YOKO

Article to Be Written in Your Head: See Yoko Ono’s retrospective “YES Yoko Ono” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Imagine an article that discusses the history and significance of her work. Try to forget that she married John Lennon.

The above “instruction piece” is closely modeled after similar pieces Yoko Ono composed in the early to mid-1960s. Tersely elegant, these simple works, from “Painting to Be Stepped On,” “Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street” to “Lighting Piece,” “Light a match and watch till it goes out” represented the vanguard of New York conceptual art before the term “conceptual” even existed. Well before her 1969 marriage to Lennon, perhaps the decade’s most memorable “event,” Ono had already been nominated “The High Priestess of the Happening” by the Liverpool Daily Post. Her collaborators and friends included John Cage and La Monte Young, along with other luminaries of the international avant-garde, while her work had caused scandal from Trafalgar Square to Tokyo.

The MIT retrospective offers an incomparable opportunity to take stock of this often overlooked and misunderstood figure, long admired by the art world but demonized by the general public. Mention Ono and you inevitably summon up two popular misconceptions: first, that she single-handedly disbanded the Beatles, and second, that her artistic celebrity was purely by association. As the MIT exhibit suggests, both statements are patently false. While Ono and Lennon’s infamous “Bed-In,” in which the newlyweds occupied hotel rooms to protest the Vietnam War, attracted media attention solely through Lennon’s participation, Ono’s most innovative and enduring work largely precedes their collaboration. Moreover, the spirit of that work, positive and life-affirming in its emphasis on the power of our communal imagination, is so different from the pernicious Asian dragon caricatured by disappointed fans.

The chronological layout of the MIT exhibition highlights the major themes in Ono’s work as they developed from her 1961 debut, beginning with her infamous instructions. These radical scripts suggested that art no longer consisted of impersonal objects meant to be studied and admired; instead, the audience now played a central role in “realizing” a work of art, which was as much “in the mind” as on the gallery wall. In their focus on process rather than product, these pieces also show the influence of the Fluxus group, a loose association of conceptual artists active throughout the 60s and 70s. The group’s name, Latin for “flow,” reflected their interest in incorporating temporal or immaterial elements into art. Ono’s “Smoke Painting,” for example, invites us to “Light canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette at any time for any length of time. See the smoke movement. The painting ends when the whole canvas or painting is gone.”

The theme of instruction persists throughout Ono’s career, but rather than come off as didactic, these works serve to demystify art by initiating viewers into their particular mode of experience. More tangible examples of such interactivity include the “Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through” (1966), which makes nature the object of wondrous contemplation, and the famous “Painting to Hammer a Nail” (1966), a white plaster-board which is only completed once the viewer has pounded in nails using an attached hammer. Ono is said to have fallen in love with Lennon when, at a 1966 exhibition, he asked her permission to add a nail to the work. She told him that a nail cost five shillings, to which Lennon responded by asking if he could hammer an imaginary nail into the surface. “So I met a guy who plays the same game I played,” Ono later commented. She was similarly impressed when, upon viewing her work “Apple”—intended to show the metamorphic effects of time upon the organic things—John took a bite out of the pedestal-supported fruit. (You can too!)

For the most part, the exhibition does an excellent job of presenting Ono’s early works, though their participatory spirit is somewhat obscured by the “Do not touch” signs that ring the more fragile pieces. Ono’s films are presented more faithfully—and, considering that most of her other works are readily “imagined” in the comfort of your dorm-room, they constitute the best reason for visiting the show. In the age of Bergman and Godard, Ono was once again at the forefront of cinematic experimentation, taking the medium to new levels of abstraction to revolutionize the way we see. The highlight here is “Film No. 13 (Fly)” (1970), in which a woman’s naked body is transformed into a surreal landscape as the camera takes on the perspective of the horsefly scouring her surface. Ono’s trademark vocal stylings provide the soundtrack. Though meek and childlike in conversation, her voice is fantastically visceral in art: Imagine crossing the frenzied whine of a boiling teapot with the grunts of a man raised by apes.

Which leads us to Lennon (at least in his hirsute, post-Sargeant Pepper phase). Perhaps in an effort to avoid eclipsing Ono’s independent work, or perhaps because their collaborations are simply less interesting, the exhibition downplays Lennon and Ono’s joint projects, which began a couple of years before their marriage and lasted until Lennon’s death in 1980. However, the scraps provided are important historically and flesh out the political dimension of Ono’s career. Ono has said that her art is about the power of the imagination to change the world through “wishing.” This principle underscored her and Lennon’s anti-war campaign of 1969, in which they erected giant billboards in prominent locations in cities across the world reading “WAR IS OVER!” as if simply endorsing the sentiment would effect an empirical change. While Ono’s conceptual pieces can be highly intellectual, the billboard campaign demonstrates the extreme idealism upon which her political works are based—an idealism that flourished in the 1960s but is far less credible today. In the documentary of the infamous 1969 “Bed-In,” the power of the peace sign for Lennon and Ono’s anti-war audience is remarkable. Now, however, that symbol seems hopelessly anachronistic. The romantic imagination that the “Bed-In” required has been significantly weakened by the passage of time, stripped of its once revolutionary force by post-conceptual pragmatism.

The end of the sixties spelled an end, too, for the art of Yoko Ono. After a retrospective in 1971 at the Whitney, Ono focused on music and video composition until a brief return to the art world in 1988 with some bronze casts of earlier works. Scattered pieces in the 90s are of interest (though few are included at MIT), but lack the visionary drama of her first events and performances. Instead, Ono’s idealistic faith in shared values and experiences has been channeled into new works that, lacking her former intellectual rigor, are more consolatory than conceptual. “Blueprint for a Sunrise” (2000), for example, which Ono performed for her Harvard audience last Sunday, is a healing but ultimately hollow shadow of more powerful early imaginings, while her political rhetoric—that we bring “light to those in darkness” in the case of Islamic fundamentalism—now appears painfully out of touch. Though she transcended the limits of artistic tradition in witty and inspiring ways, the spirit of Ono’s early work is ironically destined to survive within the confines of the museums she passionately disavowed. Still, though the 60s may be over, you could do worse than revisit them with Ono as your guide.