Yoko Ono: Yes!

Like many people, I first heard of Yoko Ono as the woman who broke up the Beatles.  I also vividly recall people snickering about her records, saying she howled instead of singing.  In reality, Yoko Ono was a major figure in the 60s art scene, whose work contributed to conceptualism, happenings, fluxus, and video art.  She was also a musical pioneer, making recordings that forecast subsequent currents in punk, riot grrl feminism, lo-fi, art rock, and noise pop.  A grand retrospective at the Louisiana museum outside of Copenhagen offers an opportunity to appreciate her contributions to art. 

John Lennon apparently met Ono in 1966, at a London gallery, where she was installing a show.  He asked if he could hammer a nail into the hammer piece (top): a plane piece of wood, which gallery visitors could modify by hammering provided nails.  She said no.  Lennon also reports adoring Ono's ceiling piece (above, source): a ladder with a magnifying glass hanging above it, and the word "yes" in tiny letters on the ceiling.  The Lennon legacy has made the pieces so legendary that their artistic significance is almost forgotten.  That is a shame.  The hammer piece was a clever innovation.  Kurt Schwitters had hammered art together decades earlier, but this piece helped to re-write the relationship between artist and view.  The idea of artist as grand master is replaced with the idea of artist as someone who invites viewers to create.  The ceiling piece raises questions about the ontology of art.  Where is the piece?  Is it the ladder?  The word?  The activity of climbing and looking?  Are artworks beautiful things?  Do they have fixed meanings?

Like other pioneers of conceptualism (Weiner and Kosuth, for example), words have been a central part of Ono's practice.  Among her most celebrated works, are the pieces described in her book Grapefruit.  Each page contains an instruction, like the ones above, to engage in an activity.  Some of these activities are impossible to carry out.  They vary from charming, silly, and absurd, to poetic and profound.  Grapefruit is a monument in conceptual art.  They perfectly exemplify Sol Lewitt's precept that artworks are ideas, and that it doesn't matter whether they are (or can be) physically instantiated.  Lewitt's own works never realized that vision as well as Ono's.  Like her, he often created works in the form of instructions, but the products created by following these instructions remain fairly traditional, or, in Duchamp's phrase, retinal.

Ono's interest in the intersection of art and language is well represented in the Danish retrospective.  We find word pieces, mail art, and instructions of various kinds.  Words were important conceptualists because they moved beyond the the focus on the visual in art.  Ono goes beyond the visual in other ways as well.  There is for example, "touch poem" consisting of a lock of hair (above).  In another piece, visitors are invited to feel the air inside an plexiglass podium.  There is also a charm machine containing plastic containers containing nothing.  Emptiness is a preoccupation in Ono's work, and also in traditional Japanese aesthetics (consider the negative space of a Zen rock garden).  We are invited to ask, Is air really nothing?  Can something invisible be art?  Are concrete objects more valuable or meaningful than the ether that surrounds us? 

 It is noteworthy, in this context, that Ono was a philosophy student, indeed the first woman in the philosophy department at her prestigious Japanese university.  She ended up dropping out, but her art can certainly be regarded as philosophy.  It is also political at times as well.

Behind the charm machine, in the photograph, there are a series of uniform images, and below each is an inscription describing a traumatic biographical event, such as a time when Ono was fondled by a doctor.  Ono also lived through the bombing of Tokyo at the end of WWII, and she was active in the peace movement and woman's movement of the late 1960s.  The exhibition is punctuated by political works, such as a suspended constellation of critic cages made to commemorate massacres (above).

The exhibit focusses more, however, on Ono's Zen-infused conceptual works.  The image above is a detail of a long shelf containing water jars with the names of famous personages.  The list ranges from Picasso to Hitler.  Here we can see Camus next to Madonna.  The piece is a great equalizer.  For Ono, everyone is really just made of the same transparent ubiquitous stuff.  It is a political statement, but also a philosophical one.

The piece on the right is a clear panel, proportioned like a painting, engraved with the words, "Paining to let the evening light go through."  It asks, as Duchamp had done, about whether art is a window onto reality.  But it is also a celebration of natural beauty, and not just an intellectual joke.

The exhibit also does a good job highlighting Ono's work as a performance artist and video artist.  It includes her piece Four (a minimal fluxus name), which shows how buttocks move as people walk.  The image on the screen pays homage, in a witty way, to formal abstractionists, like Malevich.  The photo below captures the film in production. 

Even more famous is Ono's Cut Piece, in which spectators are invited to snip off her clothing.  This concept anticipates Abramavic among others, and is a landmark in the history of performance art.  It is also an important feminist work, drawing attention well before the Guerrilla Girls, to the sexualization of women in Western visual culture.

Another interesting example, which also deals with the female body, is Fly: here a fly, which became Ono's alter ego, moves along a naked woman's body.  It brings to mind the custom of including flies in Dutch still like paintings, to represent the impermanence of beauty.

The fly film also related to Ono's musical work.  Around the same time, she began making musical records.  She had been involved in music for a decade already, and John Cage was an early mentor as she broke into the art scenes.  But, after joining forces with Lennon, Ono began producing commercial pop records.  Her first two were overtly, even aggressively avant garde -- more challenging than almost any other mass marketed music of the time.  The second record was called Fly, and an excerpt can be heard below.

The Louisiana show does not aim to present Ono's musical works, but this is an important omission.  In a way, Ono's visual art died when she met Lennon.  People blame her for destroying the Beatles, but the Beatles were already done.  Much more more profound was the effect that the Beatles had on Ono.  She was a major figure in the underground art scene before she met Lennon, but she later became redefined (and reviled) as Lennon's wife, and latter as his widow, rather than as a significant artist in her own right.  Ono has continued to make visual art in the decades since meeting Lennon, much of which is on display in the show.  Some this work is excellent (including the crickets and water pieces mentioned above), but her most important artworks precede her marriage, and her later work is often parasitic on earlier ideas.  Being married to rock's biggest celebrity may have altered her artistic trajectory, or, worse still, stifled artistic progress.  But she did continue to innovate in other ways, after marrying Lennon, and her greatest achievements were in music.

After Ono's two avant garde records, she records some material that was more accessible.  Her crowing achievement is the uneven but excellent double album, Approximately Infinite Universe.  The album varies stylistically, with a lot of blues, funk, and rock coming through with Lennon's (and occasionally Mick Jagger's) guitars.  But there is also a lot of experimentation here, and overtly feminist lyrics.  Some of the songs have a punk rock sensibility, like the stripped down number above.  Hearing this record, it is impossible not to think of Patti Smith, the X-Ray Spex (note the saxophone), Bikini Kill, and Deerhoof.  Decades of musical innovation are anticipated in these tracks, and hindsight has shown that Ono was well ahead of the curve.  She can be seen, in this light, as one of the major figures in recent music.   The Louisiana exhibition also properly confirms Ono's place as an important figure in the recent history of art.

Curtain Call: Ann Hamilton at the Armory

Ann Hamilton's new exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory is an exercise in wonder.  The enormous space, built in the 19th century for the National Guard, is bisected by an enormous curtain, which pulsates like the sea in a calm storm. 

Visitors who sit (or lie) under the curtain are treated to an etherial, kinematic abstraction.

And then there are swings.  Lot's of swings.  Made for adults, big enough for pairs.  

Irresistible at any age.

At a crucial juncture, the lights dim, signaling that something important will happen.

The visitors stop swinging.

All the while, something mysterious has been taking place at the front of the grand room.  Two actors with microphones read, in a Brechtian monotone, the text of carefully selected books.  When I was there for a Whitney sponsored opening, the choices were Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses and The New Science of Giambattista Vico.

And there are pigeons, of course.  Magnificent pigeons in wooden cages.

They sit idly, and mostly peacefully, as reams of paper roll out from the readers.

Then, when the lights dim, more actors appear on the scene and begin to transport the pigeons.

Among them, the artist herself.

The cages are neatly stacked under the curtain.

Then a singer appears on a balcony and signs an operatic song, which is recorded on a vinyl record cutter, to be replayed the next day.  When the song ends, the pigeons are released.  They fly to a suspended open cage at the far end of the exhibition hall.  Free--at least until their next performance. 

I didn't manage to film the release, but here they are flitting about in their suspended temporary home.

At one level, this is surely a satisfying experience.  The grand scale, the poetry of motion, the charming birds.  It is both starkly minimal and evocative.  Where it fails, however, is in the emptiness of its symbolism.  The liberation of birds.  The Great Texts.  Even the curtain.  The performance is strangely trite, even though it's surely nothing I've ever seen before.  It is a guilty pleasure.  The artworld equivalent to a trip to a national park: glorious while you are there, with nothing to take home afterwards.

Midnight Oil

A few months ago, New York Times art critic, Ken Johnson, published a book arguing that psychedelic drug culture was a sine qua non for the last half century of American art.  That's a hard pill to swallow.  The Haight-Ashbury music poster aesthetic seems a million miles away from minimalism, conceptualism, superrealism, neo-expressionism, and other movements deserving chapters in recent art history.  Psychedelic sensibilities are a bit more evident, perhaps, in op-art and some street art, but these trends have barely made their way into into major museum collections--or at least that's not the stuff that museums keep regularly on view.  Johnson's nostalgic joy ride is a fun if fatuous peyote hunt, which serves to underscore a gulf, rather than a bridge, between the Leary and Lewitt.  Indeed, psychedelia bears a closer relation to surrealism, fauvism, and art nouveau, suggesting that Johnson has the order of influence exactly backwards.

Still, we should not scoff at art in the age of acid.  Right now a series of concerts at NYU are providing a welcome opportunity to see psychedelic visuals in their natural habit: as a backdrop to musical performances.  In New York, the undisputed king of the psychedelic light show was Joshua White, who improvised visuals for everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Frank Zappa in the heyday of the Fillmore East.  Now the Joshua Light Show is back on stage, providing sumptuously intense visuals for a host of talented musicians.  Last night, my big brother and I were lucky enough to catch the magic with John Zorn, Lou Reed, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves, who definitely stole the show.  White did a spectacular job playing along with these unfettered musical experimentalists.  His oils, gels, and pulsating lights served as a fifth musician, rounding off the sonic dream team.  And conversely, the musical improvisations took on synesthetic visual qualities when complemented by the colorful assault.  Though more associated with trippier tunes, the Joshua Light Show felt like a good fit with this aggressive avant jazz.  The music pushed the psychedelic aesthetic in new directions, and, at times, the visuals made contact with contemporary abstract painting.  Even if we reject Johnson's thesis that psychedelia was the wellspring contemporary art, we should accept Joshua White as a serious visual artist, whose blend of performance, new media, and abstraction deserves a place alongside other important art innovations of recent decades.

John Cage, Artist

Today is the 20th anniversary of John Cage's death.  September 5th with be the centennial of his birth.  Few figures approach Cage as a leader in 20th century avant grade music.  His composition 4'33", consisting of random background sounds as musicians sit on a stage in silence, is an undisputed landmark.  But Cage should also be remembered for his visual art.  He regularly produced graphic works, and many of the scores created for music are visually compelling.

One example is Music Walk, a piece composed for a range of different instruments and noise making devices.  The score (above) is an exceptional work of minimalist art.  A similar aesthetic can be found in Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis, which was composed by tracing star maps onto musical paper (below).

Cage move's into a more geometric abstractions with in his score for William's Mix, a piece that integrates country sounds and city sounds.  His geometric mood is even more pronounced in his score for the Fontana Mix, which was performed by using overlapping transparencies containing random shapes and points.  Here is an image from each:

Or consider Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 5 in which brief snippets of 42 records are cacophonously combined according to numerical principles derived from the I-Ching.  The score is picture below.

The I-Ching was an inspiration for many Cage compositions.  He used in to generate random sequences.  One successful implementation is Ryoanji, a musical piece inspired by the zen rock garden. Cage also produced visual works in conjunction with the piece.  He traced rocks using the random numbers as in this lovely example:

Here is a more compulsive example from the series, comprise of 3,375 rock tracings:

Cage also produced works that were not intended as scores or directly linked to his musical compositions.  One example, I believe, is Global Village, based on a phrase from Marhall McLuhan (below).  Here he used smoke to stain the paper.

Cage also made some pieces on Plexiglass to honor the passing of his long-time friend, Marcel Duchamp:

Cage also collaborated with Duchamp.  Notably, he composed music for Duchamp's portion of Hans Richter's film, Dreams that Money Can Buy.  Here is the result:

Duchamp was not Cage's only friend in the art world.  He also knew Mondrian, Breton, Pollock, deKooning, Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Nam June Peik (who made a video in his honor).   William Anastasi regularly played chess with Cage, and, en route to those encounters, made his famous subway drawings, by placing a pen in each hand and letting the train's motion produce random marks.  Here is an example:

Ending with Anastasi allows one to see how well Cage's drawings hold up in comparison to those of visual artists.  Moreover, Cage's obsession with automatism undoubtedly helped to inspire this work.  Thus, in remembering Cage the composer, we must not forget his contributions to visual art, and his work--both musical and visual--can be a continuing source of inspiration.