, 1971, audiotape, Pacifica Radio Archives, Los Angeles. 9. Standard Form of Loft Lease, December 1, 1960, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, IV.B.1., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 10. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964): n.p. 11. Beate Sirota Gordon, “The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir” (manuscript, 1997), pp. 175–76, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, IV.B.1., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Published by Kodansha International in 1998. The manuscript version of the text has been quoted here, as it contains greater detail than the published version. Gordon mistakenly refers to the canvas as paper in this passage.

A few months later, on November 24, 1961, Ono presented another version of A Grapefruit in the World of Park during her first solo concert, Works by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall (pp. 68–69). Approximately twenty artists, musicians, and dancers participated in the performances, including Byrd, Jennings, Mac Low, Yvonne Rainer, and Young. Carnegie Recital Hall seated 299 people at the time, and, according to an account in the New York Times, the venue “was packed” for the concert.22 Throughout the evening, Ono used various strategies to engage her audience, such as turning the lights on and off, using microphones to amplify the sound of performers, and positioning a man at the back of the room in order to elicit fear in the audience that someone was behind them. 23 As with the Village Gate concert, Ono carefully considered publicity for the event. She created a poster by piecing together newspaper pages, over which she handpainted the concert details in large text. Maciunas, ever a master of marketing, photographed Ono with the poster in a series of promotional images that were ultimately never distributed (p. 12, fig. 1). The official concert program featured an image by Niizuma of Ono standing in MoMA’s sculpture garden alongside what appears to be Germaine Richier’s 1952 bronze The Devil with Claws (pl. 19). Other images from the session show Ono jovially posed with works including Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman (1932), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Washerwoman (1917), and Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure (1926–30, cast 1937; pl. 1). On January 8, 1962, Ono participated in a benefit to raise money for a publication titled An Anthology . Published by Young and Mac Low and designed by Maciunas, An Anthology brought together poetry, instructions, scores, and other texts by over twenty artists, including Ono. Many of the contributors would soon become identified with Fluxus. Maciunas moved to Germany in late fall 1961 and continued to send his designs back to Young and Mac Low in the United States, while they worked on raising the funds necessary to print and assemble the volume. Held at the Living Theatre, the January event featured Ono’s Touch Poem #5 (c. 1960; pp. 54–57)—a small booklet containing hair and collaged pieces of paper—in the lobby and The Chair #1, a performance in which Ono interacted with a chair on the dramatically lit theater stage.

12. Ross Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering at the Village Gate Proves Unusual Fare,” New York Times , April 4, 1961. This volume, p. 74. 13. The Village Gate concert programadditionally listed Ono’s composition AOS, with vocals by Simone Forti, though it was attributed to Toshi Ichiyanagi. It is unknown whether Ichiyanagi performed an interpretation of Ono’s work at the concert. 14. The original typescript score is reproduced in this volume, pp. 18–19. 15. Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering.” 16. Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History of an Attitude (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), p. 33. 17. Yoko Ono, “Summer of 1961,” in Jon Hendricks, ed., with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, and Roskilde, D enmark: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), p. 40. This volume, p. 73. Subsequent citations are to the text’s appearance in this volume. 18. YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica Gallery, 1966), n.p. The quote cited here is unattributed in the original text but is considered to have been Ono’s, and retains the spelling from the original source. 19. Ono, “Summer of 1961,” p. 72. 20. Ibid., p. 73. 21. Eric McLean, “Novelty in Sound Motif of Festival,” Montreal Star , August 7, 1961. 22. Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This v olume, p. 76. The hall capacity was confirmed in an e-mail to the author from Robert Hudson, associate archivist, Carnegie Hall, June 19, 2014. 23. Cott, “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,” p. 26. 24. Ono, interview by Cowan and Alpert.

As Fluxus gained momentum, many of Ono’s friends began to disperse internationally. On March 3, 1962, Ono departed for Tokyo, joining Ichiyanagi, who had returned

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CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES

SCHEDULE FOR THE CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES 112 Chambers Street, New York December 18, 1960–June 30, 1961

In December 1960, Yoko Ono rented a loft in downtown Manhattan, on the top floor (the fourth) of a building located at 112 Chambers Street. She not only used the space as a studi o but also offered it as a venue for artists, musicians, dancers, and composers struggling to find a place in a contemporary performance scene dominated by Midtown concert halls. Over the course of six months, Ono and La Monte Young presented the Chambers Street Loft Series. Ono recalls that there were as many as two hundred attendees on any given evening. These included art-world figures such as John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Each of the eleven artists participating in the series was given a scheduled time slot (usually two evenings) to present his or her program. Several works combined visual art and performance, blurring the distinctions between mediums. Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions, for example, included Huddle (1961), a performance in which participants climb atop one another to form an ephemeralhumansculpture. RobertMorris’sinstallation An Environment (1961) provided a performative experience for visitors, who walked through Passageway , a plywood corridor painted gray that gradually narrowed and curved away from the entrance to the loft, with the faint sound of a heartbeat playing from above. Though Ono did not present a program of her own, she participated in various works by others. Additionally, she installed her instruction-based paintings for the first time, demonstrating some of them on a horizontal stretch of canvas that she had hung in the space. She also used canvas for most of the works in her exhibition at AG Gallery that summer. Several of these works, such as Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) and Shadow Painting (1961; pl. 15), were displayed during the Chambers Street Loft Series, alth ough Ono may have made new versions of them for the AG presentation.

All events took place at the 112 Chambers Street loft except for Philip Corner’s. Unless otherwise noted, information reflects that which appears in the concert programs. The initial series schedule, as devised by Ono and La Monte Young, extended through Young’s performances. The contributions by Simone Forti, Robert Morris, and Dennis Lindberg were added later.

DECEMBER 18�19, 1960 Terry Jennings Two Performances With Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, Scott La Faro, and La Monte Young JANUARY 7�8, 1961 Toshi Ichiyanagi Music With Robert Dunn, Kenji Kobayashi, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Simone Forti,1 Yoko Ono, David Tudor, and La Monte Young JANUARY 26�28, 1961 Held at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village Philip Corner Music With Charles Adams, Styra Avins, Ansel Baldonado, David Busher, Joseph Byrd, Du-Young Chung, Michael Corner, Terry Fracella, Jack Glick, Arlene Rothlein,2 Malcolm Goldstein, Dick Higgins, Terry Jennings, Joel M. Katz, Alison Knowles, Kenji Kobayashi, Jackson Mac Low, Herbert Marder, Norma Marder, Norman Masonson, Skip Merems, Larry Poons, Florence Tarlow, Vincent Wright, Ralph Zeitlin, and Nicholas Zill

APRIL 8�9, 1961 Jackson Mac Low Poetry, Music & Theatre Works With Chester Anderson, Joseph Byrd, Robert Dunn, Spencer Holst, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joan Kelly, Robert Kelly, Iris Lezak, Simone Forti, John Perreault, Shimon Tamari, Diane Wakoski, and La Monte Young APRIL 28�30, 1961 Richard Maxfield Three Evenings of Picnic and Electronic Music With David Tudor and La Monte Young, among others MAY 19�20, 1961 La Monte Young Compositions With Robert Dunn MAY 26�27, 1961 Simone Forti Five Dance Constructions & Some Other Things With Ruth Allphin, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and La Monte Young (audiotape)

FEBRUARY 25�26, 1961 Henry Flynt Music and Poetry With Walter De Maria, Joe Kotzin, Simone Forti, and La Monte Young, among others MARCH 4�5, 1961 Joseph Byrd Music and Poetry With Chester Anderson, Judith Dunn, Robert Dunn, Charlotte Greenspan, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Iris Lezak, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Simone Forti, Yoko Ono, David Tudor,3 Diane Wakoski, and La Monte Young

JUNE 3�7, 1961 Robert Morris An Environment JUNE 28�30, 1961 Dennis Lindberg Blind: A Happening4 With Jake Bair, Charles Cost, and Ben Spiller

1. Simone Forti, then married to Robert Morris, appears throughout the programs for the series as Simone Morris. 2. Arlene Rothlein, as she is commonly known, was married to Malcolm Goldstein and was credited in the program as Arlene Goldstein. 3. David Tudor is not listed in the program for the event, but Joseph Byrd has indicated that he was one of the performers. See Joseph Byrd, interview by Klemen Breznikar, It’s Psychadelic Baby Magazine, February 9, 2013, http://psychedelicbaby.blogspot.com/2013/02/joseph-byrd-interview.html. 4. Ono does not recall this performance and may not have been present for it.

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SCHEDULE FOR THE CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES All events took place at the 112 Chambers Street loft except for Philip Corner’s. Unless otherwise noted, information reflects that which appears in the concert programs. The initial series schedule, as devised by Ono and La Monte Young, extended through Young’s performances. The contributions by Simone Forti, Robert Morris, and Dennis Lindberg were added later.

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES 112 Chambers Street, New York December 18, 1960–June 30, 1961

DECEMBER 18�19, 1960

APRIL 8�9, 1961

Terry Jennings Two Performances With Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, Scott La Faro, and La Monte Young

In December 1960, Yoko Ono rented a loft in downtown Manhattan, on the top floor (the fourth) of a building located at 112 Chambers Street. She not only used the space as a studi o but also offered it as a venue for artists, musicians, dancers, and composers struggling to find a place in a contemporary performance scene dominated by Midtown concert halls. Over the course of six months, Ono and La Monte Young presented the Chambers Street Loft Series. Ono recalls that there were as many as two hundred attendees on any given evening. These included art-world figures such as John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Each of the eleven artists participating in the series was given a scheduled time slot (usually two evenings) to present his or her program. Several works combined visual art and performance, blurring the distinctions between mediums. Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions, for example, included Huddle (1961), a performance in which participants climb atop one another to form an ephemeralhumansculpture. RobertMorris’sinstallation An Environment (1961) provided a performative experience for visitors, who walked through Passageway , a plywood corridor painted gray that gradually narrowed and curved away from the entrance to the loft, with the faint sound of a heartbeat playing from above.

JANUARY 7�8, 1961 Toshi Ichiyanagi Music With Robert Dunn, Kenji Kobayashi, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Simone Forti,1 Yoko Ono, David Tudor, and La Monte Young JANUARY 26�28, 1961 Held at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village Philip Corner Music With Charles Adams, Styra Avins, Ansel Baldonado, David Busher, Joseph Byrd, Du-Young Chung, Michael Corner, Terry Fracella, Jack Glick, Arlene Rothlein,2 Malcolm Goldstein, Dick Higgins, Terry Jennings, Joel M. Katz, Alison Knowles, Kenji Kobayashi, Jackson Mac Low, Herbert Marder, Norma Marder, Norman Masonson, Skip Merems, Larry Poons, Florence Tarlow, Vincent Wright, Ralph Zeitlin, and Nicholas Zill

Jackson Mac Low Poetry, Music & Theatre Works With Chester Anderson, Joseph Byrd, Robert Dunn, Spencer Holst, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joan Kelly, Robert Kelly, Iris Lezak, Simone Forti, John Perreault, Shimon Tamari, Diane Wakoski, and La Monte Young APRIL 28�30, 1961 Richard Maxfield Three Evenings of Picnic and Electronic Music With David Tudor and La Monte Young, among others MAY 19�20, 1961 La Monte Young Compositions With Robert Dunn MAY 26�27, 1961 Simone Forti Five Dance Constructions & Some Other Things With Ruth Allphin, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and La Monte Young (audiotape)

FEBRUARY 25�26, 1961

JUNE 3�7, 1961

Henry Flynt Music and Poetry With Walter De Maria, Joe Kotzin, Simone Forti, and La Monte Young, among others

Though Ono did not present a program of her own, she participated in various works by others. Additionally, she installed her instruction-based paintings for the first time, demonstrating some of them on a horizontal stretch of canvas that she had hung in the space. She also used canvas for most of the works in her exhibition at AG Gallery that summer. Several of these works, such as Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) and Shadow Painting (1961; pl. 15), were displayed during the Chambers Street Loft Series, alth ough Ono may have made new versions of them for the AG presentation.

MARCH 4�5, 1961 Joseph Byrd Music and Poetry With Chester Anderson, Judith Dunn, Robert Dunn, Charlotte Greenspan, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Iris Lezak, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Simone Forti, Yoko Ono, David Tudor,3 Diane Wakoski, and La Monte Young

Robert Morris An Environment JUNE 28�30, 1961 Dennis Lindberg Blind: A Happening4 With Jake Bair, Charles Cost, and Ben Spiller

1. Simone Forti, then married to Robert Morris, appears throughout the programs for the series as Simone Morris. 2. Arlene Rothlein, as she is commonly known, was married to Malcolm Goldstein and was credited in the program as Arlene Goldstein. 3. David Tudor is not listed in the program for the event, but Joseph Byrd has indicated that he was one of the performers. See Joseph Byrd, interview by Klemen Breznikar, It’s Psychadelic Baby Magazine, February 9, 2013, http://psychedelicbaby.blogspot.com/2013/02/joseph-byrd-interview.html. 4. Ono does not recall this performance and may not have been present for it.

1960–1962

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2. Yoko Ono with friends at her loft during the Chambers Street Loft Series, 1960 or 1961. Left to right: Ono, Simone Forti, John Cage, David Tudor, Kenji Kobayashi, La Monte Young, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and (standing on Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped On) Toshiro Mayuzumi and Isamu Noguchi. Photograph: Minoru N iizuma

3. Unidentified performance in the Chambers Street Loft Series. 1961. Background: Yoko Ono’s Add Color Painting (1961) and other works in progress. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

4. Yoko Ono during the Chambers Street Loft Series. 1960 or 1961. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

1960–1962

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2. Yoko Ono with friends at her loft during the Chambers Street Loft Series, 1960 or 1961. Left to right: Ono, Simone Forti, John Cage, David Tudor, Kenji Kobayashi, La Monte Young, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and (standing on Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped On) Toshiro Mayuzumi and Isamu Noguchi. Photograph: Minoru N iizuma

3. Unidentified performance in the Chambers Street Loft Series. 1961. Background: Yoko Ono’s Add Color Painting (1961) and other works in progress. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

1960–1962

5. Program for Music and Poetry of Henry Flynt at 112 Chambers Street, New York. February 25 and 26, 1961. Spirit duplicate, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

4. Yoko Ono during the Chambers Street Loft Series. 1960 or 1961. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

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6. Program for Compositions by La Monte Young at 112 Chambers Street, New York. May 19 and 20, 1961. Spirit duplicate, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

1960–1962

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5. Program for Music and Poetry of Henry Flynt at 112 Chambers Street, New York. February 25 and 26, 1961. Spirit duplicate, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

1960–1962


6. Program for Compositions by La Monte Young at 112 Chambers Street, New York. May 19 and 20, 1961. Spirit duplicate, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

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TOUCH POEM #5

TOUCH POEM #5 c. 1960

Touch Poem #5 is a handmade booklet whose thirty-two

pages are punctuated with locks of black and red hair (Ono’s own and that of a friend) and horizontal strips of cut white paper. Containing no written text apart from the title, the poem turns the act of reading into a tactile encounter—viewers can run their hands over the pages to experience the various textures and the staccato patterns of the paper collage elements, which differ in length and seem to be arranged according to a numeric or linguistic logic. One of Ono’s earliest extant artworks, Touch Poem #5 was likely the fifth such object of a series, although no record remains of numbers one through four. It was first shown in the lobby of the Living Theatre, New York, on January 8, 1962, during a benefit concert for An Anthology , a publication edited by La Monte Young that included contributions by many artists who had participated in the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). In May 1962, Ono showed the work again—though possibly a new vers ion of it—at th e So¯getsu Art Center, Tokyo, on the occasion of her concer t and exhibition there (pp. 86–91). Throughout the 1960s, Ono explored the theme of touch in various formats, including postcards, instructions, and performances.

7 and 8 (next page). Touch Poem #5 . c. 1960. Human hair, cut-and-pasted paper, 7 7 7 7 8 x 13 ⁄ 16" (25 x 34.1 cm); closed 9 ⁄ 8 x 6 ⁄ 8" (25 x 17.5 cm) and ink on paper, open 9 ⁄

1960–1962

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TOUCH POEM #5

TOUCH POEM #5 c. 1960

Touch Poem #5 is a handmade booklet whose thirty-two

pages are punctuated with locks of black and red hair (Ono’s own and that of a friend) and horizontal strips of cut white paper. Containing no written text apart from the title, the poem turns the act of reading into a tactile encounter—viewers can run their hands over the pages to experience the various textures and the staccato patterns of the paper collage elements, which differ in length and seem to be arranged according to a numeric or linguistic logic. One of Ono’s earliest extant artworks, Touch Poem #5 was likely the fifth such object of a series, although no record remains of numbers one through four. It was first shown in the lobby of the Living Theatre, New York, on January 8, 1962, during a benefit concert for An Anthology , a publication edited by La Monte Young that included contributions by many artists who had participated in the Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). In May 1962, Ono showed the work again—though possibly a new vers ion of it—at th e So¯getsu Art Center, Tokyo, on the occasion of her concer t and exhibition there (pp. 86–91). Throughout the 1960s, Ono explored the theme of touch in various formats, including postcards, instructions, and performances.

7 and 8 (next page). Touch Poem #5 . c. 1960. Human hair, cut-and-pasted paper, 7 7 7 7 8 x 13 ⁄ 16" (25 x 34.1 cm); closed 9 ⁄ 8 x 6 ⁄ 8" (25 x 17.5 cm) and ink on paper, open 9 ⁄

1960–1962

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TOUCH POEM #5

1960–1962

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TOUCH POEM #5

1960–1962

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PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY YOKO ONO

PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY YOKO ONO AG Galler y, New York July 17–30, 1961

Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono , Ono’s first solo

exhibition, took place in July 1961 at the short-lived AG Gallery, located at 925 Madison Avenue. Artist and designer George Maciunas and his friend Almus Salcius, an art dealer at the time, codirected the gallery. All the works on view in Ono’s exhibition were made earlier that year or completed during the course of the show, and are now lost or no longer extant.1 The paintings were manifestations of Ono’s instructions, which were communicated verbally to visitors or written on cards placed beside the pieces. (Some of these works were first realized during the Chambers Street Loft Series, though different versions might have been shown at AG.) Most works required the participation of the artist or visitors. Smoke Painting involved burning holes in a piece of canvas with either a cigarette or a candle; according to the instruction, the work was completed only when the canvas had been entirely destroyed. Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13) was placed on the floor and meant to be walked upon. (The circle of canvas in Waterdrop Painting [Version 1] [pl. 14] was cut from Painting to Be Stepped On and was installed nearby, with a bottle of water hung from the ceiling above it [pl. 16]). Other works relied on their environment to be realized. Shadow Painting (pl. 15), for instance, was a piece of canvas over which sunlight streaming through the windows (and through a translucent screen installed in front of them) cast shadows of the window framework and the lettering on the glass. The drawings were sumi-ink compositions on sheets of white paper and referred to the tradition of Japanese calligraphy. One work loosely resembled a musical staff missing the fifth line; another consisted of a field of black ink that almost entirely covered the sheet. Painting Until It Becomes Marble , an accordionfold book, was displayed alongside a bottle of sumi ink on a table placed before the windows and the translucent screen placed in front of them.2 According to the instructions for the piece, later published in the artist’s book Grapefruit (1964; pp. 100–105), visitors were asked “to cut their favorite parts until the whole thing is gone” or, alternatively, “to paint black ink over them.”3

1. The following paintings are known to have been included: Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13); A plus B Painting ; Painting for the Wind ; Painting in Three Stanzas (pls. 11, 12); Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through ; Painting to See in the Dark (Version 1) (pl. 9); Painting to See in the Dark (Version 2); Painting Until It Becomes Marble ; Shadow Painting (pl. 15); Smoke Painting; Time Painting; Waterdrop Painting (Version 1) (pl. 14); and Waterdrop Painting (Version 2) .

2. The book by th at title illustrated in this s ection [pls. 17, 18] may not be the same version that was shown at AG. 3. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p.

9. Yoko Ono with Painting to See in the Dark (Version 1) (1961), at AG Gallery, New York, July 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas

1960–1962

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PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY YOKO ONO AG Galler y, New York July 17–30, 1961

Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono , Ono’s first solo

exhibition, took place in July 1961 at the short-lived AG Gallery, located at 925 Madison Avenue. Artist and designer George Maciunas and his friend Almus Salcius, an art dealer at the time, codirected the gallery. All the works on view in Ono’s exhibition were made earlier that year or completed during the course of the show, and are now lost or no longer extant.1 The paintings were manifestations of Ono’s instructions, which were communicated verbally to visitors or written on cards placed beside the pieces. (Some of these works were first realized during the Chambers Street Loft Series, though different versions might have been shown at AG.) Most works required the participation of the artist or visitors. Smoke Painting involved burning holes in a piece of canvas with either a cigarette or a candle; according to the instruction, the work was completed only when the canvas had been entirely destroyed. Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13) was placed on the floor and meant to be walked upon. (The circle of canvas in Waterdrop Painting [Version 1] [pl. 14] was cut from Painting to Be Stepped On and was installed nearby, with a bottle of water hung from the ceiling above it [pl. 16]). Other works relied on their environment to be realized. Shadow Painting (pl. 15), for instance, was a piece of canvas over which sunlight streaming through the windows (and through a translucent screen installed in front of them) cast shadows of the window framework and the lettering on the glass. The drawings were sumi-ink compositions on sheets of white paper and referred to the tradition of Japanese calligraphy. One work loosely resembled a musical staff missing the fifth line; another consisted of a field of black ink that almost entirely covered the sheet. Painting Until It Becomes Marble , an accordionfold book, was displayed alongside a bottle of sumi ink on a table placed before the windows and the translucent screen placed in front of them.2 According to the instructions for the piece, later published in the artist’s book Grapefruit (1964; pp. 100–105), visitors were asked “to cut their favorite parts until the whole thing is gone” or, alternatively, “to paint black ink over them.”3

1. The following paintings are known to have been included: Painting to Be Stepped On (pl. 13); A plus B Painting ; Painting for the Wind ; Painting in Three Stanzas (pls. 11, 12); Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through ; Painting to See in the Dark (Version 1) (pl. 9); Painting to See in the Dark (Version 2); Painting Until It Becomes Marble ; Shadow Painting (pl. 15); Smoke Painting; Time Painting; Waterdrop Painting (Version 1) (pl. 14); and Waterdrop Painting (Version 2) .

2. The book by th at title illustrated in this s ection [pls. 17, 18] may not be the same version that was shown at AG. 3. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p.

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9. Yoko Ono with Painting to See in the Dark (Version 1) (1961), at AG Gallery, New York, July 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas

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11. Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink on canvas with vine, dimensions unknown. Instruction (pl. 12) partially visible at upper right. Photograph: George Maciunas

10. Poster for Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. 1961. Designed by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas. Offset, 8 x 10 3 ⁄ 16" (20.3 x 25.8 cm)

12. Instruction for Painting in Three Stanzas . 1961. Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ink on the back of an AG Gallery program announcement card, 3 3 ⁄ 8 x 10 5 ⁄ 8" (8.5 x 27 cm)

1960–1962

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11. Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink on canvas with vine, dimensions unknown. Instruction (pl. 12) partially visible at upper right. Photograph: George Maciunas

12. Instruction for Painting in Three Stanzas . 1961. Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ink on the back of an AG Gallery program announcement card, 3 3 ⁄ 8 x 10 5 ⁄ 8" (8.5 x 27 cm)

10. Poster for Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. 1961. Designed by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas. Offset, 8 x 10 3 ⁄ 16" (20.3 x 25.8 cm)

1960–1962

13. Painting to Be Stepped On. 1960/1961. Installed with instruction in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas

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14. Waterdrop Painting (Version 1). 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink and water on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas

1960–1962

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13. Painting to Be Stepped On. 1960/1961. Installed with instruction in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas

1960–1962

15. Shadow Painting. 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink and shadows on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas


14. Waterdrop Painting (Version 1). 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink and water on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas

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16. View of Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. From left: Waterdrop Painting (Version 1) (1961; pl. 14) (on floor); Painting Until It Becomes Marble (1961) (on table); and Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) (on floor). Photograph: George Maciunas

1960–1962

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16. View of Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. From left: Waterdrop Painting (Version 1) (1961; pl. 14) (on floor); Painting Until It Becomes Marble (1961) (on table); and Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961; pl. 13) (on floor). Photograph: George Maciunas

15. Shadow Painting. 1961. Installed in Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Sumi ink and shadows on canvas, dimensions unknown. Photograph: George Maciunas

1960–1962

17 and 18. Painting Until It Becomes Marble . 1961. Ink on paper, unfolded 6 1 ⁄ 4" x 9' 3 13 ⁄ 16" (15.9 x 284 cm); folded 6 1 ⁄ 4 x 4 1 ⁄ 4" (15.9 x 10.8 cm)


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1960–1962

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WORKS BY YOKO ONO

17 and 18. Painting Until It Becomes Marble . 1961. Ink on paper, unfolded 6 1 ⁄ 4" x 9' 3 13 ⁄ 16" (15.9 x 284 cm); folded 6 1 ⁄ 4 x 4 1 ⁄ 4" (15.9 x 10.8 cm)

1960–1962

WORKS BY YOKO ONO Carnegie Recital Hall, New York November 24, 1961

Yoko Ono’s 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall presentation, her first solo concert, included A Grapefruit in the World of Park , A Piece for Strawberries and Violin , and AOS—To David Tudor . A fourth work, Hide Piece , was also performed, although it was not listed on the concert program and may have been incorporated into one of the other performances. About twenty of Ono’s friends participated in the Carnegie concert, playing various roles. In A Grapefruit in the World of Park , Ono recited a text into a microphone on the darkened stage. The text was based on a short narrative she wrote that was published in her college newspaper in 1955 and that unfolds around the peeling and distribution of a grapefruit at a picnic. The performed work, which Ono had first presented in April at New York’s Village Gate, was a radically different version, now a series of phrases, sometimes disparate, with macabre elements like the repeated statement, “Let’s count the hairs of the dead child.”1 Ono instructed musicians to improvise in response to the verses. As in the Village Gate concert, a performer stationed in the bathroom with a stopwatch and microphone flushed a toilet at designated times, providing a humorous realworld intrusion into the event. A Piece for Strawberries and Violin comprised, as noted by one reviewer, “neither strawberries nor vio2 lin.” Choreographer Yvonne Rainer and another female performer took turns standing up and sitting down. They then began to eat from a table at the center of the stage. This seemingly mundane activity escalated as the sounds of their actions were increasingly amplified by a microphone hidden somewhere nearby. The work ended with the performers smashing their dishes, an unexpected finale highlighted by several critics who reviewed the concert. The last performance, AOS—To David Tudor ,

was a complex opera, with parts set to a soundtrack consisting of recorded words and mumblings, Ono’s own distinctive vocalizations, and audio playback of events that had been recorded earlier in the performance. In the first act, the lights were turned off and participants attempted to read newspapers by match light. In the next, tin cans and chairs were bound to a group of performers who were instructed to move across the stage without making a noise. Toward the end of the concert, a large canvas was hung across the stage. Dancers cut holes through the material and stuck out their limbs and various objects, such as flashlights, as an audiotape of Ono’s vocal improvisations played.

1. Reproductions of the text as it appeared in Ono’s school newspaper appear on pp. 14–15. The typescript for the later version appears on pp. 18–19. 2. Alan Rich, “Far Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This volume, p. 76.

19 and 20. Recto (top) and verso (bottom) of program flier for Works by Yoko Ono. 1961. Designed by Ono and incorporating photograph by Minoru Niizuma. Offset, 5 1 ⁄ 2 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (13.9 x 21.6 cm)

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WORKS BY YOKO ONO

WORKS BY YOKO ONO Carnegie Recital Hall, New York November 24, 1961

Yoko Ono’s 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall presentation, her first solo concert, included A Grapefruit in the World of Park , A Piece for Strawberries and Violin , and AOS—To David Tudor . A fourth work, Hide Piece , was also performed, although it was not listed on the concert program and may have been incorporated into one of the other performances. About twenty of Ono’s friends participated in the Carnegie concert, playing various roles. In A Grapefruit in the World of Park , Ono recited a text into a microphone on the darkened stage. The text was based on a short narrative she wrote that was published in her college newspaper in 1955 and that unfolds around the peeling and distribution of a grapefruit at a picnic. The performed work, which Ono had first presented in April at New York’s Village Gate, was a radically different version, now a series of phrases, sometimes disparate, with macabre elements like the repeated statement, “Let’s count the hairs of the dead child.”1 Ono instructed musicians to improvise in response to the verses. As in the Village Gate concert, a performer stationed in the bathroom with a stopwatch and microphone flushed a toilet at designated times, providing a humorous realworld intrusion into the event. A Piece for Strawberries and Violin comprised, as noted by one reviewer, “neither strawberries nor vio2 lin.” Choreographer Yvonne Rainer and another female performer took turns standing up and sitting down. They then began to eat from a table at the center of the stage. This seemingly mundane activity escalated as the sounds of their actions were increasingly amplified by a microphone hidden somewhere nearby. The work ended with the performers smashing their dishes, an unexpected finale highlighted by several critics who reviewed the concert. The last performance, AOS—To David Tudor ,

was a complex opera, with parts set to a soundtrack consisting of recorded words and mumblings, Ono’s own distinctive vocalizations, and audio playback of events that had been recorded earlier in the performance. In the first act, the lights were turned off and participants attempted to read newspapers by match light. In the next, tin cans and chairs were bound to a group of performers who were instructed to move across the stage without making a noise. Toward the end of the concert, a large canvas was hung across the stage. Dancers cut holes through the material and stuck out their limbs and various objects, such as flashlights, as an audiotape of Ono’s vocal improvisations played.

1. Reproductions of the text as it appeared in Ono’s school newspaper appear on pp. 14–15. The typescript for the later version appears on pp. 18–19.

19 and 20. Recto (top) and verso (bottom) of program flier for Works by Yoko Ono. 1961. Designed by Ono and incorporating photograph by Minoru Niizuma. Offset, 5 1 ⁄ 2 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (13.9 x 21.6 cm)

2. Alan Rich, “Far Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961. This volume, p. 76.

1960�1962

A LETTER TO GEORGE MACIUNAS

... if you are going to talk about being fair to Jackson MacLow who’s credit was taken by Andy Warhol, etc., use the same caution and sense of justice to write about Chamber Street Loft, you shouldn’t write as if La Monte Young was the producer just because he has taken the credit for it. I agree with him or you that he was the editor of the Anthology magazine, but I don’t agree at all that he was the producer of the shows at my loft. I am not alone in this. Once I tried to tell you on the phone about what happened in Chamber Street Loft—and you stopped me from talking about it by saying “We don’t talk about the past—that’s past”. But if you are going to write about “the past”, it’s only fair to find out my side of the story of what happened there—because you were not there and didn’t know. For instance, Marcel Duchamp was brought by Earle Brown, not John Cage. In my Village Gate Concert, John Cage, David Tudor, and LaMonte Young performed in my piece as well—this was decided at the last moment, and was done. So I repeat, don’t talk about what you don’t know.

—Excerpt from a letter by Yoko Ono to George Maciunas, December 3, 1971.

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YOKO'S VOICE


The idea was mine, and we did it together.

—Yoko Ono, November 18, 2014

1960�1962

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YOKO'S VOICE

A LETTER TO GEORGE MACIUNAS


... if you are going to talk about being fair to Jackson MacLow who’s credit was taken by Andy Warhol, etc., use the same caution and sense of justice to write about Chamber Street Loft, you shouldn’t write as if La Monte Young was the producer just because he has taken the credit for it. I agree with him or you that he was the editor of the Anthology magazine, but I don’t agree at all that he was the producer of the shows at my loft. I am not alone in this.

The idea was mine, and we did it together.

—Yoko Ono, November 18, 2014

Once I tried to tell you on the phone about what happened in Chamber Street Loft—and you stopped me from talking about it by saying “We don’t talk about the past—that’s past”. But if you are going to write about “the past”, it’s only fair to find out my side of the story of what happened there—because you were not there and didn’t know. For instance, Marcel Duchamp was brought by Earle Brown, not John Cage. In my Village Gate Concert, John Cage, David Tudor, and LaMonte Young performed in my piece as well—this was decided at the last moment, and was done. So I repeat, don’t talk about what you don’t know.

—Excerpt from a letter by Yoko Ono to George Maciunas, December 3, 1971.

1960�1962

SUMMER OF 1961

Early summer, I got a call from one of the artists who did one of the evening performances at my loft on Chambers Street. He said there was this guy who opened a midtown gallery on Madison Avenue and was planning to do exactly what I had been doing in my Chambers Street loft. All the Chamber Street Series artists were now lining up in front of his gallery, the artist said. “The guy got the idea when he came to one of the evenings at your loft. His name is George Maciunas. You were probably introduced. Do you remember him?” I didn’t. There were about 200 people attending those evenings at my loft. Many of them wanted to say hello to me. So I might have been introduced to the guy. I felt a bit miserable. “You’re finished, Yoko. He’s got all your artists.” “Oh,” I thought, so the Chamber Street Loft series would be over. Finito. That didn’t make me feel that bad. So what’s next? Then I got a call from George Maciunas himself. He wanted to do my art show in his gallery. Nobody ever thought of giving me a show yet in those days. So the guy who supposedly “finished me off” is now giving me a show? Things work in mysterious ways. I was happy.

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YOKO'S VOICE

Toshi stopped there. He didn’t do any more cards. Why? Why not? You can see those two signs glaring out of those photos from the show that have managed to survive all these years later. I am very thankful for those two cards—without them, no one would ever know that this was my first show of Instruction Paintings. When George and I finally put up all the paintings, and put a card that said 400 dollars on the side of each painting, we looked at each other. What if somebody bought one painting? What are we going to do then?” If somebody bought one painting, we can go to Europe!” he said. We felt like somebody already bought one. We became so happy we suddenly took each other’s hands and danced around the room. George said we had to have a name for this movement that was happening. “You think of the name,” he told me. I said, “I don’t think this is a movement. I think it’s wrong to make it into a movement.” To me, “movement” had a dirty sound—like we were going to be some kind of an establishment. I didn’t like that. So I didn’t think of any name. The next day, George said “Yoko, look.” He showed me the word “Fluxus” in a huge dictionary. It had many meanings, but he pointed to “flushing.” “Like toilet flushing!” he said laughing, thinking it was a good name for the movement. “This is the name,” he said. I just shrugged my shoulders in my mind.

It was dusk when I visited the AG gallery for the first time. The staircase in the hall was already half dark. I went upstairs, and the door was wide open. I entered into an already dark room. I heard some people just whispering to each other and laughing in another room. The light was coming from that room. As I walked over, I saw a very handsome man, obviously European, with a beautiful woman sitting together at a table in candlelight. They both looked at me. I remember thinking what a romantic picture the two of them made! There was an IBM typewriter on the table gleaming in the dark. One of the artists had once commented, “That IBM typewriter! That alone must be something. Just means he’s rich!” But turns out, everything was not as it seemed.

The summer of 1961 was very hot, and only few people came to the show. I remember some dear friends who did show up. I remember explaining the Smoke Painting to John Cage, and actually made thin smoke come out of the canvas ... like the smoke you get from burning incense. I remember Beate Gordon and her daughter, Nicky, who were encouraging about my work. That was a nice surprise. Beate called me later, and said, “Yoko, Nicky liked it. I was so scared that she would not like it, that I told her not to say anything. I found out later that she actually liked it and wanted to say something, but I told her not to say anything!” We both laughed. I remember Isamu Noguchi, stepping on Painting To Be Stepped On with a pair of elegant Zohri slippers. All that seems like yesterday.

The very young and pretty woman George was sitting with was actually his mother. They used the candle because the electricity was cut off. And that great looking IBM typewriter? It was a loaner. George also had phones everywhere. There was a story for that, too. He told me his phone service was listed under a new name every month. Whenever his phone was cut off, he just registered a new phone under a new name. Of course, that night I, like the rest of the artists, just thought, “WOW!”

George had a closet full of very expensive canned goods. They were canned gourmet nobody wanted to buy because they were so expensive. A friend of his had the great idea that it would make a fortune, which it didn’t. So George got them. That was our meal every day: canned foie gras. It wasn’t bad. But I thought it needed something with it. Just something.

George told me that he wanted to do a show of my artwork. That was to be the last show in this gallery. The electricity was already cut off, so we had to do it just during the day. That did not faze me. So I started to assemble the works I wanted to show. The fact that there was no electricity actually worked to my advantage—sunlight streaming through the gallery windows cast shadows on the canvases, making beautiful, natural changes to them throughout the day. The works on display all had some function. I stood in the gallery, and when people came, I took them around to each painting, and explained what the function of each piece was. I asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write out cards explaining the functions to display on the side of each painting. Well, he managed to write two cards. One was Painting To Be Stepped On, and the other was Painting In Three Stanzas.

We used to walk around the city. It was warm and rather quiet. Most people on the Upper East Side probably went to the Hamptons or something. We felt good, like we owned the city. Both of us were totally bigheaded people. So, yes, we were the owners of something. Maybe not the city, but something... maybe not so tangible.... As they say, those were the days.

y.o. April ‘08

72

1960�1962

73

SUMMER OF 1961

YOKO'S VOICE

Toshi stopped there. He didn’t do any more cards. Why? Why not? You can see those two signs glaring out of those photos from the show that have managed to survive all these years later. I am very thankful for those two cards—without them, no one would ever know that this was my first show of Instruction Paintings. When George and I finally put up all the paintings, and put a card that said 400 dollars on the side of each painting, we looked at each other. What if somebody bought one painting? What are we going to do then?” If somebody bought one painting, we can go to Europe!” he said. We felt like somebody already bought one. We became so happy we suddenly took each other’s hands and danced around the room.

Early summer, I got a call from one of the artists who did one of the evening performances at my loft on Chambers Street. He said there was this guy who opened a midtown gallery on Madison Avenue and was planning to do exactly what I had been doing in my Chambers Street loft. All the Chamber Street Series artists were now lining up in front of his gallery, the artist said. “The guy got the idea when he came to one of the evenings at your loft. His name is George Maciunas. You were probably introduced. Do you remember him?” I didn’t. There were about 200 people attending those evenings at my loft. Many of them wanted to say hello to me. So I might have been introduced to the guy. I felt a bit miserable. “You’re finished, Yoko. He’s got all your artists.” “Oh,” I thought, so the Chamber Street Loft series would be over. Finito. That didn’t make me feel that bad. So what’s next? Then I got a call from George Maciunas himself. He wanted to do my art show in his gallery. Nobody ever thought of giving me a show yet in those days. So the guy who supposedly “finished me off” is now giving me a show? Things work in mysterious ways. I was happy.

George said we had to have a name for this movement that was happening. “You think of the name,” he told me. I said, “I don’t think this is a movement. I think it’s wrong to make it into a movement.” To me, “movement” had a dirty sound—like we were going to be some kind of an establishment. I didn’t like that. So I didn’t think of any name. The next day, George said “Yoko, look.” He showed me the word “Fluxus” in a huge dictionary. It had many meanings, but he pointed to “flushing.” “Like toilet flushing!” he said laughing, thinking it was a good name for the movement. “This is the name,” he said. I just shrugged my shoulders in my mind.

It was dusk when I visited the AG gallery for the first time. The staircase in the hall was already half dark. I went upstairs, and the door was wide open. I entered into an already dark room. I heard some people just whispering to each other and laughing in another room. The light was coming from that room. As I walked over, I saw a very handsome man, obviously European, with a beautiful woman sitting together at a table in candlelight. They both looked at me. I remember thinking what a romantic picture the two of them made! There was an IBM typewriter on the table gleaming in the dark. One of the artists had once commented, “That IBM typewriter! That alone must be something. Just means he’s rich!” But turns out, everything was not as it seemed.

The summer of 1961 was very hot, and only few people came to the show. I remember some dear friends who did show up. I remember explaining the Smoke Painting to John Cage, and actually made thin smoke come out of the canvas ... like the smoke you get from burning incense. I remember Beate Gordon and her daughter, Nicky, who were encouraging about my work. That was a nice surprise. Beate called me later, and said, “Yoko, Nicky liked it. I was so scared that she would not like it, that I told her not to say anything. I found out later that she actually liked it and wanted to say something, but I told her not to say anything!” We both laughed. I remember Isamu Noguchi, stepping on Painting To Be Stepped On with a pair of elegant Zohri slippers. All that seems like yesterday.

The very young and pretty woman George was sitting with was actually his mother. They used the candle because the electricity was cut off. And that great looking IBM typewriter? It was a loaner. George also had phones everywhere. There was a story for that, too. He told me his phone service was listed under a new name every month. Whenever his phone was cut off, he just registered a new phone under a new name. Of course, that night I, like the rest of the artists, just thought, “WOW!”

George had a closet full of very expensive canned goods. They were canned gourmet nobody wanted to buy because they were so expensive. A friend of his had the great idea that it would make a fortune, which it didn’t. So George got them. That was our meal every day: canned foie gras. It wasn’t bad. But I thought it needed something with it. Just something. We used to walk around the city. It was warm and rather quiet. Most people on the Upper East Side probably went to the Hamptons or something. We felt good, like we owned the city. Both of us were totally bigheaded people. So, yes, we were the owners of something. Maybe not the city, but something... maybe not so tangible.... As they say, those were the days.

George told me that he wanted to do a show of my artwork. That was to be the last show in this gallery. The electricity was already cut off, so we had to do it just during the day. That did not faze me. So I started to assemble the works I wanted to show. The fact that there was no electricity actually worked to my advantage—sunlight streaming through the gallery windows cast shadows on the canvases, making beautiful, natural changes to them throughout the day. The works on display all had some function. I stood in the gallery, and when people came, I took them around to each painting, and explained what the function of each piece was. I asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write out cards explaining the functions to display on the side of each painting. Well, he managed to write two cards. One was Painting To Be Stepped On, and the other was Painting In Three Stanzas.

74

1960�1962

Yoko Ono, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toshiro Mayuzumi. 1961. Uncropped photograph by Minoru Niizuma.

y.o. April ‘08

Ross Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering at the Village Gate Proves Unusual Fare,” New York Times, April 4, 1961.

75


Gene Swenson, Artnews 60, no. 5 (September 1961): 17.

74

1960�1962

Yoko Ono, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toshiro Mayuzumi. 1961. Uncropped photograph by Minoru Niizuma.

75

Ross Parmenter, “Contemporary Japanese Offering at the Village Gate Proves Unusual Fare,” New York Times, April 4, 1961.

1960�1962

Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961.


Gene Swenson, Artnews 60, no. 5 (September 1961): 17.

76

77


Jill Johnston, “Life and Art,” The Village Voice, December 7, 1961: 10.

1960�1962

76

77

Alan Rich, “Far-Out Music Is Played at Carnegie,” New York Times, November 25, 1961.


Jill Johnston, “Life and Art,” The Village Voice, December 7, 1961: 10.

78

79

1962–1964

In 1962, Yoko Ono began to feel that the New York art scene was becoming a rigid and limiting establishment. Her husband, the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who had returned to Japan in 1961, arrange d a concert for her at th e So¯getsu Art Center in Tokyo. Intending to visit for just a few weeks, Ono wound up staying for two and a half years. Her stay in Japan turned out to be one of the most difficult and transformative periods in her career. Just as her life went through dramatic changes, her art began to shift its orientation from the avant-garde to the popular, with a greater emphasis on public interaction. In a way, this shift anticipated her future collaborations with John Lennon and many of her c urrent endeavors, which involve the broad public. 1 She claimed that some of the works she would later enact in New York, London, and elsewhere were “inspired directly from the environment in Japan” and born out of the exchanges she had with Japanese people. 2 The concert that Ichiyanagi had arranged, titled Works of Yoko Ono (pp. 84–91), held at So¯ getsu on May 24, 1962, was widely anticipated, with the press celebrating Ono’s novelty as a young female composer and poet who had come back to Japan from New York after ten years. In addition to the concert, there was a solo exhibition in the lobby that included, among other works, the artist’s Touch Poems and Instructions for Paintings (pls. 28–31), both of which were radical for inviting interaction: the former encouraged the viewers to explore the s ensation of touch, while the latter prompted them to complete paintings in their minds. The concert centered on the theme of kehai (vibration) and was inspired by Buddha’s halfclosed eyes. Ono wished the audience to seek out something ineffable, such as vibration, and to both view the world before them (the performances) and look into their inner worlds, inhabiting a state of being symbolized by Buddha’s meditative gaze.3 The concert was intentionally dimly lit and the works involved only subtle sounds and movements; the intention was to intrigue the audience and lead them to focus on their senses while engaging with her performances. “It was quite shocking to those of us in Japan who were mainly looking at Western art and music for insp iration,” the graphic designer Ko¯ hei Sugiura recall s. “Ms. Ono’s concept was to return action or a way of thinking to it s origin, which was opposite of what we were doing.” 4 Sugiura was one of approximately thirty vanguard artists who performed at Ono’s concert. Others included Genpei Akasegawa, who later founded the collective Hi Red Center, and Tatsumi Hijikata, creator of the dance form ankoku butoh (dance of darkness). The participating artists obediently followed Ono’s Zen koan–like instructions to enact straightforward actions, such as sweeping the stage with a broom.

21. Still from the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people, 1964), directed by Chiaki Nagano, showing Yoko Ono selling Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964) in Ginza, Tokyo. At right: Anthony Cox

The concert began with Ono’s solo A Piano Piece to See the Skies, which consisted of “inaudible” sounds (made by faintly touching the piano’s keys), “sounds that reached the sk y,” and breathing. 5 While breathing hard in the third movement, Ono lit a match and smoked a cigarette, an action that was considered a realization of her 1955 instruction Lighting Piece (pl. 25). As in this i nstance, many small works that were not listed in the program, such as Hide Piece and Question Piece, were incorporated into larger works. Audience Piece to La Monte (pl. 27) was used as the finale for AOS—To David Tudor (pl. 24). Characterized as an “opera without any sound of instrument s,” 6 this finale consisted of twenty performers standing at the front of the stage and silently watching the members of the audience. The

78

79

1962–1964

In 1962, Yoko Ono began to feel that the New York art scene was becoming a rigid and limiting establishment. Her husband, the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who had returned to Japan in 1961, arrange d a concert for her at th e So¯getsu Art Center in Tokyo. Intending to visit for just a few weeks, Ono wound up staying for two and a half years. Her stay in Japan turned out to be one of the most difficult and transformative periods in her career. Just as her life went through dramatic changes, her art began to shift its orientation from the avant-garde to the popular, with a greater emphasis on public interaction. In a way, this shift anticipated her future collaborations with John Lennon and many of her c urrent endeavors, which involve the broad public. 1 She claimed that some of the works she would later enact in New York, London, and elsewhere were “inspired directly from the environment in Japan” and born out of the exchanges she had with Japanese people. 2 The concert that Ichiyanagi had arranged, titled Works of Yoko Ono (pp. 84–91), held at So¯ getsu on May 24, 1962, was widely anticipated, with the press celebrating Ono’s novelty as a young female composer and poet who had come back to Japan from New York after ten years. In addition to the concert, there was a solo exhibition in the lobby that included, among other works, the artist’s Touch Poems and Instructions for Paintings (pls. 28–31), both of which were radical for inviting interaction: the former encouraged the viewers to explore the s ensation of touch, while the latter prompted them to complete paintings in their minds. The concert centered on the theme of kehai (vibration) and was inspired by Buddha’s halfclosed eyes. Ono wished the audience to seek out something ineffable, such as vibration, and to both view the world before them (the performances) and look into their inner worlds, inhabiting a state of being symbolized by Buddha’s meditative gaze.3 The concert was intentionally dimly lit and the works involved only subtle sounds and movements; the intention was to intrigue the audience and lead them to focus on their senses while engaging with her performances. “It was quite shocking to those of us in Japan who were mainly looking at Western art and music for insp iration,” the graphic designer Ko¯ hei Sugiura recall s. “Ms. Ono’s concept was to return action or a way of thinking to it s origin, which was opposite of what we were doing.” 4 Sugiura was one of approximately thirty vanguard artists who performed at Ono’s concert. Others included Genpei Akasegawa, who later founded the collective Hi Red Center, and Tatsumi Hijikata, creator of the dance form ankoku butoh (dance of darkness). The participating artists obediently followed Ono’s Zen koan–like instructions to enact straightforward actions, such as sweeping the stage with a broom. The concert began with Ono’s solo A Piano Piece to See the Skies, which consisted of “inaudible” sounds (made by faintly touching the piano’s keys), “sounds that reached the sk y,” and breathing. 5 While breathing hard in the third movement, Ono lit a match and smoked a cigarette, an action that was considered a realization of her 1955 instruction Lighting Piece (pl. 25). As in this i nstance, many small works that were not listed in the program, such as Hide Piece and Question Piece, were incorporated into larger works. Audience Piece to La Monte (pl. 27) was used as the finale for AOS—To David Tudor (pl. 24). Characterized as an “opera without any sound of instrument s,” 6 this finale consisted of twenty performers standing at the front of the stage and silently watching the members of the audience. The

21. Still from the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people, 1964), directed by Chiaki Nagano, showing Yoko Ono selling Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964) in Ginza, Tokyo. At right: Anthony Cox

1962–1964

80

81

1962–1964

abrupt reversal of the roles of performer and audience was so upsetting that at one point someone came onstage to pinch the noses of the performers one by one, eventually precipitating a fight. 7 Ono’s legendary concert introduced a new form of art to Japan—often referred to as “Happenings.” Ono’s concert had a strong impact at the time, receiving nearly a dozen reviews. She found, however, that most critics merely followed Western artistic trends and derided her work as eccentric, sometimes making up rumors about her private life. American expatriate critic Donald Ritchie attacked her in a popular art magazine, declaring that all her ideas were borrowed from John Cage. Ichiyanagi published a statement in the next issue of the magazine, defending Ono and her art. 8 As Ono recalled, she feared her bad reputation would harm her husband’s blossoming career, and she gradually isolated herself, growing increasingly depressed. 9 While recovering from her depression, she met Anthony Cox, an American who told her that he had seen her work in New York and came to Japan to meet her. 10 By October she was well enough to participate as a performer and translator in a Japanese concert tour by John Cage and David Tudor. Although she presented bold interpretations of Cage’s pieces, such as laying herself on top of the piano in his Music Walk (1958), her creative interventions were largely ignored by the press. In 1963, Ono and Cox married, and their daughter, Kyoko, was born. While this was a difficult time, in which she worked odd jobs (barely enough to make ends meet) and cared for her newborn child, Ono still managed to create numerous instructions and to perform some of them in public. In 1964, she self-published Grapefruit (pp. 100–105), an anthology of her instructions and product of her work up until this point. The instructions, some written in Japanese, most in English, were organized into fi ve sect ions: “Music ,” “Painting,” “Event,” “Poetry,” and “Object .” The coll ection further soli dified the belief she put forth at So¯getsu: that the instr uctions were a form of art on their own. The idea of advocating language as art anticipated the international Conceptual art movement, 11 but Ono’s work went further than this. Her intention was that others would put her instructions into action, or enact them in their minds, and in this sense her works resonated with those of her Fluxus peers. Ono experienced an explosion of creative energy in 1964. This productive period coincided with that of the Tokyo avant-garde, which began exploring alternative spaces, such as the Naiqua Gallery, and outdoor venues for their exhibitions and performances, due to the discontinuation of the annual Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. Ono performed a series of new events at Naiqua in early 1964, including Touch Piece (pp. 92–93), Fly , and 9 A.M. to 11 A.M., which was later renamed Morning Piece (pp. 94–99). Among the events’ attendees were active Fluxus member Nam June Paik, and other artists—such as Shigeko Kubota, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, Takehisa Kosugi, and Yasunao Tone—who later became involved in Fluxus in New York. For Touch Piece, participants, including Ono, sat in a circle and touched each other in silence.12 Ono was absent from the performance of Fly , for which she asked invite es to “come with preparations to fly,”13 encouraging them to interpret the piece freely, without her influence. 14 Many of them j umped from a ladder that was set up in the gallery. Later they discussed whether the act of flying was the same as dying. As early participants in Fluxus, Ono and Paik served as catalysts in promoting the idea of the “event” in Japan and brought information on like-minded Japanese artists, including those of Hi Red Center, to New York. 15 Ono played a leading role in disseminating the early forms of performance and Conceptual art in Japan, and was at the center of the Tokyo avant-garde community, whose members were interested in challenging and subverting the norms of mainstream culture. Ono was featured prominently as the only female artist in the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people), made by Chiaki Nagano and broadcast on Japanese television in 1964. The film introduced a group of artists performing

22. Tickets for Three Kyoto Events: Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall; Evening till Dawn, Nanzenji Temple; Symposium: !, French Cancan Coffee House. 1964. Four offset sheets with ink stamps, each 2

⁄ 8 x

7

9 15 ⁄ 16" (7.3 x 25.2 cm)

1962–1964

80

81

1962–1964

abrupt reversal of the roles of performer and audience was so upsetting that at one point someone came onstage to pinch the noses of the performers one by one, eventually precipitating a fight. 7 Ono’s legendary concert introduced a new form of art to Japan—often referred to as “Happenings.” Ono’s concert had a strong impact at the time, receiving nearly a dozen reviews. She found, however, that most critics merely followed Western artistic trends and derided her work as eccentric, sometimes making up rumors about her private life. American expatriate critic Donald Ritchie attacked her in a popular art magazine, declaring that all her ideas were borrowed from John Cage. Ichiyanagi published a statement in the next issue of the magazine, defending Ono and her art. 8 As Ono recalled, she feared her bad reputation would harm her husband’s blossoming career, and she gradually isolated herself, growing increasingly depressed. 9 While recovering from her depression, she met Anthony Cox, an American who told her that he had seen her work in New York and came to Japan to meet her. 10 By October she was well enough to participate as a performer and translator in a Japanese concert tour by John Cage and David Tudor. Although she presented bold interpretations of Cage’s pieces, such as laying herself on top of the piano in his Music Walk (1958), her creative interventions were largely ignored by the press. In 1963, Ono and Cox married, and their daughter, Kyoko, was born. While this was a difficult time, in which she worked odd jobs (barely enough to make ends meet) and cared for her newborn child, Ono still managed to create numerous instructions and to perform some of them in public. In 1964, she self-published Grapefruit (pp. 100–105), an anthology of her instructions and product of her work up until this point. The instructions, some written in Japanese, most in English, were organized into fi ve sect ions: “Music ,” “Painting,” “Event,” “Poetry,” and “Object .” The coll ection further soli dified the belief she put forth at So¯getsu: that the instr uctions were a form of art on their own. The idea of advocating language as art anticipated the international Conceptual art movement, 11 but Ono’s work went further than this. Her intention was that others would put her instructions into action, or enact them in their minds, and in this sense her works resonated with those of her Fluxus peers. Ono experienced an explosion of creative energy in 1964. This productive period coincided with that of the Tokyo avant-garde, which began exploring alternative spaces, such as the Naiqua Gallery, and outdoor venues for their exhibitions and performances, due to the discontinuation of the annual Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. Ono performed a series of new events at Naiqua in early 1964, including Touch Piece (pp. 92–93), Fly , and 9 A.M. to 11 A.M., which was later renamed Morning Piece (pp. 94–99). Among the events’ attendees were active Fluxus member Nam June Paik, and other artists—such as Shigeko Kubota, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, Takehisa Kosugi, and Yasunao Tone—who later became involved in Fluxus in New York. For Touch Piece, participants, including Ono, sat in a circle and touched each other in silence.12 Ono was absent from the performance of Fly , for which she asked invite es to “come with preparations to fly,”13 encouraging them to interpret the piece freely, without her influence. 14 Many of them j umped from a ladder that was set up in the gallery. Later they discussed whether the act of flying was the same as dying. As early participants in Fluxus, Ono and Paik served as catalysts in promoting the idea of the “event” in Japan and brought information on like-minded Japanese artists, including those of Hi Red Center, to New York. 15 Ono played a leading role in disseminating the early forms of performance and Conceptual art in Japan, and was at the center of the Tokyo avant-garde community, whose members were interested in challenging and subverting the norms of mainstream culture. 22. Tickets for Three Kyoto Events: Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall; Evening till Dawn, Nanzenji Temple; Symposium: !, French Cancan Coffee House. 1964.

Ono was featured prominently as the only female artist in the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people), made by Chiaki Nagano and broadcast on Japanese television in 1964. The film introduced a group of artists performing

1962–1964

Four offset sheets with ink stamps, each 2

82

83

Even though critics did not have adequate language or the necessary framework to assess her work , they paid special attent ion to her as a “guru of new art.”24 The respected cr itic Shu¯ zo¯ Takiguchi regarded her art as a “natural act ion against contemporary art, which has been corrupted, standardiz ed, and confused.” 25 Ono’s sojourn in her native country was short, but it was significant in that she reconnected with her cultural roots. Quiet and contemplative, transformative and subversive—these were the founding qualities of Ono’s art, as they were formed in the crucible of her years in Japan.

—Midori Yoshimoto

Before leaving for New York in late August 1964, Ono held two more concerts. The first was at the Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto and featured the public premieres of Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), Bag Piece, and Snake Piece; the second concert was at the So¯getsu Art Center in Tokyo and inclu ded these works and other s. 20 Artist and filmmaker Jeff Perkins, who performed in the Tokyo concert, recalls of Snake Piece: “Yoko turned out the lights in the hall, and she announced that she had released two snakes out into the audience and that they could light one match only to see if they could see any snakes .” 21 The snakes (although there were likely none actually present) served to symbolize that which we are afraid of, while the darkness represented the unknown. The theme of exploring the unknown and looking deeply into oneself united most of Ono’s pieces. Although Cut Piece—in which she invited audience members to cut off pieces of her dress—was sensationalized as a “striptease” in Japanese reviews, the misunderstanding was perhaps inevitable, since the concert was subtitled Strip-Tease Show . According to Ono, however, to strip is not to “reveal to others,” but to “disc over something hi dden in humans.” 22 She saw Cut Piece as an opportunity for audience members to learn something of themselves. At the end of Nagano’s documentary, Ono c omments: “I did various things here in Japan, but it seemed that what I was doing was not understood and disappeared into thin air.” 23 It is undeniable, however, that she had a significant effect in Japan, as seen in the press reactions at the time and as subsequent history has shown.

NOTES This essay partly stems from chap. 3, “The Message is the Medium: The Communication Art of Yoko Ono,” in Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 92–103, and Yoshimoto, “Works of Yoko Ono, 1962,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N.Abrams, 2000), pp. 150–52.

Ono intentionally presented her works inconspicuously to make a point about art disappearing into everyday life. Her subtle artistic campaign sought to destroy the institution of art through simple expressions encountered in the mundane world. The film also showed Ono and Cox performing her Morning Piece under a tree on the Tama riverbank. Passersby could stop and purchase glass shards, which were labeled as various “mornings” of the f uture. By incorporating poetic gestures into people’s ordinary routines, Ono hoped that people would slow down the pace of their lives. She stated: “I am interested in, say, delaying our culture by introducing to our life such a useless act or more and more useless things.”18 Ono furthered her campaign by inviting people to the apartment she shared with Cox and performing for them. The photographer Minoru Hirata, who frequented the apartment around then, published a photo essay featuring them in a popular weekly magazine. 19 In one of the photos, Ono and Cox are seen emerging from a giant black bag as they finish performing Bag Piece (pp. 110–13) for the photographer. By appearing in the film and the article, Ono expanded her audience to the broader public, hoping to transcend the closed circuit of the artisti c vanguard.

9 15 ⁄ 16" (7.3 x 25.2 cm)

1962–1964

on the streets, including Ushio Shinohara and Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension). Highlighting the ways in which the 1964 Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo, transformed Japan into a rising economic power and consumer society, it suggested that the happy atmosphere might be full of “superfic ial peace,” and depicted these artists as c ritics of the society, “resisting the myth of happiness.”16 In contrast to the male artists’ showy performances—such as Shinohara’s destruction of paintings and the members of Zero Jigen’s crawling about on the streets—Ono’s actions were distinctly modest. For example, she left white flowers, one by one, at various places on the street in the piece Flower Event . The only person who dared to engage with one of them was a schoolgirl, who purposefully stepped on a flower placed on the sidewalk. Ono stated in the film: Art is not a special thing. Anyone can do it. Making art does not have to be so unusual. What I mean is that middle-aged men and housewives, your neighbors, can also do it. Being an artist is not so unusual. If everybody were to become an artist, what we call “Art” would disappear. I think it would be fine if this were to happen and [what I have envisioned] becomes a reality.17

⁄ 8 x

7

All quote s from Japanese sources were translated by the author. 1.

Regarding the implications of Ono’s relationship with Lennon, see Kristine Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience,” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–54. 2. Yoko Ono, “Instructions in the MaritalArts: A Conversation with Yoko Ono,” interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossing no. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 36. 3. Ono, “Waga ai, waga to¯so¯” [My love, my struggle] (1974), in Yoko Ono, Tada no Atashi [Just me], ed. Takahiko iimura (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1986), pp. 28–29. 4. Ko¯hei Sugiura, interview by the author, June 28, 2014. 5. Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Saizen’ei no koe: Donarudo Richi e no hanron” [Voice of the most avant-garde: Objection to Donald Richie], Geijuts u shincho¯ [New trends in art] 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 138. 6. “Daitanna kokoromi: Ono Yo¯ko no ivento” [Bold experiment: Yoko Ono’s event], Asahi ja¯nar u [Asahi journal], June[?] 1962: 45. 7. Kuniharu Akiyama, “So¯ge tsu Art Center,” in Kuniharu Akiyama, ed., Bunka no shikakenin [The entrepreneur of culture] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1985), p. 486. 8. Donald Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen: Ono Yōko no zen’ ei sh ō” [Stumbling front line: Yoko Ono’s avant-garde show], Geijutsu Shinchō [New Trends in art] 13, no. 7 (July 1962): 60–61. This volume, pp. 118–19; trans., pp. 122–23. Ichiyanagi, “Saizen’ei no koe,” pp. 138–39. This volume, pp. 120–21; trans., pp. 124–25. 9. Ono, “waga ai, waga tōsō,” pp. 30–32. 10. Ibid., p. 33. 11. For a discussion of Ono’s early conceptualism, see Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., GlobalConceptualism:Pointsof Origin,1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 18–19.

12. Takahiko iimura, Ono Yoko: Hito to sakuhin [Yoko Ono: Portrait, events, and works] (Tokyo: Bunka shuppan-kyoku, 1985), p. 83. 13. Ono, postcard announcement for Fly at Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo, 1964. 14. Ono, Symposium:!, tape recording of a symposium held at the French Cancan Coffee House, Kyoto, July 22, 1964. Courtesy the artist. 15. For more on Fluxus-related development in Japan, see Midori Yoshimoto, “Fluxus Nexus: Fluxus in New York and Japan” (2013), http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/199fluxus-nexus-fluxus-in-new-york-and-japan. 16. Yoshimoto, “ Some Young People —From Nonf iction Theater : Transcript of a Documentary Film Directed by Chiaki Nagano,” in Reiko Tomii, ed., “1960s Japan: Art Outside the Box,” special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 (December 2005): 14–21. For more discussion on this film, see Yoshimoto, “Off Museum! Performance Art That Turned the Street into ‘Theatre,’ Circa 1964 Tokyo,” Performance Paradigm no. 2 (March 2006): 102–18. 17. Ono, quoted in Yoshimoto, “Some Young People,” pp. 15–16. 18. Ibid., p. 18. 19. Minoru Hirata, “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu” [The number is “strip”], Shu¯ kan taishu¯ [Weekly masses] (September 10, 1964), unpaginated gravure. I thank Mikihiko Hori for locating the magazine and providing a scan of the image. 20. For more details on these events, see Midori Yoshimoto, “Evening till Dawn,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 156. 21. “Fluxus, Film & Sam: A Conversation with Jeff Perkins,” in Judith A. Hoffberg, ed., Umbrella: The Anthology (Santa Monica, Calif.: Umbrella Editions, 1999), p. 7. 22. Ono, quoted in Hirata, “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu.” 23. Ono, quoted in Yoshimoto, “Some Young People ,” p. 19. 24. Haryū Ichirō, “Zen’ei bijutsu ni tsukaremashita” [I grew tired of avant-garde art], Geijut su shincho¯ [New trends in art] 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 148. 25. Sh ūz ō Takiguchi, quoted in Higashi (given name unknown), “Kisei geijutsu eno teik ō: Ky ō no kao, Ono Yoko” [Resistance to the established art: Today’s face Yoko Ono], Yomiuri shinbun [Yomiuri newspaper], evening edition, April 6, 1962.

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on the streets, including Ushio Shinohara and Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension). Highlighting the ways in which the 1964 Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo, transformed Japan into a rising economic power and consumer society, it suggested that the happy atmosphere might be full of “superfic ial peace,” and depicted these artists as c ritics of the society, “resisting the myth of happiness.”16 In contrast to the male artists’ showy performances—such as Shinohara’s destruction of paintings and the members of Zero Jigen’s crawling about on the streets—Ono’s actions were distinctly modest. For example, she left white flowers, one by one, at various places on the street in the piece Flower Event . The only person who dared to engage with one of them was a schoolgirl, who purposefully stepped on a flower placed on the sidewalk. Ono stated in the film:

Even though critics did not have adequate language or the necessary framework to assess her work , they paid special attent ion to her as a “guru of new art.”24 The respected cr itic Shu¯ zo¯ Takiguchi regarded her art as a “natural act ion against contemporary art, which has been corrupted, standardiz ed, and confused.” 25 Ono’s sojourn in her native country was short, but it was significant in that she reconnected with her cultural roots. Quiet and contemplative, transformative and subversive—these were the founding qualities of Ono’s art, as they were formed in the crucible of her years in Japan.

—Midori Yoshimoto

Art is not a special thing. Anyone can do it. Making art does not have to be so unusual. What I mean is that middle-aged men and housewives, your neighbors, can also do it. Being an artist is not so unusual. If everybody were to become an artist, what we call “Art” would disappear. I think it would be fine if this were to happen and [what I have envisioned] becomes a reality.17

NOTES This essay partly stems from chap. 3, “The Message is the Medium: The Communication Art of Yoko Ono,” in Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 92–103, and Yoshimoto, “Works of Yoko Ono, 1962,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N.Abrams, 2000), pp. 150–52.

Ono intentionally presented her works inconspicuously to make a point about art disappearing into everyday life. Her subtle artistic campaign sought to destroy the institution of art through simple expressions encountered in the mundane world.

All quote s from Japanese sources were translated by the author.

The film also showed Ono and Cox performing her Morning Piece under a tree on the Tama riverbank. Passersby could stop and purchase glass shards, which were labeled as various “mornings” of the f uture. By incorporating poetic gestures into people’s ordinary routines, Ono hoped that people would slow down the pace of their lives. She stated: “I am interested in, say, delaying our culture by introducing to our life such a useless act or more and more useless things.”18 Ono furthered her campaign by inviting people to the apartment she shared with Cox and performing for them. The photographer Minoru Hirata, who frequented the apartment around then, published a photo essay featuring them in a popular weekly magazine. 19 In one of the photos, Ono and Cox are seen emerging from a giant black bag as they finish performing Bag Piece (pp. 110–13) for the photographer. By appearing in the film and the article, Ono expanded her audience to the broader public, hoping to transcend the closed circuit of the artisti c vanguard.

1.

Regarding the implications of Ono’s relationship with Lennon, see Kristine Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience,” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–54. 2. Yoko Ono, “Instructions in the MaritalArts: A Conversation with Yoko Ono,” interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossing no. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 36. 3. Ono, “Waga ai, waga to¯so¯” [My love, my struggle] (1974), in Yoko Ono, Tada no Atashi [Just me], ed. Takahiko iimura (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1986), pp. 28–29. 4. Ko¯hei Sugiura, interview by the author, June 28, 2014. 5. Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Saizen’ei no koe: Donarudo Richi e no hanron” [Voice of the most avant-garde: Objection to Donald Richie], Geijuts u shincho¯ [New trends in art] 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 138. 6. “Daitanna kokoromi: Ono Yo¯ko no ivento” [Bold experiment: Yoko Ono’s event], Asahi ja¯nar u [Asahi journal], June[?] 1962: 45. 7. Kuniharu Akiyama, “So¯ge tsu Art Center,” in Kuniharu Akiyama, ed., Bunka no shikakenin [The entrepreneur of culture] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1985), p. 486. 8. Donald Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen: Ono Yōko no zen’ ei sh ō” [Stumbling front line: Yoko Ono’s avant-garde show], Geijutsu Shinchō [New Trends in art] 13, no. 7 (July 1962): 60–61. This volume, pp. 118–19; trans., pp. 122–23. Ichiyanagi, “Saizen’ei no koe,” pp. 138–39. This volume, pp. 120–21; trans., pp. 124–25. 9. Ono, “waga ai, waga tōsō,” pp. 30–32. 10. Ibid., p. 33. 11. For a discussion of Ono’s early conceptualism, see Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., GlobalConceptualism:Pointsof Origin,1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 18–19.

Before leaving for New York in late August 1964, Ono held two more concerts. The first was at the Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto and featured the public premieres of Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), Bag Piece, and Snake Piece; the second concert was at the So¯getsu Art Center in Tokyo and inclu ded these works and other s. 20 Artist and filmmaker Jeff Perkins, who performed in the Tokyo concert, recalls of Snake Piece: “Yoko turned out the lights in the hall, and she announced that she had released two snakes out into the audience and that they could light one match only to see if they could see any snakes .” 21 The snakes (although there were likely none actually present) served to symbolize that which we are afraid of, while the darkness represented the unknown. The theme of exploring the unknown and looking deeply into oneself united most of Ono’s pieces. Although Cut Piece—in which she invited audience members to cut off pieces of her dress—was sensationalized as a “striptease” in Japanese reviews, the misunderstanding was perhaps inevitable, since the concert was subtitled Strip-Tease Show . According to Ono, however, to strip is not to “reveal to others,” but to “disc over something hi dden in humans.” 22 She saw Cut Piece as an opportunity for audience members to learn something of themselves.

12. Takahiko iimura, Ono Yoko: Hito to sakuhin [Yoko Ono: Portrait, events, and works] (Tokyo: Bunka shuppan-kyoku, 1985), p. 83. 13. Ono, postcard announcement for Fly at Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo, 1964. 14. Ono, Symposium:!, tape recording of a symposium held at the French Cancan Coffee House, Kyoto, July 22, 1964. Courtesy the artist. 15. For more on Fluxus-related development in Japan, see Midori Yoshimoto, “Fluxus Nexus: Fluxus in New York and Japan” (2013), http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/199fluxus-nexus-fluxus-in-new-york-and-japan. 16. Yoshimoto, “ Some Young People —From Nonf iction Theater : Transcript of a Documentary Film Directed by Chiaki Nagano,” in Reiko Tomii, ed., “1960s Japan: Art Outside the Box,” special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 17 (December 2005): 14–21. For more discussion on this film, see Yoshimoto, “Off Museum! Performance Art That Turned the Street into ‘Theatre,’ Circa 1964 Tokyo,” Performance Paradigm no. 2 (March 2006): 102–18. 17. Ono, quoted in Yoshimoto, “Some Young People,” pp. 15–16. 18. Ibid., p. 18. 19. Minoru Hirata, “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu” [The number is “strip”], Shu¯ kan taishu¯ [Weekly masses] (September 10, 1964), unpaginated gravure. I thank Mikihiko Hori for locating the magazine and providing a scan of the image. 20. For more details on these events, see Midori Yoshimoto, “Evening till Dawn,” in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono, p. 156. 21. “Fluxus, Film & Sam: A Conversation with Jeff Perkins,” in Judith A. Hoffberg, ed., Umbrella: The Anthology (Santa Monica, Calif.: Umbrella Editions, 1999), p. 7. 22. Ono, quoted in Hirata, “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu.” 23. Ono, quoted in Yoshimoto, “Some Young People ,” p. 19. 24. Haryū Ichirō, “Zen’ei bijutsu ni tsukaremashita” [I grew tired of avant-garde art], Geijut su shincho¯ [New trends in art] 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 148. 25. Sh ūz ō Takiguchi, quoted in Higashi (given name unknown), “Kisei geijutsu eno teik ō: Ky ō no kao, Ono Yoko” [Resistance to the established art: Today’s face Yoko Ono], Yomiuri shinbun [Yomiuri newspaper], evening edition, April 6, 1962.

At the end of Nagano’s documentary, Ono c omments: “I did various things here in Japan, but it seemed that what I was doing was not understood and disappeared into thin air.” 23 It is undeniable, however, that she had a significant effect in Japan, as seen in the press reactions at the time and as subsequent history has shown.

1962–1964

84

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WORKS OF YOKO ONO So¯getsu Art Center, Tokyo May 1962

Held two months after Ono’s return to Japan from New York, Works of Yoko Ono consisted of events and music performed in the So¯getsu auditorium on May 24, 1962, and an exhibition of poems and instructions for paintings displayed in the lobby. Ono invited about thirty performers to participate. Some, suc h as Takehisa Kosugi a nd Yasunao Tone, came from Group Ongaku, a progressive Japanese music collective, and became involved in Fluxus after participating in the concert. Other participants included French mime artist Theó Le´soual c’h; classical instrumentalists; and music critics, some of whom later reviewed the concert. Ono had previously realized a few of the pie ces— A Grapefruit in the World of Park , AOS—To DavidTudor (pl. 24) and A Piece for Strawberries and Violin —at her November 1961 concert at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York (pp. 68 –69). However, the performances in Japan were very different and often incorporated other works. For instance, AOS—To David Tudor included Question Piece, which consi sted of Le´ soualc’h a nd critic Yoshiaki To¯no conducting a French language lesson for twenty minutes, “ending up with conjugations of erotic verbs.”1 The program also featured two works not performed at t he New York concert, The Pulse (pl. 26) and A Piece for Chairs #1–#10 .2 The Pulse involved a group of seven musicians at a table solving mathematical equations and producing sounds on instruments. In A Piecefor Chairs #1–#10 , the title objects served as props in dramatic scenarios. In one act, for instance, several participants sawed off the legs of the chairs on which they had been sitting. The evening culminated with Audience Piece to La Monte (pl. 27).3 The performers formed a line across the stage, choosing different members of the audience to watch. As soon as the audience members broke eye contact, the performers redirected their attention to new people. They continued to stare until the hall was nearly empty. The exhibition in the lobby consisted of Instructions for Paintings, Touch Poems, and Chance Poems. Ono wrote the short texts that comprise the Instructions for Paintings in English, translated them into Japanese, and asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write the translated versions on sheets of paper hung on the wall. Ono thus ensured that the texts themselves became the viewer’s main focus, rather than her handwriting, which she considered to be emotional. The texts—directions for creating works like t hose included in her 1961 AG Gallery show, but here unaccompanied by physical realizations—repres ent Ono’s full embrace of a Conceptual art practice, one that treated ideas themselves as works of art, independent of their tangible manifestation.

1. Yoshiaki To¯no, “Chansu opere¯sho n (Gu¯ze n so¯s a)” [Chanc e operation], Kamera geijutsu [Camera art] 9, no. 7 (July 1962): 126–29. Translation provided by Midori Yoshimoto. 2. Although A Piece for Chairs #1–#10 was not featured in her Carnegie Recital Hall concert, Ono performed The Chair #1 in New York on January 8, 1962, at a benefit for the publication An Anthology held at the Living Theatre. 3. This work was not listed in the program. Ono shared an interest in the audience-performer relationship with La Monte Young, whose Composition 1960 #6 requires the performers to look at and listen to the audience members as if they were the performers. Ono has recently retitled the work.

23. Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono . 1962. Offset and letterpress with beansprout, 18 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 1 ⁄ 2" (47.6 x 11.4 cm)

1962–1964

84

85

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

WORKS OF YOKO ONO So¯getsu Art Center, Tokyo May 1962

Held two months after Ono’s return to Japan from New York, Works of Yoko Ono consisted of events and music performed in the So¯getsu auditorium on May 24, 1962, and an exhibition of poems and instructions for paintings displayed in the lobby. Ono invited about thirty performers to participate. Some, suc h as Takehisa Kosugi a nd Yasunao Tone, came from Group Ongaku, a progressive Japanese music collective, and became involved in Fluxus after participating in the concert. Other participants included French mime artist Theó Le´soual c’h; classical instrumentalists; and music critics, some of whom later reviewed the concert. Ono had previously realized a few of the pie ces— A Grapefruit in the World of Park , AOS—To DavidTudor (pl. 24) and A Piece for Strawberries and Violin —at her November 1961 concert at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York (pp. 68 –69). However, the performances in Japan were very different and often incorporated other works. For instance, AOS—To David Tudor included Question Piece, which consi sted of Le´ soualc’h a nd critic Yoshiaki To¯no conducting a French language lesson for twenty minutes, “ending up with conjugations of erotic verbs.”1 The program also featured two works not performed at t he New York concert, The Pulse (pl. 26) and A Piece for Chairs #1–#10 .2 The Pulse involved a group of seven musicians at a table solving mathematical equations and producing sounds on instruments. In A Piecefor Chairs #1–#10 , the title objects served as props in dramatic scenarios. In one act, for instance, several participants sawed off the legs of the chairs on which they had been sitting. The evening culminated with Audience Piece to La Monte (pl. 27).3 The performers formed a line across the stage, choosing different members of the audience to watch. As soon as the audience members broke eye contact, the performers redirected their attention to new people. They continued to stare until the hall was nearly empty. The exhibition in the lobby consisted of Instructions for Paintings, Touch Poems, and Chance Poems. Ono wrote the short texts that comprise the Instructions for Paintings in English, translated them into Japanese, and asked Toshi Ichiyanagi to write the translated versions on sheets of paper hung on the wall. Ono thus ensured that the texts themselves became the viewer’s main focus, rather than her handwriting, which she considered to be emotional. The texts—directions for creating works like t hose included in her 1961 AG Gallery show, but here unaccompanied by physical realizations—repres ent Ono’s full embrace of a Conceptual art practice, one that treated ideas themselves as works of art, independent of their tangible manifestation.

1962–1964

24. AOS—To David Tudor . 1961. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

25. Lighting Piece. 1955. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

1. Yoshiaki To¯no, “Chansu opere¯sho n (Gu¯ze n so¯s a)” [Chanc e operation], Kamera geijutsu [Camera art] 9, no. 7 (July 1962): 126–29. Translation provided by Midori Yoshimoto. 2. Although A Piece for Chairs #1–#10 was not featured in her Carnegie Recital Hall concert, Ono performed The Chair #1 in New York on January 8, 1962, at a benefit for the publication An Anthology held at the Living Theatre. 3. This work was not listed in the program. Ono shared an interest in the audience-performer relationship with La Monte Young, whose Composition 1960 #6 requires the performers to look at and listen to the audience members as if they were the performers. Ono has recently retitled the work.

86

23. Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono . 1962. Offset and letterpress with beansprout, 18 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 1 ⁄ 2" (47.6 x 11.4 cm)

87

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

26. The Pulse. 1962. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performers (left to right): unknown, Yoriaki Matsudaira, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yū ji Takahashi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, and Kuniharu Akiyama. Photograph: Akio Nonaka

27. Audience Piece to La Monte. 1962. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performers (left to right): Yoko Ono, Kenji Kobayashi, Nobuaki Kojima, Kazutada Tsubouchi, Tatsumi Yoshino, Tatsumi Hijikata, Santaro Tanabe, unknown, and unknown. Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

1962–1964

86

87

26. The Pulse. 1962. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performers (left to right): unknown, Yoriaki Matsudaira, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yū ji Takahashi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, and Kuniharu Akiyama. Photograph: Akio Nonaka

24. AOS—To David Tudor . 1961. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

27. Audience Piece to La Monte. 1962. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performers (left to right): Yoko Ono, Kenji Kobayashi, Nobuaki Kojima, Kazutada Tsubouchi, Tatsumi Yoshino, Tatsumi Hijikata, Santaro Tanabe, unknown, and unknown. Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

25. Lighting Piece. 1955. Performed in Works of Yoko Ono . Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

1962–1964

28. Untitled ( Painting to See the Sky ). 1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

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89

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

29. Smoke Painting. 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

1962–1964

88

89

28. Untitled ( Painting to See the Sky ). 1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

1962–1964

30. Painting in Three Stanzas . 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

29. Smoke Painting. 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

90

91

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

31. Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

1962–1964

90

91

30. Painting in Three Stanzas . 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

1962–1964

WORKS OF YOKO ONO

31. Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961/1962. From Instructions for Paintings. 1962. Ink on paper, 9 13 ⁄ 16 x 14 15 ⁄ 16" (25 x 38 cm)

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TOUCH PIECE

TOUCH PIECE 1964

Touch Piece , and the related works Touch Poem for Group of People and Touch Poem , began as private

acts in the late 1950s: “When I first thought of the idea,” Ono said, “I couldn’t sleep at night because it was so beautiful. I was going everywhere saying to people, Did you realize how beautiful it is to touch each other?”1 In February 1964, Ono held a performance of Touch Piece at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. One attendee, Japanese filmmaker Takahiko iimura, recalled that the participants formed a circle on the gallery floor and, after overcoming initial shyness, “We all awakened our sensations by touching, wh ich was rarely an issue in the art wor ld.”2 In July of the same year, Ono gathered approximately fifty people at the Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto to participate in the event Evening till Dawn , which, in texts written later, Ono describes as a variation of Touch Piece . Ono had received rare permission from the high monk to use the temple and gardens overnight. Upon arriving at the temple, visitors were given two cards: one read “silence” and the other “touch.” Ono remembered that “it was a beautiful full moon night” and “people talked about moonburn, moonb ath, and about touchin g the sky.” In the morning, they took ba ths “three at a time” in a huge stone basin and cleaned the temple grounds together prior to departing.3 Touch Piece was performed at least twice in London in 1966, first during the Destruction in Art Symposium in September, and then at the launch party for an underground newspaper, the InternationalTimes , the following month. According to one account, at the second event the room suddenly went dark in the middle of a performance by the British rock band Soft Machine. Ono’s voice was then heard through the loudspeaker, instructing the audience to “touch the person next to you.” The audience complied, thus setting off “a flurry of embarrassed giggles.”4

1. Yoko Ono, in Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 15. This volume, p. 225. 2. Takahiko iimura, quoted in Lily Faust, “Grapefruit: Yoko Ono in 1964, at ISE Cultural Foundat ion,” May 2004, online at http://www.thenewyorkartworld.com/pastissue/mayeditorial2004.html#review08. 3. Ono, “To the Wesleyan People,” insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox, Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks (New York: Judson Gallery, 1966). This volume, p. 146. 4. Julian Palacios, Lost in the Woods: Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd (London: Boxtree, 1998), p. 87.

32. Touch Poem for Group of People . 1963. Published in Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

1962–1964

92

93

TOUCH PIECE

TOUCH PIECE 1964

Touch Piece , and the related works Touch Poem for Group of People and Touch Poem , began as private

acts in the late 1950s: “When I first thought of the idea,” Ono said, “I couldn’t sleep at night because it was so beautiful. I was going everywhere saying to people, Did you realize how beautiful it is to touch each other?”1 In February 1964, Ono held a performance of Touch Piece at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. One attendee, Japanese filmmaker Takahiko iimura, recalled that the participants formed a circle on the gallery floor and, after overcoming initial shyness, “We all awakened our sensations by touching, wh ich was rarely an issue in the art wor ld.”2 In July of the same year, Ono gathered approximately fifty people at the Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto to participate in the event Evening till Dawn , which, in texts written later, Ono describes as a variation of Touch Piece . Ono had received rare permission from the high monk to use the temple and gardens overnight. Upon arriving at the temple, visitors were given two cards: one read “silence” and the other “touch.” Ono remembered that “it was a beautiful full moon night” and “people talked about moonburn, moonb ath, and about touchin g the sky.” In the morning, they took ba ths “three at a time” in a huge stone basin and cleaned the temple grounds together prior to departing.3 Touch Piece was performed at least twice in London in 1966, first during the Destruction in Art Symposium in September, and then at the launch party for an underground newspaper, the InternationalTimes , the following month. According to one account, at the second event the room suddenly went dark in the middle of a performance by the British rock band Soft Machine. Ono’s voice was then heard through the loudspeaker, instructing the audience to “touch the person next to you.” The audience complied, thus setting off “a flurry of embarrassed giggles.”4

1962–1964

1. Yoko Ono, in Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 15. This volume, p. 225. 2. Takahiko iimura, quoted in Lily Faust, “Grapefruit: Yoko Ono in 1964, at ISE Cultural Foundat ion,” May 2004, online at http://www.thenewyorkartworld.com/pastissue/mayeditorial2004.html#review08. 3. Ono, “To the Wesleyan People,” insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox, Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks (New York: Judson Gallery, 1966). This volume, p. 146. 4. Julian Palacios, Lost in the Woods: Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd (London: Boxtree, 1998), p. 87.

94

32. Touch Poem for Group of People . 1963. Published in Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

95

MORNINGPIECE

MORNING PIECE 1964

In the mid-1960s, Ono presented the work commonly known as Morning Piece in various forms and under various titles in Tokyo and New York. She first enacted the work, under the name 9 A.M. to 11 A.M., on the roof of Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo on May 24, 1964. During the event, she sold shards of broken milk bottles, informing buyers (pl. 33), “You can see the sky through it. Also, wear gloves when you handle so you will not hurt your fingers.”A typewritten piece of paper accompanied each shard, specifying a future date and a particular period of the morning (“until sunrise,” “after sunrise,” or “all morning”). Participants included leading artists such as Miyori Hayashi, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, and Yasunao Tone, and each paid between ten and one thousand yen for a shard representing his or her chosen morning. Hayashi, for example, bought one that stated “January 1, 1972 all morning,” for the pr ice of ten yen. 1 Later that summer, Ono, assisted by Anthony Cox, enacted the piece under a tree on the Tama riverbank in Tokyo. The action was filmed for Chiaki Nagano’s short documentary Aru wakamonotachi (Some young people), which was broadcast on Japanese television in October. In September 1965, Ono performed the work under the title Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas (pls. 37–40) on the roof of her Christopher Street apartment building in New York. Here, she sold pieces of seaworn glass—gathered from a beach near Allan Kaprow’s Long Island home—arranged on a grid labeled with past and future mornings. A sign with the phrase “ENTER: SKY” hung on the roof door adjacent to the performance area. The following year, in September, as part of the fourth edition of Charlotte Moorman’s Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, the gridded board was laid on the grass in Central Park, in another presentation ofMorning Piece (which may have been titled Sunrise Event here, as that title appears in the festival program andMorning Piece does not). Ono didn’t attend this iteration, as she was in London participating in the Destruction in Art Symposium (pl. 65, pp. 156–57).

1. Illustrated in Reiko Tomii, “Yoko Ono: Tokyo/1964,” X-Tra 7, no. 2 (Winter 2004); available at http://xtraonline.org/article/yoko-onotokyo1964/.

33. English notice for Morning Piece. 1964. Ink on paper, 11 5 ⁄ 8 x 8 1 ⁄ 4" (29.5 x 21 cm)

1962–1964

94

95

MORNINGPIECE

MORNING PIECE 1964

In the mid-1960s, Ono presented the work commonly known as Morning Piece in various forms and under various titles in Tokyo and New York. She first enacted the work, under the name 9 A.M. to 11 A.M., on the roof of Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo on May 24, 1964. During the event, she sold shards of broken milk bottles, informing buyers (pl. 33), “You can see the sky through it. Also, wear gloves when you handle so you will not hurt your fingers.”A typewritten piece of paper accompanied each shard, specifying a future date and a particular period of the morning (“until sunrise,” “after sunrise,” or “all morning”). Participants included leading artists such as Miyori Hayashi, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, and Yasunao Tone, and each paid between ten and one thousand yen for a shard representing his or her chosen morning. Hayashi, for example, bought one that stated “January 1, 1972 all morning,” for the pr ice of ten yen. 1 Later that summer, Ono, assisted by Anthony Cox, enacted the piece under a tree on the Tama riverbank in Tokyo. The action was filmed for Chiaki Nagano’s short documentary Aru wakamonotachi (Some young people), which was broadcast on Japanese television in October. In September 1965, Ono performed the work under the title Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas (pls. 37–40) on the roof of her Christopher Street apartment building in New York. Here, she sold pieces of seaworn glass—gathered from a beach near Allan Kaprow’s Long Island home—arranged on a grid labeled with past and future mornings. A sign with the phrase “ENTER: SKY” hung on the roof door adjacent to the performance area. The following year, in September, as part of the fourth edition of Charlotte Moorman’s Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, the gridded board was laid on the grass in Central Park, in another presentation ofMorning Piece (which may have been titled Sunrise Event here, as that title appears in the festival program andMorning Piece does not). Ono didn’t attend this iteration, as she was in London participating in the Destruction in Art Symposium (pl. 65, pp. 156–57).

1. Illustrated in Reiko Tomii, “Yoko Ono: Tokyo/1964,” X-Tra 7, no. 2 (Winter 2004); available at http://xtraonline.org/article/yoko-onotokyo1964/.

1962–1964

96

33. English notice for Morning Piece. 1964. Ink on paper, 11 5 ⁄ 8 x 8 1 ⁄ 4" (29.5 x 21 cm)

97

MORNINGPIECE

34. Still from the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people, 1964), directed by Chiaki Nagano, showing Yoko Ono selling mornings on the Tama riverbank, Tokyo. At right: Anthony Cox

35. Sign used in Morning Piece. 1964. Ink on paper, 10 x 14 3 ⁄ 16" (25.4 x 36 cm)

36. Morning Piece. 1964. Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary

1962–1964

96

97

MORNINGPIECE

34. Still from the documentary film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people, 1964), directed by Chiaki Nagano, showing Yoko Ono selling mornings on the Tama riverbank, Tokyo. At right: Anthony Cox

35. Sign used in Morning Piece. 1964. Ink on paper, 10 x 14 3 ⁄ 16" (25.4 x 36 cm)

1962–1964

36. Morning Piece. 1964. Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary

98

99

MORNINGPIECE

37. Announcement for Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas . 1965. Designed by George Maciunas. Offset, sheet 8

⁄ 16 x 11" (21.8 x 27.9 cm)

9

38. Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas. September 1965. Performed on the roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street, New York. Photograph: Peter Moore

39 and 40. Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas. September 1965. Performed on the roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street, New York. Photographs: Peter Moore

1962–1964

98

99

MORNINGPIECE

37. Announcement for Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas . 1965. Designed by George Maciunas. Offset, sheet 8

⁄ 16 x 11" (21.8 x 27.9 cm)

9

38. Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas. September 1965. Performed on the roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street, New York. Photograph: Peter Moore

1962–1964

39 and 40. Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas. September 1965. Performed on the roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street, New York. Photographs: Peter Moore

100

101

GRAPEFRUIT

GRAPEFRUIT 1964

Ono self-published Grapefruit (pl. 42) in Tokyo in 1964. The name of her imprint, Wunternaum Press, was a play on the German word Wunderbaum , meaning “miracle tree.” “I wanted to publish my work from ‘another world,’” Ono later explained.1 She chose July 4, United States Independence Day, as the publication date, symbolically associating the book with freedom. Grapefruit contains over 150 instructions divided into five sections: “Music,” “Painting,” “Event,” “Poetry,” and “Object.” Each instruction is dated with a year between 1953 and 1964, and often a season or month. Some instructions appear in multiple forms. For instance, there are two versions of the instruction for Secret Piece (1953; pl. 43), the earliest work represented in Grapefruit . For the initial instruction, Ono drew a musical staff with one bass note, to be held for an extended duration. The treble clef has an octave symbol over it, indicating that the music should be played one octave higher, though the clef itself has no musical notes on it. Over the symbol’s dotted line, Ono handwrote the performance direction “with the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn.” Above this first version of the instruc tion for Secret Piece is a later, strictly text-based incarnation: “Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.” Printed in an edition of five hundred copies on inexpensive paper and in a compact square format, Grapefruit was intended for distribution to a general audience. In the summer of 1964, during the Olympic Games, Ono sold the book on the streets of Tokyo (pl. 21; about a third of the instructions in the first edition were written in Japanese). George Maciunas, who had initially hoped to publish Ono’s collected works as a Fluxus edition, ultimately assisted Ono’s efforts, advertising Grapefruit in his various Fluxus publications. An expanded version of the book was published by Simon and Schuster in 1970, and several times since then. It has also been translated into many languages. 1. Yoko Ono, correspondence with Thomas Kellein, August 5, 2008, quoted in Thomas Kellein, “Coughing Is a Form of Love: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Philosopher,” in Thomas Kellein, ed., Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlun g Walther Ko¨nig, 2008), p. 147.

41. Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit . 1963. Five offset sheets mailed in envelope. Clockwise, from bottom left: two envelopes, each approx. 3 1 ⁄ 4 x 7 15 ⁄ 16" (8.3 x 20.2 cm); sheet 14 3 ⁄ 16 x 9 15 ⁄ 16" (36 x 25.3 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 5 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 5 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 3 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.6 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 11 ⁄ 16" (23 x 6.8 cm)

1962–1964

100

101

GRAPEFRUIT

GRAPEFRUIT 1964

Ono self-published Grapefruit (pl. 42) in Tokyo in 1964. The name of her imprint, Wunternaum Press, was a play on the German word Wunderbaum , meaning “miracle tree.” “I wanted to publish my work from ‘another world,’” Ono later explained.1 She chose July 4, United States Independence Day, as the publication date, symbolically associating the book with freedom. Grapefruit contains over 150 instructions divided into five sections: “Music,” “Painting,” “Event,” “Poetry,” and “Object.” Each instruction is dated with a year between 1953 and 1964, and often a season or month. Some instructions appear in multiple forms. For instance, there are two versions of the instruction for Secret Piece (1953; pl. 43), the earliest work represented in Grapefruit . For the initial instruction, Ono drew a musical staff with one bass note, to be held for an extended duration. The treble clef has an octave symbol over it, indicating that the music should be played one octave higher, though the clef itself has no musical notes on it. Over the symbol’s dotted line, Ono handwrote the performance direction “with the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn.” Above this first version of the instruc tion for Secret Piece is a later, strictly text-based incarnation: “Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.” Printed in an edition of five hundred copies on inexpensive paper and in a compact square format, Grapefruit was intended for distribution to a general audience. In the summer of 1964, during the Olympic Games, Ono sold the book on the streets of Tokyo (pl. 21; about a third of the instructions in the first edition were written in Japanese). George Maciunas, who had initially hoped to publish Ono’s collected works as a Fluxus edition, ultimately assisted Ono’s efforts, advertising Grapefruit in his various Fluxus publications. An expanded version of the book was published by Simon and Schuster in 1970, and several times since then. It has also been translated into many languages. 1. Yoko Ono, correspondence with Thomas Kellein, August 5, 2008, quoted in Thomas Kellein, “Coughing Is a Form of Love: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Philosopher,” in Thomas Kellein, ed., Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlun g Walther Ko¨nig, 2008), p. 147.

1962–1964

42. Grapefruit . 1964. Artist’s book, offset, overall (closed) 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 1 1 ⁄ 4" (13.8 x 13.8 x 3.2 cm). Publisher: Wunternaum Press (the artist), Tokyo. Edition: 500

102

41. Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit . 1963. Five offset sheets mailed in envelope. Clockwise, from bottom left: two envelopes, each approx. 3 1 ⁄ 4 x 7 15 ⁄ 16" (8.3 x 20.2 cm); sheet 14 3 ⁄ 16 x 9 15 ⁄ 16" (36 x 25.3 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 5 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 5 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 3 ⁄ 16" (23 x 5.6 cm); sheet 9 1 ⁄ 16 x 2 11 ⁄ 16" (23 x 6.8 cm)

103

GRAPEFRUIT

43. Secret Piece, two versions. Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

1962–1964

102

103

42. Grapefruit . 1964. Artist’s book, offset, overall (closed) 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 1 1 ⁄ 4" (13.8 x 13.8 x 3.2 cm). Publisher: Wunternaum Press (the artist), Tokyo. Edition: 500

1962–1964

44. Central Park Pond Piece . Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

GRAPEFRUIT

43. Secret Piece, two versions. Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

104

105

GRAPEFRUIT

45. Collecting Piece II and Collecting Piece III . Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

104

1962–1964

105

44. Central Park Pond Piece . Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

45. Collecting Piece II and Collecting Piece III . Published in Grapefruit (1964), n.p. Offset, page 5 7 ⁄ 16 x 5 7 ⁄ 16" (13.8 x 13.8 cm)

106

1962–1964

GRAPEFRUIT

107

CUT PIECE

CUT PIECE 1964

Ono performed Cut Piece twice in Japan: first at the Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto, in July 1964, and then in her Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show at the So¯ getsu Art Center, in August 1964 (pl. 46). In both versions (as in those that followed), the artist, wearing her “best suit,”1 knelt silently at the center of the stage and placed a pair of tailor’s scissors in front of her. At her invitation, the audience members came up and cut off portions of her clothing, after which they exited the stage with the scraps of fabric. Ono publicly performed Cut Piece only once in New York—in the concert New Works of Yoko Ono , held at the Carnegie Recital Hall in March 1965 (pls. 47–49).2 The following year, in London, she performed the work at least three times: twice during the Destruction in Art Symposium at the Africa Centre (pp. 156–57), receiving sensational reviews in the press, and again, in a more private setting, at the Indica Gallery, shortly before her exhibition there (pp. 158–63). Cut Piece appeared for the first time in Ono’s 1964 artist’s book, Grapefruit (pp. 100–105), as an instruction dated summer 1962: “Cut out any portion of a painting you like or a piece of paper and throw it off a high building.” In early 1966, as part of a concert and exhibition proposal that was never realized, Ono typed two instructions titled Cut Piece . The first instruction, which described quite faithfully the past performances of the work, indicated that the “piece ends at the performer’s option.” In the second instruction, Ono—replacing the solo performer with a group—wrote that “the audience may cut each other’s clothing” and “may cut as long as they wan t.” In September 2003, at the Theá tre le Ranelagh in Paris, Ono performed Cut Piece for the first time in almost four decades. Here, the work took on a new meaning. At a time of growing international conflict, t he artist offered it as a metaphor for peace, telling the audience, in a text printed in the program and reprinted in this volume (p. 117), to “come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever you like the size of less than a postcard, and send it to the one you love.” ˆ

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 89. 2. With Ono’s approval, however, others have performed the work in New York (as well as elsewhere). For instance, it was performed in 1966 by two men in Central Park during the fourth edition of Charlotte Moorman’s Annual N ew York Avant Garde Festival, and on numerous other occasions by Moorman herself.

46. “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu” [The number is “strip”] in Shū kan taishū [Weekly masses]. September 10, 1964. Photograph showing Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece (1964) in Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show , Sōgetsu Art Center, August 11, 1964. Photograph: Minoru Hirata

106

1962–1964

107

CUT PIECE

CUT PIECE 1964

Ono performed Cut Piece twice in Japan: first at the Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto, in July 1964, and then in her Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show at the So¯ getsu Art Center, in August 1964 (pl. 46). In both versions (as in those that followed), the artist, wearing her “best suit,”1 knelt silently at the center of the stage and placed a pair of tailor’s scissors in front of her. At her invitation, the audience members came up and cut off portions of her clothing, after which they exited the stage with the scraps of fabric. Ono publicly performed Cut Piece only once in New York—in the concert New Works of Yoko Ono , held at the Carnegie Recital Hall in March 1965 (pls. 47–49).2 The following year, in London, she performed the work at least three times: twice during the Destruction in Art Symposium at the Africa Centre (pp. 156–57), receiving sensational reviews in the press, and again, in a more private setting, at the Indica Gallery, shortly before her exhibition there (pp. 158–63). Cut Piece appeared for the first time in Ono’s 1964 artist’s book, Grapefruit (pp. 100–105), as an instruction dated summer 1962: “Cut out any portion of a painting you like or a piece of paper and throw it off a high building.” In early 1966, as part of a concert and exhibition proposal that was never realized, Ono typed two instructions titled Cut Piece . The first instruction, which described quite faithfully the past performances of the work, indicated that the “piece ends at the performer’s option.” In the second instruction, Ono—replacing the solo performer with a group—wrote that “the audience may cut each other’s clothing” and “may cut as long as they wan t.” In September 2003, at the Theá tre le Ranelagh in Paris, Ono performed Cut Piece for the first time in almost four decades. Here, the work took on a new meaning. At a time of growing international conflict, t he artist offered it as a metaphor for peace, telling the audience, in a text printed in the program and reprinted in this volume (p. 117), to “come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever you like the size of less than a postcard, and send it to the one you love.” ˆ

1962–1964

47 and 48. Cut Piece. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photographs: Peter Moore

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 89. 2. With Ono’s approval, however, others have performed the work in New York (as well as elsewhere). For instance, it was performed in 1966 by two men in Central Park during the fourth edition of Charlotte Moorman’s Annual N ew York Avant Garde Festival, and on numerous other occasions by Moorman herself.

108

46. “Kyokumoku wa sutorippu” [The number is “strip”] in Shū kan taishū [Weekly masses]. September 10, 1964. Photograph showing Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece (1964) in Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show , Sōgetsu Art Center, August 11, 1964. Photograph: Minoru Hirata

109

CUT PIECE

49. Cut Piece . 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, N ew York, March 21, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

1962–1964

108

109

47 and 48. Cut Piece. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photographs: Peter Moore

1962–1964

CUT PIECE

49. Cut Piece . 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, N ew York, March 21, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Minoru Niizuma

110

111

BAG PIECE

BAG PIECE 1964

Ono performed Bag Piece publicly for the first time at Kyoto’s Yamaichi Hall in July 1964, in the same concert in which she premieredCut Piece.1 (She performed both works at Tokyo’s So¯getsu Art Center th e following mont h, in a program titled Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: StripTease Show [pls. 50, 51] .) A few years later, she provided this description of Bag Piece : After the curtain has gone up (or if there is no curtain, at a designated time after the announcer announced the piece), two performers walk onto the stage. Performers may be two males, two females, or a mixed couple. Performers carry a bag large enough for both to get inside of. Bag made of non-transparent material. Both performers get inside of bag. Both remove all clothing while inside of bag. Both put all clothing back on. They come out of bag. They exit with bag from stage. 2 In New York, Bag Piece was performed in New Works of Yoko Ono at the Carnegie Recital Hall in March 1965 (pl. 52) and in the Perpetual Fluxfest festival at Cinematheque (in the East End Theater) in June 1965 (pl. 53). In 1966, Ono contributed Bag Piece to a collaborative installation titled The Stone (pp. 138–43), which was shown first at the Judson Gallery, in March, and then at the Paradox restaurant, from July to August. For this new performance of Bag Piece, people were invited to enter several bags that had been placed in a small structure within the venue. The exhibition publication included Ono’s Ad for Bagwear (pls. 62–64), a group of drawings proposing the use of these large bags in everyday life by people “who suffer f rom overexposure.” Figures are shown receiving guests, taking a nap, and even attending a business conference while completely enclosed in the bags. One drawn spectator, observing someone in bagwear, notes, “She has st yle.” In December 1967, at the fourth Exprmntl film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, Ono performed Bag Piece by sitting in a bag for eight hours in the lobby of the city’s casino (the event’s main venue). Four signs reading “Yoko Ono is not here,” two in French and two in English, were placed around the bag. In the following years, Ono performed Bag Piece on multiple occasions internationally.

1. Yoko Ono had used bags previously in her work, including in her 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall Concert (pp. 68–69).

2. Ono, “Strip Tease Show” (1966), in Jon Hendrick s, “Anthology: Writings by Yoko Ono,” Alexandra Munroe and Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 276.

50 and 51. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in Y oko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip- Tease Show , Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, August 11, 1964. Performers: Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox. Photographs: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

1962–1964

110

111

BAG PIECE

BAG PIECE 1964

Ono performed Bag Piece publicly for the first time at Kyoto’s Yamaichi Hall in July 1964, in the same concert in which she premieredCut Piece.1 (She performed both works at Tokyo’s So¯getsu Art Center th e following mont h, in a program titled Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: StripTease Show [pls. 50, 51] .) A few years later, she provided this description of Bag Piece : After the curtain has gone up (or if there is no curtain, at a designated time after the announcer announced the piece), two performers walk onto the stage. Performers may be two males, two females, or a mixed couple. Performers carry a bag large enough for both to get inside of. Bag made of non-transparent material. Both performers get inside of bag. Both remove all clothing while inside of bag. Both put all clothing back on. They come out of bag. They exit with bag from stage. 2 In New York, Bag Piece was performed in New Works of Yoko Ono at the Carnegie Recital Hall in March 1965 (pl. 52) and in the Perpetual Fluxfest festival at Cinematheque (in the East End Theater) in June 1965 (pl. 53). In 1966, Ono contributed Bag Piece to a collaborative installation titled The Stone (pp. 138–43), which was shown first at the Judson Gallery, in March, and then at the Paradox restaurant, from July to August. For this new performance of Bag Piece, people were invited to enter several bags that had been placed in a small structure within the venue. The exhibition publication included Ono’s Ad for Bagwear (pls. 62–64), a group of drawings proposing the use of these large bags in everyday life by people “who suffer f rom overexposure.” Figures are shown receiving guests, taking a nap, and even attending a business conference while completely enclosed in the bags. One drawn spectator, observing someone in bagwear, notes, “She has st yle.” In December 1967, at the fourth Exprmntl film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, Ono performed Bag Piece by sitting in a bag for eight hours in the lobby of the city’s casino (the event’s main venue). Four signs reading “Yoko Ono is not here,” two in French and two in English, were placed around the bag. In the following years, Ono performed Bag Piece on multiple occasions internationally.

1. Yoko Ono had used bags previously in her work, including in her 1961 Carnegie Recital Hall Concert (pp. 68–69).

2. Ono, “Strip Tease Show” (1966), in Jon Hendrick s, “Anthology: Writings by Yoko Ono,” Alexandra Munroe and Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 276.

1962–1964

52. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital H all, New York, March 21, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Peter Moore

112

50 and 51. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in Y oko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip- Tease Show , Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, August 11, 1964. Performers: Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox. Photographs: Yasuhiro Yoshioka

113

BAG PIECE

53. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in Perpetual Fluxfest , Cinematheque, New York, June 27, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: George Maciunas

1962–1964

112

113

52. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital H all, New York, March 21, 1965.

53. Bag Piece. 1964. Performed in Perpetual Fluxfest , Cinematheque, New York, June 27, 1965. Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: George Maciunas

Performer: Yoko Ono. Photograph: Peter Moore

1962�1964

WORDS OF A FABRICATOR

I feel a strong nostalgia for the first man in the human history who lied. How did he feel when he said he saw God, eternity, and heaven, for instance? Did he intend to deceive others while trembling from his own insecurity? Did he try to make the world of lies into a real world by deceiving others? Or did he believe that his fictional world actually existed somewhere in the universe? Whatever his feelings were, I think it’s interesting that he could not keep his lies to himself, and shared them with others. Stylization is a materialization of the human desire to free oneself from the world of irrational rationality, hoping that he could extricate himself from it by immersing oneself into a fictional world. Medieval thoughts interest me for that reason. Architecture, clothing, and various social conventions are attempts to make a detour to death by creating excessive dramas/ illusions which are far from the naked reality. At its bottom lies an endless pessimism that nothing but a fictional order can rescue us. But we now find ourselves in a “healthy” era, in which “fiction” is somewhat abhored. In fact, we have contempt for any fictional act in the realm of consciousness. Even with one’s own set of rules, such as one’s belief, man cannot be satisfied without bringing the natural order into it’s structure, thereby making it appear as though his set of rules are equally real and valid as the law of nature. It is hard not to notice the farce, that instead of legitimizing man’s belief system, nature suddenly mutates into fiction as it is planted artificially into the frame work of the man-made order. Failing in the attempt of making the fabricated order appear equally real as nature, the contemporary man has now gone into a totally opposite direction of placing men in equal position to objects and plants. This is an attempt to raise men’s stature to that of nature, by regarding nature’s chance operational characteristic as superior to men’s own fictional order, and succuming to and adopting the chance operation as men’s own. It is the state of mind of wanting to become a weed and join the heartbeat of the universe by entering a state of innocence/nothingness and blowing in a gentle wind. This direction stems from ones optimism of thinking that as long as one discards ones consciousness, and leaves oneself in the hands of chance operation, one could immedidately turn into being a weed. This line of thought rubs me the wrong way. It is too simplistic to think that one can reach the world of transcendence as long as we participate in the act of Gyo and sweat. Is a human body worthy of such trust? We are talking about a body of betrayer/l’etranger to the natural world, who carries the misfortune of being capable of even controlling the length of his life by will. We’re talking about, us, the contemporary men who are soaked to the bones with a fabricator called consciousness.

BAG PIECE

114

115

YOKO'S VOICE

We, “the betrayer,” are so invaded by the falsehood of consciousness we cannot even become chance operational by using such loose method as leaving it to chance operation. Instead, if we assign the most fictional rules, only then, we may possibly transcend our consciousness. My current interest is in such a world of fictional rules: the laws of the fabricator. The assumption and realization of a perfect circle and a perfect line which we have not encountered except in our conceptual world. The nonsense act of counting the number of chimneys all over the world, and the repetition of such acts. To assign such set of rules to myself. I can call this a ritual to rationalize the irrationality in us, humans. It may have something in common with the act of medieval stylization. Except here, it is a ritual which cannot be shared in the physical world. Or shall we say, that it is a ritual without the dignity of being real. A ritual even I could only acknowledge it’s existence as fiction/fabrication. The strange result of it is that, “it” becomes a concrete “matter/ substance,” only when one tries to destroy it, as, otherwise, it cannot escape from being “imaginary.” A conceptual reality becomes a concrete reality only when it meets the enactment of destructive forces in the accidental circumstances. The rules of this conceptual world I assign myself to, differs in its nuance from the world of a certain Satori/ enlightenment derived by one trying to confuse one’s self image with that of a plant and not feel any conflict, more over, feeling most satisfied that one has joined the supeior world of chance operation by becoming like a weed. I am still groping in the world of stickiness. My attempt is not as serious as handing a knife to someone and trying to make my transcendence by asking the assistance of the force other than my own. It is nothing more than a obsessive act of the posessed, attempting to make ones own fiction a reality by letting others cut off the consistent romanticism inevitable to fiction. Anyhow, I cannot stand the fact that everything is the accumulation of “distortion”, owing to one’s slanted view. I want the truth. I want to feel the truth by any possible means. I want some one or something to let me feel it. I can neither trust the plant-likeness of my body or the manipulation of my consciousness. I know no other way but to present the structure of a drama which assumes fiction as fiction, that is, as fabricated truth.

(Words of a fabricator)

Yoko Ono SAC Journal no. 24, May 1962 issue, Tokyo Translated by the artist, August 26–27, 1999

1962�1964

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We, “the betrayer,” are so invaded by the falsehood of consciousness we cannot even become chance operational by using such loose method as leaving it to chance operation. Instead, if we assign the most fictional rules, only then, we may possibly transcend our consciousness. My current interest is in such a world of fictional rules: the laws of the fabricator.

WORDS OF A FABRICATOR

The assumption and realization of a perfect circle and a perfect line which we have not encountered except in our conceptual world. The nonsense act of counting the number of chimneys all over the world, and the repetition of such acts. To assign such set of rules to myself.

I feel a strong nostalgia for the first man in the human history who lied. How did he feel when he said he saw God, eternity, and heaven, for instance? Did he intend to deceive others while trembling from his own insecurity? Did he try to make the world of lies into a real world by deceiving others? Or did he believe that his fictional world actually existed somewhere in the universe? Whatever his feelings were, I think it’s interesting that he could not keep his lies to himself, and shared them with others.

I can call this a ritual to rationalize the irrationality in us, humans. It may have something in common with the act of medieval stylization. Except here, it is a ritual which cannot be shared in the physical world. Or shall we say, that it is a ritual without the dignity of being real. A ritual even I could only acknowledge it’s existence as fiction/fabrication. The strange result of it is that, “it” becomes a concrete “matter/ substance,” only when one tries to destroy it, as, otherwise, it cannot escape from being “imaginary.”

Stylization is a materialization of the human desire to free oneself from the world of irrational rationality, hoping that he could extricate himself from it by immersing oneself into a fictional world. Medieval thoughts interest me for that reason. Architecture, clothing, and various social conventions are attempts to make a detour to death by creating excessive dramas/ illusions which are far from the naked reality. At its bottom lies an endless pessimism that nothing but a fictional order can rescue us.

A conceptual reality becomes a concrete reality only when it meets the enactment of destructive forces in the accidental circumstances. The rules of this conceptual world I assign myself to, differs in its nuance from the world of a certain Satori/ enlightenment derived by one trying to confuse one’s self image with that of a plant and not feel any conflict, more over, feeling most satisfied that one has joined the supeior world of chance operation by becoming like a weed.

But we now find ourselves in a “healthy” era, in which “fiction” is somewhat abhored. In fact, we have contempt for any fictional act in the realm of consciousness. Even with one’s own set of rules, such as one’s belief, man cannot be satisfied without bringing the natural order into it’s structure, thereby making it appear as though his set of rules are equally real and valid as the law of nature. It is hard not to notice the farce, that instead of legitimizing man’s belief system, nature suddenly mutates into fiction as it is planted artificially into the frame work of the man-made order. Failing in the attempt of making the fabricated order appear equally real as nature, the contemporary man has now gone into a totally opposite direction of placing men in equal position to objects and plants. This is an attempt to raise men’s stature to that of nature, by regarding nature’s chance operational characteristic as superior to men’s own fictional order, and succuming to and adopting the chance operation as men’s own. It is the state of mind of wanting to become a weed and join the heartbeat of the universe by entering a state of innocence/nothingness and blowing in a gentle wind.

I am still groping in the world of stickiness. My attempt is not as serious as handing a knife to someone and trying to make my transcendence by asking the assistance of the force other than my own. It is nothing more than a obsessive act of the posessed, attempting to make ones own fiction a reality by letting others cut off the consistent romanticism inevitable to fiction. Anyhow, I cannot stand the fact that everything is the accumulation of “distortion”, owing to one’s slanted view. I want the truth. I want to feel the truth by any possible means. I want some one or something to let me feel it. I can neither trust the plant-likeness of my body or the manipulation of my consciousness. I know no other way but to present the structure of a drama which assumes fiction as fiction, that is, as fabricated truth.

This direction stems from ones optimism of thinking that as long as one discards ones consciousness, and leaves oneself in the hands of chance operation, one could immedidately turn into being a weed. This line of thought rubs me the wrong way.

(Words of a fabricator)

It is too simplistic to think that one can reach the world of transcendence as long as we participate in the act of Gyo and sweat. Is a human body worthy of such trust? We are talking about a body of betrayer/l’etranger to the natural world, who carries the misfortune of being capable of even controlling the length of his life by will. We’re talking about, us, the contemporary men who are soaked to the bones with a fabricator called consciousness.

1962�1964

YOKO'S VOICE

Yoko Ono SAC Journal no. 24, May 1962 issue, Tokyo Translated by the artist, August 26–27, 1999

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OF WORDS OF A FABRICATOR DATE: SEPTEMBER 1, 2014 1:37AM FROM: YOKO ONO

Jon, in WORDS OF A FABRICATOR, I am hitting Chance Operation as phony. Music Concrete had adopted natural sounds in its music. But Cage had gone even further and created soundless music except for the sound of nature in the limited time he had designated. After that, what could he do? Change the timing? Like his friend Marcel, he could have told the world that he would now just be a chess player. But he went on to create music pieces with musical notes operated only by chance. Nature has incredible complex forms. Music made by man had too, in the works of three B’s, Mozart and twelve tone composers. Chance Operation does not give. It only takes in the form of people’s devout attention. There is no creative fabrication (I dare to use that word!) of the human mind. No plan except to rely on chance, created by the performers. In the effort of composing avant-garde music, the musical experience La Monte Young gives is totally superb considering what chance operational music can give which is ultimately nothing. La Monte Young gives something to chew on. Cage however, experiences incredible popularity which makes most critics avoid being vocal. People who always felt that classical music was intimidating to them, must love Cage’s music, which destroys the very fabric of music itself. There may have been some people in the audience who realized that the King wore no clothes. In fact Cage him self, might have noticed it and laughed it off as life’s eternal farce. I loved Cage as a friend. But more over, I miss the human mind expressed in intricate weaving of sounds by intention and not by chance.

CUT PIECE

Following the political changes through the year after 9/11, I felt terribly vulnerable – like the most delicate wind could bring me tears. It was as though everything I believed in was rapidly melting away, while I continued walking still carrying my beliefs. The front page of the papers and the TV news were feeding us what they wanted to - assaulting our senses. Men without faces were at work. Force and intimidation were in the air. People were silenced. I always thought I wanted to live forever, that I was one person who was not scared of doing so. But would I want to live surrounded by this world as we know now? Some people went to Palestine to act as human shields. That really touched me. If all of us stood to become human shields instead of machine gunning each other... My immediate thought was to join them. I almost did, and didn’t. Later, the world heard of the death of Rachel Corrie. She made her stand for all of us. Cut Piece is my hope for World Peace. Because today is a very special day for me. Like every day. And I’m determined to cherish every moment. When I first performed this work, in 1964, I did it with some anger and turbulence in my heart. This time I do it with love for you, for me, and for the world. Come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever you like the size of less than a postcard, and send it to the one you love. I’ll see you. y.o. 8/1/’03 My body is the scar of my mind y.o. ‘64

1962�1964

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OF WORDS OF A FABRICATOR DATE: SEPTEMBER 1, 2014 1:37AM FROM: YOKO ONO

CUT PIECE

Jon, in WORDS OF A FABRICATOR, I am hitting Chance Operation as phony. Music Concrete had adopted natural sounds in its music. But Cage had gone even further and created soundless music except for the sound of nature in the limited time he had designated. After that, what could he do? Change the timing? Like his friend Marcel, he could have told the world that he would now just be a chess player. But he went on to create music pieces with musical notes operated only by chance. Nature has incredible complex forms. Music made by man had too, in the works of three B’s, Mozart and twelve tone composers. Chance Operation does not give. It only takes in the form of people’s devout attention. There is no creative fabrication (I dare to use that word!) of the human mind. No plan except to rely on chance, created by the performers.

Following the political changes through the year after 9/11, I felt terribly vulnerable – like the most delicate wind could bring me tears. It was as though everything I believed in was rapidly melting away, while I continued walking still carrying my beliefs. The front page of the papers and the TV news were feeding us what they wanted to - assaulting our senses. Men without faces were at work. Force and intimidation were in the air. People were silenced. I always thought I wanted to live forever, that I was one person who was not scared of doing so. But would I want to live surrounded by this world as we know now?

In the effort of composing avant-garde music, the musical experience La Monte Young gives is totally superb considering what chance operational music can give which is ultimately nothing. La Monte Young gives something to chew on. Cage however, experiences incredible popularity which makes most critics avoid being vocal. People who always felt that classical music was intimidating to them, must love Cage’s music, which destroys the very fabric of music itself. There may have been some people in the audience who realized that the King wore no clothes. In fact Cage him self, might have noticed it and laughed it off as life’s eternal farce. I loved Cage as a friend. But more over, I miss the human mind expressed in intricate weaving of sounds by intention and not by chance.

Some people went to Palestine to act as human shields. That really touched me. If all of us stood to become human shields instead of machine gunning each other... My immediate thought was to join them. I almost did, and didn’t. Later, the world heard of the death of Rachel Corrie. She made her stand for all of us. Cut Piece is my hope for World Peace. Because today is a very special day for me. Like every day. And I’m determined to cherish every moment. When I first performed this work, in 1964, I did it with some anger and turbulence in my heart. This time I do it with love for you, for me, and for the world. Come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever you like the size of less than a postcard, and send it to the one you love. I’ll see you. y.o. 8/1/’03 My body is the scar of my mind y.o. ‘64

1962�1964

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�” Donald Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen: Ono Y� oko no zen’ei sho � [Stumbling front line: Yoko Ono’s avant-garde show],Geijutsu shincho [New trends in art] 13, no. 7. (July 1962): 60–61.

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Donald Richie, “Tsumazuita saizensen: Ono [Stumbling front line: Yoko Ono’s avant-garde [New trends in art] 13, no. 7. (July

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�” Y� oko no zen’ei sho � show],Geijutsu shincho 1962): 60–61.


Toshi Ichiyanagi. “Saizen’ei no koe: Donarudo Richi e no hanron” [Voice of the most avant-garde: Objection to Donald Richie], � [New trends in art] 13, no. 8. (August 1962): 138–39. Geijutsu shincho

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Toshi Ichiyanagi. “Saizen’ei no koe: Donarudo Richi e no hanron” [Voice of the most avant-garde: Objection to Donald Richie], � [New trends in art] 13, no. 8. (August 1962): 138–39. Geijutsu shincho

1962�1964

Donald Richie, “Stumbling Front Line: Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde Show,” �, July 1962. Translation of article on Geijutsu shincho pp. 118–19 of this volume.

�getsu Art Center has become known for presenting the finest of The So Japanese avant-garde art, but it hardly lives up to that reputation. The works it shows are actually mostly old-fashioned. Yoko Ono’s program held there the other day epitomizes this. She must be thinking of herself as modern merely for two factors: she has just returned from New York, and the pieces she presented appeared to be avant-garde. People were seated in a circle. She would strike a match to light a fire. She would bang on the piano. Just these simple gestures would fill up a couple of hours. Following one after another were works that seemed to have no point, except for the fact that performers were voluntary participants (there was no rehearsal because of this) and the fact that the pieces focused on trivial matters. The concert offered nothing other than these two selling points—the performers’ voluntary participation and works’ triviality. Of course, this voluntary participation was nothing remarkable. Elites of the Japanese avant-garde [who performed in the concert] such as � Mayuzumi, Kenji Kobayashi, Yuji Takahashi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toshiro �no, Mitsuo Kano �, and Masunobu Yoshimura Kuniharu Akiyama, Yoshiaki To were all busy and restless, their schedules packed. The point of this concert was that these “busy” men managed to participate. We often hear of voluntary participation in New York, too, but rarely hear of such voluntary participation being done by amateurs. Usually, voluntary participation is done by professional actors. It is fundamentally different in its concept and attitude from this instance, where amateurs stood onstage without any rehearsal or preparation. Anyway, Ono did not demonstrate any originality. All her ideas are borrowed from people in New York, particularly John Cage. For example, the idea for the piece in which she sat silently in front of the piano for the first five minutes and banged on the keys for the next five was clearly stolen from Cage. The piano performance by Takahashi, which juxtaposed actions of the actors onstage, also derived from Cage. What Ono does is unoriginal. I found far more originality in a dance by two ballet dancers, Tatsumi Hijikata and Miki Wakamatsu. Unfortunately, the remaining program displayed creativity on the level of an elementary-school sports day.In other words, it was an amateur performance. In this sense, the concert exposed the very nature of Japanese. Japanese seems to believe that great and important works are those which take time, like this one, which took forever, involving long breaks—this little play went on and on. Ono is a good example of someone who tries to make works seem significant solely by making them take a very long time. Something that could have been presented in a few minutes was prolonged to twenty minutes just so that it would seem important. Her attitude toward the audience was off-track. She constantly insults the intelligence of her audience members. She must think that they have no mental capabilities at all. Perhaps she is right. That might be so. Because the latest trend is that audiences enjoy being disrespected. But this is due to nothing other than the fact that they disrespect themselves. Sensible audience members should have left their seats after fifteen minutes tonight, but they showed no signs of leaving early. I guess that was particularly hard for them to do since they were made to pay

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five hundred yen for admission. Having been deceived into paying such a pricey admission, they stayed until the end, trying to get the most of their money. Ono incorporated speeches of Hitler at Nuremberg and [the general] �jo � during the war. It was such a tacky idea. It was cheap nonHideki To sense. No one clapped, even after it lasted over twenty minutes. She must have been outraged by the reacti on and repeated it again. I just could not get it. It was a forceful imposition of uninteresting works. The evening went on. (If I was not assigned to write this review, I would have gone home much sooner.) Her intentions grew more obvious. She began taking her frustration out onto the audience. Having been put through what she calls “works” un til the end, the audience was exhausted and left S� ogetsu dissatisfied. It is not wrong for an artist to incite the audience. In a sense, a real artist is always expected to do so. But there are methods for doing it. If Ono wants to succeed in this, she should take a much more clever method. Or choose a more original way . At the very least, she should not be old-fashioned. Of course, there was something wrong with the audience tonight. I was amazed by their stupid desire for som ething new. I don’t know what else to say. They were glued to their seats, as immobile as cows, and wi llingly accepted relentless disrespect from the stage. They did not boo or whistle. Their attitude was nothing but “nothing.” Many people left dissatisfied, but no one complained. If I were pressed to explain, I’d say that they appeared to be ashamed of themselves for not speaking up before going home. Ms. Ono, you might as well handle such a dull audience lightly by p laying tricks on them. But at the same time, you should try to become an original artist by no longer stealing other people’s ideas. Around thirty years ago, Francis Picabia and Eric Satie showed brilliant magic. They sold many tickets f or an original ballet they called Relâche (meaning “sold out”). On the day of the performance, ticket holders came to the theater only to find the auditorium closed and dark. All the doors inside were closed and displayed fliers saying, “RELÂCHE.” Ms. Ono, couldn’t you do s omething as witty as this?

1962�1964

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five hundred yen for admission. Having been deceived into paying such a pricey admission, they stayed until the end, trying to get the most of their money.

Donald Richie, “Stumbling Front Line: Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde Show,” �, July 1962. Translation of article on Geijutsu shincho pp. 118–19 of this volume.

Ono incorporated speeches of Hitler at Nuremberg and [the general] �jo � during the war. It was such a tacky idea. It was cheap nonHideki To sense. No one clapped, even after it lasted over twenty minutes. She must have been outraged by the reacti on and repeated it again. I just could not get it. It was a forceful imposition of uninteresting works. The evening went on. (If I was not assigned to write this review, I would have gone home much sooner.) Her intentions grew more obvious. She began taking her frustration out onto the audience. Having been put through what she calls “works” un til the end, the audience �getsu dissatisfied. was exhausted and left So

�getsu Art Center has become known for presenting the finest of The So Japanese avant-garde art, but it hardly lives up to that reputation. The works it shows are actually mostly old-fashioned. Yoko Ono’s program held there the other day epitomizes this.

It is not wrong for an artist to incite the audience. In a sense, a real artist is always expected to do so. But there are methods for doing it. If Ono wants to succeed in this, she should take a much more clever method. Or choose a more original way . At the very least, she should not be old-fashioned.

She must be thinking of herself as modern merely for two factors: she has just returned from New York, and the pieces she presented appeared to be avant-garde. People were seated in a circle. She would strike a match to light a fire. She would bang on the piano. Just these simple gestures would fill up a couple of hours.

Of course, there was something wrong with the audience tonight. I was amazed by their stupid desire for som ething new. I don’t know what else to say. They were glued to their seats, as immobile as cows, and wi llingly accepted relentless disrespect from the stage. They did not boo or whistle. Their attitude was nothing but “nothing.” Many people left dissatisfied, but no one complained. If I were pressed to explain, I’d say that they appeared to be ashamed of themselves for not speaking up before going home.

Following one after another were works that seemed to have no point, except for the fact that performers were voluntary participants (there was no rehearsal because of this) and the fact that the pieces focused on trivial matters. The concert offered nothing other than these two selling points—the performers’ voluntary participation and works’ triviality. Of course, this voluntary participation was nothing remarkable. Elites of the Japanese avant-garde [who performed in the concert] such as � Mayuzumi, Kenji Kobayashi, Yuji Takahashi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toshiro �, and Masunobu Yoshimura Kuniharu Akiyama, Yoshiaki T� ono, Mitsuo Kano were all busy and restless, their schedules packed. The point of this concert was that these “busy” men managed to participate. We often hear of voluntary participation in New York, too, but rarely hear of such voluntary participation being done by amateurs. Usually, voluntary participation is done by professional actors. It is fundamentally different in its concept and attitude from this instance, where amateurs stood onstage without any rehearsal or preparation.

Ms. Ono, you might as well handle such a dull audience lightly by p laying tricks on them. But at the same time, you should try to become an original artist by no longer stealing other people’s ideas. Around thirty years ago, Francis Picabia and Eric Satie showed brilliant magic. They sold many tickets f or an original ballet they called Relâche (meaning “sold out”). On the day of the performance, ticket holders came to the theater only to find the auditorium closed and dark. All the doors inside were closed and displayed fliers saying, “RELÂCHE.” Ms. Ono, couldn’t you do s omething as witty as this?

Anyway, Ono did not demonstrate any originality. All her ideas are borrowed from people in New York, particularly John Cage. For example, the idea for the piece in which she sat silently in front of the piano for the first five minutes and banged on the keys for the next five was clearly stolen from Cage. The piano performance by Takahashi, which juxtaposed actions of the actors onstage, also derived from Cage. What Ono does is unoriginal. I found far more originality in a dance by two ballet dancers, Tatsumi Hijikata and Miki Wakamatsu. Unfortunately, the remaining program displayed creativity on the level of an elementary-school sports day.In other words, it was an amateur performance. In this sense, the concert exposed the very nature of Japanese. Japanese seems to believe that great and important works are those which take time, like this one, which took forever, involving long breaks—this little play went on and on. Ono is a good example of someone who tries to make works seem significant solely by making them take a very long time. Something that could have been presented in a few minutes was prolonged to twenty minutes just so that it would seem important. Her attitude toward the audience was off-track. She constantly insults the intelligence of her audience members. She must think that they have no mental capabilities at all. Perhaps she is right. That might be so. Because the latest trend is that audiences enjoy being disrespected. But this is due to nothing other than the fact that they disrespect themselves. Sensible audience members should have left their seats after fifteen minutes tonight, but they showed no signs of leaving early. I guess that was particularly hard for them to do since they were made to pay

1962�1964

Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Voice of the Most Avant-Garde: Objection to Donald Richie,” �, August 1962. Translation of article Geijutsu shincho on pp. 120–21 of this volume.

Yoko Ono was criticized for “stealing ideas” in her work (Donald �, last month’s Richie, “The Stumbling Front Line,” Geijutsu shincho issue). This is, however, a simple mistake. It can be proven by myself and others who performed her compositions that night, strongly supporting Ono. First, let me explain two of the pieces in question. The first piece, A Piano Piece to See the Skies, which Ono played by herself, began with the repetition of sounds inaudible to humans. It proceeded to the repetition of sounds that reached the sky, and concluded with the repetitive breathing that necessarily results from an energetic performance. Setting aside the discussion on the quality of the work, it is clear that this three-part piece had nothing to do with John Cage’s silent piano composition 4'33". It was conceptually different. (Cage considered every sound that was heard during the performance as music.) It was also pointed out that her next composition,Pulse, employed �] that Cage used, though it did the same juxtaposing method [taiiho not employ any such method at all. This can be confirmed by any of her pieces’ performers, including [Toshir� o] Mayuzumi, [Kuniharu] Akiyama, [Yoriaki] Matsudaira, [Tatsuo] Minakawa, [Kenji] Kobayashi, and [Yuji] Takahashi. The other day, during a question-and-answer session after a talk he gave, [Oliver] Messiaen said, “If you don’t know a language, you can’t understand its meaning. For example, since I don’t know Japanese, I don’t understand it even as I listen to it.” Though he said a simple thing, I thought his way of thinking was so clear and so typically Western. I wish that critics could understand that an artist has his or her original language, and sometimes it cannot be understood by existing senses. This especially applies to Ono’s works, which have new metaphysical rules. In such mediums as painting, music, poetry, and action, Ono has created worlds of original “language” that are totally separate from one another. This was considered unusual even among Ono’s peers in New York. Morton Feldman, a composer of chance operation, called Ono “New York’s enfant terrible,” and even Cage treated her as an exceptional talent. Ono influenced the people around her to varying degrees. So-called ideas spring from her one after another, and she will calmly give one to this or that person, remaining equable even when someone steals one. I know several people who were successful with works that borrowed ideas from Ono. It is very ironic that she is being treated as a person who stole someone else’s ideas. Ono’s notion that “a work should not be communicated to the audience but instead should have the audience look for it” requires the audience to engage, with highly acute senses, on a different level from that of a chance-operation work. Although Ono’s paintings appear monochromatic at a glance, there are such things as a hair with blood and a liquor bottle hung on the backs of them. Many people say that the stage during Ono’s performance is too dark to discern anything that is going on there, but she believes that spotlighting focal points to the audience insults their intelligence. She would like viewers to have unique experiences by feeling an “atmosphere” and a “flow of air” in the darkness, by lighting matches to see, or by walking and groping for performers. They would find that many things are going on in the darkness. No element contained in such perfectly self-enclosed ideas can be found in what they call Happenings in New York. Ono’s music uses an “indeterminate” method of oral expression, and its sound is based on a quietness created by severely suppressing the act of making a sound. Its timing is what Ono calls “discordant time,” which uses time in a very “indeterminate,” “ambiguous” way. To utilize discordant time means not to try to make beautiful timings, but to treat time like a scrap, like

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an objet, and to use whatever is available. Ono insists that “a work is the artist’s ‘private part’” and that “the artist is a tough, mental prostitute,” and she acutely feels the need for such “prostitution.” She says, “I would be happiest and healthiest if I could be saved b y just watching a baseball game, but a baseball game makes me long for something else.” She says, “I wouldn’t feel satisfied with art that is like sweets, meaning art that is made merely for entertaining senses, that can be created even by a child’s imagination.” She talks about her hunger for a substantial world i n a paradoxical way: “Even the healthy honesty of Picasso and Pollock would not satisfy me. I need a fictional world that has much more complicated settings.” That is, the kind of world where a chair can be transformed into something equivalent to humans. Ono used to say that artists show their work out of weakness and th at this is their downfall. It was only a few years ago that she began to show her work willingly. Until th en, she rarely showed it to someone unless it was absolutely necessary. She did not even tell most of her friends when she was doing something. One can feel in her work a vo id that embraces a conflict between her wondrous timidity and her uncompromising nature. Touch Poem; an instruction for a painting t o be done by others; an object to be embraced by others; Smoke Painting, which acquires its “life” by getting burned; and music that is accomplished by having others destroy it—should I call these stylized methods for suicide? Ono hated the “kinetic art” that was created by [Jean] Tinguely and others and that was popular in Europ e at the time. She condemned the destruction it involved for not being a “void” and for demonstrating “arrogance” by “having a certain rhythm.” Hence, she created many works that were quieter and relied on almost imperceptible “indeterminate transformation” and “time.” I am referring to a series of works that concerned “time,” such as, “Until waterdrops create a hole in a stone,” “Until a canvas is covered by vines, ” and “Until wind blows all the seeds.” This element of time applies to all works by Ono. In those days in New York, nobody but Ono thought of such a thing. Among her frie nds, she was called “the only painter” th at they knew. The work that most clearly revealed the character of her art was perhapsPainting to Shake Hands, which was displayed in the lo bby of the S� ogetsu Art Center. Ono self-mockingly says that “the only thing that remains to be done is to go around and shake hands with people.” But this painting, with its long subtitle of “Painting for those who cannot help putting on a diplomatic smile,” elevated her thoughts into a much more refined realm, and created a world of new beautiful , stylized rules. A hand comes out from the canvas, and it will be shaken by numerous unknown hands in unknown spaces. Because her work does not have so-called Japonica elements, Japanophiles in New York, who liked Japonica, disliked her. Ono was the only Japanese artist who wasn’t reviewed as a Japanese artist in newspaper articles, such as the one in the New York Times titled “AvantGarde Music Reaches Carnegie.” La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low discussed whether they should include her works in the American section or in the Japanese section of an avant- garde magazine to be published in Europe, the United States, and Japan. They asked, “Which do you think of yourself as?” Yoko answered in he r usual timid manner, “I feel bad for Japanese people if I am included as a representative of Japan in the Japanese section, because there should be people who do various works in Japan.” Despite what she may thin k, there is almost nobody that does such avant-garde work. There have been many enthusiastic people among Ono’s audiences in New �getsu in Japan. In addition, she has received many inviYork and at So tations to do exhibitions, concerts, events, and radio broadcasts in Europe. In a society whose art-vi ewing eyes are like a wide-holed strainer, only coarse art that does n ot sift through will survive. In a world where one can easily be sued for “stealing,” efforts not to be misunderstood become more important than doing adventurous things: I wish for the critic’s reconsideration.

1962�1964

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an objet, and to use whatever is available. Ono insists that “a work is the artist’s ‘private part’” and that “the artist is a tough, mental prostitute,” and she acutely feels the need for such “prostitution.” She says, “I would be happiest and healthiest if I could be saved b y just watching a baseball game, but a baseball game makes me long for something else.” She says, “I wouldn’t feel satisfied with art that is like sweets, meaning art that is made merely for entertaining senses, that can be created even by a child’s imagination.” She talks about her hunger for a substantial world i n a paradoxical way: “Even the healthy honesty of Picasso and Pollock would not satisfy me. I need a fictional world that has much more complicated settings.” That is, the kind of world where a chair can be transformed into something equivalent to humans.

Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Voice of the Most Avant-Garde: Objection to Donald Richie,” �, August 1962. Translation of article Geijutsu shincho on pp. 120–21 of this volume.

Yoko Ono was criticized for “stealing ideas” in her work (Donald �, last month’s Richie, “The Stumbling Front Line,” Geijutsu shincho issue). This is, however, a simple mistake. It can be proven by myself and others who performed her compositions that night, strongly supporting Ono.

Ono used to say that artists show their work out of weakness and th at this is their downfall. It was only a few years ago that she began to show her work willingly. Until th en, she rarely showed it to someone unless it was absolutely necessary. She did not even tell most of her friends when she was doing something. One can feel in her work a vo id that embraces a conflict between her wondrous timidity and her uncompromising nature.

First, let me explain two of the pieces in question. The first piece, A Piano Piece to See the Skies, which Ono played by herself, began with the repetition of sounds inaudible to humans. It proceeded to the repetition of sounds that reached the sky, and concluded with the repetitive breathing that necessarily results from an energetic performance. Setting aside the discussion on the quality of the work, it is clear that this three-part piece had nothing to do with John Cage’s silent piano composition 4'33". It was conceptually different. (Cage considered every sound that was heard during the performance as music.) It was also pointed out that her next composition,Pulse, employed �] that Cage used, though it did the same juxtaposing method [taiiho not employ any such method at all. This can be confirmed by any of her �] Mayuzumi, [Kuniharu] Akiyama, pieces’ performers, including [Toshiro [Yoriaki] Matsudaira, [Tatsuo] Minakawa, [Kenji] Kobayashi, and [Yuji] Takahashi.

Touch Poem; an instruction for a painting t o be done by others; an object to be embraced by others; Smoke Painting, which acquires its “life” by getting burned; and music that is accomplished by having others destroy it—should I call these stylized methods for suicide? Ono hated the “kinetic art” that was created by [Jean] Tinguely and others and that was popular in Europ e at the time. She condemned the destruction it involved for not being a “void” and for demonstrating “arrogance” by “having a certain rhythm.” Hence, she created many works that were quieter and relied on almost imperceptible “indeterminate transformation” and “time.” I am referring to a series of works that concerned “time,” such as, “Until waterdrops create a hole in a stone,” “Until a canvas is covered by vines, ” and “Until wind blows all the seeds.” This element of time applies to all works by Ono. In those days in New York, nobody but Ono thought of such a thing. Among her frie nds, she was called “the only painter” th at they knew. The work that most clearly revealed the character of her art was perhapsPainting to Shake �getsu Art Center. Ono Hands, which was displayed in the lo bby of the So self-mockingly says that “the only thing that remains to be done is to go around and shake hands with people.” But this painting, with its long subtitle of “Painting for those who cannot help putting on a diplomatic smile,” elevated her thoughts into a much more refined realm, and created a world of new beautiful , stylized rules. A hand comes out from the canvas, and it will be shaken by numerous unknown hands in unknown spaces.

The other day, during a question-and-answer session after a talk he gave, [Oliver] Messiaen said, “If you don’t know a language, you can’t understand its meaning. For example, since I don’t know Japanese, I don’t understand it even as I listen to it.” Though he said a simple thing, I thought his way of thinking was so clear and so typically Western. I wish that critics could understand that an artist has his or her original language, and sometimes it cannot be understood by existing senses. This especially applies to Ono’s works, which have new metaphysical rules. In such mediums as painting, music, poetry, and action, Ono has created worlds of original “language” that are totally separate from one another. This was considered unusual even among Ono’s peers in New York. Morton Feldman, a composer of chance operation, called Ono “New York’s enfant terrible,” and even Cage treated her as an exceptional talent. Ono influenced the people around her to varying degrees. So-called ideas spring from her one after another, and she will calmly give one to this or that person, remaining equable even when someone steals one. I know several people who were successful with works that borrowed ideas from Ono. It is very ironic that she is being treated as a person who stole someone else’s ideas.

Because her work does not have so-called Japonica elements, Japanophiles in New York, who liked Japonica, disliked her. Ono was the only Japanese artist who wasn’t reviewed as a Japanese artist in newspaper articles, such as the one in the New York Times titled “AvantGarde Music Reaches Carnegie.” La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low discussed whether they should include her works in the American section or in the Japanese section of an avant- garde magazine to be published in Europe, the United States, and Japan. They asked, “Which do you think of yourself as?” Yoko answered in he r usual timid manner, “I feel bad for Japanese people if I am included as a representative of Japan in the Japanese section, because there should be people who do various works in Japan.” Despite what she may thin k, there is almost nobody that does such avant-garde work.

Ono’s notion that “a work should not be communicated to the audience but instead should have the audience look for it” requires the audience to engage, with highly acute senses, on a different level from that of a chance-operation work. Although Ono’s paintings appear monochromatic at a glance, there are such things as a hair with blood and a liquor bottle hung on the backs of them. Many people say that the stage during Ono’s performance is too dark to discern anything that is going on there, but she believes that spotlighting focal points to the audience insults their intelligence. She would like viewers to have unique experiences by feeling an “atmosphere” and a “flow of air” in the darkness, by lighting matches to see, or by walking and groping for performers. They would find that many things are going on in the darkness. No element contained in such perfectly self-enclosed ideas can be found in what they call Happenings in New York. Ono’s music uses an “indeterminate” method of oral expression, and its sound is based on a quietness created by severely suppressing the act of making a sound. Its timing is what Ono calls “discordant time,” which uses time in a very “indeterminate,” “ambiguous” way. To utilize discordant time means not to try to make beautiful timings, but to treat time like a scrap, like

There have been many enthusiastic people among Ono’s audiences in New �getsu in Japan. In addition, she has received many inviYork and at So tations to do exhibitions, concerts, events, and radio broadcasts in Europe. In a society whose art-vi ewing eyes are like a wide-holed strainer, only coarse art that does n ot sift through will survive. In a world where one can easily be sued for “stealing,” efforts not to be misunderstood become more important than doing adventurous things: I wish for the critic’s reconsideration.

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1964 –1966

Yoko Ono’s departure from Japan in the late summer of 1964 was documented in the short film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people), directed by Chiaki Nagano. Ono is seen walking up the stairs to the plane, waving and smiling; she had just quietly revolutionized art in Japan, and was returning to the United States, confident that she could continue with the radicalization of art that she had begun there in 1960. On her return, her first activity was to introduce her friend Hiroshi Teshigahara to New York City and translate for his presentation of his film Woman in the Dunes at the second New York Film Festival, in September 1964. Teshigahara had hosted her concert Works of Yoko Ono, at the Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in May 1962 (pp. 84–91), and her just-completed Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: StripTease Show , also at Sōgetsu, in August 1964. The latter event featured works that Ono planned to present in her March 1965 concert at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, including Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), Bag Piece (pp. 110–13), and Striptease for Three (pl. 54; all 1964). New York had changed in the two and a half years that Ono was away. Gone were the adventurousness and the raw underground art scene to which she was so central. Pop Art had firmly established itself as the dominant movement, but nudging in from around the edges was a new avant-garde, defined by postmodern dance, films, Conceptualism, and Fluxus; advances in music, poetry, and theater; and, especially, a political awakening. Fluxus had returned to New York in the spring of 1964 with a series of events around Canal Street. George Maciunas—back from Europe, where he had been living since late fall 1961—organized a large Fluxus concert to be held at Carnegie Recital Hall that summer. Titled Fluxus Symphony Orchestra in Fluxus Concert , the event was the city’s first grand introduction to Fluxus. Maciunas had developed plans for the movement in New York in the summer and fall of 1961, and had been greatly influenced by Ono’s ideas of participation, by her conceptualism, and by the license she gave others to realize her works. This last quality became very important in Fluxus, with Maciunas interpreting artists’ ideas to produce inexpensive unlimited Fluxus Editions of their works. Maciunas was also influenced by Ono and La Monte Young’s Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). Fluxus had emerged as a public phenomenon in Europe and Japan during Maciunas’s and Ono’s absence from New York. Now, the movement’s iconoclastic yet humorous character filled a void in the cit y.

54. Striptease for Three. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Photograph: Peter Moore

Initially, while reestablishing herself in New York, Ono realized quiet postcard events, in which the recipients were invited to draw circles, or to imagine. Then, for her March 1965 Carnegie Recital Hall concert titled New Works of Yoko Ono, she premiered in the U.S. the works that had radicalized Japan: Cut Piece, Bag Piece, and Striptease for Three.1 Ono’s work challenges a public on various levels. For instance, Cut Piece is about stripping away constrictions, traditions, prejudices— releasing the self—and it deals with sexuality, gender, and class. The piece embodies conflicts of cultural philosophies—East/West, Buddhism/Christianity, female/ male, present/past, exposed/obscured, free/tied up—as did the kiss between Ono and her husband in Aru wakamono- tachi : a liberated Japanese woman kissing a middle-class white American man was extraordinarily radical for the time. The

126

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1964 –1966

Yoko Ono’s departure from Japan in the late summer of 1964 was documented in the short film Aru wakamono-tachi (Some young people), directed by Chiaki Nagano. Ono is seen walking up the stairs to the plane, waving and smiling; she had just quietly revolutionized art in Japan, and was returning to the United States, confident that she could continue with the radicalization of art that she had begun there in 1960. On her return, her first activity was to introduce her friend Hiroshi Teshigahara to New York City and translate for his presentation of his film Woman in the Dunes at the second New York Film Festival, in September 1964. Teshigahara had hosted her concert Works of Yoko Ono, at the Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in May 1962 (pp. 84–91), and her just-completed Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: StripTease Show , also at Sōgetsu, in August 1964. The latter event featured works that Ono planned to present in her March 1965 concert at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, including Cut Piece (pp. 106–9), Bag Piece (pp. 110–13), and Striptease for Three (pl. 54; all 1964). New York had changed in the two and a half years that Ono was away. Gone were the adventurousness and the raw underground art scene to which she was so central. Pop Art had firmly established itself as the dominant movement, but nudging in from around the edges was a new avant-garde, defined by postmodern dance, films, Conceptualism, and Fluxus; advances in music, poetry, and theater; and, especially, a political awakening. Fluxus had returned to New York in the spring of 1964 with a series of events around Canal Street. George Maciunas—back from Europe, where he had been living since late fall 1961—organized a large Fluxus concert to be held at Carnegie Recital Hall that summer. Titled Fluxus Symphony Orchestra in Fluxus Concert , the event was the city’s first grand introduction to Fluxus. Maciunas had developed plans for the movement in New York in the summer and fall of 1961, and had been greatly influenced by Ono’s ideas of participation, by her conceptualism, and by the license she gave others to realize her works. This last quality became very important in Fluxus, with Maciunas interpreting artists’ ideas to produce inexpensive unlimited Fluxus Editions of their works. Maciunas was also influenced by Ono and La Monte Young’s Chambers Street Loft Series (pp. 48–53). Fluxus had emerged as a public phenomenon in Europe and Japan during Maciunas’s and Ono’s absence from New York. Now, the movement’s iconoclastic yet humorous character filled a void in the cit y. Initially, while reestablishing herself in New York, Ono realized quiet postcard events, in which the recipients were invited to draw circles, or to imagine. Then, for her March 1965 Carnegie Recital Hall concert titled New Works of Yoko Ono, she premiered in the U.S. the works that had radicalized Japan: Cut Piece, Bag Piece, and Striptease for Three.1 Ono’s work challenges a public on various levels. For instance, Cut Piece is about stripping away constrictions, traditions, prejudices— releasing the self—and it deals with sexuality, gender, and class. The piece embodies conflicts of cultural philosophies—East/West, Buddhism/Christianity, female/ male, present/past, exposed/obscured, free/tied up—as did the kiss between Ono and her husband in Aru wakamono- tachi : a liberated Japanese woman kissing a middle-class white American man was extraordinarily radical for the time. The

54. Striptease for Three. 1964. Performed in New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Photograph: Peter Moore

1964–1966

shock of this kiss and its message must have been seismic in Japan in 1964, when the film was shown on national television. The act was clearly intentional on Ono’s part, just as her performances of Cut Piece left no doubt of her desire to free herself from cultural straitjackets. In Striptease for Three, three plain chairs are placed in a row in the middle of the stage (pl. 54); the curtain rises and the chairs stay set this way for a long time before the curtain falls. The piece—a work of pure conceptualism—concerns people’s expectations of sexuality and their prejudices. Bag Piece involves obscurity and imagination, as well as the suggestion of eroticism; in a way, it i s an inversion of Cut Piece. For her contribution, in late June 1965, to the Perpetual Fluxfest concert at the East End Theater in New York, Ono performed Bag Piece, with more erotically suggestive movements, and enacted her Beat Piece with Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Anthony Cox, and others. The score of the latter piece reads: “Listen to a heartbeat.” A photograph of the work shows Ono and the group casually lying on the stage bunched together seemingly like a heap of dead bodies. A week later, also for Perpetual Fluxfest , Kubota performed Vagina Painting in the same theater. Ono dedicated two works to Maciunas in 1965: Pieces Dedicated to George Maciunus, The Phantom Architect —comprising written descriptions of conceptual architecture, including buildings that incorporate the rain, wind, or sunlight—and Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas (pls. 37– 40), performed on three days in September on the roof of her apartment building. The latter work involved selling “past” and “future” mornings and was first realized in Japan the previous year. Also in 1965, Ono wrote a piece that seemed to objectify her conceptual art: Ono’s Sales List (1965) was a register of various of her works along with prices. One of the items on the list is a letter from Ono to Ivan Karp. Karp was then the director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, the most powerful art gallery in New York at the time, showing the works of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, among others. Ono’s letter is an indictment of the gallery system and of the commodification of art; Karp’s reply (also catalogued on Ono’s Sales List ) was arrogant and sexist, perfectly reflecting the instit utional power structure that Ono stood against. In September 1965, Maciunas held the second Fluxus concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, titled Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall . Ono performed two works: Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965; pp. 132–33) and Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young (1962). Both pieces were ironic dedications to composers (Jesus Christ being John Cage). Young was the conductor of the concert. Sky Piece involves wrapping the orchestra musicians and their instruments with medical bandages until they can no longer make sound, and then leading the musicians offstage. Both works can be seen as declarations of independence from great but dominating male composers, who at different times attempted to exert their will over many in the avant-garde. The pieces are manifestos of liberation.

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Ono’s instructions were accompanied by images that Maciunas made for the work. Maciunas printed two versions of the dance-festival piece—one in the aforementioned publication, and the other as an offprint on stiff, white stock (pl. 59), which he cut up and packaged in clear plastic boxes as a Fluxus Edition. Once in London, Ono made her own drawings for the work and advertised subscriptions for the event. These drawings are reproduced in the editions of Ono’s artist’s book Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) published since 1970. During the winter of 1965–66, Ono created a private piece titled Blue Room Event in the oppressive New York apartment in which she was living. She wrote short statements that served to i nvert perception—“This is not here,” “This room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end,” “Find other rooms whi ch exist in this sp ace”— on the walls, windows, floor, and ceiling, and on a large armoire. Blue Room Event was a way of transferring her state of mind outside the situation—a conceptual deliverance. In January 1966, Ono did a talk and concert titled Avant Garde in Japan at the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. The program included Breath Piece, Wind Piece, and Wall Piece. Ono described the first two works in a letter she sent to John Cage later that year. 2 For Breath Piece, she explains, “a large card with small lettering saying breathe, was passed three times among the audi ence.” 3 Wind Piece instruc ts, “Make a way for the wind ,” and was first performed at the S ōgetsu Art Center in 1962 “with a huge elect ric fan.” At Wesleyan, the “audience was asked to move their chairs a little and make a narrow aisle for the wind to pass through. No wind was created with spe cial means.” 4 The final work, Wall Piece, consists of two versions. The score is as follows: Wall Piece First version for one or many performers: One or a number of performers repeatedly knock his or their head(s) against the wall(s) on the stage or in the theatre or auditorium or place of performance. The piece ends when the performers decide that it should end. Second version for audience:

The four-page 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 (issue seven of the

Fluxus newspaper, dated February 1, 1966) dedicates an entire page, designed by Maciunas, to Ono’s Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . Ono’s work consists of instructions for pieces to be enacted, in the mind or perhaps in reality, that together constitute a dance festival. One, for instance, reads:

It is announced that the members of the audience may knock their heads against the wall(s) of the auditorium or theatre or audience area.

CUT AND SEND ADVISE ON TAKE OFF PANTS TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS BEFORE YOU FIGHT. MAKE THIS A RULE.

The audience should continue as long as they want. 5 A few days after Ono returned from Wesleyan, feeling the audience didn’t understand her radical conceptual art, she wrote a “footnote” to her lecture, titled To the Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting), which is one of her clearest writings about her artwork and philosophy (pp. 144–47).

1964–1966

128

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1964–1966

shock of this kiss and its message must have been seismic in Japan in 1964, when the film was shown on national television. The act was clearly intentional on Ono’s part, just as her performances of Cut Piece left no doubt of her desire to free herself from cultural straitjackets. In Striptease for Three, three plain chairs are placed in a row in the middle of the stage (pl. 54); the curtain rises and the chairs stay set this way for a long time before the curtain falls. The piece—a work of pure conceptualism—concerns people’s expectations of sexuality and their prejudices. Bag Piece involves obscurity and imagination, as well as the suggestion of eroticism; in a way, it i s an inversion of Cut Piece.

Ono’s instructions were accompanied by images that Maciunas made for the work. Maciunas printed two versions of the dance-festival piece—one in the aforementioned publication, and the other as an offprint on stiff, white stock (pl. 59), which he cut up and packaged in clear plastic boxes as a Fluxus Edition. Once in London, Ono made her own drawings for the work and advertised subscriptions for the event. These drawings are reproduced in the editions of Ono’s artist’s book Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) published since 1970. During the winter of 1965–66, Ono created a private piece titled Blue Room Event in the oppressive New York apartment in which she was living. She wrote short statements that served to i nvert perception—“This is not here,” “This room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end,” “Find other rooms whi ch exist in this sp ace”— on the walls, windows, floor, and ceiling, and on a large armoire. Blue Room Event was a way of transferring her state of mind outside the situation—a conceptual deliverance.

For her contribution, in late June 1965, to the Perpetual Fluxfest concert at the East End Theater in New York, Ono performed Bag Piece, with more erotically suggestive movements, and enacted her Beat Piece with Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Anthony Cox, and others. The score of the latter piece reads: “Listen to a heartbeat.” A photograph of the work shows Ono and the group casually lying on the stage bunched together seemingly like a heap of dead bodies. A week later, also for Perpetual Fluxfest , Kubota performed Vagina Painting in the same theater.

In January 1966, Ono did a talk and concert titled Avant Garde in Japan at the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. The program included Breath Piece, Wind Piece, and Wall Piece. Ono described the first two works in a letter she sent to John Cage later that year. 2 For Breath Piece, she explains, “a large card with small lettering saying breathe, was passed three times among the audi ence.” 3 Wind Piece instruc ts, “Make a way for the wind ,” and was first performed at the S ōgetsu Art Center in 1962 “with a huge elect ric fan.” At Wesleyan, the “audience was asked to move their chairs a little and make a narrow aisle for the wind to pass through. No wind was created with spe cial means.” 4

Ono dedicated two works to Maciunas in 1965: Pieces Dedicated to George Maciunus, The Phantom Architect —comprising written descriptions of conceptual architecture, including buildings that incorporate the rain, wind, or sunlight—and Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas (pls. 37– 40), performed on three days in September on the roof of her apartment building. The latter work involved selling “past” and “future” mornings and was first realized in Japan the previous year. Also in 1965, Ono wrote a piece that seemed to objectify her conceptual art: Ono’s Sales List (1965) was a register of various of her works along with prices. One of the items on the list is a letter from Ono to Ivan Karp. Karp was then the director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, the most powerful art gallery in New York at the time, showing the works of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, among others. Ono’s letter is an indictment of the gallery system and of the commodification of art; Karp’s reply (also catalogued on Ono’s Sales List ) was arrogant and sexist, perfectly reflecting the instit utional power structure that Ono stood against.

The final work, Wall Piece, consists of two versions. The score is as follows: Wall Piece First version for one or many performers:

In September 1965, Maciunas held the second Fluxus concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, titled Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall . Ono performed two works: Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965; pp. 132–33) and Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young (1962). Both pieces were ironic dedications to composers (Jesus Christ being John Cage). Young was the conductor of the concert. Sky Piece involves wrapping the orchestra musicians and their instruments with medical bandages until they can no longer make sound, and then leading the musicians offstage. Both works can be seen as declarations of independence from great but dominating male composers, who at different times attempted to exert their will over many in the avant-garde. The pieces are manifestos of liberation.

One or a number of performers repeatedly knock his or their head(s) against the wall(s) on the stage or in the theatre or auditorium or place of performance. The piece ends when the performers decide that it should end. Second version for audience:

The four-page 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 (issue seven of the

Fluxus newspaper, dated February 1, 1966) dedicates an entire page, designed by Maciunas, to Ono’s Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . Ono’s work consists of instructions for pieces to be enacted, in the mind or perhaps in reality, that together constitute a dance festival. One, for instance, reads:

It is announced that the members of the audience may knock their heads against the wall(s) of the auditorium or theatre or audience area.

CUT AND SEND ADVISE ON TAKE OFF PANTS The audience should continue as long as they want. 5

TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS BEFORE YOU FIGHT. MAKE THIS A RULE.

A few days after Ono returned from Wesleyan, feeling the audience didn’t understand her radical conceptual art, she wrote a “footnote” to her lecture, titled To the Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting), which is one of her clearest writings about her artwork and philosophy (pp. 144–47).

1964–1966

During the winter of 1965–66, Ono made her first version of Film No. 4 (pp. 164– 67), assisted by Anthony Cox and Jeff Perkins, and starring the moving buttocks of Geoffrey and Bici Hendricks (later known as Nye Ffarrabas), Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney, Ben Patterson, Philip Corner, and perhaps ten other friends and family members. These films were included in Maciunas’s award-winning Fluxfilm Anthology (1966), which additionally featured Ono’s films Match Piece (or No. 1) —a realization of her 1955 Lighting Piece (pl. 25)—and Eyeblink . During this same period, Ono collaborated with Cox, Perkins, Michael Mason, and myself to create The Stone (pp. 138–43), a participatory installation in the Judson Gallery, a small space next to Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. A structure was built inside the space, with a paper scrim on one wall for a rearscreen projection by Perkins; a slightly raised floating platform with markings by Cox; speakers in each corner of the ceiling for “sound forms” by Mason; and a scrim overhead, above which lights were mounted that were continually dimmed and brightened. Ono had prepared questionnaires for visitors, who, after removing their shoes, could enter the interior space, put bags over their bodies, undress if they wished, a nd stay as long as they l iked. Referre d to as “eyebags,” the bags were made of a material that could be seen through but not into, the work sharing certain aspects with Ono’s earlier Bag Piece. Ono and Cox prepared a publication for The Stone. Among the pages were Cox’s texts on his ideas for The Stone, Mason’s text on sound forms, Perkins’s discussion of his “film message,” and various work s by Ono, such as Forms to Be Filled for the Rental o f the Eye bags: Questionnaire, Truth/False, A, B, or C; Ad for Bagwear (pls. 62–64); and Biography , which included her Statement : Statement People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone. 6 Inserted into the publication were To the Wesleyan People and Ono’s Sales List , as well as mimeographed copies of reviews of The Stone from the HeraldTribune and The Village Voice. It was sold in the gallery for one dollar. Grapefruit was also for sale, for ten dollars. The Stone was quite popular, and that summer it was moved to the Paradox restaurant in the East Village. In 1967, The Stone was included in Ono’s Lisson Gallery exhibition in London.

Before the summer of 1966 had ended, Ono left for England, bringing with her the plans and works she had been developing, includingOno’s Sales List , which became a working blueprint for her Indica Gallery show that fall (pp. 158–63), andFilm No. 4 , which was expanded to over an hour’s length that winter. Most importantly, she brought with her an extraordinary energy and vision, which, as had occurred in New York, Tokyo, and again in New York, would ignite the art scene in London. — Jon Hendricks

130

131

1964–1966

NOTES

1.

In addition, the concert included Clock Piece and * Piece. The asterisk in this last title indicated a missing word, as explained in the concert program. The word ended up being “snake”—the piece being Snake Piece, in which the artist announces that she has released two snakes into the concert hall where the audience is sitting.

2.

In the letter, dated December 15, 1966, Ono included thirteen short instruction pieces, accompanied by descriptions. She wrote the letter in response to a request from Cage, who wanted to publish her works in a book he was compiling titled Notations . He was meant to choose nine of them. See Yoko Ono, 9 Concert Pieces for John Cage , in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 279–81.

3. 4. 5.

Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 279. The score for Wall Piece appears in Ono’s text piece Strip Tease Show (dated early spring 1966), which brings together a number of scores and which the artist describes as a “script consist[ing] of a series of EVENTS that have been performed in Kyoto 1964, Tokyo 1964, Carnegie Recital Hall 1965, and Wesleyan University 1966.” Strip Tease Show is reproduced in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono , pp. 276–78. Yoko Ono, Statement , in Judson Gal lery Presents

6.

The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sand Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Messages by Jeff Perkins, Air: Jon Hendricks (New York: Judson

Gallery, 1966), n.p.

130

1964–1966

131

During the winter of 1965–66, Ono made her first version of Film No. 4 (pp. 164– 67), assisted by Anthony Cox and Jeff Perkins, and starring the moving buttocks of Geoffrey and Bici Hendricks (later known as Nye Ffarrabas), Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney, Ben Patterson, Philip Corner, and perhaps ten other friends and family members. These films were included in Maciunas’s award-winning Fluxfilm Anthology (1966), which additionally featured Ono’s films Match Piece (or No. 1) —a realization of her 1955 Lighting Piece (pl. 25)—and Eyeblink . During this same period, Ono collaborated with Cox, Perkins, Michael Mason, and myself to create The Stone (pp. 138–43), a participatory installation in the Judson Gallery, a small space next to Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. A structure was built inside the space, with a paper scrim on one wall for a rearscreen projection by Perkins; a slightly raised floating platform with markings by Cox; speakers in each corner of the ceiling for “sound forms” by Mason; and a scrim overhead, above which lights were mounted that were continually dimmed and brightened. Ono had prepared questionnaires for visitors, who, after removing their shoes, could enter the interior space, put bags over their bodies, undress if they wished, a nd stay as long as they l iked. Referre d to as “eyebags,” the bags were made of a material that could be seen through but not into, the work sharing certain aspects with Ono’s earlier Bag Piece. Ono and Cox prepared a publication for The Stone. Among the pages were Cox’s texts on his ideas for The Stone, Mason’s text on sound forms, Perkins’s discussion of his “film message,” and various work s by Ono, such as Forms to Be Filled for the Rental o f the Eye bags: Questionnaire, Truth/False, A, B, or C; Ad for Bagwear (pls. 62–64); and Biography , which included her Statement :

1964–1966

NOTES

1.

In addition, the concert included Clock Piece and * Piece. The asterisk in this last title indicated a missing word, as explained in the concert program. The word ended up being “snake”—the piece being Snake Piece, in which the artist announces that she has released two snakes into the concert hall where the audience is sitting.

2.

In the letter, dated December 15, 1966, Ono included thirteen short instruction pieces, accompanied by descriptions. She wrote the letter in response to a request from Cage, who wanted to publish her works in a book he was compiling titled Notations . He was meant to choose nine of them. See Yoko Ono, 9 Concert Pieces for John Cage , in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 279–81.

3. 4. 5.

Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 279. The score for Wall Piece appears in Ono’s text piece Strip Tease Show (dated early spring 1966), which brings together a number of scores and which the artist describes as a “script consist[ing] of a series of EVENTS that have been performed in Kyoto 1964, Tokyo 1964, Carnegie Recital Hall 1965, and Wesleyan University 1966.” Strip Tease Show is reproduced in Munroe and Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono , pp. 276–78. Yoko Ono, Statement , in Judson Gal lery Presents

6.

The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sand Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Messages by Jeff Perkins, Air: Jon Hendricks (New York: Judson

Statement


People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone. 6 Inserted into the publication were To the Wesleyan People and Ono’s Sales List , as well as mimeographed copies of reviews of The Stone from the HeraldTribune and The Village Voice. It was sold in the gallery for one dollar. Grapefruit was also for sale, for ten dollars. The Stone was quite popular, and that summer it was moved to the Paradox restaurant in the East Village. In 1967, The Stone was included in Ono’s Lisson Gallery exhibition in London.

Before the summer of 1966 had ended, Ono left for England, bringing with her the plans and works she had been developing, includingOno’s Sales List , which became a working blueprint for her Indica Gallery show that fall (pp. 158–63), andFilm No. 4 , which was expanded to over an hour’s length that winter. Most importantly, she brought with her an extraordinary energy and vision, which, as had occurred in New York, Tokyo, and again in New York, would ignite the art scene in London. — Jon Hendricks

132

1964–1966

133

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST 1965

Sky Piece to Jesus Christ was first performed on September 25, 1965,1 in Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall , a multipart Fluxus concert conducted by La

Monte Young. One of Ono’s contributions to the concert, Sky Piece to Jesus Christ started with the Fluxorchestra performing music. They were soon interrupted by a second set of performers, including Ono, who began to wrap white gauze around the musicians and their instruments (pls. 55, 56).2 Eventually, unable to continue to play, the orchestra members were led offstage, slowly exiting as linked wrapped units. The Jesus Christ in the title was an allusion to John Cage, who was sometimes referred to as J. C. or Jesus Christ in Ono’s milieu. It was perhaps a loving tribute, but was also an acknowledgm ent of Cage’s dominating position in the world of avant-garde music at the time. Realizing ideas she had expressed three years earlier in her text “Words of a Fabricator,” 3 and despite her close friendship with Cage, Ono’s performance suggests a declaration of freedom from the constraints she felt that he and his concept of chance operations had imposed on music and on her generation of artists. Cage had perhaps acknowledged Ono’s critique when he dedicated a 1962 composition, 0 00 , to the artist and her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.4 He considered this piece, seemingly a negation of time but a designation of it nonetheless, to be a second version of his well-known work4 33 , in which a performer is invited to engage an instrument but produce no sound, encouraging the audience members to become aware of the music of the world around them. Ono’s reference to the sky in her work reads as a metaphor for freedom and escape, and contrasts with the restraints imposed on the musicians at the center of the performance. The bandages evoke the possibility of healing, and the emergence of artistic liberation from the strictures of the past. '

"

'

"

1. The work is also known as Sky Piece for Jesus Christ .

2. Ono frequently used binding and wrapping in her work. Performers were tied up for her work AOS—To David Tudor (1961; pl. 24), and in the years after Sky Piece to Jesus Christ , she presented Wrapping Piece for London (1966) and Lion Wrapping Event (1967; pp. 168–69). 3. Yoko Ono, “Words of A Fabricator,” S AC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p. This volume, pp. 114–15; Ono explains this text in an e-mail printed on p. 116. 4. The 0 00 score is available through Edition Peters, of Leipzig, London, and Glendale, N.Y. It is als o reproduced in Willi am Fetterman, John Cage's Theatr e '

"

Pieces:Notationsand Performances

(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 85.

55 and 56. Sky Piece to Jesus Christ . Performed in Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall , New York, September 25, 1965. Photographs: Fred W. McDarrah (top) and Peter Moore ( bottom)

132

1964–1966

133

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST

SKY PIECE TO JESUS CHRIST 1965

Sky Piece to Jesus Christ was first performed on September 25, 1965,1 in Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall , a multipart Fluxus concert conducted by La

Monte Young. One of Ono’s contributions to the concert, Sky Piece to Jesus Christ started with the Fluxorchestra performing music. They were soon interrupted by a second set of performers, including Ono, who began to wrap white gauze around the musicians and their instruments (pls. 55, 56).2 Eventually, unable to continue to play, the orchestra members were led offstage, slowly exiting as linked wrapped units. The Jesus Christ in the title was an allusion to John Cage, who was sometimes referred to as J. C. or Jesus Christ in Ono’s milieu. It was perhaps a loving tribute, but was also an acknowledgm ent of Cage’s dominating position in the world of avant-garde music at the time. Realizing ideas she had expressed three years earlier in her text “Words of a Fabricator,” 3 and despite her close friendship with Cage, Ono’s performance suggests a declaration of freedom from the constraints she felt that he and his concept of chance operations had imposed on music and on her generation of artists. Cage had perhaps acknowledged Ono’s critique when he dedicated a 1962 composition, 0 00 , to the artist and her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.4 He considered this piece, seemingly a negation of time but a designation of it nonetheless, to be a second version of his well-known work4 33 , in which a performer is invited to engage an instrument but produce no sound, encouraging the audience members to become aware of the music of the world around them. Ono’s reference to the sky in her work reads as a metaphor for freedom and escape, and contrasts with the restraints imposed on the musicians at the center of the performance. The bandages evoke the possibility of healing, and the emergence of artistic liberation from the strictures of the past. '

"

'

"

1. The work is also known as Sky Piece for Jesus Christ .

2. Ono frequently used binding and wrapping in her work. Performers were tied up for her work AOS—To David Tudor (1961; pl. 24), and in the years after Sky Piece to Jesus Christ , she presented Wrapping Piece for London (1966) and Lion Wrapping Event (1967; pp. 168–69). 3. Yoko Ono, “Words of A Fabricator,” S AC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p. This volume, pp. 114–15; Ono explains this text in an e-mail printed on p. 116. 4. The 0 00 score is available through Edition Peters, of Leipzig, London, and Glendale, N.Y. It is als o reproduced in Willi am Fetterman, John Cage's Theatr e '

"

55 and 56. Sky Piece to Jesus Christ . Performed in Fluxorchestra at Carnegie Recital Hall , New York, September 25, 1965. Photographs: Fred W. McDarrah (top) and Peter Moore ( bottom)

Pieces:Notationsand Performances

(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 85.

1964–1966

134

135

SKY MACHINE

SKY MACHINE 1961/1966

This stainless steel card dispenser, also titled Sky Dispenser , bears the inscription along the bottom, “WORD MACHINE PIECE #1 ‘SKY MACHINE’ BY YOKO ONO 1961, REALIZED BY ANTHONY COX 1966.” When a coin is ins erted into it , the machine releases a card with the word “Sky” written in the artist’s hand in pencil. As noted in the inscription, there was a lapse between the conception and realization of the work. Sky Machine developed out of ideas and instructions found in Grapefruit (1964; (1964; pp. 100–105), 1 but was not produced unt il Ono’s return to New York.

The first month of 1966 was a period of intense creative activity for Ono. Sky Machine was first shown in a group exhibition and performance at Judson Memorial Church on January 14, 1966, along with her Painting to Shake Hands ; both were performed by Jon Hendricks. Just one day earl ier, Ono had performed at Wesleyan University, writing her now iconic follow-up piece, To the Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting)

(pp. 144–47), in the days immediately following. In this piece, Ono writes, “I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than c oke.” Anthony Cox, her husband at the time, called the piece a “parody” of “mammoth “mammoth industries,” like Coca-Cola, which create mass-produced items and present them to the consumer public as if they are essential aspects of daily life.2 Ono flips this paradigm on its head and sells something that cannot actually be sold, owned, or possessed in any sense but is an elemental part of human existence: the sky. Furthermore, through the act of selling bits of sky, Ono asks her audience to reflect on the indispensability of the sky—the air we breathe—and embeds in the work her concerns about the degradation of the environment. Ono encourages her viewer-participants to question their relationship to the environment and to reflect on the pervasiveness of consumer culture in the United States, a country where seemingly anything and everything can be bought and sold, even the air around us. 1. The work specifically relates to the instruction Chewing Gum Machine Piece (winter 1961). See Midori Yoshimoto, “Sky Machine,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Yo rk: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 120. 2. Anthony Cox, “Instructive Auto-Destruction,” Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966): 19.

57. Sky Machine. 1961/1966. Stainless steel dispenser, stainless steel pedestal, and cards with graphite inscriptions, 51 3 ⁄ 16 x 16 1 ⁄ 8 x 16 1 ⁄ 8" (130 x 41 x 41 cm)

58. Cards for Sky Machine. 1961/1966. Graphite on paper, each 1 x 1 3 ⁄ 4" (2.5 x 4.5 cm)

1964–1966

134

135

SKY MACHINE

SKY MACHINE 1961/1966

This stainless steel card dispenser, also titled Sky Dispenser , bears the inscription along the bottom, “WORD MACHINE PIECE #1 ‘SKY MACHINE’ BY YOKO ONO 1961, REALIZED BY ANTHONY COX 1966.” When a coin is ins erted into it , the machine releases a card with the word “Sky” written in the artist’s hand in pencil. As noted in the inscription, there was a lapse between the conception and realization of the work. Sky Machine developed out of ideas and instructions found in Grapefruit (1964; (1964; pp. 100–105), 1 but was not produced unt il Ono’s return to New York.

The first month of 1966 was a period of intense creative activity for Ono. Sky Machine was first shown in a group exhibition and performance at Judson Memorial Church on January 14, 1966, along with her Painting to Shake Hands ; both were performed by Jon Hendricks. Just one day earl ier, Ono had performed at Wesleyan University, writing her now iconic follow-up piece, To the Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting)

(pp. 144–47), in the days immediately following. In this piece, Ono writes, “I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than c oke.” Anthony Cox, her husband at the time, called the piece a “parody” of “mammoth “mammoth industries,” like Coca-Cola, which create mass-produced items and present them to the consumer public as if they are essential aspects of daily life.2 Ono flips this paradigm on its head and sells something that cannot actually be sold, owned, or possessed in any sense but is an elemental part of human existence: the sky. Furthermore, through the act of selling bits of sky, Ono asks her audience to reflect on the indispensability of the sky—the air we breathe—and embeds in the work her concerns about the degradation of the environment. Ono encourages her viewer-participants to question their relationship to the environment and to reflect on the pervasiveness of consumer culture in the United States, a country where seemingly anything and everything can be bought and sold, even the air around us. 1. The work specifically relates to the instruction Chewing Gum Machine Piece (winter 1961). See Midori Yoshimoto, “Sky Machine,” in Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Yo rk: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 120. 2. Anthony Cox, “Instructive Auto-Destruction,” Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966): 19.

1964–1966

136

57. Sky Machine. 1961/1966. Stainless steel dispenser, stainless steel pedestal, and cards with graphite inscriptions, 51 3 ⁄ 16 x 16 1 ⁄ 8 x 16 1 ⁄ 8" (130 x 41 x 41 cm)

137

58. Cards for Sky Machine. 1961/1966. Graphite on paper, each 1 x 1 3 ⁄ 4" (2.5 x 4.5 cm)

DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS

DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS 1966–67

On December 23 and 30, 1965, an advertisement with the headline “Fluxus Presents Yoko Ono and Dance Company” appeared among the music listings in The Village Voice . The short notice announced a two-week “Do It Yourself”Dance Festival that was to take place in January 1966. Though little documentation exists of the response to the ad or any resulting events, it anticipated two other dance festivals that Ono formulated between 1966 and 1967. Without stages, choreography, or frequently even locations, Ono’s dance festivals exist largely as conceptual works, whose events are often to be performed alone or in the minds of participants. The second 1966 iteration of the project emerged on February 1, in the Fluxus publication 3 newspa per eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 . Designed by George Maciunas, a full-page grid consisted of twenty squares featuring Ono’s instructions—some linked to specific days of the thirteen-day event, others not. These were paired with found vintage imagery. The instruction for the first three days was si mply, “BREATHE. “BREATHE.” Others listed actual times and locations. On February 4, for instance, performers were asked to “HIDE AND WATCH THE AUDIENCE COME IN, WAIT & LEAVE” from 9 to 10 P.M. in the Canal Street subway station. A number of other such projects followed,including a series of instruction pieces that Ono produced for Artists after relocating to London the magazine Art and Artists in September 1966. The following year, for her 13 Days Do-It-Yourself Dance Festival , which ran from September 27 to October 9, she edited and rearranged the instructions that had been printed in 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 and made a new set of drawings. On the printed sheet for the festival, Ono announced that interested parties could send her one pound in currency or “a pound worth of flowers and 13 stamps” in order to recei ve her dance instructions through the mail. She reproduced these texts and drawings in the 1970 edition ofGrapefruit (1964; pp. 100–105).

59. Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co. 1966. Designed and produced by George Maciunas. Uncut sheet for a Fluxus Edition. Offset, 22 1 ⁄ 16 x 16 15 ⁄ 16" (56 x 43 cm). The same image appears in Fluxus 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 (Fluxus newspaper, no. 7 [February 1966]), p. 2

136

1964–1966

137

DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS

DO-IT-YOURSELF DANCE FESTIVALS 1966–67

On December 23 and 30, 1965, an advertisement with the headline “Fluxus Presents Yoko Ono and Dance Company” appeared among the music listings in The Village Voice . The short notice announced a two-week “Do It Yourself”Dance Festival that was to take place in January 1966. Though little documentation exists of the response to the ad or any resulting events, it anticipated two other dance festivals that Ono formulated between 1966 and 1967. Without stages, choreography, or frequently even locations, Ono’s dance festivals exist largely as conceptual works, whose events are often to be performed alone or in the minds of participants. The second 1966 iteration of the project emerged on February 1, in the Fluxus publication 3 newspa per eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 . Designed by George Maciunas, a full-page grid consisted of twenty squares featuring Ono’s instructions—some linked to specific days of the thirteen-day event, others not. These were paired with found vintage imagery. The instruction for the first three days was si mply, “BREATHE. “BREATHE.” Others listed actual times and locations. On February 4, for instance, performers were asked to “HIDE AND WATCH THE AUDIENCE COME IN, WAIT & LEAVE” from 9 to 10 P.M. in the Canal Street subway station. A number of other such projects followed,including a series of instruction pieces that Ono produced for Artists after relocating to London the magazine Art and Artists in September 1966. The following year, for her 13 Days Do-It-Yourself Dance Festival , which ran from September 27 to October 9, she edited and rearranged the instructions that had been printed in 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 and made a new set of drawings. On the printed sheet for the festival, Ono announced that interested parties could send her one pound in currency or “a pound worth of flowers and 13 stamps” in order to recei ve her dance instructions through the mail. She reproduced these texts and drawings in the 1970 edition ofGrapefruit (1964; pp. 100–105).

59. Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co. 1966. Designed and produced by George Maciunas. Uncut sheet for a Fluxus Edition. Offset, 22 1 ⁄ 16 x 16 15 ⁄ 16" (56 x 43 cm). The same image appears in Fluxus 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1 (Fluxus newspaper, no. 7 [February 1966]), p. 2

138

1964–1966

139

THE STONE

THE STONE 1966–67

The Stone was a collaborative environment environment first installed

at New York’s Judson Gallery—newly directed by Jon Hendricks—in March 1966. Ono, Anthony Cox, Michael Mason, Jeff Perkins, and Hendricks each contributed to the multimedia presentation. On entering the gallery, visitors were asked to complete a six-page questionnaire by Ono, which included a series of of abstract questions. One question, for example, asked whether “teeth and bones are solid form of cloud,” and another whether “coughing is a form of love.” According to Cox, the survey was “supposed to put [the visitors] in a certain frame of mind.” 1 The installation featured a participatory version of Ono’s Bag Piece (pp. 110–13). She now called the piece Eyebags, perhaps alluding to the fact that the large cloth bags, like eyes, allowed people to see out (through the weave of the material) but could not themselves be seen into. After filling out the questionnaire, participants were given one of the bags, asked to take off their shoes, and finally allowed to enter a nine-square-foot chamber constructed from white paper and wood. They were informed that they could take off their clothes inside the bags and could stay inside as long as they wished. In the same chamber, a rear screen projection of a film by Jeff Perkins was shown on loop—projecting the phrases “From here” and “To “To here” on alternate days—and four-track music by Michael Mason, consisting of flute and guitar sounds, played from a speaker in each corner. A drawing by Cox was installed on the floor.The lights overhead continuously dimmed and brightened. An accompanying catalogue included Ono’stext piece Statement , which relates The Stone to her performance Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9). She explains, “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.”2 Whereas Cut Piece invited viewers to remove Ono’s clothing, however, any disrobing that occurred in Eyebags took place in the private, concealed environments of the bags. The Stone was installed the following summer at the Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant where Ono waitressed, and another version was presented in Ono’s exhibition Half-A-WindShow at London’s Lisson Gallery in fall 196 7.

1. Anthony Cox, Cox, quoted in Rasa Gustaitis, “Experiencing an ‘Experience’ Inside a Black Bag,” New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1966. 2. Yoko Ono, Statement , in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins, Air: Jon Hendricks(New York: Judson


60. Contact sheet showing Yoko Ono, Anthony Cox, and others in The Stone, Judson Gallery, New York. York. 1966. Gelatin silver print, 9 15 ⁄ 16 x 8 1 ⁄ 16" (25.3 x 20.5 cm). Photographs: Charles S. Rotenberg

138

1964–1966

139

THE STONE

THE STONE 1966–67

The Stone was a collaborative environment environment first installed

at New York’s Judson Gallery—newly directed by Jon Hendricks—in March 1966. Ono, Anthony Cox, Michael Mason, Jeff Perkins, and Hendricks each contributed to the multimedia presentation. On entering the gallery, visitors were asked to complete a six-page questionnaire by Ono, which included a series of of abstract questions. One question, for example, asked whether “teeth and bones are solid form of cloud,” and another whether “coughing is a form of love.” According to Cox, the survey was “supposed to put [the visitors] in a certain frame of mind.” 1 The installation featured a participatory version of Ono’s Bag Piece (pp. 110–13). She now called the piece Eyebags, perhaps alluding to the fact that the large cloth bags, like eyes, allowed people to see out (through the weave of the material) but could not themselves be seen into. After filling out the questionnaire, participants were given one of the bags, asked to take off their shoes, and finally allowed to enter a nine-square-foot chamber constructed from white paper and wood. They were informed that they could take off their clothes inside the bags and could stay inside as long as they wished. In the same chamber, a rear screen projection of a film by Jeff Perkins was shown on loop—projecting the phrases “From here” and “To “To here” on alternate days—and four-track music by Michael Mason, consisting of flute and guitar sounds, played from a speaker in each corner. A drawing by Cox was installed on the floor.The lights overhead continuously dimmed and brightened. An accompanying catalogue included Ono’stext piece Statement , which relates The Stone to her performance Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9). She explains, “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.”2 Whereas Cut Piece invited viewers to remove Ono’s clothing, however, any disrobing that occurred in Eyebags took place in the private, concealed environments of the bags. The Stone was installed the following summer at the Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant where Ono waitressed, and another version was presented in Ono’s exhibition Half-A-WindShow at London’s Lisson Gallery in fall 196 7.

1. Anthony Cox, Cox, quoted in Rasa Gustaitis, “Experiencing an ‘Experience’ Inside a Black Bag,” New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1966. 2. Yoko Ono, Statement , in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins, Air: Jon Hendricks(New York: Judson

60. Contact sheet showing Yoko Ono, Anthony Cox, and others in The Stone, Judson Gallery, New York. York. 1966. Gelatin silver print, 9 15 ⁄ 16 x 8 1 ⁄ 16" (25.3 x 20.5 cm). Photographs: Charles S. Rotenberg


1964–1966

61. Antechamber to The Stone, Judson Gallery, New York, March 1966. Photograph: Peter Moore

140

141

THE STONE

62. Yoko Ono. Page from Ad for Bagwear , in exhibition catalogue for The Stone . 1966. Offset, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (21.6 x 27.9 cm)

1964–1966

140

141

61. Antechamber to The Stone, Judson Gallery, New York, March 1966. Photograph: Peter Moore

1964–1966

63 and 64. Yoko Ono. Pages from Ad for Bagwear , in exhibition catalogue for The Stone . 1966. Offset, each 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (21.6 x 27.9 cm)

THE STONE

62. Yoko Ono. Page from Ad for Bagwear , in exhibition catalogue for The Stone . 1966. Offset, 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (21.6 x 27.9 cm)

142

143

THE STONE

1964–1966

142

143

THE STONE

144

145

YOKO'S VOICE

63 and 64. Yoko Ono. Pages from Ad for Bagwear , in exhibition catalogue for The Stone . 1966. Offset, each 11 x 8 1 ⁄ 2" (21.6 x 27.9 cm)

1964�1966

I think it is possible to see a chair as it is. But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your head did not burn or disappear.

FOR THE WESLEYAN PEOPLE

The world of construction seems to be the most tangible, and therefore final. This made me nervous. I started to wonder if it were really so.

YOKO ONO 1 WEST 100TH ST. NEW YORK., 10025

Isn’t a construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn’t it a segment of a larger totality, like an elephant’s tail? Isn’t it something just about to emerge - not quite structured – never quite structured . . . like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling? Therefore, the following works:

JANUARY 23, 1966

To The Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting.) - a footnote to my lecture of January 13th, 1966

A venus made of plastic, except that her head has to be imagined.

When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.

A paper ball and a marble book, except that the final version is the fusion of these two objects which come into existance only in your head.

If my music seems to require physical silence, that is because it requires concentration to yourself - and this requires inner silence which may lead to outer silence as well.

A marble sphere (actually existing) which, in your head, gradually becomes a sharp cone by the time it is extended to the far end of the room.

I think of my music more as a practice (gyo) than a music.

A garden covered with thick marble instead of snow — but like snow, which is to be appreciated only when you uncover the marble coating.

The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people. It is not possible to control a mind-time with a stopwatch or a metronome. In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time. There is a wind that never dies.

One thousand needles: imagine threading them with a straight thread. ********* I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than coke.

************* My paintings, which are all instruction paintings (and meant for others to do), came after collage & assemblage (1915) and happening (1905) came into the art world. Considering the nature of my painting, any of the above three words or a new word can be used instead of the word, painting. But I like the old word painting because it immediately connects with “wall painting” painting, and it is nice and funny. Among my instruction paintings, my interest is mainly in “painting to construct in your head”. In your head, for instance, it is possible for a straight line to exist - not as a segment of a curve but as a straight line. Also, a line can be straight, curved and something else at the same time. A dot can exist as a 1,2,3,4,5,6, dimentional object all at the same time or at various times in different combinations as you wish to perceive. The movement of the molecule can be continuum and discontinuum at the same time. It can be with colour and/or without. There is no visual object that does not exist in comparison to or simultaneously with other objects, but these characteristics can be eliminated if you wish. A sunset can go on for days. You can eat up all the clouds in the sky. You can assemble a painting with a person in the North Pole over a phone, like playing chess. This painting method derives from as far back as the time of the Second World War when we had no food to eat, and my brother and I exchanged menus in the air. There maybe a dream that two dream together, but there is no chair that two see together.

******* Dance was once the way people communicated with God and godliness in people. Since when did dance become a pasted-face exhibitionism of dancers on the spotlighted stage? Can you not communicate if it is totally dark? If people make it a habit to draw a somersault on every other street as they commute to their office, take off their pants before they fight, shake hands with strangers whenever they feel like, give flowers or part of their clothing on streets, subways, elevator, toilet, etc., and if politicians go through a tea house door (lowered, so people must bend very low to get through) before they discuss anything and spend a day watching the fountain water dance at the nearest park, the world business may slow down a little but we may have peace. To me this is dance. ***** All my works in the other fields have an “Event bent” so to speak. People ask me why I call some works Event and others not. They also ask me why I do not call my Events, Happenings. Event, to me, is not an assimilation of all the other arts as Happening seems to be, but an extrication from the various sensory perceptions. It is not “a get togetherness” as most happenings are, but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it moving – the closest word for it may be a “wish” or “hope”.

*********** At a

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144

1964�1966

145

YOKO'S VOICE

I think it is possible to see a chair as it is. But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your head did not burn or disappear.

FOR THE WESLEYAN PEOPLE

The world of construction seems to be the most tangible, and therefore final. This made me nervous. I started to wonder if it were really so.

YOKO ONO 1 WEST 100TH ST. NEW YORK., 10025

Isn’t a construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn’t it a segment of a larger totality, like an elephant’s tail? Isn’t it something just about to emerge - not quite structured – never quite structured . . . like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling? Therefore, the following works:

JANUARY 23, 1966

To The Wesleyan People (who attended the meeting.) - a footnote to my lecture of January 13th, 1966

A venus made of plastic, except that her head has to be imagined.

When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.

A paper ball and a marble book, except that the final version is the fusion of these two objects which come into existance only in your head.

If my music seems to require physical silence, that is because it requires concentration to yourself - and this requires inner silence which may lead to outer silence as well.

A marble sphere (actually existing) which, in your head, gradually becomes a sharp cone by the time it is extended to the far end of the room.

I think of my music more as a practice (gyo) than a music.

A garden covered with thick marble instead of snow — but like snow, which is to be appreciated only when you uncover the marble coating.

The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people.

One thousand needles: imagine threading them with a straight thread.

It is not possible to control a mind-time with a stopwatch or a metronome. In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time.

*********

There is a wind that never dies.

I would like to see the sky machine on every corner of the street instead of the coke machine. We need more skies than coke.

*************

*******

My paintings, which are all instruction paintings (and meant for others to do), came after collage & assemblage (1915) and happening (1905) came into the art world. Considering the nature of my painting, any of the above three words or a new word can be used instead of the word, painting. But I like the old word painting because it immediately connects with “wall painting” painting, and it is nice and funny.

Dance was once the way people communicated with God and godliness in people. Since when did dance become a pasted-face exhibitionism of dancers on the spotlighted stage? Can you not communicate if it is totally dark? If people make it a habit to draw a somersault on every other street as they commute to their office, take off their pants before they fight, shake hands with strangers whenever they feel like, give flowers or part of their clothing on streets, subways, elevator, toilet, etc., and if politicians go through a tea house door (lowered, so people must bend very low to get through) before they discuss anything and spend a day watching the fountain water dance at the nearest park, the world business may slow down a little but we may have peace. To me this is dance.

Among my instruction paintings, my interest is mainly in “painting to construct in your head”. In your head, for instance, it is possible for a straight line to exist - not as a segment of a curve but as a straight line. Also, a line can be straight, curved and something else at the same time. A dot can exist as a 1,2,3,4,5,6, dimentional object all at the same time or at various times in different combinations as you wish to perceive. The movement of the molecule can be continuum and discontinuum at the same time. It can be with colour and/or without. There is no visual object that does not exist in comparison to or simultaneously with other objects, but these characteristics can be eliminated if you wish. A sunset can go on for days. You can eat up all the clouds in the sky. You can assemble a painting with a person in the North Pole over a phone, like playing chess. This painting method derives from as far back as the time of the Second World War when we had no food to eat, and my brother and I exchanged menus in the air.

***** All my works in the other fields have an “Event bent” so to speak. People ask me why I call some works Event and others not. They also ask me why I do not call my Events, Happenings. Event, to me, is not an assimilation of all the other arts as Happening seems to be, but an extrication from the various sensory perceptions. It is not “a get togetherness” as most happenings are, but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it moving – the closest word for it may be a “wish” or “hope”.

There maybe a dream that two dream together, but there is no chair that two see together. ***********

At a

a

a

000000

a

146

1964�1966

At a small dinner party last week, we suddenly discovered that our poet friend whom we admire very much was colour blind. Barbara Moore said, “That explains about his work. Usually people’s eyes are blocked by colour and they can’t see the thing.”

147

YOKO'S VOICE

Another Event was memorable for me was “Fly”, at Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. People were asked to come prepared to fly in their own way. I did not attend. ***

After unblocking one’s mind, by dispensing with visual, auditory, and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder. And my Events are mostly spent in wonderment. In Kyoto, at Nanzenji Temples the High Monk was kind to let me use one of the temples and the gardens for my Event. It is a temple with great history, and it was an unheard of honour for the Monk to give permission for such a use, especially, to a woman. The Event took place from evening till dawn. About fifty people came with the knowledge that it will last till dawn. The instruction was to watch the sky and to “touch”. Some of them were just fast asleep until dawn. Some sat in the garden, some on the wide corridor, which is like a verandah. It was a beautiful full moon night, and the moon was so bright, that the mountains and the trees, which usually looked black under the moonlight, began to show their green. People talked about moonburn, moonbath, and about touching the sky. Two people, I noticed, were whispering all about their life story to each other. Once in a while, a restless person would come to me and ask if I was alright. I thought that was very amusing, because it was a very warm and peaceful July night, and there was no reason why I should not be alright. Probably he was starting to feel something happening to him, something that he did not yet know how to cope with, the only way out for him was to come to me and ask if I was alright. I was a little nervous about people making cigarette holes on the national treasure floors and tatami, from being high on the moonlight, since most of the people were young modern Japanese and some French and Americans. But nothing like that happened. When the morning breeze started to come in, people quietly woke up their friends, and we took a bath, three at a time, in a bath especially prepared for us at that hour of day. The temple bath is made of huge stone, and it is very warm. After the bath, we had miso soup and onigiri (rice sandwich). Without my saying anything about it, people silently swept the room and mopped the corridor before leaving. I did not know most of them, as they were mostly Kyoto people, and they left without giving their names. I wonder who they were. At another time, also in Kyoto, before the Nanzenji Event, I had a concert at Yamaichi Hall. It was called “The Strip-tease Show” (it was stripping of the mind). When I met the High Monk the next day, he seemed a bit dissatisfied. “I went to your concert”, he said. “Thank you, did you like it?” “Well, why did you have those three chairs on the stage and call it a strip-tease by three?” “If it is a chair or stone or woman, it is the same thing, my Monk.” “Where is the music?” “The music is in the mind, my Monk.” “But that is the same with what we are doing, aren’t you an avant-garde composer?” “That is a label which was put by others for convenience.” “For instance, does Toshiro Mayuzumi create music of your kind?” “I can only speak for myself.” “Do you have many followers?” “No, but I know of two men who know what I am doing. I am very thankful for that.” Though he is a High Monk he is extremely young, he may be younger than myself. I wonder what the Monk is doing now. x

x

x

x

People talk about happening. They say that art is headed towards that direction, that happening is assimilating the arts. I don’t believe in collectivism of art nor in having only one direction in anything. I think it is nice to return to having many different arts, including happening, just as having many flowers. In fact, we could have more arts “smell”, “weight”, “taste”, “cry”, “anger” (competition of anger, that sort of thing), etc. People might say, that we never experience things separately, they are always in fusion, and that is why “the happening”, which is a fusion of all sensory perceptions. Yes, I agree, but if that is so, it is all the more reason and challenge to create a sensory experience isolated from other sensory experiences, which is something rare in daily life. Art is not merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life, is different from art duplicating life. But returning to having various divisions of art, does not mean, for instance, that one must use only sounds as means to create music. One may give instructions to watch the fire for 10 days in order to create music in the mind, or drink water once a month to create a vision in ones mind. * The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone and the history is forever increasing its volume. The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all - to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem. Mental richness should be worried just as physical richness. Didn’t Christ say that it was like a camel trying to pass through a needle hole, for John Cage to go to heaven? I think it is nice to abandon what you have as much as possible, as many mental possessions as the physical ones, as they clutter your mind. It is nice to maintain poverty of environment, sound, thinking and belief. It is nice to keep oneself small, like a grain of rice, instead of expanding. Make yourself dispensable, like paper. See little, hear little, and think little. The body is the Bodhi Tree The mind like a bright mirror standing Take care to wipe it all the time And allow no dust to cling. - Shen-hsiu There never was a Bodhi Tree Nor bright mirror standing Fundamentally, not one thing exists So where is the dust to cling? - Hui-neng y.o.

146

1964�1966

147

At a small dinner party last week, we suddenly discovered that our poet friend whom we admire very much was colour blind. Barbara Moore said, “That explains about his work. Usually people’s eyes are blocked by colour and they can’t see the thing.”

YOKO'S VOICE

Another Event was memorable for me was “Fly”, at Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. People were asked to come prepared to fly in their own way. I did not attend. ***

After unblocking one’s mind, by dispensing with visual, auditory, and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder. And my Events are mostly spent in wonderment.

People talk about happening. They say that art is headed towards that direction, that happening is assimilating the arts. I don’t believe in collectivism of art nor in having only one direction in anything. I think it is nice to return to having many different arts, including happening, just as having many flowers. In fact, we could have more arts “smell”, “weight”, “taste”, “cry”, “anger” (competition of anger, that sort of thing), etc. People might say, that we never experience things separately, they are always in fusion, and that is why “the happening”, which is a fusion of all sensory perceptions. Yes, I agree, but if that is so, it is all the more reason and challenge to create a sensory experience isolated from other sensory experiences, which is something rare in daily life. Art is not merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life, is different from art duplicating life.

In Kyoto, at Nanzenji Temples the High Monk was kind to let me use one of the temples and the gardens for my Event. It is a temple with great history, and it was an unheard of honour for the Monk to give permission for such a use, especially, to a woman. The Event took place from evening till dawn. About fifty people came with the knowledge that it will last till dawn. The instruction was to watch the sky and to “touch”. Some of them were just fast asleep until dawn. Some sat in the garden, some on the wide corridor, which is like a verandah. It was a beautiful full moon night, and the moon was so bright, that the mountains and the trees, which usually looked black under the moonlight, began to show their green. People talked about moonburn, moonbath, and about touching the sky. Two people, I noticed, were whispering all about their life story to each other. Once in a while, a restless person would come to me and ask if I was alright. I thought that was very amusing, because it was a very warm and peaceful July night, and there was no reason why I should not be alright. Probably he was starting to feel something happening to him, something that he did not yet know how to cope with, the only way out for him was to come to me and ask if I was alright. I was a little nervous about people making cigarette holes on the national treasure floors and tatami, from being high on the moonlight, since most of the people were young modern Japanese and some French and Americans. But nothing like that happened. When the morning breeze started to come in, people quietly woke up their friends, and we took a bath, three at a time, in a bath especially prepared for us at that hour of day. The temple bath is made of huge stone, and it is very warm. After the bath, we had miso soup and onigiri (rice sandwich). Without my saying anything about it, people silently swept the room and mopped the corridor before leaving. I did not know most of them, as they were mostly Kyoto people, and they left without giving their names. I wonder who they were.

But returning to having various divisions of art, does not mean, for instance, that one must use only sounds as means to create music. One may give instructions to watch the fire for 10 days in order to create music in the mind, or drink water once a month to create a vision in ones mind. * The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone and the history is forever increasing its volume. The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all - to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem. Mental richness should be worried just as physical richness. Didn’t Christ say that it was like a camel trying to pass through a needle hole, for John Cage to go to heaven? I think it is nice to abandon what you have as much as possible, as many mental possessions as the physical ones, as they clutter your mind. It is nice to maintain poverty of environment, sound, thinking and belief. It is nice to keep oneself small, like a grain of rice, instead of expanding. Make yourself dispensable, like paper. See little, hear little, and think little.

At another time, also in Kyoto, before the Nanzenji Event, I had a concert at Yamaichi Hall. It was called “The Strip-tease Show” (it was stripping of the mind). When I met the High Monk the next day, he seemed a bit dissatisfied. “I went to your concert”, he said. “Thank you, did you like it?” “Well, why did you have those three chairs on the stage and call it a strip-tease by three?” “If it is a chair or stone or woman, it is the same thing, my Monk.” “Where is the music?” “The music is in the mind, my Monk.” “But that is the same with what we are doing, aren’t you an avant-garde composer?” “That is a label which was put by others for convenience.” “For instance, does Toshiro Mayuzumi create music of your kind?” “I can only speak for myself.” “Do you have many followers?” “No, but I know of two men who know what I am doing. I am very thankful for that.” Though he is a High Monk he is extremely young, he may be younger than myself. I wonder what the Monk is doing now. x

x

x

The body is the Bodhi Tree The mind like a bright mirror standing Take care to wipe it all the time And allow no dust to cling. - Shen-hsiu There never was a Bodhi Tree Nor bright mirror standing Fundamentally, not one thing exists So where is the dust to cling? - Hui-neng y.o.

x

1964�1966

Warren DeMotte, “One Woman—Many Arts,” The Villager, March 18, 1965: 4.

148

149


Raymond Ericson, “An Event Is Not a Happening,” New York Times, March 21, 1965.

1964�1966

148

149


Raymond Ericson, “An Event Is Not a Happening,” New York Times, March 21, 1965.

Warren DeMotte, “One Woman—Many Arts,” The Villager, March 18, 1965: 4.

150

151

1966–1969

On September 1, 1966, Yoko Ono “sailed to Southampton on a cargo ship from New York and from t here . . . took a train to London.” 1 The chain of events that led up to this voyage began with the appointment of Brooklyn-born Mario Amaya as editor of the new London magazine Art & Artists, whose first issue was released in April 1966. Amaya had the idea of publishing a special summer issue devoted to “auto-destructive” art, or art that attacked “capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihil ation.”2 He discussed this with London-based artist Gustav Metzger, who had published five defining manifestos on auto-destructive and autocreative art between 1959 and 1964, as well as having created and performed such work. Metzger’s response to Amaya’s idea was to conceive the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) (pp. 156–57), an international event that was to coincide with the publication of this special issue. Then, as Metzger tells us: “In the Summer of 1966 Mario Amaya visited New York and met Yoko Ono in her famous loft; he was bowled over. On his return, he told us ‘ . . . you must get her to come to DIAS.’ Ono, Anthony Cox (her husband and collaborator), and their small child arrived on the third day of the Symposium.” 3 The symposium was held at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden from September 9 to 11, and these three days were preceded and succeeded by other events, the entire affair lasting until the end of the month. The DIAS international committee, composed primarily of artist s and writers, including Amaya, Metzger, John Sharkey, Ivor Davies, Bob Cobbing, dom sylvester houe´dard, and Barry Miles, issued a final call for participants in the “Auto Destructive” issue of Art & Artists (August 1966). Many artists si gned on, such as Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Latham, Gu¨nter Brus, Hermann Nitsc h, Otto Mu¨hl, Rafael (Ralph) Ort iz, Juan Hidalgo, Wolf Vostell, Al Hansen, and Ono. The arrival of this cast of artists and activists in London was a disruption in an art world that was mostly somnolent, enjoying the pleasures of Pop art and colorful abstract sculpture. When the popular press learned of the activit ies at the symposium, it sank its teeth into the scruff of DIAS with stories of destruction and animal sacrifice. Ono spoke at the symposium, and also performed, notably her Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), twice, at Two Evenings with Yoko Ono at the Africa Centre on September 28 and 29. Cut Piece, as it had in previous iterations, involved members of the audience coming up onstage and cutting off pieces of Ono’s clothing until she was practically naked. As Metzger said of the two evenings, “These were sell-outs, especially the second one, because after the first one there was at least one article in t he press. And I remember people ringing up, begging, for tickets for the second evening with that publ icity.”4 The response of the audience was very intense: “as soon as somebody stopped, the next [person stepped forward]; it could have gone on for hours.”5 Ono also enacted Whisper Piece, Shadow Piece, and Disappearing Piece during DIAS’s month-long program.

65. Yoko Ono delivering a talk at the Destruction in Art Symposium, Africa Centre, London, September 11, 1966. Photograph: Hanns Sohm

In London at this time, a number of alternative galleries, spaces, and publications had been or were being established. One of the centers for alternative and countercultural ideas was the bookshop Better Books, which was managed by poet Bob Cobbing, and subsequently by Barry Miles, who together with John Dunbar went on to open the Indica Gallery and Bookshop, near Piccadilly, in 1966. As Miles related:

150

151

1966–1969

On September 1, 1966, Yoko Ono “sailed to Southampton on a cargo ship from New York and from t here . . . took a train to London.” 1 The chain of events that led up to this voyage began with the appointment of Brooklyn-born Mario Amaya as editor of the new London magazine Art & Artists, whose first issue was released in April 1966. Amaya had the idea of publishing a special summer issue devoted to “auto-destructive” art, or art that attacked “capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihil ation.”2 He discussed this with London-based artist Gustav Metzger, who had published five defining manifestos on auto-destructive and autocreative art between 1959 and 1964, as well as having created and performed such work. Metzger’s response to Amaya’s idea was to conceive the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) (pp. 156–57), an international event that was to coincide with the publication of this special issue. Then, as Metzger tells us: “In the Summer of 1966 Mario Amaya visited New York and met Yoko Ono in her famous loft; he was bowled over. On his return, he told us ‘ . . . you must get her to come to DIAS.’ Ono, Anthony Cox (her husband and collaborator), and their small child arrived on the third day of the Symposium.” 3 The symposium was held at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden from September 9 to 11, and these three days were preceded and succeeded by other events, the entire affair lasting until the end of the month. The DIAS international committee, composed primarily of artist s and writers, including Amaya, Metzger, John Sharkey, Ivor Davies, Bob Cobbing, dom sylvester houe´dard, and Barry Miles, issued a final call for participants in the “Auto Destructive” issue of Art & Artists (August 1966). Many artists si gned on, such as Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Latham, Gu¨nter Brus, Hermann Nitsc h, Otto Mu¨hl, Rafael (Ralph) Ort iz, Juan Hidalgo, Wolf Vostell, Al Hansen, and Ono. The arrival of this cast of artists and activists in London was a disruption in an art world that was mostly somnolent, enjoying the pleasures of Pop art and colorful abstract sculpture. When the popular press learned of the activit ies at the symposium, it sank its teeth into the scruff of DIAS with stories of destruction and animal sacrifice. Ono spoke at the symposium, and also performed, notably her Cut Piece (1964; pp. 106–9), twice, at Two Evenings with Yoko Ono at the Africa Centre on September 28 and 29. Cut Piece, as it had in previous iterations, involved members of the audience coming up onstage and cutting off pieces of Ono’s clothing until she was practically naked. As Metzger said of the two evenings, “These were sell-outs, especially the second one, because after the first one there was at least one article in t he press. And I remember people ringing up, begging, for tickets for the second evening with that publ icity.”4 The response of the audience was very intense: “as soon as somebody stopped, the next [person stepped forward]; it could have gone on for hours.”5 Ono also enacted Whisper Piece, Shadow Piece, and Disappearing Piece during DIAS’s month-long program.

In London at this time, a number of alternative galleries, spaces, and publications had been or were being established. One of the centers for alternative and countercultural ideas was the bookshop Better Books, which was managed by poet Bob Cobbing, and subsequently by Barry Miles, who together with John Dunbar went on to open the Indica Gallery and Bookshop, near Piccadilly, in 1966. As Miles related:

65. Yoko Ono delivering a talk at the Destruction in Art Symposium, Africa Centre, London, September 11, 1966. Photograph: Hanns Sohm

1966–1969

152

153

1966–1969

“I don’t recall how Yoko found us, but as she was staying initially with the art critic Mario Amaya, he probably suggested that she visit.”6 In actual fact, when she first arrived in London, Ono stayed briefly in a hotel, but then went to stay with artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni and their children for “about a fortnight,”7 after Gustav Metzger had asked if anyone could put up Ono, her husband, and their child. It was agreed that Indica would present an exhibition by Ono, titled YOKO at INDICA (pp. 158–63). The exhibition was open from November 9 to 22, 1966. Dunbar says: “It was up to Yoko what she wanted in the show . . . The catalogue was very elaborate and cost quite a lot to produce, but I think that Tony and Yoko luckil y raised the money for that.”8 One visitor described coming to the gallery on the night before opening night: The place wasn’t really opened, but John Dunbar, the owner, was . . . flittering around like crazy. Now I’m looking at this stuff. There’s a couple of nails on a plastic box. Then I look over and see an apple on a stand—a fres h apple on a stand wi th a note saying “apple.” I thought, you know, This is a joke, this is pretty funny. . . . I said, “How much i s the appl e?” “Two hundred pounds? Really”. . . . Then I saw this l adder on a painting leading up to the ceiling where there was a spyglass hanging down. . . . I went up the ladder and I got the spyglass and there was tiny little writing there. You really have to stand on the top of the ladder . . . and you look through and it just says “ YES.”9 This spectator was John Lennon. The other works in the exhibition were mostly white and often presented in transparent plastic frames or on transparent plastic plinths. They included White Chess Set (1966; pl. 71), in which both sets of pieces are white; Painting to Be Stepped On (1966), an earlier version of which was included in Ono’s 1961 AG Gallery show (pl. 13); and Object in Three Parts (1966), which consists of a condom, a diaphragm, and a birth control pill, each on a separate white plinth. A great many of the works in the exhibition were examples of her “instruction paintings” and demonstrated her notion of “brain painting.” 10 The sources for many of them were the scores printed in the 1964 edition of her book Grapefruit .11 For example, Water Piece (1966) was derived from the score: PAINTING TO BE WATERED Water every day. 1962 summer The popular press in London had seized upon Cut Piece when it was performed at DIAS, and had subsequently focused intensely on Ono’s activities, egged on by continual pressure from Cox, who was “constantly on the phone doing the PR for Yoko.” 12 This attention increased after Ono decided to stay on in London, and particularly after the news broke that she had begun shooting an expanded version of her five-and-a-half-minute Film No. 4 (1966; pp. 164–67). Both films were sequences of close-up shots of people’s buttocks in motion. The first version included fifteen participants, who were filmed walking across Ono’s apartment. The second version, which ran for eighty minutes, featured around two hundred participants shot on a treadmill-like apparatus from behind (pl. 73). The score for the work is: “String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” 13 Ono stated that “these bottoms in fact belonged to people who represented the London scene.” 14 The participants included friends and associates, as well as members of the public who responded to a 1967 questionnaire in the underground newspaper the International Times. (Ono had performed Touch Piece [1964; pp. 92–93] at the launch of the International Times at the Roundhouse space on October 15, 1966.)

66. Three Spoons. 1967. Plexiglas pedestal, silver plaque, and four silver spoons, pedestal 55 x 11 1 ⁄ 4 x 11 1 ⁄ 4" (139.7 x 28.5 x 28.5 cm)

1966–1969

152

153

1966–1969

“I don’t recall how Yoko found us, but as she was staying initially with the art critic Mario Amaya, he probably suggested that she visit.”6 In actual fact, when she first arrived in London, Ono stayed briefly in a hotel, but then went to stay with artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni and their children for “about a fortnight,”7 after Gustav Metzger had asked if anyone could put up Ono, her husband, and their child. It was agreed that Indica would present an exhibition by Ono, titled YOKO at INDICA (pp. 158–63). The exhibition was open from November 9 to 22, 1966. Dunbar says: “It was up to Yoko what she wanted in the show . . . The catalogue was very elaborate and cost quite a lot to produce, but I think that Tony and Yoko luckil y raised the money for that.”8 One visitor described coming to the gallery on the night before opening night: The place wasn’t really opened, but John Dunbar, the owner, was . . . flittering around like crazy. Now I’m looking at this stuff. There’s a couple of nails on a plastic box. Then I look over and see an apple on a stand—a fres h apple on a stand wi th a note saying “apple.” I thought, you know, This is a joke, this is pretty funny. . . . I said, “How much i s the appl e?” “Two hundred pounds? Really”. . . . Then I saw this l adder on a painting leading up to the ceiling where there was a spyglass hanging down. . . . I went up the ladder and I got the spyglass and there was tiny little writing there. You really have to stand on the top of the ladder . . . and you look through and it just says “ YES.”9 This spectator was John Lennon. The other works in the exhibition were mostly white and often presented in transparent plastic frames or on transparent plastic plinths. They included White Chess Set (1966; pl. 71), in which both sets of pieces are white; Painting to Be Stepped On (1966), an earlier version of which was included in Ono’s 1961 AG Gallery show (pl. 13); and Object in Three Parts (1966), which consists of a condom, a diaphragm, and a birth control pill, each on a separate white plinth. A great many of the works in the exhibition were examples of her “instruction paintings” and demonstrated her notion of “brain painting.” 10 The sources for many of them were the scores printed in the 1964 edition of her book Grapefruit .11 For example, Water Piece (1966) was derived from the score: PAINTING TO BE WATERED Water every day. 1962 summer The popular press in London had seized upon Cut Piece when it was performed at DIAS, and had subsequently focused intensely on Ono’s activities, egged on by continual pressure from Cox, who was “constantly on the phone doing the PR for Yoko.” 12 This attention increased after Ono decided to stay on in London, and particularly after the news broke that she had begun shooting an expanded version of her five-and-a-half-minute Film No. 4 (1966; pp. 164–67). Both films were sequences of close-up shots of people’s buttocks in motion. The first version included fifteen participants, who were filmed walking across Ono’s apartment. The second version, which ran for eighty minutes, featured around two hundred participants shot on a treadmill-like apparatus from behind (pl. 73). The score for the work is: “String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” 13 Ono stated that “these bottoms in fact belonged to people who represented the London scene.” 14 The participants included friends and associates, as well as members of the public who responded to a 1967 questionnaire in the underground newspaper the International Times. (Ono had performed Touch Piece [1964; pp. 92–93] at the launch of the International Times at the Roundhouse space on October 15, 1966.)

1966–1969

The film was submitted to the British Board of Film Censors for general release, but was turned down. In March 1967, there was a demonstration against the ban. Ono gave daffodils to people in the street as a protest, and contributed to the bedecking of the censors’ office with more daffodils. A photograph of this event got into the newspapers and the censorship became news. Probably due partly to this commotion, the ban was overturned, and the film was finally premiered in a cinema in Soho, London, on August 8, 1967. Five days earlier, Ono’s Lion Wrapping Event (pp. 168–69) in Trafalgar Square amounted to a different kind of public event. Trafalgar Square, just a street away from Parliament, has been called the cockpit of the nation, and has been a cradle of protest for many years. Ono had first attempted her Trafalgar Square work the year before, while her exhibition at Indica was on view. She had tried to cover with paper one of the large bronze lions that guard the column celebrating Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victories, but the event was halted partway through, due to rain and the intervention of the police. Coming back ten months later, she successfully wrapped and unwrapped one of the lions in white cloth under the gaze of the populace—with police permission, since this time they thought Ono was shooting a scene for a film.15 Around this time, Ono visited the newly established Lisson Gallery, near London’s Marylebone, which “was seeming to attract the attention of the emerging London art world at that tim e,” according to its owner, Nichol as Logsdail. 16 Ono met Logsdail, and subsequently invited him to her flat for a visit, 17 after which, he said, “frequent meetin gs and discussions ensued.” 18 The resultant exhibition, which ran from October 11 to November 14, featured four environments: a new iteration of The Stone (1966; pp. 138–43); The Blue Room (1966); Half-A-Room (1967; pp. 170–73); and Backyard (1967). Apart from Half-A-Room, which mostly survives,

the installations have largely been lost or destroyed (though some of their constituent parts still exist and are now considered stand-alone artworks). Everything in Half-A-Room had been halved: chairs existed as halves, as did a flower arrangement, a set of shelves, a hat, shoes, a lamp, a bed, a table, a radio. This concept is likely to have had its emotional origins in Ono’s marital split.19 Cox’s efforts to publicize Ono’s work had achieved great success, but the interest of the press and the media expanded even further when her acquaintance with John Lennon, a Beatle after all, became deeper and more public. And although Lennon and Ono together also fostered the publicity, the attention developed to a point when it became over-intrusive. Thus, Ono created a score for a film titled “Rape” in 1968, which proposes that “a cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera” until she is cornered and falls over. The following year, she and Lennon gave directions to the cameraman Nic Knowland to film the 77-minute work. (They were not present for the filming.) Lennon biographer Ray Coleman claimed that the film “parodied the story of the Beatles’ escalator to success,” 20 but it is much more likely t hat it reflected what curator Chrissie Iles described as “the tension and fear felt by Ono and Lennon as the intrusive press and public attention generated by their fame becam e increasingl y harder to bear.” 21 The rest of their lives together would be in the public eye.

— Clive Phillpot

66. Three Spoons. 1967. Plexiglas pedestal, silver plaque, and four silver spoons, pedestal 55 x 11 1 ⁄ 4 x 11 1 ⁄ 4" (139.7 x 28.5 x 28.5 cm)

154

155

1966– 1969 1.

NOTES

Yoko Ono, in Yoko Ono and others, “Is that an apple? Yoko Ono in London,” Art Monthly , no. 212 (December 1997– January 1998): 2. 2. Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art (Third Manifesto)” (1961), in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Gustav Metzger: History History (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2005), p. 228. 3. Metzger, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 2. 4. Metzger, interview by the author, 1997, NLSC: Artists’ Lives, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue, reference C466/50, track 021A. 5. Ibid. 6. Barry Miles, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 4. 7. Barbara Steveni, in conversation with the author, July 11, 2014. Steveni’s son, Noa Latham, agrees with her, and said that it was about “2–3 weeks.” E-mail to the author, August 19, 2014. 8. John Dunbar, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 4. 9. John Lennon, interview by David Sheff, in G.Barry Golson, ed., The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982), pp. 115–17. 10. In the exhibition catalogue, Ono replies to a question as to whether painting is a dying art by saying that “first they painted with hands, then they painted with eyes, then with heart, and then with brain.” The discussion asserts that “Duchamp instituted brain painting,” and that “Yoko Ono continues brain painting.” See “Yoko Ono—Instruction Painting,” in YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica, 1966), n.p.

11. Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. 12. Steveni, e-mail to the author, May 5, 2014. 13. “Film No. 4: Bottoms,” in Jon Hendricks and Ina Blom, eds., Yoko Ono: Insound/Instructure (H ø vikodden, Norway: Sonia Henie and Niels Onstad Foundation, 1990), p. 14. 14. Ibid., p. 15. 15. Although Christo proposed a “project for a packaged public building” in Paris in 1961, he did not “package” an entire building until he wrapped the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968—two years after Yoko Ono first attempted to wrap one of the lions. See Marina Vaizey, Christo (Barcelona: Ediciones Polí grafa, S.A., 1990), pp. 28–29, 46–47. 16. Ni cholas Logsdail, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 7. 17. See letter of invitation from Yoko Ono to Nicholas Logsdail, September 23, 1967, in Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Sphere Books, 1971), n.p. 18. Logsdail, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 7. 19. A few years later, in 1971, Geoffrey Hendricks and Bici Hendricks (neé Forbes ; now known as Nye Ffarrabas) enacted their Flux Divorce, an event in which the artists cut many domestic items in half. 20. Ray Coleman, Lennon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 398. 21. Chrissie Iles, “Rape,” in Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 216. Eva Majlath was the subject in the film, and Christian Wangler handled the sound during the filming.

154

1966–1969

155

1966– 1969

The film was submitted to the British Board of Film Censors for general release, but was turned down. In March 1967, there was a demonstration against the ban. Ono gave daffodils to people in the street as a protest, and contributed to the bedecking of the censors’ office with more daffodils. A photograph of this event got into the newspapers and the censorship became news. Probably due partly to this commotion, the ban was overturned, and the film was finally premiered in a cinema in Soho, London, on August 8, 1967.

1.

NOTES

Yoko Ono, in Yoko Ono and others, “Is that an apple? Yoko Ono in London,” Art Monthly , no. 212 (December 1997– January 1998): 2. 2. Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art (Third Manifesto)” (1961), in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Gustav Metzger: History History (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2005), p. 228. 3. Metzger, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 2. 4. Metzger, interview by the author, 1997, NLSC: Artists’ Lives, British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue, reference C466/50, track 021A. 5. Ibid. 6. Barry Miles, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 4. 7. Barbara Steveni, in conversation with the author, July 11, 2014. Steveni’s son, Noa Latham, agrees with her, and said that it was about “2–3 weeks.” E-mail to the author, August 19, 2014. 8. John Dunbar, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 4. 9. John Lennon, interview by David Sheff, in G.Barry Golson, ed., The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982), pp. 115–17. 10. In the exhibition catalogue, Ono replies to a question as to whether painting is a dying art by saying that “first they painted with hands, then they painted with eyes, then with heart, and then with brain.” The discussion asserts that “Duchamp instituted brain painting,” and that “Yoko Ono continues brain painting.” See “Yoko Ono—Instruction Painting,” in YOKO at INDICA (London: Indica, 1966), n.p.

Five days earlier, Ono’s Lion Wrapping Event (pp. 168–69) in Trafalgar Square amounted to a different kind of public event. Trafalgar Square, just a street away from Parliament, has been called the cockpit of the nation, and has been a cradle of protest for many years. Ono had first attempted her Trafalgar Square work the year before, while her exhibition at Indica was on view. She had tried to cover with paper one of the large bronze lions that guard the column celebrating Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victories, but the event was halted partway through, due to rain and the intervention of the police. Coming back ten months later, she successfully wrapped and unwrapped one of the lions in white cloth under the gaze of the populace—with police permission, since this time they thought Ono was shooting a scene for a film.15 Around this time, Ono visited the newly established Lisson Gallery, near London’s Marylebone, which “was seeming to attract the attention of the emerging London art world at that tim e,” according to its owner, Nichol as Logsdail. 16 Ono met Logsdail, and subsequently invited him to her flat for a visit, 17 after which, he said, “frequent meetin gs and discussions ensued.” 18 The resultant exhibition, which ran from October 11 to November 14, featured four environments: a new iteration of The Stone (1966; pp. 138–43); The Blue Room (1966); Half-A-Room (1967; pp. 170–73); and Backyard (1967). Apart from Half-A-Room, which mostly survives,

11. Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964), n.p. 12. Steveni, e-mail to the author, May 5, 2014. 13. “Film No. 4: Bottoms,” in Jon Hendricks and Ina Blom, eds., Yoko Ono: Insound/Instructure (H ø vikodden, Norway: Sonia Henie and Niels Onstad Foundation, 1990), p. 14. 14. Ibid., p. 15. 15. Although Christo proposed a “project for a packaged public building” in Paris in 1961, he did not “package” an entire building until he wrapped the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968—two years after Yoko Ono first attempted to wrap one of the lions. See Marina Vaizey, Christo (Barcelona: Ediciones Polí grafa, S.A., 1990), pp. 28–29, 46–47. 16. Ni cholas Logsdail, in Ono and others, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 7. 17. See letter of invitation from Yoko Ono to Nicholas Logsdail, September 23, 1967, in Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Sphere Books, 1971), n.p. 18. Logsdail, “Yoko Ono in London,” p. 7. 19. A few years later, in 1971, Geoffrey Hendricks and Bici Hendricks (neé Forbes ; now known as Nye Ffarrabas) enacted their Flux Divorce, an event in which the artists cut many domestic items in half. 20. Ray Coleman, Lennon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 398. 21. Chrissie Iles, “Rape,” in Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 216. Eva Majlath was the subject in the film, and Christian Wangler handled the sound during the filming.

the installations have largely been lost or destroyed (though some of their constituent parts still exist and are now considered stand-alone artworks). Everything in Half-A-Room had been halved: chairs existed as halves, as did a flower arrangement, a set of shelves, a hat, shoes, a lamp, a bed, a table, a radio. This concept is likely to have had its emotional origins in Ono’s marital split.19 Cox’s efforts to publicize Ono’s work had achieved great success, but the interest of the press and the media expanded even further when her acquaintance with John Lennon, a Beatle after all, became deeper and more public. And although Lennon and Ono together also fostered the publicity, the attention developed to a point when it became over-intrusive. Thus, Ono created a score for a film titled “Rape” in 1968, which proposes that “a cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera” until she is cornered and falls over. The following year, she and Lennon gave directions to the cameraman Nic Knowland to film the 77-minute work. (They were not present for the filming.) Lennon biographer Ray Coleman claimed that the film “parodied the story of the Beatles’ escalator to success,” 20 but it is much more likely t hat it reflected what curator Chrissie Iles described as “the tension and fear felt by Ono and Lennon as the intrusive press and public attention generated by their fame becam e increasingl y harder to bear.” 21 The rest of their lives together would be in the public eye.

— Clive Phillpot

1966–1969

156

157

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM Various locations, London September 1966

Organized by artist Gustav Metzger and others, the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) brought together artists and intellectuals from around the world to examine increasingly destructive tendencies in art and society. The symposium was held at London’s Africa Centre from September 9 to 11, 1966, with associated performances and events running all September at locations throughout the city. Ono and dancer Barbara Gladstone were the only two scheduled women contributors to the monthlong event. During a speech on the final day of the symposium, Ono distinguished herself from her male contemporaries, who carried out aggressive actions such as burning books (John Latham) and taking an ax to a piano (Ralph Ortiz). Expressing interest in “quiet destructions . . . such as forgetting, dreaming, or simply thinkin g,” Ono contended that it woul d be more meaningful to change social values than to destroy physical objects.1 She concluded the talk on a dark note, however, by instructing the audience to “hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody di es.” 2

Ono performed a number of works associated with the symposium in the days and weeks following her talk. She performed Shadow Event —realizing an instruction she conceived in 1963—in the London Free School playground by tracing the shadows of volunteers, as well as a dog, in red chalk on a long scroll of fabric. The site was located in an area that had been leveled by bombs just t wo decades prior, the performance thus bringing to mind the casualties of World War II and, specifically, the shadowlike forms left on walls and other surfaces by victims of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During an event titled Two Evenings with Yoko Ono at the Africa Centre, Ono enacted two works she had debuted in 1964: Cut Piece (pp. 106–9) and Bag Piece (pp. 110–13). Both works shifted meaning with each new presentation. In Cut Piece, the context of DIAS and the presence of the voracious British press heightened the violent potential of the work. Metzger recalled that he even “initiated the protective presence of five or six men seated in the front row ready to intervene if necessary.” His precautio ns were ultimately unn ecessary. As he explained, “The audience, you felt, was in support of this lonely figure facing . . . death, actually. At [the work’s] most extreme. Facing a cert ain risk.”3

1. Yoko Ono, “Talk Deliver ed at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London, September 1966,” in Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, eds., Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2013), p. 80. 2. Ibid., p. 81. 3. Gustav Metzger, interview by Clive Phillpot, London, July 3, 2014.

67. Poster for DIAS Presents Two Evenings with Yoko Ono. 1966. Offset, sheet 23 1 ⁄ 2 x 17 15 ⁄ 16" (59.7 x 45.5 cm)

1966–1969

156

157

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM

DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM Various locations, London September 1966

Organized by artist Gustav Metzger and others, the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) brought together artists and intellectuals from around the world to examine increasingly destructive tendencies in art and society. The symposium was held at London’s Africa Centre from September 9 to 11, 1966, with associated performances and events running all September at locations throughout the city. Ono and dancer Barbara Gladstone were the only two scheduled women contributors to the monthlong event. During a speech on the final day of the symposium, Ono distinguished herself from her male contemporaries, who carried out aggressive actions such as burning books (John Latham) and taking an ax to a piano (Ralph Ortiz). Expressing interest in “quiet destructions . . . such as forgetting, dreaming, or simply thinkin g,” Ono contended that it woul d be more meaningful to change social values than to destroy physical objects.1 She concluded the talk on a dark note, however, by instructing the audience to “hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody di es.” 2

Ono performed a number of works associated with the symposium in the days and weeks following her talk. She performed Shadow Event —realizing an instruction she conceived in 1963—in the London Free School playground by tracing the shadows of volunteers, as well as a dog, in red chalk on a long scroll of fabric. The site was located in an area that had been leveled by bombs just t wo decades prior, the performance thus bringing to mind the casualties of World War II and, specifically, the shadowlike forms left on walls and other surfaces by victims of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During an event titled Two Evenings with Yoko Ono at the Africa Centre, Ono enacted two works she had debuted in 1964: Cut Piece (pp. 106–9) and Bag Piece (pp. 110–13). Both works shifted meaning with each new presentation. In Cut Piece, the context of DIAS and the presence of the voracious British press heightened the violent potential of the work. Metzger recalled that he even “initiated the protective presence of five or six men seated in the front row ready to intervene if necessary.” His precautio ns were ultimately unn ecessary. As he explained, “The audience, you felt, was in support of this lonely figure facing . . . death, actually. At [the work’s] most extreme. Facing a cert ain risk.”3

1966–1969

1. Yoko Ono, “Talk Deliver ed at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London, September 1966,” in Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, eds., Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2013), p. 80. 2. Ibid., p. 81. 3. Gustav Metzger, interview by Clive Phillpot, London, July 3, 2014.

158

67. Poster for DIAS Presents Two Evenings with Yoko Ono. 1966. Offset, sheet 23 1 ⁄ 2 x 17 15 ⁄ 16" (59.7 x 45.5 cm)

159

YOKO AT INDICA

YOKO AT INDICA Indica Gallery, London November 9–22, 1966

Founded by John Dunbar and Barry Miles in 1965, Indica was an alternative art space and bookstore in London. Prior to its c losing in 1967, it exhibited works by the Groupe de Rec herche d’Art Visuel, Takis, a nd other artists associated with the recently closed Signals Gallery. Dunbar offered Ono a show on very short notice, following her September arrival in the UK for the Destruction in Art Symposium, and the resultant presentation—titled YOKO at INDICA—was her first solo exhibition in London. The show included roughly fifteen paintings and twenty-five objects; almost all the pieces were white or made with clear Plexiglas. One of the works was Ono’s iconic sculpture Apple (1966; pl. 70), which comprises the single piece of fruit on a tall Plexiglas column with a prominent title plaque. Ono explains, “There is the excitement of the apple decomposing, and then the decision as to whether to replace it, or just thinking of the beauty of the apple after it ’s gone.” 1 In Sky TV (1966), she used closed-circuit television—cuttingedge technology at the time—to bring live imagery of the London sky into the gallery. Since the early 1960s, Ono had frequently distanced the execution of her works from her conception of them, and she continued this tendency in the Indica show. For Add Color Painting (1961/1966; pl. 69), she placed paint and brushes on a chair beneath a blank canvas, permitting each visitor to add a single color to the surface. The outcome was unpredictable; one visitor even pasted an advertisement for the exhibition onto the canvas. According to Miles, White Chess Set (1966; pl. 71) was the most popular work in the show. 2 Rounds of the game would quickly unravel, as the players were unable to distinguish between their all-white chess pieces and those of their opponents. The work thus illustrated Ono’s antiwar stance. A number of celebrated figures visited the exhibition, such as filmmaker Roman Polanski, who returned on multiple occasions to play White Chess Set with his future wife, actress Sharon Tate. 3 The gallery guest book conveys the variety of people who attended—from French financier Baron de Rothschild to the legendary Kunsthalle Bern director Harald Szeemann. 4 Shortly before the show opened, John Lennon stopped by the gallery, meeting Ono for the first time. Enthused by Ono and her art, he was the first person to sign the guest book, including his middle name, Winston, and his home address.

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in 3 —–> ∞ new multiple art (London: Arts Council of Great Britain [1970?]), p. 60. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, November 19, 1970– January 3, 1971. 2. Barry Miles, In the Sixties (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 146. 3. Ibid. 4. From scans of the book’s pages. Courtesy John Dunbar.

68. YOKO at INDICA . 1966. Exhibition catalogue, offset and letterpress, open (front and back covers) 10 15 ⁄ 16 x 11" (27.8 x 28 cm). Publisher: Indica Gallery, London

1966–1969

158

159

YOKO AT INDICA

YOKO AT INDICA Indica Gallery, London November 9–22, 1966

Founded by John Dunbar and Barry Miles in 1965, Indica was an alternative art space and bookstore in London. Prior to its c losing in 1967, it exhibited works by the Groupe de Rec herche d’Art Visuel, Takis, a nd other artists associated with the recently closed Signals Gallery. Dunbar offered Ono a show on very short notice, following her September arrival in the UK for the Destruction in Art Symposium, and the resultant presentation—titled YOKO at INDICA—was her first solo exhibition in London. The show included roughly fifteen paintings and twenty-five objects; almost all the pieces were white or made with clear Plexiglas. One of the works was Ono’s iconic sculpture Apple (1966; pl. 70), which comprises the single piece of fruit on a tall Plexiglas column with a prominent title plaque. Ono explains, “There is the excitement of the apple decomposing, and then the decision as to whether to replace it, or just thinking of the beauty of the apple after it ’s gone.” 1 In Sky TV (1966), she used closed-circuit television—cuttingedge technology at the time—to bring live imagery of the London sky into the gallery. Since the early 1960s, Ono had frequently distanced the execution of her works from her conception of them, and she continued this tendency in the Indica show. For Add Color Painting (1961/1966; pl. 69), she placed paint and brushes on a chair beneath a blank canvas, permitting each visitor to add a single color to the surface. The outcome was unpredictable; one visitor even pasted an advertisement for the exhibition onto the canvas. According to Miles, White Chess Set (1966; pl. 71) was the most popular work in the show. 2 Rounds of the game would quickly unravel, as the players were unable to distinguish between their all-white chess pieces and those of their opponents. The work thus illustrated Ono’s antiwar stance. A number of celebrated figures visited the exhibition, such as filmmaker Roman Polanski, who returned on multiple occasions to play White Chess Set with his future wife, actress Sharon Tate. 3 The gallery guest book conveys the variety of people who attended—from French financier Baron de Rothschild to the legendary Kunsthalle Bern director Harald Szeemann. 4 Shortly before the show opened, John Lennon stopped by the gallery, meeting Ono for the first time. Enthused by Ono and her art, he was the first person to sign the guest book, including his middle name, Winston, and his home address.

1966–1969

69. Add Color Painting. 1961/1966. Paint, newspaper, and foil on canvas, 15 15 ⁄ 16 x 15 15 ⁄ 16" (40.5 x 40.5 cm)

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in 3 —–> ∞ new multiple art (London: Arts Council of Great Britain [1970?]), p. 60. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, November 19, 1970– January 3, 1971. 2. Barry Miles, In the Sixties (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 146. 3. Ibid. 4. From scans of the book’s pages. Courtesy John Dunbar.

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68. YOKO at INDICA . 1966. Exhibition catalogue, offset and letterpress, open (front and back covers) 10 15 ⁄ 16 x 11" (27.8 x 28 cm). Publisher: Indica Gallery, London

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YOKO AT INDICA

70. Apple. 1966. Plexiglas pedestal, brass plaque, and apple, pedestal 45 x 6 11 ⁄ 16 x 6 15 ⁄ 16" (114.3 x 17 x 17.6 cm)

1966–1969

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69. Add Color Painting. 1961/1966. Paint, newspaper, and foil on canvas, 15 15 ⁄ 16 x 15 15 ⁄ 16" (40.5 x 40.5 cm)

1966–1969

71. Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox playing chess on Ono’s White Chess Set (1966), with other works included in her exhibition at back, at Indica Gallery, London, November 1966. Photograph: E. Wilkins

YOKO AT INDICA

70. Apple. 1966. Plexiglas pedestal, brass plaque, and apple, pedestal 45 x 6 11 ⁄ 16 x 6 15 ⁄ 16" (114.3 x 17 x 17.6 cm)

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72. Yoko Ono with Ceiling Painting (1966) at Indica Gallery, London, November 1966. Photograph: Graham Keen

1966–1969

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71. Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox playing chess on Ono’s White Chess Set (1966), with other works included in her exhibition at back, at Indica Gallery, London, November 1966. Photograph: E. Wilkins

1966–1969

YOKO AT INDICA

72. Yoko Ono with Ceiling Painting (1966) at Indica Gallery, London, November 1966. Photograph: Graham Keen

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FILM NO. 4

FILM NO. 4 1966–67

In the first version of Ono’s Film No. 4 , full-framed shots of the moving buttocks of fifteen people (including Ben Patterson, Jeff Perkins, Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney, and Ono herself) appear on-screen, each for ten to twenty seconds. Ono shot the film in her New York apartment, at 1 West 100 Street, in 1966, the same year she produced Match Piece (aka No. 1 ) and Eyeblink with George Maciunas. The finished film was screened in February in the FluxfilmFestival in New York,1 and was released individually as a Fluxus Edition with a handcranked peep-show-style viewer. Beginning later that year, in London, Ono made a new, extended version of the work, now setting out to include 365 participants. In order to obtain the necessary number of bottoms, Ono and Anthony Cox placed advertisements in the underground press and distributed fliers. Ultimately, she recorded around two hundred. For the many film sessions, she used a customized apparatus that allowed people to walk in place while remaining centered in the camera shot. The resultant eighty-minute feature includes a soundtrack in which interviews with the participants play out of sync with the imagery on-screen. Speaking about the film later, Ono explained, “For me the film is less about bottoms than about a certain beat, a beat you didn’t see in films, even in avant-garde fil ms then.”2

In a program that accompanied the London release of the new version of Film No. 4 , Ono expressed her antiestablishment aims. Denouncing the “professionalism” of the film world, she mentioned her desire to show that anyone could direct or star in a motion picture.3 The film, however, spurred widespread controversy, resulting in a ban by the British Board of Film Censors. Ono, armed with daffodils, stood outside the board’s office in protest, and eventually the film was certified, but with an X rating. When Film No. 4 opened at London’s Jacey-Tatler cinema in August 1967, the venue earned its third highest ticket sales.4 Nonetheless, the film continued to be censured in the media and in film festivals. In December 1967, for instance, the Royal Film Library of Belgium rejected it from the fourth edition ofExprmntl , an international festival of experimental film in Knokkele-Zoute.

1. The Fluxfilms were short films by Fluxus artists that George Maciunas compiled as the Fluxfilm Anthology . Ono’s Film No.4 was one of these. It was included in the anthology, where it was labeled Fluxfilm No.16. The film is also known by the title Bottoms. 2. Yoko Ono, “Yoko Ono: Ideas on Film: Interview/Scripts,” interview by Scott MacDonald, Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 8. 3. Yoko Ono, “On Film No. 4— SEE! (in taking the bottoms of 365 saints of our time)” (film program, self-published, 1967). 4. Yoko Ono, interview by Jud Yalkut, East Village Other 4, no. 30 (June 25, 1969): 9.

73. Yoko Ono directing Film No.4, London, 1966. Photograph: Graham Keen

1966–1969

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FILM NO. 4

FILM NO. 4 1966–67

In the first version of Ono’s Film No. 4 , full-framed shots of the moving buttocks of fifteen people (including Ben Patterson, Jeff Perkins, Carolee Schneemann, James Tenney, and Ono herself) appear on-screen, each for ten to twenty seconds. Ono shot the film in her New York apartment, at 1 West 100 Street, in 1966, the same year she produced Match Piece (aka No. 1 ) and Eyeblink with George Maciunas. The finished film was screened in February in the FluxfilmFestival in New York,1 and was released individually as a Fluxus Edition with a handcranked peep-show-style viewer. Beginning later that year, in London, Ono made a new, extended version of the work, now setting out to include 365 participants. In order to obtain the necessary number of bottoms, Ono and Anthony Cox placed advertisements in the underground press and distributed fliers. Ultimately, she recorded around two hundred. For the many film sessions, she used a customized apparatus that allowed people to walk in place while remaining centered in the camera shot. The resultant eighty-minute feature includes a soundtrack in which interviews with the participants play out of sync with the imagery on-screen. Speaking about the film later, Ono explained, “For me the film is less about bottoms than about a certain beat, a beat you didn’t see in films, even in avant-garde fil ms then.”2

In a program that accompanied the London release of the new version of Film No. 4 , Ono expressed her antiestablishment aims. Denouncing the “professionalism” of the film world, she mentioned her desire to show that anyone could direct or star in a motion picture.3 The film, however, spurred widespread controversy, resulting in a ban by the British Board of Film Censors. Ono, armed with daffodils, stood outside the board’s office in protest, and eventually the film was certified, but with an X rating. When Film No. 4 opened at London’s Jacey-Tatler cinema in August 1967, the venue earned its third highest ticket sales.4 Nonetheless, the film continued to be censured in the media and in film festivals. In December 1967, for instance, the Royal Film Library of Belgium rejected it from the fourth edition ofExprmntl , an international festival of experimental film in Knokkele-Zoute.

1966–1969

74. Poster for Film No.4. 1967. Offset, 13 x 8" (33 x 20.3 cm)

1. The Fluxfilms were short films by Fluxus artists that George Maciunas compiled as the Fluxfilm Anthology . Ono’s Film No.4 was one of these. It was included in the anthology, where it was labeled Fluxfilm No.16. The film is also known by the title Bottoms. 2. Yoko Ono, “Yoko Ono: Ideas on Film: Interview/Scripts,” interview by Scott MacDonald, Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 8. 3. Yoko Ono, “On Film No. 4— SEE! (in taking the bottoms of 365 saints of our time)” (film program, self-published, 1967). 4. Yoko Ono, interview by Jud Yalkut, East Village Other 4, no. 30 (June 25, 1969): 9.

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73. Yoko Ono directing Film No.4, London, 1966. Photograph: Graham Keen

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FILM NO. 4

75. Film No.4. 1966–67. 16mm film (black-and-white, sound), 80 min.

1966–1969

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74. Poster for Film No.4. 1967. Offset, 13 x 8" (33 x 20.3 cm)

1966–1969

FILM NO. 4

75. Film No.4. 1966–67. 16mm film (black-and-white, sound), 80 min.

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LION WRAPPING EVENT

LION WRAPPING EVENT Trafalgar Square, London August 3, 1967

Over the course of six hours, Ono and a small group of friends used white cloth to slowly wrap and then unwrap one of the four large bronze li ons in Trafalgar Square. Directly facing the National Gallery, the site is central to Britain’s cultural identity. The nineteenth-century lion sculptures form part of a monument commemorating the death, in 1805, of Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Covering one of them in white cloth suggested a pacifist stance during a time of escalating tension over the Vietnam War. Ono first attempted Lion Wrapping Event in November 1966, while her exhibition at Indic a (pp. 158– 63) was still installed. The action was stopped short,

however, due to the intervention of the police and the onslaught of rain, which dampened the paper she was using to wrap the lion. With further pl anning, Ono was able to realize the work without complications for the 1967 iteration. She created a twenty-six-minute film documenting the event and commissioned the electronic musician Delia Derbyshire to create a soundtrack. The film was screened in August 1967 alongside Ono’s Film No. 4 (1966–67; pp. 164– 67), at the Jacey-Tatler cinema on Charing Cross Road, a shor t walk from Trafalgar Square. Wrapping and binding were recurring themes in Ono’s work, prompting associations ranging from trauma and healing to concealment and intimacy. She has reflected that “in order to let something be you have to cloak it.”1

1. Yoko Ono, intervi ew by Chrissie Iles, August 1997, quoted in Chrissie Iles, Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? (Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997), p. 67.

76 and 77. Lion Wrapping Event . August 3, 1967. Trafalgar Square, London. Photographs: Anthony Cox (top) and Nigel Hartnup (bottom)

1966–1969

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LION WRAPPING EVENT

LION WRAPPING EVENT Trafalgar Square, London August 3, 1967

Over the course of six hours, Ono and a small group of friends used white cloth to slowly wrap and then unwrap one of the four large bronze li ons in Trafalgar Square. Directly facing the National Gallery, the site is central to Britain’s cultural identity. The nineteenth-century lion sculptures form part of a monument commemorating the death, in 1805, of Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Covering one of them in white cloth suggested a pacifist stance during a time of escalating tension over the Vietnam War. Ono first attempted Lion Wrapping Event in November 1966, while her exhibition at Indic a (pp. 158– 63) was still installed. The action was stopped short,

however, due to the intervention of the police and the onslaught of rain, which dampened the paper she was using to wrap the lion. With further pl anning, Ono was able to realize the work without complications for the 1967 iteration. She created a twenty-six-minute film documenting the event and commissioned the electronic musician Delia Derbyshire to create a soundtrack. The film was screened in August 1967 alongside Ono’s Film No. 4 (1966–67; pp. 164– 67), at the Jacey-Tatler cinema on Charing Cross Road, a shor t walk from Trafalgar Square. Wrapping and binding were recurring themes in Ono’s work, prompting associations ranging from trauma and healing to concealment and intimacy. She has reflected that “in order to let something be you have to cloak it.”1

1. Yoko Ono, intervi ew by Chrissie Iles, August 1997, quoted in Chrissie Iles, Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? (Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997), p. 67.

1966–1969

170

76 and 77. Lion Wrapping Event . August 3, 1967. Trafalgar Square, London. Photographs: Anthony Cox (top) and Nigel Hartnup (bottom)

171

HALF-A-ROOM

HALF-A-ROOM 1967

With the si mple act of subtraction, Yoko Ono’s Half-ARoom installation turned a suite of domestic objects, arranged as they might be in a room in an ordinary home, into a site for rumination on the divide between body and mind or between people. The artist cut all her chosen items in half—from chairs, tables, and a rug to ordinary kitchen utensils—and painted them white. By stripping the objects of their original function and placing them in a roomlike installation, Ono compelled visitors to see the familiar domestic environment in a new way. Also titled Half-A-Spring Room, the installation was part of Ono’s fall 1967 exhibition Yoko Ono Half A-Wind Show , at the newly opened Lisson Gallery in London. The show featured three additional environments—including a new realization of The Stone (1966; pp. 138–43)—as well as several objects. Three Spoons (1967; pl. 66) comprised four (not three) si lver spoons displayed on a clear Plexiglas pedestal. The exhibition also included a new version of Hammer a Nail Painting—a work Ono conceived in 1961 and produced for the first time for her 1966 Indica Gallery show. Her 1967 version consisted of a metal panel and a glass hammer, inviting an action that would inevitably shatter the tool and thus result in the work’s destruction.

Photographs of the installation show Ono sitting or standing alone in the room (pl. 78). “Somebody said I should also put h alf-a-person i n the show,” Ono reflected. “But we are halves already.”1 The exhibition was the first to include a collaborative work made by Ono and John Lennon. The work came about when Ono told Lennon about “this ‘half’ idea” that she had for the show, and he responded , “Why don’t you put the other half i n bottles.”2 Air Bottles (1967) comprised a series of empty glass containers placed on a high shelf in the gallery’s back room; to each was affixed a handwritten label that noted half of an object or concept.

1. Yoko Ono, “Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show,” in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show (London: Lisson Gallery, 1967), n.p. This volume, p. 180. 2. Yoko Ono, interview, EGG: The Arts Show , PBS, 2003; see www. pbs.org/wnet/egg/209/ono/interview_ content_1.html.

78. Yoko Ono in Half-A-Room at Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photograph: Clay Perry

1966–1969

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HALF-A-ROOM

HALF-A-ROOM 1967

With the si mple act of subtraction, Yoko Ono’s Half-ARoom installation turned a suite of domestic objects, arranged as they might be in a room in an ordinary home, into a site for rumination on the divide between body and mind or between people. The artist cut all her chosen items in half—from chairs, tables, and a rug to ordinary kitchen utensils—and painted them white. By stripping the objects of their original function and placing them in a roomlike installation, Ono compelled visitors to see the familiar domestic environment in a new way. Also titled Half-A-Spring Room, the installation was part of Ono’s fall 1967 exhibition Yoko Ono Half A-Wind Show , at the newly opened Lisson Gallery in London. The show featured three additional environments—including a new realization of The Stone (1966; pp. 138–43)—as well as several objects. Three Spoons (1967; pl. 66) comprised four (not three) si lver spoons displayed on a clear Plexiglas pedestal. The exhibition also included a new version of Hammer a Nail Painting—a work Ono conceived in 1961 and produced for the first time for her 1966 Indica Gallery show. Her 1967 version consisted of a metal panel and a glass hammer, inviting an action that would inevitably shatter the tool and thus result in the work’s destruction.

Photographs of the installation show Ono sitting or standing alone in the room (pl. 78). “Somebody said I should also put h alf-a-person i n the show,” Ono reflected. “But we are halves already.”1 The exhibition was the first to include a collaborative work made by Ono and John Lennon. The work came about when Ono told Lennon about “this ‘half’ idea” that she had for the show, and he responded , “Why don’t you put the other half i n bottles.”2 Air Bottles (1967) comprised a series of empty glass containers placed on a high shelf in the gallery’s back room; to each was affixed a handwritten label that noted half of an object or concept.

1. Yoko Ono, “Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show,” in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show (London: Lisson Gallery, 1967), n.p. This volume, p. 180. 2. Yoko Ono, interview, EGG: The Arts Show , PBS, 2003; see www. pbs.org/wnet/egg/209/ono/interview_ content_1.html.

1966–1969

79. Half-A-Room. 1967. Domestic objects cut in half, most painted white, dimensions vary upon installation

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78. Yoko Ono in Half-A-Room at Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photograph: Clay Perry

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HALF-A-ROOM

1966–1969

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YOKO'S VOICE

79. Half-A-Room. 1967. Domestic objects cut in half, most painted white, dimensions vary upon installation

1966�1969

INDICA PLAN Artist’s notes and drawings for YOKO at INDICA (pp. 158–63), Indica Gallery, London. 1966. Four spreads from a notebook, ink and graphite on paper, each spread 8 x 12 �/�" (20.3 x 31.8 cm)

1966�1969

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YOKO'S VOICE

INDICA PLAN Artist’s notes and drawings for YOKO at INDICA (pp. 158–63), Indica Gallery, London. 1966. Four spreads from a notebook, ink and graphite on paper, each spread 8 x 12 �/�" (20.3 x 31.8 cm)

1966�1969

INDICA PLAN Artist’s notes and drawings for YOKO at INDICA (pp. 158–63), Indica Gallery, London. 1966. Two pages, felt-tip pen on paper, each 10 x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm)

1966�1969

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YOKO'S VOICE

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YOKO'S VOICE


1966�1969


1966�1969

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1966�1969

Some practical and tangible future plans: NOTES ON THE LISSON GALLERY SHOW

Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show y.o. October ‘67 London

The light house is a phantom house that is built by sheer light. You set up prisms and at a certain time of the day, under a certain evening light which goes through the prisms, the light house appears in the middle of the field like an image, except that, with this image, you can actually go inside if you wanted to. The light house may not emerge every day, just as the sun doesn’t shine every day. The wind house is a house on a hill. The rooms and the windows are so constructed so it makes music, like a whistle, depending on the wind that goes through.

I think of this show as an elephant’s tail. Life is only half a game. Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging. Somebody said I should also put half-a-person in the show. But we are halves already. Seng, Sung, Sang, Sing and Song were good musicians. The princess asked them to play for the concert of the midsummer night of the warmest day in Li-Fung. It was a tradition in Li-Fung for the best musicians to get together and play for the people all night and soothe the air from the heat. Seng said he would not play because he did not have enough time to prepare. Sung immediately went into an intensive and elaborate preparation. Sang did nothing. He wandered around the fields until the day came. On the night, Seng was not there. Sung’s music overwhelmed people. Sang went on the stage, and when he sang, the warm wind went through his lungs and came out, transformed into the most beautiful music. It was the warm wind that made the music, he said. Sing did not even sing. He just stood on the stage and smiled, and the smile sent vibrations into people’s mind, and they heard, they heard their minds tingling, and they smiled back. Do you know anything about Song? People say that he was too pure, and one day, he just suddenly turned into air and was assimilated into the skies. It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us. It is also nice that we share the air. No matter how far apart we are, the air links us. The switch piece is meant to be mass-produced. By using this switch, you can dispense with a large part of language communication. Instead of shouting to your husband who is in the bath that the dinner is ready, you can turn on the light in the bathroom from the kitchen. Instead of calling your wife and telling her that you are coming home, you can just turn the light in her room from 500 miles away and she will know that you are on your way home, etc., etc. I would have a whole room of lights, like a light flower garden, and see which friends are tuning in. When “Hammer A Nail” painting was exhibited at Indica Gallery, a person came and asked if it was alright to hammer a nail in the painting. I said it was alright if he pays 5 shillings. Instead of paying the 5 shillings, he asked if it was alright for him to hammer an imaginary nail in. That was John Lennon. I thought, so I met a guy who plays the same game I played. This time John suggested how about selling the other half of my half-a-matter objects in bottles. It was such a beautiul idea I decided to use it even though it was not mine.

Moon-music: This is a well that is receptive to the moon-tide and makes music according to the tide. When we were fish, the sea-water surrounded us. When we came on ground, we carried the sea inside us. Our blood structure is 90% salt-water. There’s a very strong tie between us and the moon-tide. They say that when you die a natural death it is invariably when the tide is low. You should have the moon-music in your house like you would have a clock. And when it sings, you will remember the connection. TV to see the sky: This is a TV just to see the sky. Different channels for different skies, high-up sky, low sky, etc. Published in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show, exh. cat. (London: Lisson Gallery, 1967)

1966�1969

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Some practical and tangible future plans: NOTES ON THE LISSON GALLERY SHOW

The light house is a phantom house that is built by sheer light. You set up prisms and at a certain time of the day, under a certain evening light which goes through the prisms, the light house appears in the middle of the field like an image, except that, with this image, you can actually go inside if you wanted to. The light house may not emerge every day, just as the sun doesn’t shine every day.

Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show y.o. October ‘67 London

The wind house is a house on a hill. The rooms and the windows are so constructed so it makes music, like a whistle, depending on the wind that goes through.

I think of this show as an elephant’s tail. Moon-music: This is a well that is receptive to the moon-tide and makes music according to the tide. When we were fish, the sea-water surrounded us. When we came on ground, we carried the sea inside us. Our blood structure is 90% salt-water. There’s a very strong tie between us and the moon-tide. They say that when you die a natural death it is invariably when the tide is low. You should have the moon-music in your house like you would have a clock. And when it sings, you will remember the connection.

Life is only half a game. Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging. Somebody said I should also put half-a-person in the show. But we are halves already. Seng, Sung, Sang, Sing and Song were good musicians. The princess asked them to play for the concert of the midsummer night of the warmest day in Li-Fung. It was a tradition in Li-Fung for the best musicians to get together and play for the people all night and soothe the air from the heat. Seng said he would not play because he did not have enough time to prepare. Sung immediately went into an intensive and elaborate preparation. Sang did nothing. He wandered around the fields until the day came. On the night, Seng was not there. Sung’s music overwhelmed people. Sang went on the stage, and when he sang, the warm wind went through his lungs and came out, transformed into the most beautiful music. It was the warm wind that made the music, he said. Sing did not even sing. He just stood on the stage and smiled, and the smile sent vibrations into people’s mind, and they heard, they heard their minds tingling, and they smiled back. Do you know anything about Song? People say that he was too pure, and one day, he just suddenly turned into air and was assimilated into the skies.

TV to see the sky: This is a TV just to see the sky. Different channels for different skies, high-up sky, low sky, etc. Published in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show, exh. cat. (London: Lisson Gallery, 1967)

It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us. It is also nice that we share the air. No matter how far apart we are, the air links us. The switch piece is meant to be mass-produced. By using this switch, you can dispense with a large part of language communication. Instead of shouting to your husband who is in the bath that the dinner is ready, you can turn on the light in the bathroom from the kitchen. Instead of calling your wife and telling her that you are coming home, you can just turn the light in her room from 500 miles away and she will know that you are on your way home, etc., etc. I would have a whole room of lights, like a light flower garden, and see which friends are tuning in. When “Hammer A Nail” painting was exhibited at Indica Gallery, a person came and asked if it was alright to hammer a nail in the painting. I said it was alright if he pays 5 shillings. Instead of paying the 5 shillings, he asked if it was alright for him to hammer an imaginary nail in. That was John Lennon. I thought, so I met a guy who plays the same game I played. This time John suggested how about selling the other half of my half-a-matter objects in bottles. It was such a beautiul idea I decided to use it even though it was not mine.

1966�1969

“The Honourable Art of Selling an Appl e for £200,” Daily Sketch, November 15, 1966

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“Yoko, the girl behind a protest,” Daily Sketch, March 11, 1967

1966�1969

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“The Honourable Art of Selling an Appl e for £200,” Daily Sketch, November 15, 1966

1966�1969

Ivor Turnbull, “The Strange Arts of Yoko Ono,”London Look, March 18, 1967: 30–31.


“Yoko, the girl behind a protest,” Daily Sketch, March 11, 1967

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Ivor Turnbull, “The Strange Arts of Yoko Ono,”London Look, March 18, 1967: 30–31.

1966� 1966 �1969

Ivor Turnbull, “The Strange Arts of Yoko Ono,”London Ono,” London Look, Look, March 18, 1967: 32–33.

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Ivor Turnbull, “The Strange Arts of Yoko Ono,”London Ono,” London Look, Look, March 18, 1967: 32–33.

1969–1971

I’m not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That’s the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. —Yoko Ono, 1972 1

In Yoko Ono’s archives there is a black-and-white photograph of a small threedimensional piece produced in 1968 (pl. 81), at the moment when Ono and John Lennon were beginning to collaborate on audio works, a pursuit that would eventually embody an important aspect of their lives together. The piece, created by Lennon and now lost, consisted of four objects on a painted wooden base. In the forefront are a two-part transparent plastic rectangular box, an upright clear plastic tube,2 and, at the far right, an audio cassette case. To To the rear of the work is a cube that appears to be a clear acrylic paperweight, placed on top of a small wooden plinth. This collection of objects might be read as stand-ins for members of a typical rock band: the rectangle and cassette case standing in for guitar players (or a guitarist and a vocalist), t he tube for a bassist, the cube for a drummer drummer.. Their presence as hollow, transparent plastic objects, however, gives a key conceptual hint to t he work—this might be any band, or even anybody . A label applied to the base of the piece provides the title: Plastic Ono Band. In November 1968, around the same point in time as the sculpture was made, Ono and Lennon released their first collaborative record, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (pl. 80). The front cover of the 12-inch vinyl LP was adorned with a black-and-white full-frontal nude image of the artists, photograp photographed hed by Lennon. 3 The verso, logically, featured a corresponding photo of them from the rear. The recording, made in Lennon’s home studio in Surrey, England, can be described as an avant-garde soundscape of audio loops featuring Lennon on various instruments filtered by audio delay and other distortions, overlaid with Ono’s improvised vocals in response to the processed audio. Whereas Ono’s previous vocal works were performed for people attuned to experimental music, 4 Two Virgins—Ono’s first record album—was released in a pressing of well over one hundred thousand thousand copies worldwide and thus meant to reach a broader audience. Two Virgins was followed by Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions in May 1969 and Wedding Album in October of the same year. 5 The albums tracked similar trajectories of sound, aligning Lennon’s Lennon’s music with Ono’s open-ended structure and improvisational sensibilities, through which they distanced themselves from pop formulas. The last of the three records, Wedding Album, was a kind of climax: an elaborate boxed set containing a single LP record and an extravagant compilation of wedding-inspir wedding-inspired ed ephemera, including a loose postcard of Ono and Lennon in bed in Amsterdam under their “HAIR PEACE” and “BED PEACE” posters. 6

80. Photograph from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s shoot for the cover of their LP Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, 1968. Photograph: John Lennon

As layered and rich as the packaging was, the audio of Wedding Album proved to be a conundrum for listeners. Side one consisted of a single twenty-two-minute track that has often been described as the artists’ wailing, but is more accurately characterized as an extended recording of Ono and Lennon engaged in what could be described as wedding-night conjugal bliss. In contrast, side two,

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1969–1971

I’m not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That’s the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. —Yoko Ono, 1972 1

In Yoko Ono’s archives there is a black-and-white photograph of a small threedimensional piece produced in 1968 (pl. 81), at the moment when Ono and John Lennon were beginning to collaborate on audio works, a pursuit that would eventually embody an important aspect of their lives together. The piece, created by Lennon and now lost, consisted of four objects on a painted wooden base. In the forefront are a two-part transparent plastic rectangular box, an upright clear plastic tube,2 and, at the far right, an audio cassette case. To To the rear of the work is a cube that appears to be a clear acrylic paperweight, placed on top of a small wooden plinth. This collection of objects might be read as stand-ins for members of a typical rock band: the rectangle and cassette case standing in for guitar players (or a guitarist and a vocalist), t he tube for a bassist, the cube for a drummer drummer.. Their presence as hollow, transparent plastic objects, however, gives a key conceptual hint to t he work—this might be any band, or even anybody . A label applied to the base of the piece provides the title: Plastic Ono Band. In November 1968, around the same point in time as the sculpture was made, Ono and Lennon released their first collaborative record, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (pl. 80). The front cover of the 12-inch vinyl LP was adorned with a black-and-white full-frontal nude image of the artists, photograp photographed hed by Lennon. 3 The verso, logically, featured a corresponding photo of them from the rear. The recording, made in Lennon’s home studio in Surrey, England, can be described as an avant-garde soundscape of audio loops featuring Lennon on various instruments filtered by audio delay and other distortions, overlaid with Ono’s improvised vocals in response to the processed audio. Whereas Ono’s previous vocal works were performed for people attuned to experimental music, 4 Two Virgins—Ono’s first record album—was released in a pressing of well over one hundred thousand thousand copies worldwide and thus meant to reach a broader audience. Two Virgins was followed by Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions in May 1969 and Wedding Album in October of the same year. 5 The albums tracked similar trajectories of sound, aligning Lennon’s Lennon’s music with Ono’s open-ended structure and improvisational sensibilities, through which they distanced themselves from pop formulas. The last of the three records, Wedding Album, was a kind of climax: an elaborate boxed set containing a single LP record and an extravagant compilation of wedding-inspir wedding-inspired ed ephemera, including a loose postcard of Ono and Lennon in bed in Amsterdam under their “HAIR PEACE” and “BED PEACE” posters. 6

As layered and rich as the packaging was, the audio of Wedding Album proved to be a conundrum for listeners. Side one consisted of a single twenty-two-minute track that has often been described as the artists’ wailing, but is more accurately characterized as an extended recording of Ono and Lennon engaged in what could be described as wedding-night conjugal bliss. In contrast, side two,

80. Photograph from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s shoot for the cover of their LP Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, 1968. Photograph: John Lennon

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titled “Amsterdam,” is composed of collaged excerpt s of interviews and other found sound accumulated over the couple’s Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in March 1969 (pp. 198–99)—a seven-day event in which they protested for peace from their temporary bed. A second such weeklong event, titled Bed-In, followed, starting on May 26, 1969, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. These These actions capitalized on the artists’ capacity to galvanize their own personas as instruments for social change in the face of the war in Vietnam. As Lennon stated regarding regarding the conception of the Bed-Ins: Personally we thought, “What have we got in common? It’s a desire to change the world a little bit.” So how to do it? And so we went through the whole idea of creating the idea of being in bed till we came up with that conclusion, to be in bed! That’s the best way for the two of us to do it!” 7 From another angle, the Bed-Ins can be seen as an amalgam in which the nonviolent civil-rights sit-in protests that took place during the mid-1950s and early 1960s merged with the decidedly hedonistic pro-psychede pro-psychedelics lics Human Be-In that was staged in San Francisco on January 14, 1967. 8 While the term “media circus” may have not been coined until the 1970s, it suggests exactly what Ono and Lennon encountered when they staged their Bed-In in Montreal, as in every aspect of their lives together. 9 In addition to members of the media, the event drew counterculture celebrities, culminating on the evening of June 1, when Lennon, Ono, Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Ginsberg, radio DJ Murray the K, and a hotel room full of wellwishers rec orded “Give Peace a Chance.” The song, which embodied the fervent sentiment of the antiwar movement, movement, was released on July 4, 1969, becoming the first Plastic Ono Band record. For the cover of the single (pl. 82), Ono reimagined the 1968 Plastic Ono Band object. What had been a small tabletop collection of items was now a larger work whose components resembled the pedestals for Ono’s sculptures in her 1966 Indica Gallery exhibition (pp. 158–63). This latest Plastic Ono Band, now at human scale, comprised a microphone stand placed inside two Plexiglas cylinders; two stacked Plexiglas boxes; a turntable sitting on a third box; and a reel-to-reel tape deck set atop a tall Plexiglas pedestal. In September 1969, for a concert at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival, a new version of the human Plastic Ono Band was assembled featuring, in addition to Ono and Lennon, Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Alan White on drums. From 1969 through the mid-1970s, Plastic Ono Band—true to the definition of the word “plastic”—would take many different forms. The lineup continually changed, with members coming in and out (though Voormann Voormann was a consistent presence). This post-Beatles band became Lennon’s Lennon’s initial route towar toward d a vastly more stripped-down form of music, opposed to the deeply layered and orchestrated sound of his former band. For Ono the band was more than a namesake; it was a vehicle for the vocal and performance pieces that had begun almost ten years prior. Previously, Ono had been engaged primarily with avant-garde avant-garde endeavors, and the capacity to work in professional sound studios with musicians and engineers was a liberating opportunity for her, allowing her to stretch her voice into new realms of instrumentation. This This prolific period produced a wellspring of albums, providing an expansive opportunity for Ono to challenge not only herself, Lennon, and Plastic Ono Band, but also the larger musical c ommunity and record-buying public.

81. Still from the documentary film John Lennon &Yoko Ono , produced by Hans Preiner/ORF, showing John Lennon’s sculpture Plastic Ono Band (1968)

If the first third of the 1960s can be characterized by a brewing alternative scene gathering strength just below the surface of a broader culture, then the final years of the decade and the first part of the 1970s marked a diagrammatic shift where counterculture merged, merged, or at least became aligned, with society at large. The The previously clear line between artists and activists, now united by a common political

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titled “Amsterdam,” is composed of collaged excerpt s of interviews and other found sound accumulated over the couple’s Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in March 1969 (pp. 198–99)—a seven-day event in which they protested for peace from their temporary bed. A second such weeklong event, titled Bed-In, followed, starting on May 26, 1969, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. These These actions capitalized on the artists’ capacity to galvanize their own personas as instruments for social change in the face of the war in Vietnam. As Lennon stated regarding regarding the conception of the Bed-Ins: Personally we thought, “What have we got in common? It’s a desire to change the world a little bit.” So how to do it? And so we went through the whole idea of creating the idea of being in bed till we came up with that conclusion, to be in bed! That’s the best way for the two of us to do it!” 7 From another angle, the Bed-Ins can be seen as an amalgam in which the nonviolent civil-rights sit-in protests that took place during the mid-1950s and early 1960s merged with the decidedly hedonistic pro-psychede pro-psychedelics lics Human Be-In that was staged in San Francisco on January 14, 1967. 8 While the term “media circus” may have not been coined until the 1970s, it suggests exactly what Ono and Lennon encountered when they staged their Bed-In in Montreal, as in every aspect of their lives together. 9 In addition to members of the media, the event drew counterculture celebrities, culminating on the evening of June 1, when Lennon, Ono, Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Ginsberg, radio DJ Murray the K, and a hotel room full of wellwishers rec orded “Give Peace a Chance.” The song, which embodied the fervent sentiment of the antiwar movement, movement, was released on July 4, 1969, becoming the first Plastic Ono Band record. For the cover of the single (pl. 82), Ono reimagined the 1968 Plastic Ono Band object. What had been a small tabletop collection of items was now a larger work whose components resembled the pedestals for Ono’s sculptures in her 1966 Indica Gallery exhibition (pp. 158–63). This latest Plastic Ono Band, now at human scale, comprised a microphone stand placed inside two Plexiglas cylinders; two stacked Plexiglas boxes; a turntable sitting on a third box; and a reel-to-reel tape deck set atop a tall Plexiglas pedestal. In September 1969, for a concert at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival, a new version of the human Plastic Ono Band was assembled featuring, in addition to Ono and Lennon, Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Alan White on drums. From 1969 through the mid-1970s, Plastic Ono Band—true to the definition of the word “plastic”—would take many different forms. The lineup continually changed, with members coming in and out (though Voormann Voormann was a consistent presence). This post-Beatles band became Lennon’s Lennon’s initial route towar toward d a vastly more stripped-down form of music, opposed to the deeply layered and orchestrated sound of his former band. For Ono the band was more than a namesake; it was a vehicle for the vocal and performance pieces that had begun almost ten years prior. Previously, Ono had been engaged primarily with avant-garde avant-garde endeavors, and the capacity to work in professional sound studios with musicians and engineers was a liberating opportunity for her, allowing her to stretch her voice into new realms of instrumentation. This This prolific period produced a wellspring of albums, providing an expansive opportunity for Ono to challenge not only herself, Lennon, and Plastic Ono Band, but also the larger musical c ommunity and record-buying public. If the first third of the 1960s can be characterized by a brewing alternative scene gathering strength just below the surface of a broader culture, then the final years of the decade and the first part of the 1970s marked a diagrammatic shift where counterculture merged, merged, or at least became aligned, with society at large. The The previously clear line between artists and activists, now united by a common political

81. Still from the documentary film John Lennon &Yoko Ono , produced by Hans Preiner/ORF, showing John Lennon’s sculpture Plastic Ono Band (1968)

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agenda, blurred. Ono and Lennon’s WAR IS OVER! campaign (pp. 200–203) arose during this time. In twelve international cities prior to Christmas 1969, an assortment of postcards, posters, and large-scale billboards displaying the campaign’s title statement—in each city’s respective language—appeared simultaneously. No longer needing to be tied to a single city to stage an event, Ono and Lennon, through mass communication and large-scale distribution of their albums, now permeated the globe by way of their art.

Despite Ono’s visibility during this period based on her and Lennon’s fusing of art and private life, her work going forward would increasingly become independent of her physical presence. In 1971, she returned to an elusive artistic practice that she had begun developing in the instruction pieces assembled in her 1964 artist’s book, Grapefruit (pp. 100–105). Often prioritizing transitory, open-ended experiences over objects produced by the artist’s hand, such pieces foreshadowed the sly, rebellious ploy seen with her fictitious solo exhibition in 1971 (pp. 208–13). Advertised by Ono in The Village Voice and the New York Times,10 the show would allegedly be held from December 1 to 15 at The Museum of Modern Art. While the exhibition itself was imaginary—no works by Ono were displayed in the galleries, nor was the artist present or the event sanctioned by the Museum—it was very much real in the sense that it brought together artistic actions that warranted contemplation, though here the actions involved absence rather than presence. At the center of this “exhibition” was, supposedly, a work involving flies scented with Ono’s perfume, Ma Griffe, that had been released in the Museum’s sculpture garden.

2.

The exhibition project included interviewing visitors to the Museum about the show (which of course they could not have actually experienced). The interviews were filmed, and the resulting reportage is comic and at times insightful, and only occasionally do visitors show flashes of resentment that the show was purely a subversion of their expectations. An artist’s book—titled Museum Of Modern (F)art , after the artist’s renaming of the Museum in a manipulated photo on the book’s cover— added another layer of i ntrigue, through photographs by Iain Macmillan and Ono that allegedly tracked the flies’ migration from the Museum and then throughout New York City, which was now becoming home to Ono and Lennon. In the 1960s Ono often engaged with a host of avant-garde musicians and artists, from John Cage to George Maciunas and other innovators associated with the Fluxus generation. Her art took many forms, including purely conceptual actions and performative pieces. Similarly, it grew in dimension from small-scale events in downtown Manhattan lofts to concerts and exhibitions in formal art galleries and recital halls, all while remaining aggressively on the edge of both worlds— these works were neither conceived entirely for consumption nor wholly distant from a need to be performed or otherwise activated in public. And, like the mass media and alternative-culture periodicals that came to intensely document her every activity, both public and private, Ono continued to seek out the fine line between artistic and political activism that challenges the entrenched establishment. Through her partnerships with Lennon, Ono was inescapably thrust into t he public eye. She used her spotlight to push popular culture in a radical direction on the cusp of the 1970s, making their life together part of her art, and challenging audiences unaccustomed to avant-garde performance to accept unconventional practices that had previously resided on the margins.

— David Platzker

NOTES

6.

The author wishes to thank Jennie Waldow, Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Intern, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, for her assistance with this text.

7. 1.

3.

4.

5.

Yoko Ono, in“John and Yoko: I Don’t Like All This Dribblin’ Pop-Opera-Jazz. I Like Pop Records,” in Hit Parader (Derby, Conn.), February 1972: 44. The tube is a container for a brush used to clean vinyl records. “I thought that the best picture of her for an album would be her naked. I was just going to record her as an artist, we were only on those kind of terms then. So after that, when we got together it just seemed natural for us, if we made an album together, for both of us to be naked.” John Lennon, in “The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon,” by Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, no. 22 (November 23, 1968): 14. See also Jim Buckley, “In Bed With John and Yoko,” Screw: The Sex Review (New York), no. 18 (June 27, 1969): 6. For example, Ono contributed her own original vocals to John Cage’s 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists & a String Player , performed in Osaka on October 17, 1962, and enacted her own works in many contemporary avant-garde and Fluxus contexts internationally throughout the 1960s. Lennon quotes Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions as having initially sold over sixty thousand copies in the United States. See “John & Yoko: Give Em a Chance!,” interview of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Fusion (Boston), no. 27 (February 20, 1970): 15.

8.

9.

The ephemera also included a reproduction of Ono and Lennon’s wedding certificate, issued in the British Territory of Gibraltar; a photograph of a slice of wedding cake; a seventeen-page booklet of wedding photos and press clippings; a strip of photo-booth portraits of the pair; and a large poster of the newlyweds’ w edding photographs. “Give Em a Chance,” p. 16. This was one of many responses Lennon and Ono provided to the international press during—and following—their two Bed-Ins and press conferences. The suffix “-in” was used in the names of myriad events in the 1960s, from Yippie Yip-ins to sexual love-ins, culminating in the NBC television show Laugh-In, which ran from 1968 to 1973. Ono also used “in” as a prefix in her 1964 concepts of Insound and Instructure. See Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Alexandra Munore and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 12.

The event was documented not only in copious news footage but also in a documentary made by Lennon and Ono, titled Bed Peace , and in a short movie shot by the filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Lennon and Ono’s film can be found at http://imaginepeace.com/archives/15702 and Mekas’s at http://jonasmekasfilms.com/40/film.php?film=11. 10. The advertisement appeared in The Village Voice on November 25, 1971, and December 2, 1971, and in the New York Times on November 27, 1971.

192

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agenda, blurred. Ono and Lennon’s WAR IS OVER! campaign (pp. 200–203) arose during this time. In twelve international cities prior to Christmas 1969, an assortment of postcards, posters, and large-scale billboards displaying the campaign’s title statement—in each city’s respective language—appeared simultaneously. No longer needing to be tied to a single city to stage an event, Ono and Lennon, through mass communication and large-scale distribution of their albums, now permeated the globe by way of their art.

Despite Ono’s visibility during this period based on her and Lennon’s fusing of art and private life, her work going forward would increasingly become independent of her physical presence. In 1971, she returned to an elusive artistic practice that she had begun developing in the instruction pieces assembled in her 1964 artist’s book, Grapefruit (pp. 100–105). Often prioritizing transitory, open-ended experiences over objects produced by the artist’s hand, such pieces foreshadowed the sly, rebellious ploy seen with her fictitious solo exhibition in 1971 (pp. 208–13). Advertised by Ono in The Village Voice and the New York Times,10 the show would allegedly be held from December 1 to 15 at The Museum of Modern Art. While the exhibition itself was imaginary—no works by Ono were displayed in the galleries, nor was the artist present or the event sanctioned by the Museum—it was very much real in the sense that it brought together artistic actions that warranted contemplation, though here the actions involved absence rather than presence. At the center of this “exhibition” was, supposedly, a work involving flies scented with Ono’s perfume, Ma Griffe, that had been released in the Museum’s sculpture garden.

2.

NOTES

6.

The author wishes to thank Jennie Waldow, Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Intern, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, for her assistance with this text.

7. 1.

3.

4.

5.

The exhibition project included interviewing visitors to the Museum about the show (which of course they could not have actually experienced). The interviews were filmed, and the resulting reportage is comic and at times insightful, and only occasionally do visitors show flashes of resentment that the show was purely a subversion of their expectations. An artist’s book—titled Museum Of Modern (F)art , after the artist’s renaming of the Museum in a manipulated photo on the book’s cover— added another layer of i ntrigue, through photographs by Iain Macmillan and Ono that allegedly tracked the flies’ migration from the Museum and then throughout New York City, which was now becoming home to Ono and Lennon.

Yoko Ono, in“John and Yoko: I Don’t Like All This Dribblin’ Pop-Opera-Jazz. I Like Pop Records,” in Hit Parader (Derby, Conn.), February 1972: 44. The tube is a container for a brush used to clean vinyl records. “I thought that the best picture of her for an album would be her naked. I was just going to record her as an artist, we were only on those kind of terms then. So after that, when we got together it just seemed natural for us, if we made an album together, for both of us to be naked.” John Lennon, in “The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon,” by Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, no. 22 (November 23, 1968): 14. See also Jim Buckley, “In Bed With John and Yoko,” Screw: The Sex Review (New York), no. 18 (June 27, 1969): 6. For example, Ono contributed her own original vocals to John Cage’s 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists & a String Player , performed in Osaka on October 17, 1962, and enacted her own works in many contemporary avant-garde and Fluxus contexts internationally throughout the 1960s. Lennon quotes Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions as having initially sold over sixty thousand copies in the United States. See “John & Yoko: Give Em a Chance!,” interview of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Fusion (Boston), no. 27 (February 20, 1970): 15.

8.

The ephemera also included a reproduction of Ono and Lennon’s wedding certificate, issued in the British Territory of Gibraltar; a photograph of a slice of wedding cake; a seventeen-page booklet of wedding photos and press clippings; a strip of photo-booth portraits of the pair; and a large poster of the newlyweds’ w edding photographs. “Give Em a Chance,” p. 16. This was one of many responses Lennon and Ono provided to the international press during—and following—their two Bed-Ins and press conferences. The suffix “-in” was used in the names of myriad events in the 1960s, from Yippie Yip-ins to sexual love-ins, culminating in the NBC television show Laugh-In, which ran from 1968 to 1973. Ono also used “in” as a prefix in her 1964 concepts of Insound and Instructure. See Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Alexandra Munore and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 12.

9.

The event was documented not only in copious news footage but also in a documentary made by Lennon and Ono, titled Bed Peace , and in a short movie shot by the filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Lennon and Ono’s film can be found at http://imaginepeace.com/archives/15702 and Mekas’s at http://jonasmekasfilms.com/40/film.php?film=11. 10. The advertisement appeared in The Village Voice on November 25, 1971, and December 2, 1971, and in the New York Times on November 27, 1971.

In the 1960s Ono often engaged with a host of avant-garde musicians and artists, from John Cage to George Maciunas and other innovators associated with the Fluxus generation. Her art took many forms, including purely conceptual actions and performative pieces. Similarly, it grew in dimension from small-scale events in downtown Manhattan lofts to concerts and exhibitions in formal art galleries and recital halls, all while remaining aggressively on the edge of both worlds— these works were neither conceived entirely for consumption nor wholly distant from a need to be performed or otherwise activated in public. And, like the mass media and alternative-culture periodicals that came to intensely document her every activity, both public and private, Ono continued to seek out the fine line between artistic and political activism that challenges the entrenched establishment. Through her partnerships with Lennon, Ono was inescapably thrust into t he public eye. She used her spotlight to push popular culture in a radical direction on the cusp of the 1970s, making their life together part of her art, and challenging audiences unaccustomed to avant-garde performance to accept unconventional practices that had previously resided on the margins.

— David Platzker

1969–1971

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PLASTIC ONO BAND

PLASTIC ONO BAND est. c. 1968–69

Around 1968, Ono decided to create a band “that would never exist . . . that didn’t have a set number of members . . . that could accommodate anyone who wanted to play with i t.”1 Advertisements for the band included the statement “You are the Plastic Ono Band.” The name derived from a small three-dimensional work—composed almost entirely of transparent plastic objects (pl. 81)—that John Lennon made in response to Ono’s initial concept. The musical output of the band grew from Ono and Lennon’s earlier collaborations, beginning with the album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins , recorded in one session in May 1968 (pl. 80). Though conceptually Plastic Ono Band had no members, in practice it had a flexible lineup. For a p erformance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in September 1969, the band consisted of Ono, Lennon, Eric Clapton, Kl aus Voormann, and Alan White. During this session—which produced the band’s first live recording—Ono performed her Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13), entering a white bag in the middle of the stage. A number of other performa nces likewise incorporated Ono’s earlier works, or they introduced new artistic pursuits. In a concert at London’s Lyceum Ballroom in December 1969, for instance, Plastic Ono Supergroup—which comprised the five members mentioned above as well as seven other noted musicians of the time—publicly launched Ono and Lennon’s global WAR IS OVER! campaign (pp. 200–203). Ono was also involved in the visual design of the albums. For the cover of the 1971 Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band album Fly (pl. 84), she used a photograph of herself taken by Lennon. The cover serves as a pendant to that of the John Lennon/Plas tic Ono Band album from the same year, Imagine (pl. 85), which displays a photograph of Lennon taken by Ono.

Plastic Ono Band continued releasing records, often featuring Ono’s singular voice, through the mid1970s. In 2009, Ono revived Plastic Ono Band with her son, Sean Lennon, and recent performances have included a wide assortment of artists, including Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, the Scissor Sisters, Lady Gaga, and Iggy Pop.

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Al exandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 234.

82. Plastic Ono Band. Remember Love/Give Peace a Chance . 1969. Vinyl single, 7 1 ⁄ 4 x 7 1 ⁄ 4" (18.4 x 18.4 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968)

1969–1971

194

195

PLASTIC ONO BAND

PLASTIC ONO BAND est. c. 1968–69

Around 1968, Ono decided to create a band “that would never exist . . . that didn’t have a set number of members . . . that could accommodate anyone who wanted to play with i t.”1 Advertisements for the band included the statement “You are the Plastic Ono Band.” The name derived from a small three-dimensional work—composed almost entirely of transparent plastic objects (pl. 81)—that John Lennon made in response to Ono’s initial concept. The musical output of the band grew from Ono and Lennon’s earlier collaborations, beginning with the album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins , recorded in one session in May 1968 (pl. 80). Though conceptually Plastic Ono Band had no members, in practice it had a flexible lineup. For a p erformance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in September 1969, the band consisted of Ono, Lennon, Eric Clapton, Kl aus Voormann, and Alan White. During this session—which produced the band’s first live recording—Ono performed her Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13), entering a white bag in the middle of the stage. A number of other performa nces likewise incorporated Ono’s earlier works, or they introduced new artistic pursuits. In a concert at London’s Lyceum Ballroom in December 1969, for instance, Plastic Ono Supergroup—which comprised the five members mentioned above as well as seven other noted musicians of the time—publicly launched Ono and Lennon’s global WAR IS OVER! campaign (pp. 200–203). Ono was also involved in the visual design of the albums. For the cover of the 1971 Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band album Fly (pl. 84), she used a photograph of herself taken by Lennon. The cover serves as a pendant to that of the John Lennon/Plas tic Ono Band album from the same year, Imagine (pl. 85), which displays a photograph of Lennon taken by Ono.

Plastic Ono Band continued releasing records, often featuring Ono’s singular voice, through the mid1970s. In 2009, Ono revived Plastic Ono Band with her son, Sean Lennon, and recent performances have included a wide assortment of artists, including Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, the Scissor Sisters, Lady Gaga, and Iggy Pop.

1. Yoko Ono, quoted in Edward M. Gomez, “Music of the Mind from the Voice of Raw Soul,” in Al exandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, eds., Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 234.

1969–1971

196

82. Plastic Ono Band. Remember Love/Give Peace a Chance . 1969. Vinyl single, 7 1 ⁄ 4 x 7 1 ⁄ 4" (18.4 x 18.4 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968)

197

PLASTIC ONO BAND

84. Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Fly . 1971. Vinyl LP, 12 7 ⁄ 16 x 12 3 ⁄ 16" (31.6 x 31 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968). Photograph: John Lennon

83. Yoko Ono recording her LP Fly , New York, July 13, 1971. Photograph: Peter Moore

85. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Imagine. 1971. Vinyl LP, 12 3 ⁄ 8 x 12 3 ⁄ 8" (31.4 x 31.4 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968) Photograph: Yoko Ono

1969–1971

196

197

PLASTIC ONO BAND

84. Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Fly . 1971. Vinyl LP, 12 7 ⁄ 16 x 12 3 ⁄ 16" (31.6 x 31 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968). Photograph: John Lennon

85. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Imagine. 1971. Vinyl LP, 12 3 ⁄ 8 x 12 3 ⁄ 8" (31.4 x 31.4 cm). Apple Records (est. 1968) Photograph: Yoko Ono

83. Yoko Ono recording her LP Fly , New York, July 13, 1971. Photograph: Peter Moore

1969–1971

198

199

BED-INS

BED-INS 1969

Five days after their private wedding ceremony, held in Gibraltar on March 2 0, 1969, John Lennon an d Yoko Ono checked into the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and initiated a weeklong public honeymoon celebration. They invited reporters, countercultural figures, artists, and activists into their suite between the hours of 9 A.M. and 9 P.M. The title of their event, Bed-In for Peace , played off of the psychedelic countercultural gatherings dubbed “be-ins” and civil -rights-era “sit-ins.”1 Throughout the week, Ono and Lennon, dressed in white pajamas, gave interviews and hosted public discussions about current political events and the topic of world peace. Handmade posters reading “BAGISM,” “HAIR PEACE,” and “BED PEACE” adorned the walls of the hotel room, marrying messages of peace to evocations of Ono’s earlier Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13) and instruction pieces. In May of the same year, Lennon and Ono held another such event, titled Bed-In , at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. This time, they hired a documentary film crew to record the conversations. Highlights of the resultant film, Bed Peace , include a philosophical exchange with comedian-activist Dick Gregory and a telephone conversation with student protesters occupying the Berkeley People’s Park.2 Speaking of her broadscale public campaigns, Ono stated: “We mustn’t be traditional in the way we communicate with people— especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you d on’t do only what th ey expect you to do.”3 Ono and Lennon built upon the media attention surrounding the Bed-In events to launch their WAR IS OVER! advertising campaign later that year (pp. 200– 203), again using publicity and advertising to spread their antiwar message on a global scale.

1. Two years earlier, Ono herself hosted a be-in on a hill in London’s Hampstead Heath. See “What’s Happening,” International Times , no. 14 (June 2, 1967): 15. Her use of the suffix “in” may also refer to her 1964 concepts of Insound and Instructure. See Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 12.

2. Bed Peace can be viewed at http://imaginepeace.com/ archives/15702. In addition, artist and filmmaker Jonas Mekas made a short film about the event; available at http://jonasmekasfilms.com/40/ film.php?film=11. 3. Yoko Ono, “Power to the People: John Lennon and Yoko Ono Talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali,” Red Mole 2, no. 5 (March 8–22, 1971): 7–10, available online at http:// imaginepeace.com/archives/2667.

86. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Bed-In. 1969. Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal.

Photograph: Gerry Deiter

1969–1971

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BED-INS

BED-INS 1969

Five days after their private wedding ceremony, held in Gibraltar on March 2 0, 1969, John Lennon an d Yoko Ono checked into the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and initiated a weeklong public honeymoon celebration. They invited reporters, countercultural figures, artists, and activists into their suite between the hours of 9 A.M. and 9 P.M. The title of their event, Bed-In for Peace , played off of the psychedelic countercultural gatherings dubbed “be-ins” and civil -rights-era “sit-ins.”1 Throughout the week, Ono and Lennon, dressed in white pajamas, gave interviews and hosted public discussions about current political events and the topic of world peace. Handmade posters reading “BAGISM,” “HAIR PEACE,” and “BED PEACE” adorned the walls of the hotel room, marrying messages of peace to evocations of Ono’s earlier Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13) and instruction pieces. In May of the same year, Lennon and Ono held another such event, titled Bed-In , at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. This time, they hired a documentary film crew to record the conversations. Highlights of the resultant film, Bed Peace , include a philosophical exchange with comedian-activist Dick Gregory and a telephone conversation with student protesters occupying the Berkeley People’s Park.2 Speaking of her broadscale public campaigns, Ono stated: “We mustn’t be traditional in the way we communicate with people— especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you d on’t do only what th ey expect you to do.”3 Ono and Lennon built upon the media attention surrounding the Bed-In events to launch their WAR IS OVER! advertising campaign later that year (pp. 200– 203), again using publicity and advertising to spread their antiwar message on a global scale.

1. Two years earlier, Ono herself hosted a be-in on a hill in London’s Hampstead Heath. See “What’s Happening,” International Times , no. 14 (June 2, 1967): 15. Her use of the suffix “in” may also refer to her 1964 concepts of Insound and Instructure. See Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono,” in Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 12.

2. Bed Peace can be viewed at http://imaginepeace.com/ archives/15702. In addition, artist and filmmaker Jonas Mekas made a short film about the event; available at http://jonasmekasfilms.com/40/ film.php?film=11. 3. Yoko Ono, “Power to the People: John Lennon and Yoko Ono Talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali,” Red Mole 2, no. 5 (March 8–22, 1971): 7–10, available online at http:// imaginepeace.com/archives/2667.

1969–1971

200

86. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Bed-In. 1969. Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal.

Photograph: Gerry Deiter

201

WAR IS OVER!

WAR IS OVER! 1969–

On December 15, 1969 , Yoko Ono, John Lenno n, and the rest of Plastic Ono Supergroup performed in a UNICEF benefit at London’s Lyceum Ballroom. Posters hung across the stage and auditorium, emblazoned with the statement “WAR IS OVER!,” below which, in smaller letters, “If You Want It” and “Happy Christmas from John & Yoko” were printed. The concert launched an advertising campaign across a range of media, from billboards and newspaper ads to radio and television spots. The tagline “WAR IS OVER!” and the presentation method evoked attention-grabbing headlines from the end of World War II. The qualifi cation “If You Want It” aske d readers to imagine their role in ending contemporary conflict, namely the war in Vietnam. The project first developed during Ono and Lennon’s March 1969 Bed-In for Peace (pp. 198–99), the honeymoon event in which the couple invited activists and journalists to join them in conversations around their hotel-room bed in Amsterdam. The two artists then made use of their extensive network to spread the message across twelve cities worldwide: Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Paris, Port of Spain, Rome, Tokyo, and Toronto. In most cases, the phrase was presented in the city’s official language. In Toronto the words were even drawn in smoke across the sky from a plane.1 The WAR IS OVER! campaign placed Ono and Lennon’s message in dialogue with contemporary issues. For example, one of their ads appeared in the December 21, 1969, issue of the NewYorkTimes in close proximity to the Letters to the Editor section, which was filled with reactions to antiwar protests and the Vietnam War atrocities that had just come to light.2 Ono had used advertising as an artistic medium since the mid-1960s, and her partnership with Lennon helped her realize a longstanding ambition to bring activism to an even broader internat ional public. To this day, Ono continues to promote world peace by placing messages— “WAR IS OVER!,” “IMAGINE PEACE,” and others—on billboards and in advertisements.

1. Kevin Concannon, “War is Over! John and Yoko’s Christmas Eve Happening, Tokyo, 1969,” Review of Japanese Cult ure and Society 17 (December 2005): 74. 2. The M ỹ Lai Massacre became public knowledge in November 1969. Lennon and Ono later used a notorious image, showing bodies strewn on the ground, for the cover of the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band single “Now or Never” (1972).

87. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. WAR IS OVER! 1969. Offset, 29 15 ⁄ 16 x 20" (76 x 50.8 cm)

1969–1971

200

201

WAR IS OVER!

WAR IS OVER! 1969–

On December 15, 1969 , Yoko Ono, John Lenno n, and the rest of Plastic Ono Supergroup performed in a UNICEF benefit at London’s Lyceum Ballroom. Posters hung across the stage and auditorium, emblazoned with the statement “WAR IS OVER!,” below which, in smaller letters, “If You Want It” and “Happy Christmas from John & Yoko” were printed. The concert launched an advertising campaign across a range of media, from billboards and newspaper ads to radio and television spots. The tagline “WAR IS OVER!” and the presentation method evoked attention-grabbing headlines from the end of World War II. The qualifi cation “If You Want It” aske d readers to imagine their role in ending contemporary conflict, namely the war in Vietnam. The project first developed during Ono and Lennon’s March 1969 Bed-In for Peace (pp. 198–99), the honeymoon event in which the couple invited activists and journalists to join them in conversations around their hotel-room bed in Amsterdam. The two artists then made use of their extensive network to spread the message across twelve cities worldwide: Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Paris, Port of Spain, Rome, Tokyo, and Toronto. In most cases, the phrase was presented in the city’s official language. In Toronto the words were even drawn in smoke across the sky from a plane.1 The WAR IS OVER! campaign placed Ono and Lennon’s message in dialogue with contemporary issues. For example, one of their ads appeared in the December 21, 1969, issue of the NewYorkTimes in close proximity to the Letters to the Editor section, which was filled with reactions to antiwar protests and the Vietnam War atrocities that had just come to light.2 Ono had used advertising as an artistic medium since the mid-1960s, and her partnership with Lennon helped her realize a longstanding ambition to bring activism to an even broader internat ional public. To this day, Ono continues to promote world peace by placing messages— “WAR IS OVER!,” “IMAGINE PEACE,” and others—on billboards and in advertisements.

1969–1971

1. Kevin Concannon, “War is Over! John and Yoko’s Christmas Eve Happening, Tokyo, 1969,” Review of Japanese Cult ure and Society 17 (December 2005): 74. 2. The M ỹ Lai Massacre became public knowledge in November 1969. Lennon and Ono later used a notorious image, showing bodies strewn on the ground, for the cover of the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band single “Now or Never” (1972).

202

87. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. WAR IS OVER! 1969. Offset, 29 15 ⁄ 16 x 20" (76 x 50.8 cm)

203

WAR IS OVER!

90. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. 88. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. WAR IS OVER! 1969. Billboard installed in Times Square, New York.

DER KRIEG IST AUS! (WAR IS OVER! ). 1969. Posters installed in Berlin.

Photograph: Erich Thomas

Photograph: Peter Moore

89. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. É FINITA LA GUERRA! (WAR IS OVER!). 1969. Billboard installed

in Rome. Photograph: unknown

91. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. LA GUERRE EST FINIE! (WAR IS OVER! ). 1969. Posters instal led on the Avenue des Champs-Elys ées, Paris. Photograph: Agence France Presse

1969–1971

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WAR IS OVER!

90. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. 88. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. WAR IS OVER! 1969. Billboard installed in Times Square, New York. Photograph: Peter Moore

DER KRIEG IST AUS! (WAR IS OVER! ). 1969. Posters installed in Berlin.

89. Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

91. Yoko Ono and John Lennon. LA GUERRE EST FINIE! (WAR IS OVER! ). 1969. Posters instal led on the Avenue des Champs-Elys ées, Paris. Photograph: Agence France Presse

Photograph: Erich Thomas

É FINITA LA GUERRA! (WAR IS OVER!). 1969. Billboard installed

in Rome. Photograph: unknown

1969–1971

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FLY

FLY 1970

Yoko Ono’s 1970 film Fly opens with a shot of a blurry form accompanied by a soft human sound, something between sighing and singing. A fly comes into focus, walking across the undulating surfaces of a nude female body.1 Ono’s voice, meandering, staccato, and mesmerizing, like the buzzing of the insect, serves as the soundtrack. Close-up sequences show what appears to be the same fly as it navigates various areas of the woman’s body. As the vocal accompaniment becomes more chordal and is joined by abstract instrumentals, the camera zooms out, providing an expanded view of t he woman—now seen to be lying on a bed and in fact dotted with flies. Finally, the camera pans upward to the room’s window and the dusky cityscape outside. The film grew out of Ono’s 1968 film score Fly , which reads, “Let a fly walk on a woman’s body from toe to head and fly out of the window,” 2 suggesting conditions of both entrapment and liberation. Ono has described the film in feminist terms, relating it to self-sacrifice as a strategy for survival: “When the camera moves back a little and shows the whole body then you really don’t know whether the body is a dead body or a live body in a way. But a live body which is almost si mulating a dead body is what a woman has to go through. This whole idea of a male societ y was based on the fact that women shut up . . . but s hutting up is death in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.” 3

The film’s multilayered soundtrack, made in a New York hotel room around Christmas 1970, consists of recordings of Ono’s vocalizations spliced together with John Lennon’s guitar instrumentals responding to those vocalizations.4 The following year, Ono released an album titled Fly (pl. 84), including the audio recording from the film as the last track. Ono had frequently explored the concept of flies and flight since the early 1960s, conjuring feelings of freedom, fear, and revulsion.5 In 1971, flies were central protagonists in her conceptual Museum Of Modern (F)art project (pp. 208–13). In the accompanying catalogue, readers were asked to track the path of fli es across New York City—an act simi lar to that of tracing the inse cts over the surface of the woman’s body in Fly .

1. The actress is Virginia Lust. 2. The Fly score came from a numbered series of scores—some to be realized by Ono, some to be carried out by others, and others that could not realistically be carried out at all. See “Thirteen Film Scores London, 1968,” reprinted in Scott MacDonald, ed., Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, Los Angeles,

and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 21–30. 3. Yoko Ono, telephone interview by Kevin Concannon, September 4, 1996, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Sometimes a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Yoko Ono’s Art as a Verb,” in Fly (Richmond:VirginiaCommonwealth University, 1996), p. 13.

4. Ono described the procedure in detail in Yoko Ono, “Yoko On Fly,” Crawdaddy , December 5, 1971: 14–15. 5. In 1963, Ono’s Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit (pl. 41) included an insert with Instructions for Poem No. 86, which read simply, “Fly.” The fol-

lowing year Ono mailed a postcard inviting people to “come prepared to fly” at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. Visitors were encouraged to interpret the instruction freely, and many jumped from a ladder in the gallery. Ono was not present.

92. Fly . 1970. 16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 25 min.

1969–1971

204

205

FLY

FLY 1970

Yoko Ono’s 1970 film Fly opens with a shot of a blurry form accompanied by a soft human sound, something between sighing and singing. A fly comes into focus, walking across the undulating surfaces of a nude female body.1 Ono’s voice, meandering, staccato, and mesmerizing, like the buzzing of the insect, serves as the soundtrack. Close-up sequences show what appears to be the same fly as it navigates various areas of the woman’s body. As the vocal accompaniment becomes more chordal and is joined by abstract instrumentals, the camera zooms out, providing an expanded view of t he woman—now seen to be lying on a bed and in fact dotted with flies. Finally, the camera pans upward to the room’s window and the dusky cityscape outside. The film grew out of Ono’s 1968 film score Fly , which reads, “Let a fly walk on a woman’s body from toe to head and fly out of the window,” 2 suggesting conditions of both entrapment and liberation. Ono has described the film in feminist terms, relating it to self-sacrifice as a strategy for survival: “When the camera moves back a little and shows the whole body then you really don’t know whether the body is a dead body or a live body in a way. But a live body which is almost si mulating a dead body is what a woman has to go through. This whole idea of a male societ y was based on the fact that women shut up . . . but s hutting up is death in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.” 3

The film’s multilayered soundtrack, made in a New York hotel room around Christmas 1970, consists of recordings of Ono’s vocalizations spliced together with John Lennon’s guitar instrumentals responding to those vocalizations.4 The following year, Ono released an album titled Fly (pl. 84), including the audio recording from the film as the last track. Ono had frequently explored the concept of flies and flight since the early 1960s, conjuring feelings of freedom, fear, and revulsion.5 In 1971, flies were central protagonists in her conceptual Museum Of Modern (F)art project (pp. 208–13). In the accompanying catalogue, readers were asked to track the path of fli es across New York City—an act simi lar to that of tracing the inse cts over the surface of the woman’s body in Fly .

1. The actress is Virginia Lust. 2. The Fly score came from a numbered series of scores—some to be realized by Ono, some to be carried out by others, and others that could not realistically be carried out at all. See “Thirteen Film Scores London, 1968,” reprinted in Scott MacDonald, ed., Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, Los Angeles,

and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 21–30. 3. Yoko Ono, telephone interview by Kevin Concannon, September 4, 1996, quoted in Kevin Concannon, “Sometimes a Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Yoko Ono’s Art as a Verb,” in Fly (Richmond:VirginiaCommonwealth University, 1996), p. 13.

4. Ono described the procedure in detail in Yoko Ono, “Yoko On Fly,” Crawdaddy , December 5, 1971: 14–15. 5. In 1963, Ono’s Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit (pl. 41) included an insert with Instructions for Poem No. 86, which read simply, “Fly.” The fol-

lowing year Ono mailed a postcard inviting people to “come prepared to fly” at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo. Visitors were encouraged to interpret the instruction freely, and many jumped from a ladder in the gallery. Ono was not present.

1969–1971

93 and 94. Fly . 1970. 16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 25 min.

206

92. Fly . 1970. 16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 25 min.

207

FLY

1969–1971

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FLY

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MUSEUM OF MODERN (F)ART

93 and 94. Fly . 1970. 16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 25 min.

1969–1971

MUSEUM OF MODERN (F)ART 1971

On November 25 and December 2, 1971, an advertisement appeared in The Village Voice announcing the “Yoko Ono—one woman show” (p. 23, fig. 3). 1 The ad featured an image taken in front of The Museum of Modern Art and manipulated by Ono. Carrying a white shopping bag with a large letter “F” on it, the artist appears on the sidewalk under Museum signage— which she had inserted into the image—just at a break in the name, irreverently relabeling the insti tution the “Museum Of Modern ( F)art.”

The exhibition was advertised as running from December 1 to 15, 1971. However, when visitors came to the Museum, the only evidence of Ono’s show was a sandwich board worn by a man walking outside of the entrance, and the Village Voice ad taped to the ticket window by Museum staff, now inscribed with a handwritten message, “THIS IS NOT HERE” (p. 26, fig. 6).2 The sandwich board contained text that described the exhibition. In the Museum’s sculpture garden, Ono had supposedly placed a glass jar equal in volume to that of her body and filled with flies scented with the perfume she wore, Ma Griffe. Noting that the jar had been opened, the text invited visitors to join Ono in tracking the insects as they dispersed across the city. A short film, titled The Museum of Modern Art Show , documented the public’s response.While some were incredulous, others were moved by the absence of a concrete exhibition, including a man who reflected, “The entire world in general can be a show.” The Village Voice advertisement also included a mail-order form that readers could send in with one dollar to receive an exhibition catalogue. The square white book features a sequence of photographs (taken by Iain Macmillan and Ono) with arrows purportedly pointing to the flies as they carried out their migration: first through the Museum’s galleries, then through the streets just outside, and finally across Manhattan and some of the boroughs. It also includes interactive elements and original texts. Since the early 1960s, Ono had questioned the conventions of traditional art venues like The Museum of Modern Art, proposing new exhibition platforms— from her Chambers Street loft (pp. 48– 53) and her artist’s book Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) to her DIY dance festivals (pp. 136–37) and advertising pages. In her “one-woman show,” Ono, like the surrogate fli es, was at once everywhere and nowhere, existing only in the imaginations of visitors.

1. An advertisement for the show also appeared in the New York Times on November 27, 1971. 2. This message was perhaps a witty allusion to Ono’s October 1971 exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, N.Y., titled This Is Not Here.

95. Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971. Exhibition catalogue, offset, 11 13 ⁄ 16 x 11 13 ⁄ 16 x 3 ⁄ 8" (30 x 30 x 1 cm). Publisher: the artist, New York

1969–1971

208

209


MUSEUM OF MODERN (F)ART 1971

On November 25 and December 2, 1971, an advertisement appeared in The Village Voice announcing the “Yoko Ono—one woman show” (p. 23, fig. 3). 1 The ad featured an image taken in front of The Museum of Modern Art and manipulated by Ono. Carrying a white shopping bag with a large letter “F” on it, the artist appears on the sidewalk under Museum signage— which she had inserted into the image—just at a break in the name, irreverently relabeling the insti tution the “Museum Of Modern ( F)art.”

The exhibition was advertised as running from December 1 to 15, 1971. However, when visitors came to the Museum, the only evidence of Ono’s show was a sandwich board worn by a man walking outside of the entrance, and the Village Voice ad taped to the ticket window by Museum staff, now inscribed with a handwritten message, “THIS IS NOT HERE” (p. 26, fig. 6).2 The sandwich board contained text that described the exhibition. In the Museum’s sculpture garden, Ono had supposedly placed a glass jar equal in volume to that of her body and filled with flies scented with the perfume she wore, Ma Griffe. Noting that the jar had been opened, the text invited visitors to join Ono in tracking the insects as they dispersed across the city. A short film, titled The Museum of Modern Art Show , documented the public’s response.While some were incredulous, others were moved by the absence of a concrete exhibition, including a man who reflected, “The entire world in general can be a show.” The Village Voice advertisement also included a mail-order form that readers could send in with one dollar to receive an exhibition catalogue. The square white book features a sequence of photographs (taken by Iain Macmillan and Ono) with arrows purportedly pointing to the flies as they carried out their migration: first through the Museum’s galleries, then through the streets just outside, and finally across Manhattan and some of the boroughs. It also includes interactive elements and original texts. Since the early 1960s, Ono had questioned the conventions of traditional art venues like The Museum of Modern Art, proposing new exhibition platforms— from her Chambers Street loft (pp. 48– 53) and her artist’s book Grapefruit (pp. 100–105) to her DIY dance festivals (pp. 136–37) and advertising pages. In her “one-woman show,” Ono, like the surrogate fli es, was at once everywhere and nowhere, existing only in the imaginations of visitors.

1. An advertisement for the show also appeared in the New York Times on November 27, 1971. 2. This message was perhaps a witty allusion to Ono’s October 1971 exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, N.Y., titled This Is Not Here.

1969–1971

96. Spread from Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971. Offset, 11 13 ⁄ 16 x 23 5 ⁄ 8" (30 x 60 cm)

210

95. Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971. Exhibition catalogue, offset, 11 13 ⁄ 16 x 11 13 ⁄ 16 x 3 ⁄ 8" (30 x 30 x 1 cm). Publisher: the artist, New York

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1969–1971


1969–1971

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YOKO'S VOICE


1969�1971

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD AND THE ARTIST?

Many people believe that in this age, art is dead. They despise the artists who show in galleries and are caught up in the traditional art world. Artists themselves are beginning to lose their confidence. They don’t know whether they are doing something that still has value in this day and age where the social problems are so vital and critical. I wondered myself about this. Why am I still an artist? And why a m I not joining the violent revolutionaries? Then I realized that destruction is not my game. Violent revolutionaries are trying to destroy the establishment. That is good. But how? By killing? Killing is such an artless thing. All you need is a coke bottle in your hand and you can kill. But people who kill that way most often become the next establishment after they’ve killed the old. Because they are using the same method that the old establishment used to destroy. Violent revolutionaries’ thinking is very close to establishment-type thinking and ways of solving problems. I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back. For instance, they cannot stamp out John and Yoko events Two Virgins, Bed Peace, Acorn Peace, and War is Over Poster event. Artists are not here to destroy or to create. Creating is just as simple and artless a thing to do as destroying. Everyone on earth has creativity. Even a housewife can create a baby. Children are just as creative as the people whom society considers artists. Creative artists are just good enough to be considered children. Artists must not create more objects, the world is full of everything it needs. I‘m bored with artists who make big lumps of sculpture and occupy a big space with them and think they have done something creative and allow people nothing but to applaud the lump. That is sheer narcissism. Why don’t they at least let people touch them? Money and space are wasted on such projects when there are people starving and people who don’t have enough space to sleep or breathe. The job of an artist is not to destroy but to change the value of things. And by doing that, artists can change the world into a Utopia where there is total freedom for everybody. That can be achieved only when there is total communication in the world. Total communication equals peace. That is our aim. That is what artists can do for the world! In order to change the value of things, you’ve got to know about life and the situation of the world. You have to be more than a child.

PLASTIC ONO BAND Yoko Ono. TO MY SISTERS, WITH LOVE (detail). 1971. Offset, 22 ��/�� x 29" (58.3 x 73.7 cm)

That is the difference between a child’s work and an artist’s work. That is the difference between an artist’s work and a murderer’s work. We are artists. Artist is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist. It doesn’t involve having a talent. It involves only having a certain frame of mind, an attitude, determination, and imagination that springs naturally out of the necessity of the situation.

1969�1971

214

215

YOKO'S VOICE

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD AND THE ARTIST?

Many people believe that in this age, art is dead. They despise the artists who show in galleries and are caught up in the traditional art world. Artists themselves are beginning to lose their confidence. They don’t know whether they are doing something that still has value in this day and age where the social problems are so vital and critical. I wondered myself about this. Why am I still an artist? And why a m I not joining the violent revolutionaries? Then I realized that destruction is not my game. Violent revolutionaries are trying to destroy the establishment. That is good. But how? By killing? Killing is such an artless thing. All you need is a coke bottle in your hand and you can kill. But people who kill that way most often become the next establishment after they’ve killed the old. Because they are using the same method that the old establishment used to destroy. Violent revolutionaries’ thinking is very close to establishment-type thinking and ways of solving problems. I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back. For instance, they cannot stamp out John and Yoko events Two Virgins, Bed Peace, Acorn Peace, and War is Over Poster event. Artists are not here to destroy or to create. Creating is just as simple and artless a thing to do as destroying. Everyone on earth has creativity. Even a housewife can create a baby. Children are just as creative as the people whom society considers artists. Creative artists are just good enough to be considered children. Artists must not create more objects, the world is full of everything it needs. I‘m bored with artists who make big lumps of sculpture and occupy a big space with them and think they have done something creative and allow people nothing but to applaud the lump. That is sheer narcissism. Why don’t they at least let people touch them? Money and space are wasted on such projects when there are people starving and people who don’t have enough space to sleep or breathe. The job of an artist is not to destroy but to change the value of things. And by doing that, artists can change the world into a Utopia where there is total freedom for everybody. That can be achieved only when there is total communication in the world. Total communication equals peace. That is our aim. That is what artists can do for the world! In order to change the value of things, you’ve got to know about life and the situation of the world. You have to be more than a child. That is the difference between a child’s work and an artist’s work. That is the difference between an artist’s work and a murderer’s work. We are artists. Artist is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist. It doesn’t involve having a talent. It involves only having a certain frame of mind, an attitude, determination, and imagination that springs naturally out of the necessity of the situation.

PLASTIC ONO BAND Yoko Ono. TO MY SISTERS, WITH LOVE (detail). 1971. Offset, 22 ��/�� x 29" (58.3 x 73.7 cm)

1969�1971

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YOKO'S VOICE

Examples of today’s living artists: There was a temple in Japan called the Golden Temple. A man loved it very much as it was, and he couldn’t stand the thought of anything happening to it. He felt the only way he could stop anything from happening to it was to burn it down, and he did. Now, the image of the temple was able to stay forever in his mind as a perfect form. There was a man who made a counterfeit one thousand yen. It circulated with no trouble at all. The man travel led to another city and circulated another counterfeit one thousand yen. If he had made lots of counterfeit money he could have been discovered right away. But he wasn’t interested in making lots of money. He wanted to have fun and play a subtle game. The police went wild and announced that if anybody found a counterfeit one thou sand yen they would get two thousand yen as a reward if they came to the police station. This man changed the value of money by his actions. In this very same sense, we have artists today whose works move beyond the gallery space and help change the world: Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, for instance, and many others. They radiate something that is sensitive and artistic in a very renaissance sense, when the majority of so-called artists these days are hardcore businessmen. Message is the medium. There are only two classes left in our society. The class who communicates and the class who doesn’t. Tomorrow I hope there will be just one. Total communication equals peace. Men can destroy/Women can create/Artists revalue. Y.O., Cannes Film Festival, May, 1971

THE FEMINIZATION OF OUR SOCIETY

The aim of the feminist movement should not just end with getting more jobs in the existing society, though we should definitely work on that as well. We have to keep on going until the whole of the female race is freed. How are we going to go about this? This society is the very society that killed female freedom: the society that was built on female slavery. If we try to achieve our freedom within the framework of the existing social set-up, men, who run the society, will continue to make a token gesture of giving us a place in their world. Some of us will succeed in moving into elitist jobs, kicking our sisters on the way up. Others will resort to producing babies, or being conned into thinking that joining male perversions and madness is what equality is about: “join the army” “join the sexist trip,” etc. The ultimate goal of female liberation is not just to escape from male oppression. How about liberating ourselves from our various mind trips such as ignorance, greed, masochism, fear of God and social conventions? It’s hard to so easily dismiss the importance of paternal influence in this society, at this time. Since we face the reality that, in this global village, there is very little choice but to coexist with men, we might as well find a way to do it and do it well. We definitely need more positive participation by men in the care of our children. But how are we going to do this? We have to demand it. James Baldwin has said of this problem, “I can’t give a performance all day in the office and come back and give a performance at home.” He’s right. How can we expect men to share the responsibility of childcare in the present social conditions where his job in the office is, to him, a mere “performance” and where he cannot relate to the role of childcare except as yet another “performance”? Contemporary men must go through major changes in their thinking before they volunteer to look after children, and before they even start to want to care. Childcare is the most important issue for the future of our generation. It is no longer a pleasure for the majority of men and women in our society, because the whole society is geared towards living up to a Hollywood-cum-Madison Avenue image of men and women, and a way of life that has nothing to do with childcare. We are in a serious identity crisis. This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed, and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and women we have created for ourselves; the image has nothing to do with the reality of people. How could we be an eternal James Bond or Twiggy (false eyelashes, the never-had-a-baby-or-a-fullmeal look) and raise three kids on the side? In such an imagedriven culture, a piece of reality, such as a child, becomes a direct threat to our false existence.

Drawing published in Museum Of Modern (F)art. 1971

The only game we play together with our children is star-chasing; sadly, not the stars in the sky, but the “STARS” who we think have achieved the standard of the dream image we have imposed on the human race. We cannot trust ourselves anymore, because we know that we are, well . . . too real. We are forever apologetic for being real. Excuse me for farting, excuse me for making love and smelling like a human being, instead of that odorless celluloid prince and princess image up there on the screen.

1969�1971

216

217

YOKO'S VOICE

Examples of today’s living artists: There was a temple in Japan called the Golden Temple. A man loved it very much as it was, and he couldn’t stand the thought of anything happening to it. He felt the only way he could stop anything from happening to it was to burn it down, and he did. Now, the image of the temple was able to stay forever in his mind as a perfect form.

THE FEMINIZATION OF OUR SOCIETY

There was a man who made a counterfeit one thousand yen. It circulated with no trouble at all. The man travel led to another city and circulated another counterfeit one thousand yen. If he had made lots of counterfeit money he could have been discovered right away. But he wasn’t interested in making lots of money. He wanted to have fun and play a subtle game. The police went wild and announced that if anybody found a counterfeit one thou sand yen they would get two thousand yen as a reward if they came to the police station. This man changed the value of money by his actions.

The aim of the feminist movement should not just end with getting more jobs in the existing society, though we should definitely work on that as well. We have to keep on going until the whole of the female race is freed. How are we going to go about this? This society is the very society that killed female freedom: the society that was built on female slavery. If we try to achieve our freedom within the framework of the existing social set-up, men, who run the society, will continue to make a token gesture of giving us a place in their world. Some of us will succeed in moving into elitist jobs, kicking our sisters on the way up. Others will resort to producing babies, or being conned into thinking that joining male perversions and madness is what equality is about: “join the army” “join the sexist trip,” etc.

In this very same sense, we have artists today whose works move beyond the gallery space and help change the world: Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, for instance, and many others. They radiate something that is sensitive and artistic in a very renaissance sense, when the majority of so-called artists these days are hardcore businessmen. Message is the medium. There are only two classes left in our society. The class who communicates and the class who doesn’t. Tomorrow I hope there will be just one. Total communication equals peace.

The ultimate goal of female liberation is not just to escape from male oppression. How about liberating ourselves from our various mind trips such as ignorance, greed, masochism, fear of God and social conventions? It’s hard to so easily dismiss the importance of paternal influence in this society, at this time. Since we face the reality that, in this global village, there is very little choice but to coexist with men, we might as well find a way to do it and do it well.

Men can destroy/Women can create/Artists revalue. Y.O., Cannes Film Festival, May, 1971

We definitely need more positive participation by men in the care of our children. But how are we going to do this? We have to demand it. James Baldwin has said of this problem, “I can’t give a performance all day in the office and come back and give a performance at home.” He’s right. How can we expect men to share the responsibility of childcare in the present social conditions where his job in the office is, to him, a mere “performance” and where he cannot relate to the role of childcare except as yet another “performance”? Contemporary men must go through major changes in their thinking before they volunteer to look after children, and before they even start to want to care. Childcare is the most important issue for the future of our generation. It is no longer a pleasure for the majority of men and women in our society, because the whole society is geared towards living up to a Hollywood-cum-Madison Avenue image of men and women, and a way of life that has nothing to do with childcare. We are in a serious identity crisis. This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed, and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and women we have created for ourselves; the image has nothing to do with the reality of people. How could we be an eternal James Bond or Twiggy (false eyelashes, the never-had-a-baby-or-a-fullmeal look) and raise three kids on the side? In such an imagedriven culture, a piece of reality, such as a child, becomes a direct threat to our false existence. The only game we play together with our children is star-chasing; sadly, not the stars in the sky, but the “STARS” who we think have achieved the standard of the dream image we have imposed on the human race. We cannot trust ourselves anymore, because we know that we are, well . . . too real. We are forever apologetic for being real. Excuse me for farting, excuse me for making love and smelling like a human being, instead of that odorless celluloid prince and princess image up there on the screen.

Drawing published in Museum Of Modern (F)art. 1971

1969�1971

Most of us, as women, hope that we can achieve our freedom within the existing social set-up, thinking that, somewhere, there must be a happy medium for men and women to share freedom and responsibility. But if we just took the time to observe the very function of our society, the greed-power-frustration syndrome, we would soon see that there is no happy medium to be achieved. We can, of course, aim to play the same game that men have played for centuries, and inch by inch, take over all the best jobs and eventually conquer the whole world, leaving an extremely bitter male stud-cum-slave class moaning and groaning underneath us. This is alright for an afternoon dream, but in reality, it would obviously be a drag. Just as the blacks have in the past, women are going through an initial stage of revolution now. We are now at a stage where we are eager to compete with men on all levels. But women will inevitably arrive at the next stage, and realize the futility of trying to be like men. Women will realize themselves as they are, and not as beings comparative to or in response to men. As a result, the feminist revolution will take a more positive step in the society by offering a feminine direction. In their past two thousand years of effort, men have shown us their failure in their method of running the world. Instead of falling into the same trap that men fell into, women can offer something that the society never had before because of male dominance. That is the feminine direction. What we can do is to take the current society, which contains both masculine and feminine characteristics, and bring out its’ feminine nature rather than its’ masculine force which is now at work. We must make more positive usage of the feminine tendencies of the society which, up to now, have been either suppressed or dismissed as something harmful, impractical, irrelevant and ultimately shameful.

I am proposing the feminization of society; the use of feminine nature as a positive force to change the world. We can change ourselves with feminine intelligence and awareness, into a basically organic, noncompetitive society that is based on love, rather than reasoning. The result will be a society of balance, peace and contentment. We can evolve rather than revolt, come together, rather than claim independence, and feel rather than think. These are characteristics that are considered feminine; characteristics that men despise in women. But have men really done so well by avoiding the development of these characteristics within themselves? Already, as I catch a glimpse of the new world, I see feminine wisdom working as a positive force. I refer to the feminine wisdom and awareness which is based on reality, intuition and empirical thinking, rather than logistics and ideologies. The entire youth generation, their idiom and their dreams, are headed in a feminine direction. A more advanced field of communication, such as telepathy, is also a phenomenon which can only be developed in a highly feminine climate. The problem is that feminine tendency in the society has never been given a chance to blossom, whereas masculine tendency overwhelms it. What we need now is the patience and natural wisdom of a pregnant woman, an awareness and acceptance of our natural resources, or what is left of them. Let’s not kid ourselves and think of ourselves as an old and matured civilization. We are by no means mature. But that is alright. That is beautiful. Let’s slow down and try to grow as organically, and healthfully as a newborn infant. The aim of the female revolution will have to be a total one, eventually making it a revolution for the whole world. As mothers of the tribe, we share the guilt of the male chauvinists, and our faces are their mirrors as well. It’s good to start now, since it’s never too late to start from the start. Yoko Ono, 1971

218

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YOKO'S VOICE

FEELING THE SPACE 1973

A man came up to me and said “May I shake hands with the hand that shook hands with John Lennon?” I said, “Well, we’ve done a lot of things in our time but we haven’t got around to doing that yet…so what are you going to do about that?” He just mumbled, sort of, and shook my hand anyway. Hey, yoke, yoki, yoyo, yoho! A is for Anger, B is for Brute, C is for Cunning, D is for Death. Actually, I’m a Lenny Bruce married to Greta Garbo, if you must know. Two people in love never shake hands. The shortest distance between two dots is a direct line. Direct line is out of order. Snow in New York City – in our heads. Central Park is still summer. The air smells wise and tender. It surrounds me without giving me any pressure – like a kind friend. It makes me feel innocent again. I was never able to get hold of my mother without touching her manicure and fur. My father had a huge desk in front of him that separated us permanently. There was always such a space around me. I would play sitting in the deep gaps between tall and fat chairs. I never liked ringing the service bell because it often made me realize that there was nobody at the other end. In the middle of the night I wake up in the dark. Is this Tokyo, London, where is it? It doesn’t seem to matter as long as it’s on this globe. Would I care if it was on the moon? Yes, I think I would be lonelier then though I don’t know why. Sometimes the moon looks closer than Tokyo. What would happen if I called my mother now. Would I hit her manicure again? The phone is glowing in the dark like an entrance to a mysterious space. Is there anything that is real I would hit if I reached into space through that wire? Shall I call my cousin? What time is it in Paris? I might wake up the woman he is with. Curse the day when I was taught to be considerate – it’s so much like death. But that was decades ago. Now there’s nobody in Paris to call. I think of this friend and that friend. I want to call them and tell them how beautiful they are, how much I love them, how much I care for them…and, that when I said this, I actually meant that. What I really wanted to say was…but I just couldn’t…and if I had…if I had…Why is calling somebody such a difficult thing to do? They say if you write your thoughts down on paper you don’t have to send it. They get the message anyway. Shall I do that? I doze off for awhile. I’m up again at dawn. I feel something strange is happening that I can’t put my finger on. At the breakfast table, I find that one of the friends I wished to call had died during the night. What if I had called and spoken to her? Would it have changed anything? Things that I wanted to tell her…they’ll never be resolved now. Never is a long time. Maybe death has resolved it all. Don’t leave me words, they haunt me. Leave me your coat to keep me warm. I like secondhand clothes because that is like wearing a person. I miss you. I’ve written twenty letters to you in my mind but never mailed them. Anyway, I don’t know your address. I don’t even know your name. And if you do exist, why should you care about me? – an electric fan.

1969�1971

218

219

Most of us, as women, hope that we can achieve our freedom within the existing social set-up, thinking that, somewhere, there must be a happy medium for men and women to share freedom and responsibility. But if we just took the time to observe the very function of our society, the greed-power-frustration syndrome, we would soon see that there is no happy medium to be achieved. We can, of course, aim to play the same game that men have played for centuries, and inch by inch, take over all the best jobs and eventually conquer the whole world, leaving an extremely bitter male stud-cum-slave class moaning and groaning underneath us. This is alright for an afternoon dream, but in reality, it would obviously be a drag.

FEELING THE SPACE 1973

A man came up to me and said “May I shake hands with the hand that shook hands with John Lennon?” I said, “Well, we’ve done a lot of things in our time but we haven’t got around to doing that yet…so what are you going to do about that?” He just mumbled, sort of, and shook my hand anyway. Hey, yoke, yoki, yoyo, yoho! A is for Anger, B is for Brute, C is for Cunning, D is for Death. Actually, I’m a Lenny Bruce married to Greta Garbo, if you must know. Two people in love never shake hands.

Just as the blacks have in the past, women are going through an initial stage of revolution now. We are now at a stage where we are eager to compete with men on all levels. But women will inevitably arrive at the next stage, and realize the futility of trying to be like men. Women will realize themselves as they are, and not as beings comparative to or in response to men. As a result, the feminist revolution will take a more positive step in the society by offering a feminine direction.

The shortest distance between two dots is a direct line. Direct line is out of order. Snow in New York City – in our heads. Central Park is still summer. The air smells wise and tender. It surrounds me without giving me any pressure – like a kind friend. It makes me feel innocent again. I was never able to get hold of my mother without touching her manicure and fur. My father had a huge desk in front of him that separated us permanently. There was always such a space around me. I would play sitting in the deep gaps between tall and fat chairs. I never liked ringing the service bell because it often made me realize that there was nobody at the other end.

In their past two thousand years of effort, men have shown us their failure in their method of running the world. Instead of falling into the same trap that men fell into, women can offer something that the society never had before because of male dominance. That is the feminine direction. What we can do is to take the current society, which contains both masculine and feminine characteristics, and bring out its’ feminine nature rather than its’ masculine force which is now at work. We must make more positive usage of the feminine tendencies of the society which, up to now, have been either suppressed or dismissed as something harmful, impractical, irrelevant and ultimately shameful.

In the middle of the night I wake up in the dark. Is this Tokyo, London, where is it? It doesn’t seem to matter as long as it’s on this globe. Would I care if it was on the moon? Yes, I think I would be lonelier then though I don’t know why. Sometimes the moon looks closer than Tokyo. What would happen if I called my mother now. Would I hit her manicure again?

I am proposing the feminization of society; the use of feminine nature as a positive force to change the world. We can change ourselves with feminine intelligence and awareness, into a basically organic, noncompetitive society that is based on love, rather than reasoning. The result will be a society of balance, peace and contentment. We can evolve rather than revolt, come together, rather than claim independence, and feel rather than think. These are characteristics that are considered feminine; characteristics that men despise in women. But have men really done so well by avoiding the development of these characteristics within themselves?

The phone is glowing in the dark like an entrance to a mysterious space. Is there anything that is real I would hit if I reached into space through that wire? Shall I call my cousin? What time is it in Paris? I might wake up the woman he is with. Curse the day when I was taught to be considerate – it’s so much like death. But that was decades ago. Now there’s nobody in Paris to call.

Already, as I catch a glimpse of the new world, I see feminine wisdom working as a positive force. I refer to the feminine wisdom and awareness which is based on reality, intuition and empirical thinking, rather than logistics and ideologies. The entire youth generation, their idiom and their dreams, are headed in a feminine direction. A more advanced field of communication, such as telepathy, is also a phenomenon which can only be developed in a highly feminine climate. The problem is that feminine tendency in the society has never been given a chance to blossom, whereas masculine tendency overwhelms it.

I think of this friend and that friend. I want to call them and tell them how beautiful they are, how much I love them, how much I care for them…and, that when I said this, I actually meant that. What I really wanted to say was…but I just couldn’t…and if I had…if I had…Why is calling somebody such a difficult thing to do? They say if you write your thoughts down on paper you don’t have to send it. They get the message anyway. Shall I do that? I doze off for awhile. I’m up again at dawn. I feel something strange is happening that I can’t put my finger on. At the breakfast table, I find that one of the friends I wished to call had died during the night. What if I had called and spoken to her? Would it have changed anything? Things that I wanted to tell her…they’ll never be resolved now. Never is a long time. Maybe death has resolved it all.

What we need now is the patience and natural wisdom of a pregnant woman, an awareness and acceptance of our natural resources, or what is left of them. Let’s not kid ourselves and think of ourselves as an old and matured civilization. We are by no means mature. But that is alright. That is beautiful. Let’s slow down and try to grow as organically, and healthfully as a newborn infant. The aim of the female revolution will have to be a total one, eventually making it a revolution for the whole world. As mothers of the tribe, we share the guilt of the male chauvinists, and our faces are their mirrors as well. It’s good to start now, since it’s never too late to start from the start.

Don’t leave me words, they haunt me. Leave me your coat to keep me warm. I like secondhand clothes because that is like wearing a person. I miss you. I’ve written twenty letters to you in my mind but never mailed them. Anyway, I don’t know your address. I don’t even know your name. And if you do exist, why should you care about me? – an electric fan.

Yoko Ono, 1971

1969�1971

YOKO'S VOICE

220

221

YOKO'S VOICE

A musician came up to me and said he was very glad to work with me, because he liked foreigners. “Foreigners?” “I mean, foreign people, specially the Oriental people.” I was going to snap back and say, “Well, I like to work with foreigners, too.” but then the whole thing suddenly hit me as being so funny, and I just said something to thank him for liking to work with foreigners. It’s hard to remember about your slanted eyes and your skin in the melting pot of a recording session, but I suppose that is the first thing that hits them when they try to communicate. “That Jap. You never know what she’s thinking.” Next time you meet a “foreigner,” remember it’s only like a window with a little different shape to it and the person who’s sitting inside is you. Anyway, in my mind I’m a singing Sylvia Plath, half her head out of the gas stove still looking for a pencil to write her last beauty. In the evening I watch the city lights from my apartment that hangs in the air, and become overwhelmed with the incredibility of it all. Behind each shining dot, there is a room, an apartment, a person or people who are all having a life show of their own. Every person’s life can be a book thicker than an encyclopedia and still you couldn’t explain all that they took to survive. I would probably not meet even 1/1000th of those people. The odds of not meeting in this life are so great that every meeting is like a miracle. It’s a wonder that we don’t make love to every single person we meet in our life. We take meetings like riding a cab. You know that you would probably never meet the driver again. Yet if the car crashed, that driver is the person you are going to die with. In fact, your life is in the driver’s hands while you’re in the car. But when you get to the destination, you give a bit of metal and slam the door behind you. When I’m on the stage, I freak out thinking about the strangeness of the gathering. In four hours or so, all the seats would be empty again. In ten years nobody would remember that these people were here, or it wouldn’t matter to anybody. In a hundred years, they would all be dead. People say that for the last five years I had been a hate object of the world. It was sort of fashionable to put me down. You don’t hurt me though, because I know you and I love you. I can take hatred, because I don’t believe that people are capable of real hate. We are too lonely for that. We vanish too quickly for that. Do you ever hate a cloud? How could anyone hate people who are on their deathbeds? That’s where we all are since the day of birth. Hate is just an awkward way of love. We spit on people when we want to kiss them. We hit them when we only want to be held. We talk about misunderstanding and hurt. But how could we hurt or misunderstand each other when we are so much alike, when we are the only people who share this world for this decade, this year, this day, under the same sky? Deep down inside, and far outside, none of us really misunderstand anything. We don’t miss a trick. We know. But we all pretend, to ourselves and to others, that we don’t. All we have to do is just admire each other and love each other 24 hours a day until we vanish. That’s what we really want to do. The rest is just foreplay to get to that. “I told ‘er she should quit workin’ now, ya naw, now that she’s married. An’ you know what that bitch said, she said ‘would you quit working if you ever got married?’ I mean, what’s gonna ‘appen to the music industry?” In my mind I’m really an eternal sphinx. Shake my hand for what it’s worth. There is a wind that never dies. y.o.n.y. aug.’ 73

“Strawberryfields Forever.” Text by Yoko Ono placed in the New York Times. August 28, 1981

1969�1971

220

221

YOKO'S VOICE

A musician came up to me and said he was very glad to work with me, because he liked foreigners. “Foreigners?” “I mean, foreign people, specially the Oriental people.” I was going to snap back and say, “Well, I like to work with foreigners, too.” but then the whole thing suddenly hit me as being so funny, and I just said something to thank him for liking to work with foreigners. It’s hard to remember about your slanted eyes and your skin in the melting pot of a recording session, but I suppose that is the first thing that hits them when they try to communicate. “That Jap. You never know what she’s thinking.” Next time you meet a “foreigner,” remember it’s only like a window with a little different shape to it and the person who’s sitting inside is you. Anyway, in my mind I’m a singing Sylvia Plath, half her head out of the gas stove still looking for a pencil to write her last beauty. In the evening I watch the city lights from my apartment that hangs in the air, and become overwhelmed with the incredibility of it all. Behind each shining dot, there is a room, an apartment, a person or people who are all having a life show of their own. Every person’s life can be a book thicker than an encyclopedia and still you couldn’t explain all that they took to survive. I would probably not meet even 1/1000th of those people. The odds of not meeting in this life are so great that every meeting is like a miracle. It’s a wonder that we don’t make love to every single person we meet in our life. We take meetings like riding a cab. You know that you would probably never meet the driver again. Yet if the car crashed, that driver is the person you are going to die with. In fact, your life is in the driver’s hands while you’re in the car. But when you get to the destination, you give a bit of metal and slam the door behind you. When I’m on the stage, I freak out thinking about the strangeness of the gathering. In four hours or so, all the seats would be empty again. In ten years nobody would remember that these people were here, or it wouldn’t matter to anybody. In a hundred years, they would all be dead. People say that for the last five years I had been a hate object of the world. It was sort of fashionable to put me down. You don’t hurt me though, because I know you and I love you. I can take hatred, because I don’t believe that people are capable of real hate. We are too lonely for that. We vanish too quickly for that. Do you ever hate a cloud? How could anyone hate people who are on their deathbeds? That’s where we all are since the day of birth. Hate is just an awkward way of love. We spit on people when we want to kiss them. We hit them when we only want to be held. We talk about misunderstanding and hurt. But how could we hurt or misunderstand each other when we are so much alike, when we are the only people who share this world for this decade, this year, this day, under the same sky? Deep down inside, and far outside, none of us really misunderstand anything. We don’t miss a trick. We know. But we all pretend, to ourselves and to others, that we don’t. All we have to do is just admire each other and love each other 24 hours a day until we vanish. That’s what we really want to do. The rest is just foreplay to get to that. “I told ‘er she should quit workin’ now, ya naw, now that she’s married. An’ you know what that bitch said, she said ‘would you quit working if you ever got married?’ I mean, what’s gonna ‘appen to the music industry?” In my mind I’m really an eternal sphinx. Shake my hand for what it’s worth. There is a wind that never dies. “Strawberryfields Forever.” Text by Yoko Ono placed in the New York Times. August 28, 1981

y.o.n.y. aug.’ 73

1969�1971

222

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UNCOVER

Let’s quickly assemble the knowledge we have. We ourselves must be peaceful to get peace. Once we follow that logic, and clear our minds of anger, hatred, fear and violence, we can see what we were doing wrong. We are being given the option of having a peaceful world or a violent one. And we keep choosing the violent world, when we actually want the other. Why? That is because in our hearts of hearts, we are more attracted to violence. Violence comes with power. We want that power without getting violence. We are attracted to the idea of achievement. We want to be able to say, we are on the road of DISCOVERY. The word DISCOVERY has a powerful tone. I am here to discover something in life. It’s a prestigious position to be in. My son discovered a planet. But actually, we are not discovering anything. We are just uncovering what is there already. Everything that is around us all has miracles inside, if you just uncover them. But uncovering does not come with prestige. You don’t get an award for uncovering things. To discover something, you may need a special skill, even some credentials. You may have to compete with a fellow man to achieve it. Uncovering can be done even by your teenage son. So you may still prefer the drama of discovering. Since there’s no glory in uncovering. We are playing the same game to get world peace. One day, I pushed a huge elephant to the water to quench its thirst. I pushed and pushed. But the elephant did not move an inch. Will I keep pushing until I die? Maybe I will get a bravery award for trying. Which do I want, an award or a peaceful world? Of course, a peaceful world. Am I sure? If it’s something we cannot ever get, shall I just keep waving the flag? World Peace is right in front of our eyes like the biggest billboard in the world. It’s still there. Forget pushing the elephant. Instead of changing the world, we should change our heads. That we can do. Our heads are on our shoulders not something that is in the horizon. Once we change our heads, we will see that the world peace will reign on us without us even lifting our fingers. We are animals with wits. In terms of power, wits are the only thing we were given. That is what we are. So when we exercise our wits, we can do anything. We use our wits instead of our energy. And the elephants, the birds and the mountains will all surround us and say “thank you for changing your heads.” I saw thousands and thousands of elephants in tears. We were too. We were just in time. It took only 7 seconds to make the change. Because it was the right change, it didn’t take long. All we had to do was to pave all highways of the planet with solar powered panels so there will be no more need for fighting for oil and gas. It will stop all wars.... and use stem cells to heal. Uncover, not discover. Small change we have to make. But it’s worth it. Yoko Ono 23 July 2014, Tokyo, Japan

DON'T STOP ME!

At my age I should be in a certain way. Please don’t stop me the way I am. I don’t want to be old and sick like many others of my age. Please don’t create another old person. So even when I am rocking on the stage, they are totally hard on me. They demand the musical standard of a classical musician and attack me for the rhythm or some of the notes which are not precisely in tune. I am not concerned with what my voice is doing. If I was, what you experience would not be. If I was concerned about it, in the way you are asking me to be, my voice would be dead. Go to a classical concert if you want to hear a “trained” voice. What I escaped from when I was very, very young. I created my own niche. If I tried to present you with classical music it wouldn’t be what I created. You don’t get it that way with Iggy for instance, a grand rocker, who is creating his own brand of Rock, just as I am. Let me be free. Let me be me! Don’t make me old, with your thinking and words about how I should be. You don’t have to come to my shows. I am giving tremendous energy with my voice, because that is me. Get my energy or shut up. A critic of my show I did on my 80th birthday. You wanted me to be coming in at the same time on the top of the bars with the tracks. Well, I like to syncopate my voice to come in before or after the music notes not right on top of the tracks, you see. That’s done in classical music, also. Remember? Yes. I don’t mind using what I learnt from classical music. Just let me be free, so music will come out as my voice in the way it wants. Otherwise, it will not be beautiful. My music has an unworldly beauty. It is a mixture of all the generations I went through on this planet: when I was born seeing the world with wonderment, when I was a wise infant, full of original ideas with not too much intimidation yet, when I was a energetic and rebellious teenager, when i was a sexy twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and now. Plus all the folk music of the world, voices of the people, never intimidated and plus some of the music coming from another planet or planets! I respect that, cherish it, and am always thankful of each note by note that comes into me and out of me. Another criticism: That my short pants in my video BAD DANCER were very short. was that bad? You are not criticizing other dancers whose pants are worn short. Do you have a separate standard for a person of my age, even in the way our outfits are cut? I am afraid of just one thing. That those ageism criticisms might finally influence me; that I would succumb to it and get old. So I am covering my ears not to listen to you guys! Because dancing in the middle of an ageism society is a lonely trip. Don’t stone me! Let me be! Love me plenty for what I am! Yoko Ono November 9th, 2014, NYC

1969�1971

222

223

YOKO'S VOICE

UNCOVER

DON'T STOP ME!

Let’s quickly assemble the knowledge we have. We ourselves must be peaceful to get peace. Once we follow that logic, and clear our minds of anger, hatred, fear and violence, we can see what we were doing wrong.

At my age I should be in a certain way. Please don’t stop me the way I am. I don’t want to be old and sick like many others of my age. Please don’t create another old person.

We are being given the option of having a peaceful world or a violent one. And we keep choosing the violent world, when we actually want the other. Why?

So even when I am rocking on the stage, they are totally hard on me. They demand the musical standard of a classical musician and attack me for the rhythm or some of the notes which are not precisely in tune. I am not concerned with what my voice is doing. If I was, what you experience would not be. If I was concerned about it, in the way you are asking me to be, my voice would be dead. Go to a classical concert if you want to hear a “trained” voice. What I escaped from when I was very, very young. I created my own niche. If I tried to present you with classical music it wouldn’t be what I created. You don’t get it that way with Iggy for instance, a grand rocker, who is creating his own brand of Rock, just as I am.

That is because in our hearts of hearts, we are more attracted to violence. Violence comes with power. We want that power without getting violence. We are attracted to the idea of achievement. We want to be able to say, we are on the road of DISCOVERY. The word DISCOVERY has a powerful tone. I am here to discover something in life. It’s a prestigious position to be in. My son discovered a planet. But actually, we are not discovering anything. We are just uncovering what is there already. Everything that is around us all has miracles inside, if you just uncover them. But uncovering does not come with prestige. You don’t get an award for uncovering things. To discover something, you may need a special skill, even some credentials. You may have to compete with a fellow man to achieve it. Uncovering can be done even by your teenage son. So you may still prefer the drama of discovering. Since there’s no glory in uncovering.

Let me be free. Let me be me! Don’t make me old, with your thinking and words about how I should be. You don’t have to come to my shows. I am giving tremendous energy with my voice, because that is me. Get my energy or shut up. A critic of my show I did on my 80th birthday. You wanted me to be coming in at the same time on the top of the bars with the tracks. Well, I like to syncopate my voice to come in before or after the music notes not right on top of the tracks, you see. That’s done in classical music, also. Remember? Yes. I don’t mind using what I learnt from classical music.

We are playing the same game to get world peace. One day, I pushed a huge elephant to the water to quench its thirst. I pushed and pushed. But the elephant did not move an inch. Will I keep pushing until I die? Maybe I will get a bravery award for trying. Which do I want, an award or a peaceful world? Of course, a peaceful world. Am I sure? If it’s something we cannot ever get, shall I just keep waving the flag?

Just let me be free, so music will come out as my voice in the way it wants. Otherwise, it will not be beautiful. My music has an unworldly beauty. It is a mixture of all the generations I went through on this planet: when I was born seeing the world with wonderment, when I was a wise infant, full of original ideas with not too much intimidation yet, when I was a energetic and rebellious teenager, when i was a sexy twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and now. Plus all the folk music of the world, voices of the people, never intimidated and plus some of the music coming from another planet or planets! I respect that, cherish it, and am always thankful of each note by note that comes into me and out of me.

World Peace is right in front of our eyes like the biggest billboard in the world. It’s still there. Forget pushing the elephant. Instead of changing the world, we should change our heads. That we can do. Our heads are on our shoulders not something that is in the horizon. Once we change our heads, we will see that the world peace will reign on us without us even lifting our fingers. We are animals with wits. In terms of power, wits are the only thing we were given. That is what we are. So when we exercise our wits, we can do anything. We use our wits instead of our energy. And the elephants, the birds and the mountains will all surround us and say “thank you for changing your heads.”

Another criticism: That my short pants in my video BAD DANCER were very short. was that bad? You are not criticizing other dancers whose pants are worn short. Do you have a separate standard for a person of my age, even in the way our outfits are cut?

I saw thousands and thousands of elephants in tears. We were too. We were just in time. It took only 7 seconds to make the change. Because it was the right change, it didn’t take long.

I am afraid of just one thing. That those ageism criticisms might finally influence me; that I would succumb to it and get old. So I am covering my ears not to listen to you guys! Because dancing in the middle of an ageism society is a lonely trip. Don’t stone me! Let me be! Love me plenty for what I am!

All we had to do was to pave all highways of the planet with solar powered panels so there will be no more need for fighting for oil and gas. It will stop all wars.... and use stem cells to heal. Uncover, not discover. Small change we have to make. But it’s worth it.

Yoko Ono November 9th, 2014, NYC

Yoko Ono 23 July 2014, Tokyo, Japan

1969� 1969 �1971

Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 11, 15.

224

225


1969� 1969 �1971

224

225


226

227


Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 11, 15.

1969�1971

Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 20.

Lawrence Alloway, Art, The Nation, November 8, 1971: 477–78.

1969�1971

226

227

Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mandelkau, and William Bloom, “Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit,” International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12–26, 1971): 20.

1969�1971

Donald Singleton, “Yoko Ono: The Princess of Pop!,”Daily News, November 22, 1971, 44 and overlay.


Lawrence Alloway, Art, The Nation, November 8, 1971: 477–78.

228

229


1969�1971

228

229


Donald Singleton, “Yoko Ono: The Princess of Pop!,”Daily News, November 22, 1971, 44 and overlay.

231

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

A number of works, such as Touch Poem for Group of People (1963; pl. 32) and Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13), will be performed with the participation of the public and are not noted on t his selected checklist. The checklist also does not include various ephemera, albums, and new realizations or interventions carried out by Yoko Ono on the occasion of the exhibition. WORKS BY YOKO ONO

Human hair, cut-and-pasted paper, and ink on paper, open 9 ⁄ x 13 ⁄ " (25 x 34.1 cm); closed 9 ⁄ x 6 ⁄ " (25 x 17.5 cm) Privatecollection 7

7

8

7

8

16

8

Instruction for Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961 (plate 12) Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi Ink on the back of an AG Gallery program announcement card, 3 ⁄ x 10 ⁄ " (8.5 x 27 cm) Privatecollection 3

5

8

8

15

16

15

(plates 17, 18) Ink on paper, unfolded 6 ⁄ x 9' 3 ⁄ " (15.9 x 284 cm); folded 6 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (15.9 x 10.8 cm) Privatecollection 1

13

4

1

1

4

16

4

1961 Burned cardboard with magazine clipping adhered to verso, 6 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (17.3 x 11.4 cm) Privatecollection 13

1

16

2

Sky Machine. 1961/1966 (plates 57, 58)

Stainless steel dispenser, stainless steel pedestal, and cards with graphite inscriptions, 51 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ " (130 x 41 x 41 cm); each card 1 x 1 ⁄ ” (2.5 x 4.5 cm). Inscription: “WORD MACHINE PIECE #1 ‘SKY MACHINE’ BY YOKO ONO 1961, REALIZED BY ANTHONY COX 1966” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 3

16

1

8

1

3

8

4

Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head . 1962 spring

Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961/1966

Painted wood panel, nails, metal chain, and painted hammer, 13 ⁄ x 10 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (34.9 x 26.6 x 11.4 cm) Private collection 3

1

4

1

(“Go on transforming a square canvas . . . ”)

2

Portrait of Mary . 1962 spring

2

Painting for a Broken Sewing Machine .1961 winter Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1961 winter

(“Look through a phone book from the . . . ”) Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961

winter (plate 31) Painting for the Buriel . 1961 summer Painting for the Wind. 1961 summer Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961

summer (plate 30) Painting to Enlarge and See . 1961 Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through.

1961 summer Painting to See the Sky . 1961

(“Send a canvas to a Mary of any country . . . ”) Painting to See the Sky . 1962

(plate 28) Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi Ink on paper, each 9 ⁄ x 14 ⁄ " (25 x 38 cm) Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit 13

15

16

16

Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young .

1962/1965 Ballpoint pen on cardstock, and transfer type and graphite on four boards, card 3 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (7.7 x 12.6 cm); sheet (“TEAR”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (8.1 x 9.1 cm); sheet (“RUB”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (7.9 x 8.3 cm); sheet (“ PEEL”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (8.4 x 9.6 cm); sheet (“TAKE OFF”) 3 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (8 x 13.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

15

16

16

3

9

16

16

1

1

8

5

1

8

1

4

3

16

4

4

summer Painting Until It Becomes Marble.

1961 summer A Plus B Painting and Smoke Painting.

(“Hammer a nail in the center of a piece . . . ”)

16

summer Painting Until It Becomes Marble. 1961


Paint, newspaper, and foil on canvas, 15 ⁄ x 15 ⁄ " (40.5 x 40.5 cm) Private collection

Instructions for Paintings. 1962 Twenty-two works corresponding to the following instructions by Yoko Ono:

Touch Poem #5. c. 1960 (plates 7, 8) 7

Add Color Painting. 1961/1966 (plate 69)

Smoke Painting. 1961 summer

(plate 29) A Plus B Painting. 1961 autumn

(“Cut out a circle on canvas A . . . ”) A Plus B Painting. 1961 autumn (“Let somebody other than yourself cut out . . . ”) Painting to See the Room. 1961 autumn Painting to Shake Hands. 1961 autumn Waterdrop Painting. 1961 autumn Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1962 spring

(“Observe three paintings carefully . . . ”) Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1962 spring

(“Imagine dividing the canvas into twenty . . . ”)

Soundtape of the Snow Falling at Dawn .

1963/1965 Audiotape, metal container, and offset, container (closed) ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (1.8 x 5 cm) Collection Jon and Joanne Hendricks 3

15

4

16

Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit . 1963 (plate 41)

Five offset sheets mailed in envelope, envelope 3 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (8.3 x 20.2 cm); sheet (“Grapefruit”) 14 ⁄ x 9 ⁄ " (36 x 25.3 cm); sheet (“No. 81”) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " 1

4

15

16

3

15

16

1

16

5

16

16

(23 x 5.9 cm); sheet (“first performed by . . . ”)

9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet (‘No. 86’) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 5.6 cm); sheet (“the price of the book . . . ”) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 6.8 cm) Private collection 1

16

5

16

1

1

16

11

16

3

16

16

Typescript for Grapefruit . 1963–64 One hundred fifty-one t ypewritten cards, some with ink additions, each 5 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (14 x 10.5 cm) Private collection 1

2

1

8

231


A number of works, such as Touch Poem for Group of People (1963; pl. 32) and Bag Piece (1964; pp. 110–13), will be performed with the participation of the public and are not noted on t his selected checklist. The checklist also does not include various ephemera, albums, and new realizations or interventions carried out by Yoko Ono on the occasion of the exhibition. WORKS BY YOKO ONO

Add Color Painting. 1961/1966 (plate 69) 15

7

7

8

7

3

1

5

1

4

Instructions for Paintings. 1962 Twenty-two works corresponding to the following instructions by Yoko Ono: Painting for a Broken Sewing Machine .1961 winter Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1961 winter

16

(“Look through a phone book from the . . . ”) Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961

winter (plate 31) Painting for the Buriel . 1961 summer Painting for the Wind. 1961 summer Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961

8

summer (plate 30)

Painting Until It Becomes Marble. 1961

Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through.

(plates 17, 18) Ink on paper, unfolded 6 ⁄ x 9' 3 ⁄ " (15.9 x 284 cm); folded 6 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (15.9 x 10.8 cm) Privatecollection 13

4

1

1

4

1961 summer

16

Painting to See the Sky . 1961

4

1961 summer Smoke Painting. 1961 summer

(plate 29)

1961 Burned cardboard with magazine clipping adhered to verso, 6 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (17.3 x 11.4 cm) Privatecollection 1

16

(“Cut out a circle on canvas A . . . ”) A Plus B Painting. 1961 autumn (“Let somebody other than yourself cut out . . . ”) Painting to See the Room. 1961 autumn Painting to Shake Hands. 1961 autumn Waterdrop Painting. 1961 autumn

Stainless steel dispenser, stainless steel pedestal, and cards with graphite inscriptions, 51 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ " (130 x 41 x 41 cm); each card 1 x 1 ⁄ ” (2.5 x 4.5 cm). Inscription: “WORD MACHINE PIECE #1 ‘SKY MACHINE’ BY YOKO ONO 1961, REALIZED BY ANTHONY COX 1966” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

16

8

1

3

8

4

Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1962 spring

(“Observe three paintings carefully . . . ”) Painting to Be Constructed In Your Head. 1962 spring

(“Imagine dividing the canvas into twenty . . . ”)

232


Grapefruit . 1964 (plate 42)

Artist’s book, offset, each page 5 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (13.8 x 13.8 cm); overall (closed) 5 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (13.8 x 13.8 x 3.2 cm). Publisher: Wunternaum Press (the artist), Tokyo. Edition: 500 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 7

7 7

16

16

7

16

16

1

4

Piece for Nam June Paik no. 1. 1964

Ink on paper, 11 x 8 ⁄ " (28 x 21.7 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 9

16

English notice for Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 33) Ink on paper, 11 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (29.5 x 21 cm) Privatecollection 5

1

8

4

Japanese notice for Morning Piece. 1964 Ink on paper, 11 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (29.5 x 21 cm) Privatecollection 5

1

8

4

Sign used in Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 35) Ink on paper, 10 x 14 ⁄ " (25.4 x 36 cm) Privatecollection 3

Future mornings: May 24,1972,until sunrise May 24,1972,all morning February 3,1987,until sunrise February 3,1987,after sunrise February 4,1987,until sunrise February 4,1987,all morning February 18,1991,until sunrise March 3,1991,until sunrise March 3,1991,after sunrise August 3,1995,until sunrise August 3,1995,all morning September 8,1995,after sunrise September 8,1995,all morning November 16,1996,after sunrise December 27,1999, until sunrise December 27,1999, after sunrise December 27,1999, all morning Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary

Privatecollection NIGHT AIR JUNE 16  1964. 1964

Glass bottle with ink-on-paper label, 6 ⁄ x ⁄ " (15.8 x 2.1 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 4

13

White Chess Set . 1966 (plate 71)

Film by David and Albert Maysles. Performance by the artist, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-andwhite, sound), 9:10 min. Private collection

Wooden table, two chairs, and chess set, all painted white, 30 ⁄ x 24 ⁄ x 24 ⁄ " (77 x 61.1 x 61.1 cm) museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien

16

Self Portrait . 1965

Envelope with graphite and stamped ink, containing metal mirror, envelope 2 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (6.2 x 10.8 cm); mirror 1 ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (4.9 x 5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 7

1

15

4

16

16

15

11

16

9

16

Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co. 1966 (plate 59)

Designed and produced by George Maciunas Offset, 22 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ " (56 x 43 cm). Publisher: Fluxus Edition The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

15

16

16

Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . 1966

Painted ladder, label, metal chain, magnifying glass, and framed ink on paper, ladder 71 ⁄ x 19 ⁄ x 47 ⁄ " (182.8 x 48.9 x 120.6 cm); framed ink on paper ⁄ x 25 ⁄ x 22 ⁄ " (2 x 64.8 x 56.4 cm) Private collection 15

3

1

4

3

16

1

1

4

2

2

16

Engraved Plexiglas pedestal and stainless steel needle, pedestal 49 ⁄ x 12 x 12" (126.5 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm); needle 3 ⁄ " (8.2 cm) Private collection 13

1

4

2

Apple. 1966 (plate 70)

Plexiglas pedestal, brass plaque, and apple, pedestal 45 x 6 ⁄ x 6 ⁄ " (114.3 x 17 x 17.6 cm) Private collection 11

16

15

16

SELECTED EPHEMERA

A Box of Smile. 1967/1971

Engraved plastic box with mirror, 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (6 x 5.4 x 5.4 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

8

8

8


Engraved wooden box with mirror, 4 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (12.2 x 12.2 x 6.4 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 13

13

1

16

16

2

Film No.5 (Smile). 1968

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 51 min. Privatecollection

Ink on paper, fifteen sheets, each 10 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (26 x 20 cm) John Cage Notations Collection, Northwestern University Library

Fly . 1970 (plates 92–94)

Mend Piece. 1966/1968

The Museum of Modern Art Show . 1971

Broken cup, tube of glue, ink on paper, and ink on collaged box, dimensions vary upon installation Collection Jon and Joanne Hendricks


1

7

4

8


Poster for Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono, AG Gallery, New York. 1961 (plate 10) Designed by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas

Offset, 8 x 10 ⁄ " (20.3 x 25.8 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 3

Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971

Camera, television, and closed-circuit wiring, dimensions vary upon installation Private collection 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, sound), 80 min. Private collection

(plates 95–97) Exhibition catalogue, offset, 11 ⁄ x 11 ⁄ x ⁄ " (30 x 30 x 1 cm). Publisher: the artist, New York The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York 13

13

16

3

16

8

WORKS BY YOKO ONO AND JOHN LENNON

Wrapping Event . 1967

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, soundtrack absent), 26 min. Private collection

1

1

4

4

Half-A-Room. 1967 (plate 79)

Domestic objects cut in half, most painted white, dimensions vary upon installation Private collection

Air Bottles. 1967 Half-A-Letter Half-A-Shoe Half-A-Painting Half-A-Jacket Half-A-Door Half-A-Cupboard Half-A-Music Half-A-Wind Half-A-Life

Glass jars with ink-on-paper labels, dimensions vary Privatecollection Bed-In. 1969

Glass Keys to Open the Skies. 1967

Four glass keys and Plexiglas box with brass hinges, box 7 ⁄ x 10 x 1 ⁄ " (19.1 x 25.4 x 3.8 cm) Private collection 1

2

1

2

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 70:56 min. Privatecollection WAR IS OVER! 1969 (plate 87)

Offset, 29 ⁄ x 20" (76 x 50.8 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 15

16

16

Photograph conceived as poster for Works by Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1961 (p. 12) Poster by Yoko Ono. Photograph by George Maciunas Gelatin silver print, 9 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (25.3 x 20.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 15

15

16

16

Program flier for Works by Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1961 (plates 19, 20) Designed by Yoko Ono and incorporating photograph by Minoru Niizuma Offset, 5 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (13.9 x 21.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.936 1

Sky TV . 1966/2015

15

16

16

Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young .

1962/1965 Ballpoint pen on cardstock, and transfer type and graphite on four boards, card 3 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (7.7 x 12.6 cm); sheet (“TEAR”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (8.1 x 9.1 cm); sheet (“RUB”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (7.9 x 8.3 cm); sheet (“ PEEL”) 3 ⁄ x 3 ⁄ " (8.4 x 9.6 cm); sheet (“TAKE OFF”) 3 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (8 x 13.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

15

16

16

3

9

16

16

1

8

5

1

8

1

4

3

16

4

4

Soundtape of the Snow Falling at Dawn .

1963/1965 Audiotape, metal container, and offset, container (closed) ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (1.8 x 5 cm) Collection Jon and Joanne Hendricks 15

4

16

Birth Announcement and Announcement for Grapefruit . 1963 (plate 41)

Five offset sheets mailed in envelope, envelope 3 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (8.3 x 20.2 cm); sheet (“Grapefruit”) 14 ⁄ x 9 ⁄ " (36 x 25.3 cm); sheet (“No. 81”) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " 1

15

4

16

3

15

16

1

16

5

16

16

(23 x 5.9 cm); sheet (“first performed by . . . ”)

9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 5.9 cm); sheet (‘No. 86’) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 5.6 cm); sheet (“the price of the book . . . ”) 9 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (23 x 6.8 cm) Private collection 1

16

5

16

1

1

16

11

3

16

16

16

Typescript for Grapefruit . 1963–64 One hundred fifty-one t ypewritten cards, some with ink additions, each 5 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (14 x 10.5 cm) Private collection 1

2

1

8

Flier for New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 Offset, 11 x 8 ⁄ " (27.9 x 21.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.936 1

2

9 Concert Pieces for John Cage. 1966

Plexiglas pedestal, silver plaque, and four silver spoons, pedestal 55 x 11 ⁄ x 11 ⁄ " (139.7 x 28.5 x 28.5 cm) Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit

1

1

2

16

Realization of the instruction Lighting Piece, 1955 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, silent), 5 min. Included in the FluxfilmAnthology compiled by George Maciunas in 1966 Private collection

16

1

16

3

Three Spoons. 1967 (plate 66)

1

11

13


Engraved sterling silver box with mirror, 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (6.8 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm) Privatecollection

1

Match Piece (or No.1). 1966

16

16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, silent), 35 sec. Included in the FluxfilmAnthology compiled by George Maciunas in 1966 Private collection

16

16

Film No.4. 1966–1967 (plate 75)

5

233 A Box of Smile. 1967

1

16

Designed and produced by George Maciunas Plastic box with twenty offset cards, box 4 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ x ⁄ " (11 x 10.3 x 1.3 cm); each card 4 x 4” (10.1 x 10.1 cm). Publisher: Fluxus Edition The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

Eyeblink . 1966

13

1

16

Forget It . 1966

Glass bottle with ink-on-paper label, 6 ⁄ x ⁄ " (16.4 x 2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 16

16

Typescript for Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . c. 1965 Thirteen typed sheets (twelve originals and one inkjet reproduction), pen additions by George Maciunas and Yoko Ono, some with cut-and-pasted paper, each approx. 8 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (22.1 x 14.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

NIGHT AIR JULY 3 NIGHT 1964. 1964 7

5

Ceiling Painting. 1966 (plate 72)

16

Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 36)

1

Cut Piece. 1964

(plate 28) Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi Ink on paper, each 9 ⁄ x 14 ⁄ " (25 x 38 cm) Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit

3

A Plus B Painting. 1961 autumn

2

Sky Machine. 1961/1966 (plates 57, 58)

3

(“Send a canvas to a Mary of any country . . . ”) Painting to See the Sky . 1962

summer Painting Until It Becomes Marble.

A Plus B Painting and Smoke Painting.

13

Portrait of Mary . 1962 spring

1

Painting to Enlarge and See . 1961

summer 1

(“Go on transforming a square canvas . . . ”)

2

2

8

8


Painted wood panel, nails, metal chain, and painted hammer, 13 ⁄ x 10 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (34.9 x 26.6 x 11.4 cm) Private collection

Instruction for Painting in Three Stanzas. 1961 (plate 12) Handwritten by Toshi Ichiyanagi Ink on the back of an AG Gallery program announcement card, 3 ⁄ x 10 ⁄ " (8.5 x 27 cm) Privatecollection 3

(“Hammer a nail in the center of a piece . . . ”)

16

Painting to Hammer a Nail . 1961/1966

Human hair, cut-and-pasted paper, and ink on paper, open 9 ⁄ x 13 ⁄ " (25 x 34.1 cm); closed 9 ⁄ x 6 ⁄ " (25 x 17.5 cm) Privatecollection 8

15

16

Touch Poem #5. c. 1960 (plates 7, 8) 7


Paint, newspaper, and foil on canvas, 15 ⁄ x 15 ⁄ " (40.5 x 40.5 cm) Private collection

1

2

2

Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono, Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo. 1962 (plate 23) Designed by Yoko Ono Offset and letterpress with beansprout, 18 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (47.6 x 11.4 cm) Keiō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo 3

1

4

2

Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono, Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo. 1962 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset and letterpress, 18 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (47.6 x 11.4 cm) Privatecollection 3

4

1

2

Poster for Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto. 1964 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 38 ⁄ x 15" (98.1 x 38.1 cm) Privatecollection 5

8

Tickets for Three Kyoto Events: Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall; Evening till Dawn, Nanzenji Temple; Symposium: !, French Cancan

Coffee House. 1964 (plate 22) Designed by Yoko Ono Four offset sheets with ink stamps, each 2 ⁄ x 9 ⁄ " (7.3 x 25.2 cm) Privatecollection 7

8

15

16

2

Program for New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 11 x 5 ⁄ " (28 x 13.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 5

16

Announcement for Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas, roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building, New York. 1965 (plate 37)

Designed by George Maciunas Offset, 8 ⁄ x 11" (21.8 x 27.9 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 9

16

Poster for DIAS Presents Two Evenings with Yoko Ono , Africa Centre, London. 1966 (plate 67) Offset, 23 ⁄ x 17 ⁄ " (59.7 x 45.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

2

15

16

Poster for showing of Film No.4, JaceyTatler, London. 1967 (plate 74) Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 13 x 8" (33 x 20.3 cm) Privatecollection Invitation to preview of Yoko Ono Half-AWind Show , Lisson Gallery, London. 1967 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 10 x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Privatecollection

232


Grapefruit . 1964 (plate 42)

Artist’s book, offset, each page 5 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (13.8 x 13.8 cm); overall (closed) 5 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (13.8 x 13.8 x 3.2 cm). Publisher: Wunternaum Press (the artist), Tokyo. Edition: 500 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 7

7 7

16

16

7

16

16

1

4

Piece for Nam June Paik no. 1. 1964

Ink on paper, 11 x 8 ⁄ " (28 x 21.7 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 9

16

English notice for Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 33) Ink on paper, 11 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (29.5 x 21 cm) Privatecollection 5

1

8

4

Japanese notice for Morning Piece. 1964 Ink on paper, 11 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (29.5 x 21 cm) Privatecollection 5

1

8

4

Sign used in Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 35) Ink on paper, 10 x 14 ⁄ " (25.4 x 36 cm) Privatecollection 3

Future mornings: May 24,1972,until sunrise May 24,1972,all morning February 3,1987,until sunrise February 3,1987,after sunrise February 4,1987,until sunrise February 4,1987,all morning February 18,1991,until sunrise March 3,1991,until sunrise March 3,1991,after sunrise August 3,1995,until sunrise August 3,1995,all morning September 8,1995,after sunrise September 8,1995,all morning November 16,1996,after sunrise December 27,1999, until sunrise December 27,1999, after sunrise December 27,1999, all morning Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary

Privatecollection NIGHT AIR JUNE 16  1964. 1964

Glass bottle with ink-on-paper label, 6 ⁄ x ⁄ " (15.8 x 2.1 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 4

13

White Chess Set . 1966 (plate 71)

Film by David and Albert Maysles. Performance by the artist, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-andwhite, sound), 9:10 min. Private collection

Wooden table, two chairs, and chess set, all painted white, 30 ⁄ x 24 ⁄ x 24 ⁄ " (77 x 61.1 x 61.1 cm) museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien

16

Self Portrait . 1965

Envelope with graphite and stamped ink, containing metal mirror, envelope 2 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (6.2 x 10.8 cm); mirror 1 ⁄ x 1 ⁄ " (4.9 x 5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 7

1

15

4

16

16

15

11

16

9

16

Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co. 1966 (plate 59)

Designed and produced by George Maciunas Offset, 22 ⁄ x 16 ⁄ " (56 x 43 cm). Publisher: Fluxus Edition The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

15

16

16

Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . 1966

Painted ladder, label, metal chain, magnifying glass, and framed ink on paper, ladder 71 ⁄ x 19 ⁄ x 47 ⁄ " (182.8 x 48.9 x 120.6 cm); framed ink on paper ⁄ x 25 ⁄ x 22 ⁄ " (2 x 64.8 x 56.4 cm) Private collection 15

3

1

4

3

16

1

1

4

2

2

16

Engraved Plexiglas pedestal and stainless steel needle, pedestal 49 ⁄ x 12 x 12" (126.5 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm); needle 3 ⁄ " (8.2 cm) Private collection 13

1

4

2

Apple. 1966 (plate 70) 16

15


Engraved plastic box with mirror, 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (6 x 5.4 x 5.4 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

8

8

8


Engraved wooden box with mirror, 4 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (12.2 x 12.2 x 6.4 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 13

13

1

16

16

2

Film No.5 (Smile). 1968

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 51 min. Privatecollection Fly . 1970 (plates 92–94)

Mend Piece. 1966/1968

The Museum of Modern Art Show . 1971

Broken cup, tube of glue, ink on paper, and ink on collaged box, dimensions vary upon installation Collection Jon and Joanne Hendricks


1

7

4

8


Museum Of Modern (F)art . 1971

Camera, television, and closed-circuit wiring, dimensions vary upon installation Private collection 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, sound), 80 min. Private collection

(plates 95–97) Exhibition catalogue, offset, 11 ⁄ x 11 ⁄ x ⁄ " (30 x 30 x 1 cm). Publisher: the artist, New York The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York 13

13

16

3

16

8

WORKS BY YOKO ONO AND JOHN LENNON

Wrapping Event . 1967

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, soundtrack absent), 26 min. Private collection

1

1

4

4

Half-A-Room. 1967 (plate 79)

Domestic objects cut in half, most painted white, dimensions vary upon installation Private collection

Air Bottles. 1967 Half-A-Letter Half-A-Shoe Half-A-Painting Half-A-Jacket Half-A-Door Half-A-Cupboard Half-A-Music Half-A-Wind Half-A-Life

Glass jars with ink-on-paper labels, dimensions vary Privatecollection Bed-In. 1969

Glass Keys to Open the Skies. 1967

16mm film transferred to DVD (color, sound), 70:56 min. Privatecollection

Four glass keys and Plexiglas box with brass hinges, box 7 ⁄ x 10 x 1 ⁄ " (19.1 x 25.4 x 3.8 cm) Private collection 1

2

1

2

15

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS AND OTHER WRITINGS BY YOKO ONO

235

Hendricks, Jon, David D. J. Rau, and Yoko Ono. Yoko Ono: Glimpse. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, 1993.

This Is Not Here: A Show of Unfinished Paintings and Sculpture. Syracuse,

SOLO EXHIBITION CATALOGUES

N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1971.

In alphabetical order

In chronological order

“Words of a Fabricator.” S AC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p.

Museum Of Modern (F)art . New York:

Six Film Scripts by Yoko Ono . Tokyo:

self-published,1964.

“To the Wesleyan People.” Insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono, Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks.

New York: Judson Gallery, 1966: n.p.

Concannon, Kevin, ed. Imagine Peace. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron, 2007. Family Album. Berlin: Stiftung Starke;

Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993. Haraldsson, Haukur, ed. IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. Reykjaví k: Iceland Post, 2008.

Yoko Ono: Spare Room . New York:

Haskell, Barbara, and John G. Hanhardt, eds. Yoko Ono: Objects, Films. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989.

Wunternaum Press; with the support of Paris: Paris Musées, 2003. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Yoko Ono—Women’s Room at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Hendricks, Jon, ed.. Conceptual Photography . Copenhagen: Fotografisk Center; Gothenburg: Konsthallen Göteborg, 1997.

“Summer of 1961.” In Jon Hendricks, with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, eds. Fluxus Scores and I nstructions:

————, ed. Yoko Ono: In Facing. London: Riverside Studios; Brighton, UK: Elwick Grover Aicken, 1990.

and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1995.

Ono’s Sales List . Self-published, 1965.

Crutchfield, Jean, ed.. Yoko Ono: Fly . Richmond, Va.: Anderson Gallery, 1996.

Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings. New York

Grapefruit . Tokyo: Wunternaum Press,

1964.

Å rbu, Grete, ed. Yoko Ono: Horizontal Memories. Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum

of Modern Art, 2005.

“The Feminization of Society.” New York Times, February 23, 1972. Unabridged version published in SunDance, April–May 1972. The version published in the present catalogue first appeared in a slightly different form as liner notes for Yoko Ono, Approximately Infinite Universe, two LPs, Apple Records SVBB 3399, 1973.

The Transformative Years: “Make a Salad” .

“Yoko Ono Talk Delivered at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London, September 1966.” Transcript published in Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, eds., Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 2014, pp. 80–81.

Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2008, pp. 38–39.

————, ed. Yoko Ono: The Bronze Age. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook

Yoko Ono: The Other Rooms. New York:

————, ed. Yoko Ono: To See the Skies. Milan: Fondazione Mudima; Milan: Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990.

Wunternaum Press; Milan: Charta, 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Anton’s Room at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Palazzetto Tito, Venice.

YOKO at INDICA. London: Indica Gallery,

1966. “Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show.” In Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show . London: Lisson Gallery, 1967, pp. 1–2.

Yoko Ono: An Invisible Flower . Introduction

by Sean Lennon. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2012. Japanese edition, Tokyo: Chimera Library, 2011. Acorn. New York: OR Books, 2013.

Academy of Art Museum, 1989.

Hendricks, Jon, and Marianne Bech, eds. Yoko Ono: Color,Fly,Sky . Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 1992. Hendricks, Jon, and Ina Blom, eds. Yoko Ono: Insound/Instructure. Høvikodden, Norway: Sonia Henie and Niels Onstad Foundation, 1990.

Thirteen Film Scores by Yoko Ono . London:


INFINITE UNIVERSE AT DAWN. Surrey,

UK: Genesis Publications, 2014. “On Paper.” In Anthony Barnett, ed., Nothing Doing in London Two. London: Curwen Press, 1968, n.p.

3

16

Photograph conceived as poster for Works by Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1961 (p. 12) Poster by Yoko Ono. Photograph by George Maciunas Gelatin silver print, 9 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (25.3 x 20.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 15

15

16

16

Program flier for Works by Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1961 (plates 19, 20) Designed by Yoko Ono and incorporating photograph by Minoru Niizuma Offset, 5 ⁄ x 8 ⁄ " (13.9 x 21.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.936 1

2

2

Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono, Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo. 1962 (plate 23) Designed by Yoko Ono Offset and letterpress with beansprout, 18 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (47.6 x 11.4 cm) Keiō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo 3

1

4

2

Invitation to Works of Yoko Ono, Sōgetsu Art Center, Tokyo. 1962 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset and letterpress, 18 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ " (47.6 x 11.4 cm) Privatecollection 3

4

1

Program for New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 11 x 5 ⁄ " (28 x 13.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 5

16

Announcement for Morning Piece (1964) to George Maciunas, roof of Yoko Ono’s apartment building, New York. 1965 (plate 37)

Designed by George Maciunas Offset, 8 ⁄ x 11" (21.8 x 27.9 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 9

16

Poster for DIAS Presents Two Evenings with Yoko Ono , Africa Centre, London. 1966 (plate 67) Offset, 23 ⁄ x 17 ⁄ " (59.7 x 45.5 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 1

2

15

16

Poster for showing of Film No.4, JaceyTatler, London. 1967 (plate 74) Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 13 x 8" (33 x 20.3 cm) Privatecollection Invitation to preview of Yoko Ono Half-AWind Show , Lisson Gallery, London. 1967 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 10 x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Privatecollection

2

Poster for Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto. 1964 Designed by Yoko Ono Offset, 38 ⁄ x 15" (98.1 x 38.1 cm) Privatecollection 5

8

Tickets for Three Kyoto Events: Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, Yamaichi Hall; Evening till Dawn, Nanzenji Temple; Symposium: !, French Cancan

Coffee House. 1964 (plate 22) Designed by Yoko Ono Four offset sheets with ink stamps, each 2 ⁄ x 9 ⁄ " (7.3 x 25.2 cm) Privatecollection 7

8

15

16

16

Hendricks, Jon, and Pablo J. Rico, eds. Yoko Ono: En Trance—Ex It . Valencia, Spain: Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana, 1997.

self-published, 1971.

Offset, 8 x 10 ⁄ " (20.3 x 25.8 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

Offset, 29 ⁄ x 20" (76 x 50.8 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

Hendricks, Jon, and Birgit Hessellund, eds. Yoko Ono: En Trance. Randers, Denmark: Randers Kunstmuseum, 1990.

“What Is the Relationship between the World and the Artist?” In This Is Not Here (see previous entry).

Designed by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas

2

WAR IS OVER! 1969 (plate 87)

16

234

This bibliography represents a selection of texts and publications that we consulted while researching Yoko Ono’s work. For a comprehensive bibliography, including the many articles by and interviews with the artist, see Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks’s book Yes Yoko Ono (full details below), which also contains reprints of a number of Ono’s self-published works.

Poster for Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono, AG Gallery, New York. 1961 (plate 10)

1

Sky TV . 1966/2015

Flier for New Works of Yoko Ono , Carnegie Recital Hall, New York. 1965 Offset, 11 x 8 ⁄ " (27.9 x 21.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.936 1

2

Ink on paper, fifteen sheets, each 10 ⁄ x 7 ⁄ " (26 x 20 cm) John Cage Notations Collection, Northwestern University Library

Plexiglas pedestal, brass plaque, and apple, pedestal 45 x 6 ⁄ x 6 ⁄ " (114.3 x 17 x 17.6 cm) Private collection 11

1

2

9 Concert Pieces for John Cage. 1966

Plexiglas pedestal, silver plaque, and four silver spoons, pedestal 55 x 11 ⁄ x 11 ⁄ " (139.7 x 28.5 x 28.5 cm) Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit

1

1

16

16

Realization of the instruction Lighting Piece, 1955 16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, silent), 5 min. Included in the FluxfilmAnthology compiled by George Maciunas in 1966 Private collection

16

11

3

Three Spoons. 1967 (plate 66)

1

SELECTED EPHEMERA

Engraved sterling silver box with mirror, 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ x 2 ⁄ " (6.8 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm) Privatecollection

1

Match Piece (or No.1). 1966

16

16mm film transferred to DVD (black-and-white, silent), 35 sec. Included in the FluxfilmAnthology compiled by George Maciunas in 1966 Private collection

16

16

Film No.4. 1966–1967 (plate 75)

5


A Box of Smile. 1967 1

16

Designed and produced by George Maciunas Plastic box with twenty offset cards, box 4 ⁄ x 4 ⁄ x ⁄ " (11 x 10.3 x 1.3 cm); each card 4 x 4” (10.1 x 10.1 cm). Publisher: Fluxus Edition The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

Eyeblink . 1966

13

1

16

Forget It . 1966

Glass bottle with ink-on-paper label, 6 ⁄ x ⁄ " (16.4 x 2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 16

16

Typescript for Do It Yourself Fluxfest Presents Yoko Ono & Dance Co . c. 1965 Thirteen typed sheets (twelve originals and one inkjet reproduction), pen additions by George Maciunas and Yoko Ono, some with cut-and-pasted paper, each approx. 8 ⁄ x 5 ⁄ " (22.1 x 14.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

NIGHT AIR JULY 3 NIGHT 1964. 1964 7

5

Ceiling Painting. 1966 (plate 72)

16

Morning Piece. 1964 (plate 36)

1

Cut Piece. 1964

233

Hendricks, Jon, and Sam Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: 3 Rooms. Trento, Italy: Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea; Milan: Skira Editore, 1995.

Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Pilar Baos, eds. Sphere—9 . Palma: Fundació Pilar i Joan Mir ó a Mallorca, 1995. Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Samuel Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: Ebro . Zaragoza, Spain: Diputación de Zaragoza, 2000. Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Samuel Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: Tajo. Mérida, Spain: Consejer í a de Cultura de la Junta de Extremadura, 2000; Cáceres, Spain: Museum Vostell Malpartida. Herzogenrath, Wulf, and Frank Lauk ötter, eds. Yoko Ono: Gem ä lde/Paintings 1960–1964 . Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen; Bremen: Hachmann Edition, 2007.

SELECTEDBIBLIOGRAPHY

Rattee, Kathryn, Melissa Larner, and Rebecca Lewin, eds. Yoko Ono: To the Light . London: Serpentine Gallery; London: Koenig Books, 2012.

Robinson, Julia, and Christian Xatrec, eds. ± I96I: Founding the Expanded Arts. Madrid: Museum Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2013.

Starke, Jörg. Yoko Ono: Endangered Species 2319–2322. Berlin: Stiftung Starke, 1992.

Shiner, Eric C., and Reiko Tomii, eds. Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York . New York: Japan Society, 2008.

Yoko Ono: The Yoko Ono Film Festival Smile Event . Rome: Studio Stefania

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Miscetti; Rome: 2RC Edizioni d’Arte, 1996. Yoko Ono: Touch Me. New York: Galerie

Bari, Martha Ann. Mass Media Is the

Lelong; Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2008.

Message: Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1969 Year of Peace. PhD diss., College

Park: University of Maryland, 2007. GROUP EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Armstrong, Elizabeth, and Joan Rothfuss, eds. In the Spirit of Fluxus. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993. Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,1950s–1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. Chong, Doryun, ed. Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.

Iles, Chrissie. Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997. Kellein, Thomas, ed. Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K önig, 2008. Kent, Rachel, ed. Yoko Ono: War Is Over! (If you want it): Yoko Ono. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2013.

Hendricks, Jon, ed. What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why . Brasí lia: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Detroit, Mich.: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, 2002. Judson Gallery PresentsThe Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks. New York: Judson Gallery, 1966.

Kvaran, Gunnar, ed. Yoko Ono: Impressions. Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunstmuseum, 1999.

Merewether, Charles, with Rika Iezumi Hiro, eds. Art,Anti-Art, Non-Art:

Munroe, Alexandra, and Jon Hendricks, eds. Yes Yoko Ono. New York: Japan Society; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Getty Research Institute, 2007.

Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan,1950–1970. Los Angeles:

Michalka, Matthias, ed. Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987.

Ono, Yoko. Fumie. Tokyo: Sōgetsukai, 1990. ————. Light . Tokyo: Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2013. ————. Yoko Ono: A Piece of Sky . Rome: Galleria Stefania Miscetti, 1993. Panicelli, Ida. Yoko Ono: Lighting Piece. Rome: Studio Stefania Miscetti, 1994.

Vienna: MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2010. Oliva, Achille Bonito, ed. Ubi Fluxus ibi motus: 1990–1962. Venice: Ex Granai della Repubblica alle Zitelle;Venice: Fondazione Mudima; Venice: Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990.

Pfeiffer, Ingrid, and Max Hollein, eds.

af Petersens, Magnus, ed. Explosion! Painting as Action. Stockholm: Moderna Museet; London: Koenig Books, 2012.

Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show—A Retrospective. Frankfurt am Main: Schirn

Phillpot, Clive, and Jon Hendricks.

Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013.

Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection . New York:

The Museum of Modern Art, 1988.

Beram, Nell, and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky. Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies. New York: Amulet Books, 2013. Boriss-Krimsky, Carolyn. “Yoko Ono: Art of the Mind.” Art New England 22, no. 6 (October–November 2001): 26–28, 83. Bracewell, Michael. “Rising Sun: An Interview with Yoko Ono.” Frieze, no. 64 (January–February 2002): 68–71. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Remembering Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece.’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 101–23. Concannon, Kevin. “Not for Sale: Yoko Ono’s Discounted Advertising Art.” Athanor 17 (1999): 77–85. ————. “War I s Ove r! Jo hn and Yoko’s Christmas Eve Happening, Tokyo, 1969.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society

17 (December 2005): 72–85. Cott, Jonathan. Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

————. “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice.” Rolling Stone, no. 78 (March 18, 1971), pp. 24–26. Danto, Arthur C. “Yoko Ono.” In Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, pp. 69–76. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. “Self-Stylization and Performativity in the Work of Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and Mariko Mori.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27, no. 4 (2010): 267–75. Frank, Whitney. “Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art.” Intersections 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 571–607. Haskell, Barbara, and John Hanhardt. Yoko Ono,Arias and Objects. Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991.

234

235 Hendricks, Jon, and Birgit Hessellund, eds. Yoko Ono: En Trance. Randers, Denmark: Randers Kunstmuseum, 1990.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hendricks, Jon, David D. J. Rau, and Yoko Ono. Yoko Ono: Glimpse. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, 1993. Hendricks, Jon, and Pablo J. Rico, eds. Yoko Ono: En Trance—Ex It . Valencia, Spain: Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana, 1997.

This bibliography represents a selection of texts and publications that we consulted while researching Yoko Ono’s work. For a comprehensive bibliography, including the many articles by and interviews with the artist, see Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks’s book Yes Yoko Ono (full details below), which also contains reprints of a number of Ono’s self-published works.

This Is Not Here: A Show of Unfinished Paintings and Sculpture. Syracuse,

SOLO EXHIBITION CATALOGUES

N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1971.

In alphabetical order

“What Is the Relationship between the World and the Artist?” In This Is Not Here (see previous entry).

In chronological order

“Words of a Fabricator.” S AC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p.

Museum Of Modern (F)art . New York:

“The Feminization of Society.” New York Times, February 23, 1972. Unabridged version published in SunDance, April–May 1972. The version published in the present catalogue first appeared in a slightly different form as liner notes for Yoko Ono, Approximately Infinite Universe, two LPs, Apple Records SVBB 3399, 1973.

Six Film Scripts by Yoko Ono . Tokyo:


“To the Wesleyan People.” Insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason, Eye Bags by Yoko Ono, Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks.

New York: Judson Gallery, 1966: n.p.

Concannon, Kevin, ed. Imagine Peace. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron, 2007. Family Album. Berlin: Stiftung Starke;

Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993. Haraldsson, Haukur, ed. IMAGINE PEACE TOWER. Reykjaví k: Iceland Post, 2008.

Yoko Ono: Spare Room . New York:

Haskell, Barbara, and John G. Hanhardt, eds. Yoko Ono: Objects, Films. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989.

Wunternaum Press; with the support of Paris: Paris Musées, 2003. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Yoko Ono—Women’s Room at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Hendricks, Jon, ed.. Conceptual Photography . Copenhagen: Fotografisk Center; Gothenburg: Konsthallen Göteborg, 1997.

“Summer of 1961.” In Jon Hendricks, with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, eds. Fluxus Scores and I nstructions:

————, ed. Yoko Ono: In Facing. London: Riverside Studios; Brighton, UK: Elwick Grover Aicken, 1990.

and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1995.

Ono’s Sales List . Self-published, 1965.

Crutchfield, Jean, ed.. Yoko Ono: Fly . Richmond, Va.: Anderson Gallery, 1996.

Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings. New York

Grapefruit . Tokyo: Wunternaum Press,

1964.

Å rbu, Grete, ed. Yoko Ono: Horizontal Memories. Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum

of Modern Art, 2005. self-published, 1971.

BOOKS AND OTHER WRITINGS BY YOKO ONO

Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Pilar Baos, eds. Sphere—9 . Palma: Fundació Pilar i Joan Mir ó a Mallorca, 1995.

The Transformative Years: “Make a Salad” .

“Yoko Ono Talk Delivered at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London, September 1966.” Transcript published in Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, eds., Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 2014, pp. 80–81.

Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2008, pp. 38–39.

————, ed. Yoko Ono: The Bronze Age. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook

Yoko Ono: The Other Rooms. New York:

————, ed. Yoko Ono: To See the Skies. Milan: Fondazione Mudima; Milan: Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990.

Wunternaum Press; Milan: Charta, 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Anton’s Room at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Palazzetto Tito, Venice.

YOKO at INDICA. London: Indica Gallery,

1966. “Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show.” In Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show . London: Lisson Gallery, 1967, pp. 1–2.

Yoko Ono: An Invisible Flower . Introduction

by Sean Lennon. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2012. Japanese edition, Tokyo: Chimera Library, 2011. Acorn. New York: OR Books, 2013.

Academy of Art Museum, 1989.

Hendricks, Jon, and Marianne Bech, eds. Yoko Ono: Color,Fly,Sky . Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 1992.

INFINITE UNIVERSE AT DAWN. Surrey,

UK: Genesis Publications, 2014. “On Paper.” In Anthony Barnett, ed., Nothing Doing in London Two. London: Curwen Press, 1968, n.p.

Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Samuel Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: Tajo. Mérida, Spain: Consejer í a de Cultura de la Junta de Extremadura, 2000; Cáceres, Spain: Museum Vostell Malpartida. Herzogenrath, Wulf, and Frank Lauk ötter, eds. Yoko Ono: Gem ä lde/Paintings 1960–1964 . Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen; Bremen: Hachmann Edition, 2007. Iles, Chrissie. Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997. Kellein, Thomas, ed. Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K önig, 2008. Kent, Rachel, ed. Yoko Ono: War Is Over! (If you want it): Yoko Ono. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2013.

Robinson, Julia, and Christian Xatrec, eds. ± I96I: Founding the Expanded Arts. Madrid: Museum Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2013.

Starke, Jörg. Yoko Ono: Endangered Species 2319–2322. Berlin: Stiftung Starke, 1992.

Shiner, Eric C., and Reiko Tomii, eds. Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York . New York: Japan Society, 2008.

Yoko Ono: The Yoko Ono Film Festival Smile Event . Rome: Studio Stefania

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Miscetti; Rome: 2RC Edizioni d’Arte, 1996. Yoko Ono: Touch Me. New York: Galerie

Bari, Martha Ann. Mass Media Is the

Lelong; Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2008.

Message: Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1969 Year of Peace. PhD diss., College

Park: University of Maryland, 2007. GROUP EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Armstrong, Elizabeth, and Joan Rothfuss, eds. In the Spirit of Fluxus. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993. Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,1950s–1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. Chong, Doryun, ed. Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Hendricks, Jon, ed. What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why . Brasí lia: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Detroit, Mich.: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, 2002. Judson Gallery PresentsThe Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono,Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks. New York: Judson Gallery, 1966.

Kvaran, Gunnar, ed. Yoko Ono: Impressions. Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunstmuseum, 1999.

Merewether, Charles, with Rika Iezumi Hiro, eds. Art,Anti-Art, Non-Art:

Munroe, Alexandra, and Jon Hendricks, eds. Yes Yoko Ono. New York: Japan Society; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Getty Research Institute, 2007.

Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan,1950–1970. Los Angeles:

Michalka, Matthias, ed. Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987.

Ono, Yoko. Fumie. Tokyo: Sōgetsukai, 1990. ————. Light . Tokyo: Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2013.

Panicelli, Ida. Yoko Ono: Lighting Piece. Rome: Studio Stefania Miscetti, 1994.

Hendricks, Jon, and Sam Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: 3 Rooms. Trento, Italy: Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea; Milan: Skira Editore, 1995.

Rattee, Kathryn, Melissa Larner, and Rebecca Lewin, eds. Yoko Ono: To the Light . London: Serpentine Gallery; London: Koenig Books, 2012.


————. Yoko Ono: A Piece of Sky . Rome: Galleria Stefania Miscetti, 1993.

Hendricks, Jon, and Ina Blom, eds. Yoko Ono: Insound/Instructure. Høvikodden, Norway: Sonia Henie and Niels Onstad Foundation, 1990.

Thirteen Film Scores by Yoko Ono . London:


Hendricks, Jon, Pablo J. Rico, and Samuel Havadtoy, eds. Yoko Ono: Ebro . Zaragoza, Spain: Diputación de Zaragoza, 2000.

SELECTEDBIBLIOGRAPHY

Vienna: MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2010. Oliva, Achille Bonito, ed. Ubi Fluxus ibi motus: 1990–1962. Venice: Ex Granai della Repubblica alle Zitelle;Venice: Fondazione Mudima; Venice: Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990.

Pfeiffer, Ingrid, and Max Hollein, eds.

af Petersens, Magnus, ed. Explosion! Painting as Action. Stockholm: Moderna Museet; London: Koenig Books, 2012.

Yoko Ono: Half-A-Wind Show—A Retrospective. Frankfurt am Main: Schirn

Phillpot, Clive, and Jon Hendricks.

Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013.

Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection . New York:

Beram, Nell, and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky. Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies. New York: Amulet Books, 2013. Boriss-Krimsky, Carolyn. “Yoko Ono: Art of the Mind.” Art New England 22, no. 6 (October–November 2001): 26–28, 83. Bracewell, Michael. “Rising Sun: An Interview with Yoko Ono.” Frieze, no. 64 (January–February 2002): 68–71. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Remembering Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece.’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 101–23. Concannon, Kevin. “Not for Sale: Yoko Ono’s Discounted Advertising Art.” Athanor 17 (1999): 77–85. ————. “War I s Ove r! Jo hn and Yoko’s Christmas Eve Happening, Tokyo, 1969.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society

17 (December 2005): 72–85. Cott, Jonathan. Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

————. “Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice.” Rolling Stone, no. 78 (March 18, 1971), pp. 24–26. Danto, Arthur C. “Yoko Ono.” In Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, pp. 69–76. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. “Self-Stylization and Performativity in the Work of Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and Mariko Mori.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27, no. 4 (2010): 267–75. Frank, Whitney. “Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art.” Intersections 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 571–607. Haskell, Barbara, and John Hanhardt. Yoko Ono,Arias and Objects. Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991.



Hendricks, Jon. Fluxus Codex . Detroit, Mich.: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; in association with New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988, pp. 414–26.

Wiener, Jon. “Pop and Avant-Garde: The Case of John and Yoko.” Popular Music and Society 22, no. 1 (July 24, 2008): 1–16.

————, ed. Instructions for Paintings by Yoko Ono. Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993.

Yoshimoto, Midori. “Fluxus and Japanese Women Artists.” In Midori Yoshimoto and Reiko Kokatsu. Japanese Women Artists in Avant-Garde Movements,1950–1975. Tochigi, Japan: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2005, pp. 194–200.

————, ed. Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993. hooks, bell. “The Dancing Heart: A Conversation between Yoko Ono and bell hooks.” Paper , September 1997. ̄ iimura, Takahiko. Ono Yo ko hito to sakuhin = Yoko Ono. Tokyo: Bunka Shuppankyoku, Sho ̄wa 60, 1985.

Lippard, Lucy, ed. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger Press,

1973. MacDonald, Scott. “Yoko Ono.” In A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers . Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999, pp. 139–56. ————. “Yoko Ono : I deas o n Film : Interview/Scripts.” Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 2–23.

————. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Young, La Monte, ed. An Anthology of Chance Operations,Concept Art,Anti Art, Indeterminacy,Plans of Action,Diagrams, Music,Dance Constructions, Improvisation, Meaningless Work,Natural Disasters, Compositions,Mathematics,Essays, Poetry . New York: La Monte Young and

Jackson Mac Low, 1963.

236

237

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Individual works of art appearing in this publication may be protected by copyright in the United States of America, or elsewhere, and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the rights holders. In reproducing the images contained herein, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders whenever possible. Should the Museum have been unable to locate a rights holder, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions. Unless otherwise noted, all works of art by Yoko Ono are © Yoko Ono 2015. Agence France-Presse/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images: pl. 91.

Mackie, Vera. “Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono.” In Roy Starrs, ed., RethinkingJapanese Modernism. Boston: Brill, 2011, pp. 490–501.

© ARTnews, LLC, September 1961. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: p. 75.

Mekas, Jonas. Jonas Mekas pr ésente

1955). Courtesy Sarah Lawrence College Archives, Bronxville, N.Y.: pp. 14–15.

Fluxfriends: George Maciunus,Yoko Ono, John Lennon. Paris: Éditions du Centre

Pompidou, 2002. Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky . New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Yoko Ono—The Conversation Series. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K önig, 2009. Palmer, Robert. “On Thin Ice: The Music of Yoko Ono.” In liner notes to Yoko Ono, Onobox , six compact discs, Rykodisc RCD 10224/29, 1992. Shank, Barry. “Abstraction and Embodiment: Yoko Ono and the Weaving of Global Musical Networks.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 3 (2006): 282–300. Stiles, Kristine. “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience.” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–52. Wasserman, Emily. “Yoko Ono at Syracuse, ‘This Is Not Here.’” Artforum 10, no. 5 (January 1972): 69–73.

Photograph by Minoru Hirata. Permission granted by Shū kan taishū. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 46. Text © Toshi Ichiyanagi. Article © Shinchosha Publishing Company. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 120–21. www.internationaltimes.it: pp. 224–26. Photographs by Graham Keen. © Graham Keen. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 72, 73. Courtesy Keiō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo: pl. 23. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 18–19; p. 23, figs. 1, 2; p. 37, figs. 2, 4, 5; pls. 22, 62–64, 68, 74, 89; pp. 174–79, 182, 183, 214, 221; Dan Dennehy: pl. 12; John Bigelow Taylor: pl. 69.

The Campus 4, no. 26 (October 25,

Photograph by Tony Conrad. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York: p. 26, fig. 4. Photograph by Anthony Cox. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 76. © Daily News, L.P., New York. Used with permission. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 228–29. Photograph by Gerry Deiter. © Joan Athey ([email protected]): pl. 86. Courtesy the Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit. Robert Hensleigh: pls. 28–31, 66. Photograph by Nigel Hartnup. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 77. Photograph by Simon Hilton. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 38.

From the New York Times, April 4, 1961, © 1961 The New York Times: p. 74; November 25, 1961, © 1961 The New York Times: p. 76; March 21, 1965, © 1965 The New York Times: p. 149. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Photographs by John Lennon. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 80, 84. © George Maciunas. Used by permission. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pls. 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 53. Fred W. McDarrah/Premium Archive/Getty Images: pl. 55. Courtesy Marta Minuj í n Archives: p. 26, fig. 7. Photographs by Peter Moore. © Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York: pls. 38–40, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 61, 83, 88. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: p. 26, fig. 6; pls. 5, 6, 19, 20, 32, 43–45, 67, 87, 95–97; p. 216. Peter Butler: pls. 42, 57, 58, 82. Stills from film by Chiaki Nagano. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 21, 34. Reprinted with permission from the November 8, 1971, issue of The Nation: p. 227.

Photographs by Minoru Niizuma, © Minoru Niizuma. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 1–4, 49; p. 74. Photograph by Akio Nonaka. Image courtesy Shinchosha Publishing Company: pl. 26. Photographs by Yoko Ono: p. 37, fig. 3; pl. 85. Stills from films by Yoko Ono: pls. 75, 92–94. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York. © Yoko Ono and George Maciunas: p. 12; pls. 10, 37. © Yoko Ono (concept and text) and George Maciunas (graphics): pl. 59. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources. Photograph by Clay Perry. Courtesy England & Co, London: pl. 78. Still from film by Hans Preiner/ORF. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 81. Private collection. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pls. 33, 35; Peter Butler: pls. 7, 8, 17, 18, 36, 41, 70, 79. Photograph by Jan van Raay. © Jan van Raay: p. 26, fig. 5. Original text © Donald Richie. Article © Shinchosha Publishing Company. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 118–19. Photographs by Charles S. Rotenberg, AICP. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pl. 60.

236


Hendricks, Jon. Fluxus Codex . Detroit, Mich.: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; in association with New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988, pp. 414–26.

Wiener, Jon. “Pop and Avant-Garde: The Case of John and Yoko.” Popular Music and Society 22, no. 1 (July 24, 2008): 1–16.

————, ed. Instructions for Paintings by Yoko Ono. Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993.

Yoshimoto, Midori. “Fluxus and Japanese Women Artists.” In Midori Yoshimoto and Reiko Kokatsu. Japanese Women Artists in Avant-Garde Movements,1950–1975. Tochigi, Japan: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2005, pp. 194–200.

————, ed. Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono. Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993. hooks, bell. “The Dancing Heart: A Conversation between Yoko Ono and bell hooks.” Paper , September 1997. ̄ iimura, Takahiko. Ono Yo ko hito to sakuhin = Yoko Ono. Tokyo: Bunka Shuppankyoku, Sho ̄wa 60, 1985.

Lippard, Lucy, ed. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger Press,

1973. MacDonald, Scott. “Yoko Ono.” In A Critical

237

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

————. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Individual works of art appearing in this publication may be protected by copyright in the United States of America, or elsewhere, and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the rights holders. In reproducing the images contained herein, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders whenever possible. Should the Museum have been unable to locate a rights holder, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

Young, La Monte, ed. An Anthology of Chance Operations,Concept Art,Anti Art, Indeterminacy,Plans of Action,Diagrams, Music,Dance Constructions, Improvisation, Meaningless Work,Natural Disasters, Compositions,Mathematics,Essays, Poetry . New York: La Monte Young and

Jackson Mac Low, 1963.

Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers . Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999, pp. 139–56.

Unless otherwise noted, all works of art by Yoko Ono are © Yoko Ono 2015.

————. “Yoko Ono : I deas o n Film : Interview/Scripts.” Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 2–23.

Agence France-Presse/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images: pl. 91.

Mackie, Vera. “Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono.” In Roy Starrs, ed., RethinkingJapanese Modernism. Boston: Brill, 2011, pp. 490–501.

© ARTnews, LLC, September 1961. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: p. 75.

Mekas, Jonas. Jonas Mekas pr ésente

1955). Courtesy Sarah Lawrence College Archives, Bronxville, N.Y.: pp. 14–15. Photograph by Tony Conrad. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York: p. 26, fig. 4.

Pompidou, 2002. Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky . New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Photograph by Anthony Cox. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 76.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Yoko Ono—The Conversation Series. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K önig, 2009.

© Daily News, L.P., New York. Used with permission. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 228–29.

Palmer, Robert. “On Thin Ice: The Music of Yoko Ono.” In liner notes to Yoko Ono, Onobox , six compact discs, Rykodisc RCD 10224/29, 1992.

Photograph by Gerry Deiter. © Joan Athey ([email protected]): pl. 86. Courtesy the Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit. Robert Hensleigh: pls. 28–31, 66.

Shank, Barry. “Abstraction and Embodiment: Yoko Ono and the Weaving of Global Musical Networks.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 3 (2006): 282–300.

Photograph by Nigel Hartnup. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 77.

Stiles, Kristine. “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience.” Art Criticism 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 21–52.

Photograph by Simon Hilton. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 38.

Wasserman, Emily. “Yoko Ono at Syracuse, ‘This Is Not Here.’” Artforum 10, no. 5 (January 1972): 69–73.

238

Photograph by Hanns Sohm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Sohm © Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Image courtesy Kristine Stiles Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University: pl. 65. Photographs by Studio One. Idea by Yoko Ono. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 32. Image (article) © 2014 Tate, London: pp. 184–87. Photograph by Erich Thomas. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 90. Villager . Image courtesy LENONO

PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 148. The Village Voice , a Voice Media Group,

NOTES ON THE LISSON GALLERY SHOW: pp. 180–81. Published in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show . London: Lisson Gallery, 1967, pp. 1–2. THE PLASTIC ONO BAND: p. 214. Self-published in “To My Sisters, With Love,” 1971. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD AND THE ARTIST?: pp. 215–16. First published in This Is Not Here. Syracuse, N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1971. Reprinted in Museum Of Modern (F)art . New York: self-published, 1971, n.p. A LETTER TO GEORGE MACIUNAS: p. 70. Written December 3, 1971. First published in this volume. THE FEMINIZATION OF OUR SOCIETY: pp. 217–18. First published in the New York Times, February 23, 1972. Unabridged version published in SunDance , April–May 1972. The version published in the present catalogue first appeared, in slightly different form, in the liner notes for Yoko Ono, Approximately Infinite Universe, two LPs, Apple Records SVBB 3399, 1973. Feeling the Space: pp. 219–20. First published on the back cover of Yoko Ono, Feeling the Space, LP, Apple Records SW-3412, 1973.

Inc. Publication: p. 23 fig. 3; p. 77. Photograph by Ray Weaver, © Mirrorpix: p. 28. Photograph by E. Wilkins. Courtesy REX USA: pl. 71. Photographs by Yasuhiro Yoshioka. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 24, 25, 27, 50, 51. “YOKO’S VOICE” TEXT CREDITS In chronological order

All texts and images are © Yoko Ono 2015. WORDS OF A FABRICATOR: pp. 114–15. First published in SAC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p. FOR THE WESLEYAN PEOPLE: pp. 144–47. Self-published as insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono, Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks. New York: Judson Gallery,

1966: n.p.

Strawberryfields Forever: p. 221. First published in New York Times, August 28, 1981. CUT PIECE: p. 117. First published in Libération, Paris, September 2003; also distributed during Ono’s performance of Cut Piece at the Théâtre Le Ranelagh, Paris, September 15, 2003.

Photographs by Graham Keen. © Graham Keen. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 72, 73. Courtesy Keiō University Art Center and Archives, Tokyo: pl. 23. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 18–19; p. 23, figs. 1, 2; p. 37, figs. 2, 4, 5; pls. 22, 62–64, 68, 74, 89; pp. 174–79, 182, 183, 214, 221; Dan Dennehy: pl. 12; John Bigelow Taylor: pl. 69. Photographs by John Lennon. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 80, 84. © George Maciunas. Used by permission. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pls. 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 53. Fred W. McDarrah/Premium Archive/Getty Images: pl. 55. Courtesy Marta Minuj í n Archives: p. 26, fig. 7. Photographs by Peter Moore. © Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York: pls. 38–40, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 61, 83, 88. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: p. 26, fig. 6; pls. 5, 6, 19, 20, 32, 43–45, 67, 87, 95–97; p. 216. Peter Butler: pls. 42, 57, 58, 82. Stills from film by Chiaki Nagano. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 21, 34.

SUMMER OF 1961: pp. 72–73. First published in Jon Hendricks, with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, eds., Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years: “Make a Salad” .

Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2008, pp. 38–39. UNCOVER: p. 222. First published on www.imaginepeace.com, July 24, 2014; republished in English and Japanese, Gallery 360 Degrees, Tokyo, December 9, 2014; republished in the New York Times, January 4, 2015. DON’T STOP ME!: p. 223. Written November 9, 2014. First published in this volume. OF WORDS OF A FABRICATOR: p. 116. E-mail from Yoko Ono to Jon Hendricks, September 1, 2014. First published in this volume.

239

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES: p. 71. Written November 18, 2014. First published in this volume. MAP PEACE: p. 2. Written December 2014. First published in this volume. SURRENDER TO PEACE: interior of catalogue back cover. This version written in 2015. First published in this volume.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show,1960–197 1, presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 17 to September 7, 2015, and organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, and Director, MoMA PS1, and Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, with Francesca Wilmott, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art.

© 2015The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Major support for the exhibition is provided by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, BNP Paribas, and The Modern Women’s Fund.

Published by The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, New York 10019 www.moma.org

Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.

Distributed in the United States and Canada by ARTBOOK | D.A.P., New York 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013 www.artbook.com

Support for this publication is provided by The Museum of Modern Art’s Research and Scholarly Publications endowment established through the generosity of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edward John Noble Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Perry R. Bass, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Challenge Grant Program. Produced by the Department of Publications, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Christopher Hudson, Publisher Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher David Frankel, Editorial Director Marc Sapir, Production Director Edited by Kyle Bentley Designed by Kloepfer-Ramsey-Kwon Production by Hannah Kim Printed and bound by OGI/1010 Printing Group Ltd., China

Unless otherwise noted, all works of art by Yoko Ono are © Yoko Ono 2015. Copyright credits for certain illustrations are cited on pp. 237–38. All rights reserved Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931935 ISBN: 978-0-87070-966-1

Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson ltd 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX www.thamesandhudson.com Front cover of catalogue, back cover of slipcase: photographs by Kishin Shinoyama. Yoko Ono at The Museum of Modern Art. 2015. Seen within the latter: Henry Moore. Family Group. 1948–49; cast 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A. Conger Goodyear Fund P. 2: Yoko Ono. MAP PEACE. 2014. Image by Tom Van Sant, “The Earth from Space,” 1990 Interior of catalogue back cover: Yoko Ono. SURRENDER TO PEACE. 2015. Printed in China

Translations from Japanese to English by Midori Yoshimoto: pp. 122–25. This book is typeset in Helvetica and BG Nr.4325. The paper is 115 gsm Kasadaka matt art paper.

From the New York Times, April 4, 1961, © 1961 The New York Times: p. 74; November 25, 1961, © 1961 The New York Times: p. 76; March 21, 1965, © 1965 The New York Times: p. 149. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

www.internationaltimes.it: pp. 224–26.

Reprinted with permission from the November 8, 1971, issue of The Nation: p. 227.


Photographs by Kishin Shinoyama. © Yoko Ono. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: front cover of catalogue, back cover of slipcase. Seen within the latter: Henry Moore. Family Group. 1948–49; cast 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A. Conger Goodyear Fund. © 2015/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Text © Toshi Ichiyanagi. Article © Shinchosha Publishing Company. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 120–21.

The Campus 4, no. 26 (October 25,

Fluxfriends: George Maciunus,Yoko Ono, John Lennon. Paris: Éditions du Centre

Image by Tom Van Sant: p. 2.

Photograph by Minoru Hirata. Permission granted by Shū kan taishū. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 46.

Photographs by Minoru Niizuma, © Minoru Niizuma. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 1–4, 49; p. 74. Photograph by Akio Nonaka. Image courtesy Shinchosha Publishing Company: pl. 26. Photographs by Yoko Ono: p. 37, fig. 3; pl. 85. Stills from films by Yoko Ono: pls. 75, 92–94. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York. © Yoko Ono and George Maciunas: p. 12; pls. 10, 37. © Yoko Ono (concept and text) and George Maciunas (graphics): pl. 59. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources. Photograph by Clay Perry. Courtesy England & Co, London: pl. 78. Still from film by Hans Preiner/ORF. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 81. Private collection. Images: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pls. 33, 35; Peter Butler: pls. 7, 8, 17, 18, 36, 41, 70, 79. Photograph by Jan van Raay. © Jan van Raay: p. 26, fig. 5. Original text © Donald Richie. Article © Shinchosha Publishing Company. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pp. 118–19. Photographs by Charles S. Rotenberg, AICP. Image: The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: pl. 60.

238


NOTES ON THE LISSON GALLERY SHOW: pp. 180–81. Published in Yoko Ono Half-A-Wind Show . London: Lisson Gallery, 1967, pp. 1–2.

Image by Tom Van Sant: p. 2. Photographs by Kishin Shinoyama. © Yoko Ono. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: front cover of catalogue, back cover of slipcase. Seen within the latter: Henry Moore. Family Group. 1948–49; cast 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A. Conger Goodyear Fund. © 2015/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

THE PLASTIC ONO BAND: p. 214. Self-published in “To My Sisters, With Love,” 1971. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD AND THE ARTIST?: pp. 215–16. First published in This Is Not Here. Syracuse, N.Y.: Everson Museum of Art, 1971. Reprinted in Museum Of Modern (F)art . New York: self-published, 1971, n.p.

Photograph by Hanns Sohm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Sohm © Photo: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Image courtesy Kristine Stiles Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University: pl. 65. Photographs by Studio One. Idea by Yoko Ono. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 32. Image (article) © 2014 Tate, London: pp. 184–87. Photograph by Erich Thomas. Image courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pl. 90.

A LETTER TO GEORGE MACIUNAS: p. 70. Written December 3, 1971. First published in this volume. THE FEMINIZATION OF OUR SOCIETY: pp. 217–18. First published in the New York Times, February 23, 1972. Unabridged version published in SunDance , April–May 1972. The version published in the present catalogue first appeared, in slightly different form, in the liner notes for Yoko Ono, Approximately Infinite Universe, two LPs, Apple Records SVBB 3399, 1973.

Villager . Image courtesy LENONO

PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: p. 148. The Village Voice , a Voice Media Group,

Feeling the Space: pp. 219–20. First published on the back cover of Yoko Ono, Feeling the Space, LP, Apple Records SW-3412, 1973.

Inc. Publication: p. 23 fig. 3; p. 77. Photograph by Ray Weaver, © Mirrorpix: p. 28. Photograph by E. Wilkins. Courtesy REX USA: pl. 71. Photographs by Yasuhiro Yoshioka. Images courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York: pls. 24, 25, 27, 50, 51. “YOKO’S VOICE” TEXT CREDITS In chronological order

All texts and images are © Yoko Ono 2015. WORDS OF A FABRICATOR: pp. 114–15. First published in SAC Journal , no. 24 (May 1962): n.p. FOR THE WESLEYAN PEOPLE: pp. 144–47. Self-published as insert in Judson Gallery Presents The Stone by Anthony Cox,Sound Forms by Michael Mason,Eye Bags by Yoko Ono, Film Message by Jeff Perkins,Air: Jon Hendricks. New York: Judson Gallery,

1966: n.p.

Strawberryfields Forever: p. 221. First published in New York Times, August 28, 1981. CUT PIECE: p. 117. First published in Libération, Paris, September 2003; also distributed during Ono’s performance of Cut Piece at the Théâtre Le Ranelagh, Paris, September 15, 2003. SUMMER OF 1961: pp. 72–73. First published in Jon Hendricks, with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin, eds., Fluxus Scores and Instructions: The Transformative Years: “Make a Salad” .

Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; Roskilde, Denmark: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2008, pp. 38–39. UNCOVER: p. 222. First published on www.imaginepeace.com, July 24, 2014; republished in English and Japanese, Gallery 360 Degrees, Tokyo, December 9, 2014; republished in the New York Times, January 4, 2015. DON’T STOP ME!: p. 223. Written November 9, 2014. First published in this volume. OF WORDS OF A FABRICATOR: p. 116. E-mail from Yoko Ono to Jon Hendricks, September 1, 2014. First published in this volume.

239

CHAMBERS STREET LOFT SERIES: p. 71. Written November 18, 2014. First published in this volume. MAP PEACE: p. 2. Written December 2014. First published in this volume. SURRENDER TO PEACE: interior of catalogue back cover. This version written in 2015. First published in this volume.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show,1960–197 1, presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 17 to September 7, 2015, and organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, and Director, MoMA PS1, and Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, with Francesca Wilmott, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art.

© 2015The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Major support for the exhibition is provided by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, BNP Paribas, and The Modern Women’s Fund.

Published by The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, New York 10019 www.moma.org

Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.

Distributed in the United States and Canada by ARTBOOK | D.A.P., New York 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013 www.artbook.com

Support for this publication is provided by The Museum of Modern Art’s Research and Scholarly Publications endowment established through the generosity of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Edward John Noble Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Perry R. Bass, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Challenge Grant Program. Produced by the Department of Publications, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Christopher Hudson, Publisher Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher David Frankel, Editorial Director Marc Sapir, Production Director Edited by Kyle Bentley Designed by Kloepfer-Ramsey-Kwon Production by Hannah Kim Printed and bound by OGI/1010 Printing Group Ltd., China

Unless otherwise noted, all works of art by Yoko Ono are © Yoko Ono 2015. Copyright credits for certain illustrations are cited on pp. 237–38. All rights reserved Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931935 ISBN: 978-0-87070-966-1

Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson ltd 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX www.thamesandhudson.com Front cover of catalogue, back cover of slipcase: photographs by Kishin Shinoyama. Yoko Ono at The Museum of Modern Art. 2015. Seen within the latter: Henry Moore. Family Group. 1948–49; cast 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A. Conger Goodyear Fund P. 2: Yoko Ono. MAP PEACE. 2014. Image by Tom Van Sant, “The Earth from Space,” 1990 Interior of catalogue back cover: Yoko Ono. SURRENDER TO PEACE. 2015. Printed in China

Translations from Japanese to English by Midori Yoshimoto: pp. 122–25. This book is typeset in Helvetica and BG Nr.4325. The paper is 115 gsm Kasadaka matt art paper.

240

TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

David Rockefeller* Honorary Chairman

Ronald S. Lauder Honorary Chairman

Robert B. Menschel* Chairman Emeritus

Agnes Gund* President Emerita

Donald B. Marron President Emeritus

Jerry I. Speyer Chairman

Marie-Josée Kravis President

Wallis Annenberg Lin Arison** Sid R. Bass Lawrence B. Benenson Leon D. Black Eli Broad* Clarissa Alcock Bronfman Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Mrs. Jan Cowles** Douglas S. Cramer* Paula Crown Lewis B. Cullman** David Dechman Glenn Dubin Joel S. Ehrenkranz* John Elkann Laurence D. Fink H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria** Glenn Fuhrman Kathleen Fuld Gianluigi Gabetti*

Ted Sann** Anna Marie Shapiro* Gilbert Silverman** Anna Deavere Smith Jerry I. Speyer Ricardo Steinbruch Yoshio Taniguchi** Eugene V. Thaw** Jeanne C. Thayer* Alice M. Tisch Joan Tisch* Edgar Wachenheim III* Gary Winnick

Ex Officio Glenn D. Lowry Director

Yoko Ono Moma 2015

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