Artist and activist, pioneer of conceptual and participatory art, performance art and experimental music and film, famous widow of Beatles founder John Lennon and committed campaigner for world peace, Yoko Ono is the subject of a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. From her Instructions paintings, which turn the work of art into a work in progress, to her Wish Tree, her “unfinished objects” and her Sky TV, some 200 works by the artist born in Tokyo in 1933 are on show.
“Listen to your heartbeat,” “Walk through every puddle in the city”, “TOUCH”, “VOLER”… These written instructions for visitors, usually confined to the role of “viewer”, are a strange kind of injunction… Transgressing the rules of the museum game, these “instructions pieces” devised by Yoko Ono in the mid-1950s transformed the viewer into an actor. Tasked with experimenting, imagining, even realising or completing the work, the viewer could be led to “construct a painting in [his] head” or to hammer nails into a picture… In 1961, at her first solo exhibition in New York, she invited visitors to walk on her canvas (Peinture à piétiner) or to look at it in the dark… These famous Instructions paintings redefined the work of art entirely: no longer a finished object to be contemplated, but a participatory work in the making, a scaleable process, a work in progress…: like a score, the instructions given by the artist are open to interpretation. “This allows the work to exist in infinite variations that the artist herself cannot foresee,” explains Yoko Ono, for whom art, less than a creation, must be an experimentation and a sharing. Totally revolutionary in its time, this conception of the work of art opened up new perspectives which, far from having been exhausted, are still being exploited today. A radical work if ever there was one, even more radical than those of the most iconoclastic members of the Fluxus group (to which she is generally associated), Yoko Ono’s protean art was, in fact, in the vanguard of the avant-garde. It is to this innovative art that Tate Modern pays tribute today.
Pioneering Work
Among the key works on show is Cut Piece in 1964: kneeling on stage in the traditional, impassive posture of the Japanese woman, the artist invited spectators to come and cut off pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors. Staging the vulnerability of the body, outraged intimacy, exhibitionism, voyeurism and the relationships of domination and violence in human relations, this performance had a huge impact on the art world. In 1966, her Apple, placed on a pedestal and doomed to decompose until its possible rebirth through seeds, caused a stir. The same year saw the censorship of her film Bottoms, which filmed a succession of naked buttocks in motion “in place of signatures on a petition for peace”. It’s a humour that’s always imbued with a poetic undertone that hints at a certain gravity. Such as the objects cut in half in her Half-A-Room (1967), her all-white Chess Game or her Sky TV (1966), which broadcasts a live sky shot in real time…
« YOKO ONO – MUSIC OF THE MIND»
Tate Modern
February 15 – Sept. 1
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono
England – London