Having arrived in New York in the mid-’50s, Ono, who was born in Tokyo, carved out her place in the experimental art world soon after leaving her studies at Sarah Lawrence College. In fact, she was thinking about “conceptual” art well before anyone was calling it that.
“She thought about the artist not just as someone who provides something for you to look at-because she’s not always the maker of things, or even the performer. “She gave a new status to the artist,” says Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints, who, along with Klaus Biesenbach, the museum’s chief curator at large, organized the show. The exhibition comprises text-based works, objects, performances, recordings, and experimental films that leave no doubt of her seminal influence on conceptual art. Opening May 17, “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971” focuses on that vital first decade, when she forged new mediums and honed her singular voice. Now, 44 years after Ono imagined that 1971 guerrilla-style happening at MoMA, she is finally being officially recognized by the museum. John Cage and La Monte Young were regulars Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Max Ernst, and Peggy Guggenheim also took part in the gatherings. The Museum of Modern art was yet another in a long line of pioneering conceptual artworks that Ono had been making since 1960, when she began hosting a Who’s Who of New York’s avant-garde in her cold-water loft in TriBeCa, then a seedy part of town. Taped to the ticketing window was her ad, bearing the hand-written wordsthis is not here. As it happened, no one could have seen Ono’s MoMA show. A few said they had, others said they hadn’t but planned to. She also made a film: Visitors exiting MoMA were asked by a cameraman whether they’d seen Ono’s show. She printed a catalog and placed ads in The New York Times and The Village Voice that showed her outside the museum carrying a large letter F, lined up in such a way that the sign out front seemed to read museum of modern fart. In her version, players work together so that the game can progress.In 1971, Yoko Ono created a one-woman exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The film captures that then surprising experience.įor those hankering to take part in her interactive body of work, MoMA offers the perfect opportunity via Ono’s 1966 ’White Chess Set’, where she sought to alter the very rules of that board game. Beyond elevating the ordinary to an art form, Yoko injected a daring participatory element into her groundbreaking work, ’Ono’s earliest works were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form.’ Simply consider her pivotal 1964 ’Cut Piece’ performance when she asked viewers to snip away her clothing while she sat quietly on stage. ’During the first decade of her career, Ono played a pioneering role in the international development of Fluxus, Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art,’ adds Cherix. Museum goers can also listen to the artist and her Beatle rocker husband John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. Then in 1967 ’Half-a-Room’ displayed a chair cut right down the middle. ’These ideas have remained remarkably current in contemporary art, politics, and society.’ For her 1966 ’Apple’, she placed that solitary piece of fruit on a plexiglas pedestal. ’Central to Ono’s work since the 1960s has been her unwavering devotion to revealing beauty in everyday encounters and promoting world peace,’ notes Cherix. That was at a time when MoMA championed virtually no female nor Asian artists.įor this new, comprehensive show, curators Christophe Cherix and the somewhat controversial Klaus Biesenbach - whose Bjork exhibition is still hotly contested by journalists - gathered together one hundred and twenty five of her early objects, installations, performances, audio recordings and films to feature alongside her rarely seen archival materials. MoMA curators were aghast, not least because the show wasn’t even prepared for them. Just outside the museum’s front doors, a man touted a sign stating that Ono had released dozens of common houseflies inside and invited visions to witness those winged creatures. Back in 1971, she announced her first one-woman show, which she rather irreverently titled ’Museum Of Modern (F)art’. MoMA has always been a bit of a home base for Ono’s early outside-the-box creations. And now the Museum of Modern Art is showcasing her early innovative endeavours with ’Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971’. For decades, conceptual and performance artist and experimental filmmaker Yoko Ono has led the pack when it comes to cutting-edge creativity.
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