The Engaged Art Activism of Yoko Ono
“I’m walking on thin ice, paying the price, for tossing my dice in the air.”
Yoko Ono, Glass Hammer, 1967. Image: Clay Perry
Yoko Ono’s recognition by both the art and music worlds was perhaps late in coming but is very welcome nonetheless. Multiple high-profile museums, starting in about 2001 with the mammoth Yes: Yoko Ono survey show, began giving her major forty year retrospective exhibitions which toured the globe. These gave many members of the public their first actual and concrete opportunity to witness why she was being considered one of the most formative and foundational of early conceptual artists, even before conceptual really had a formal designation. At first it was called “Fluxus,” and then “concept art,” and then—in the hands of largely white males who commanded more attention for it—it morphed into what we commonly know today as conceptual art.
Ono's well-earned victory lap continues with yet another large public museum exhibition and a special birthday present. Recently, the esteemed music critic and Ono appreciator Jon Pareles of the New York Times commented on the musical celebration of her 89th birthday on February 18th, 2022, when a new tribute album curated and executive produced by Ben Gibbard, was released. Luminaries of contemporary music, among them David Byrne and Yo La Tengo, demonstrated their respect for her historic work by crafting their own versions of many of her most notable compositions for the disc titled "Ocean Child: The Songs of Yoko Ono".
As Pareles explained, "Yoko Ono's ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’—a lullaby about the invisible power of nature, love and dreams—was the B-Side of John Lennon's 1970 single ‘Instant Karma’. Byrne and Yo Ya Tengo remade the song as a reverberant meditation: tinged with Indian drone, shimmering with vibraphone pulse and gathering communal vocal harmonies."
"Ceiling Painting (Yes)" Ono demonstrating the iconic sculptural work first exhibited at Indica Gallery, London in 1966, noted for John Lennon's arrival and ascent of the ladder to discover the tiny word "Yes" written on the ceiling, visible only with the hanging magnifying glass. (B/W Image: WikiArt)
Meanwhile, several pieces of Ono's art are set to be featured in a large group exhibition at the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. She will be in good company, with eight other artists for whom the ideas are the medium, and the process is the product, with the result being a shared sensibility and fondness for the transitory, the ethereal and the impermanent.
On view from March through July of 2022, Assembly Required features nine artists whose work invites the viewers' active participation. The artists were selected on the basis of a shared belief that public action is vital for transforming society. Ultimately, Assembly Required poses questions about how art allows us to imagine new ways of being in the world, which has basically always been Ono's job description. All of which just goes to illustrate that Yoko Ono's own personal karma was not so instant in the end, and instead is of the slow-motion but long-lasting sort.
Cut Piece performance, 1964-65, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York (Minoru Niizuma).
Ono is a uniquely situated conceptual artist: she utilizes her private and personal experience as a transnational feminist to express her feelings and ideas in a highly intimate diaristic form that shares with her public the innermost operations of her emotive equipment. It is my contention on her idiosyncratic methodology that every work of art she ever produced, whether it be an object, a poem, a sculpture, a musical composition, a performance piece, a film or a video, is in actuality an activist’s essay, albeit an embodied essay, a manifesto of sorts, and one which is parallel to other feminist artists who use autobiography as a source material for their work.
Cut Piece performance, 1964-65, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York (Minoru Niizuma).
Ono’s compelling artworks, especially her discursive poetic statements known as “Instruction Pieces,” (later released in book form as Grapefruit) have long been about three principal subjects and themes: the self as a staged and filmed performance, the aesthetics of embodied meaning, and the poetics of reverie in duration. Her sculptural objects, meanwhile, often appear to be transfixed moments of frozen time or feeling.
Ono has thus long actively demonstrated the lived work of art even more clearly than her works of art themselves often imply, and a marvelous cross section of these moments has been on display in the aptly named Growing Freedom show at the Vancouver Art Gallery between October 2021 and May 2022. Yoko Ono is finally being recognized as a highly capable installation and performance artist whose mysterious durational gestures—which I often call frozen music—masterfully impersonate simplicity. Her works of performed art, including her carefully crafted public persona, are a unique form of social sculpture, one which almost rivals Montaigne’s in terms of its dissolution of the illusory borders between private and public.
"Ceiling Painting (Yes)" Reprised at the Contemporary Calgary Gallery in 2020, and again at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2022. (Color image: Blaine Campbell.)
Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based art critic/curator who writes about art, photography, music and films. His new book, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, is being released in April 2022 by Sutherland House Press.
