shyGirl
Nov 06, 2002, 08:15 AM
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=sfl%2Dliyoko2nov02
How do you separate Yoko Ono, the celebrity widow of John Lennon, from Yoko Ono the artist?
In theater, it's called a willing suspension of disbelief. And it's what anyone planning a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami might have to do to understand "Yes Yoko Ono," her first American retrospective of more than 150 works from the early 1960s to the present.
Forget the pop star, and you soon realize that what MoCA has on display is an exhibition of ideas. The first piece viewers see is called Play It by Trust. The two all-white chess sets remove the element of competition. Without an opponent, the game of strategy must become a game of cooperation.
Ono's work is all about big ideas meant to create change.
With more than 40 years of art-making behind her, critics now see her place in the evolution of art and have torn apart her life for clues to her motivation.
Born to a wealthy banking family in Tokyo, Ono grew up partly in the United States, but spent most of World War II in Japan, often moving to the country when bombing was particularly brutal. Her peace activism, to name just one theme that runs through her work, comes from experience.
Her multimedia approach -- poetry, film, music, sculpture, installations -- often confounded critics. But she is now seen as prefiguring such art forms as installation art, feminist art, public art, performance art and conceptual art.
The celebrity Ono was definitely on display last week when MoCA held a four-hour media preview. There was an exhibition tour with MoCA director Bonnie Clearwater and the show's curators, Alexandra Munroe of the Japan Society Gallery, and Jon Hendricks, Ono's personal curator and archivist since 1989.
Ono, accompanied by two assistants, arrived in a black Mercedes sedan with black tinted windows for a press conference in North Miami's City Hall chambers.
Photos of Ono could only be taken at the press conference and "photo opportunity," which followed back in the museum.
At 69, Ono looks a good 20 years younger. She walks three to six miles every day and says she quit chain-smoking about five years ago.
In person, she's equal parts flower child, rock 'n' roll chick and enigmatic artiste.
Asked at the press conference if her 40-year-old work still resonated, Ono said: "I just saw that full moon three days ago and it looked like the full moon I saw when I was 5."
Ono was famous -- in rarified art circles, at least -- long before she met Lennon at a 1966 exhibition of her work in London. Lennon is said to have climbed the ladder in her famous sculptural work called Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting). At the top of the ladder, he picked up the magnifying glass to see what was printed on the ceiling. What he saw was the word "YES." Ono's optimism is said to have enchanted him. They were married in 1969 and until Lennon's tragic murder in 1980, it seemed we heard little of Ono's art and lots about their famous partnership.
But that partnership, according to the exhibition, produced some of Ono's most provocative work.
"What she was doing was hiding in full sight," says MoCA's Clearwater.
There was the famous 1969 Bed-In for Peace, where the couple simply sat in bed as a weeklong media event. That same Christmas, Ono and Lennon launched a Christmas peace campaign in the middle of the Vietnam War. Massive billboards -- "War is Over! If You Want It" -- were placed in urban settings around the world, including Times Square, Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and the Shaftsbury area of London.
Asked if her marriage overshadowed her art, Ono says: "I think that for an artist, the most important thing is when your creativity has been injured in some way, and it hasn't been."
If fact, Ono credits Lennon with rescuing her early work from storage.
While Ono is no doubt a sophisticated and shrewd businesswoman, her work is mostly simple, free of the irony and cynicism seen in much conceptual work. Instead, says Clearwater, it encourages the viewer's participation both physically and in the imagination. It seeks to create a higher level of consciousness that can be carried back into the world.
The most obvious example is her 1971 Amaze, a 16-foot square Plexiglas maze. "A viewer goes through the maze and experiences many different feelings," says Clearwater. "First, there's a certain boldness that this is going to be easy. Then there's a sense of disorientation and even perhaps panic that you might be getting lost. And then there's a sense of relief when you exit it. So you've gone through all of these different feelings when you're in it."
Amaze, like much of her work, hardly looks like what we consider art.
There were the anti-war billboards, and at the MoCA, there's a work called Telephone Piece. It's a simple white phone with these instructions: "When the telephone rings, pick up the receiver and talk to Yoko Ono." Ono will actually call the museum once a day during the run of the show.
That kind of humor pervades much of the exhibition. Consider her 80-minute, 1966 film Bottoms in which Ono filmed the naked, moving buttocks of a group of New York artists and friends. Or a 1967 piece called A Box of Smile. The viewer looks inside the box and sees a reflection that can only make you smile.
As curator Alexandra Munroe has said: "She's using humor to kind of trip you into another consciousness. She wants you to think differently, she wants you to have a flash."
In person, Ono is earnest.
Ask how Lennon's death affected her art, she says: "He was a very warm presence in my life. We were very, very close. I don't know how to verbalize it. It seems too contrived for words."
But ever the conceptual artist, Ono says she found herself eating chocolate. Apparently, Lennon liked it and Ono always made him feel guilty. Eating chocolate, she says, made her re-experience both her love for him and the guilt he might have felt.
Several pieces speak to her grief, but one, a sort of Zen exercise called Cleaning Piece, features a pile of stones that the viewer can move into two wooden bowls. One bowl is marked Mound of Sorrow, the other Mound of Joy.
It seems to be Ono's reflection on the afterlife.
She says too many of us have a idea of heaven where the creator makes a decision on our behalf.
But, says Ono: "We're the ones who put the stone where we want it."
------------------
http://www.beatlelinks.net/ubb/smilies/rocknroll.gif
Song of the moment-My Sweet Lord
shyGirl's Hideout (http://www.geocities.com/smw15/index.html)
"I get shy when they start to stare."
How do you separate Yoko Ono, the celebrity widow of John Lennon, from Yoko Ono the artist?
In theater, it's called a willing suspension of disbelief. And it's what anyone planning a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami might have to do to understand "Yes Yoko Ono," her first American retrospective of more than 150 works from the early 1960s to the present.
Forget the pop star, and you soon realize that what MoCA has on display is an exhibition of ideas. The first piece viewers see is called Play It by Trust. The two all-white chess sets remove the element of competition. Without an opponent, the game of strategy must become a game of cooperation.
Ono's work is all about big ideas meant to create change.
With more than 40 years of art-making behind her, critics now see her place in the evolution of art and have torn apart her life for clues to her motivation.
Born to a wealthy banking family in Tokyo, Ono grew up partly in the United States, but spent most of World War II in Japan, often moving to the country when bombing was particularly brutal. Her peace activism, to name just one theme that runs through her work, comes from experience.
Her multimedia approach -- poetry, film, music, sculpture, installations -- often confounded critics. But she is now seen as prefiguring such art forms as installation art, feminist art, public art, performance art and conceptual art.
The celebrity Ono was definitely on display last week when MoCA held a four-hour media preview. There was an exhibition tour with MoCA director Bonnie Clearwater and the show's curators, Alexandra Munroe of the Japan Society Gallery, and Jon Hendricks, Ono's personal curator and archivist since 1989.
Ono, accompanied by two assistants, arrived in a black Mercedes sedan with black tinted windows for a press conference in North Miami's City Hall chambers.
Photos of Ono could only be taken at the press conference and "photo opportunity," which followed back in the museum.
At 69, Ono looks a good 20 years younger. She walks three to six miles every day and says she quit chain-smoking about five years ago.
In person, she's equal parts flower child, rock 'n' roll chick and enigmatic artiste.
Asked at the press conference if her 40-year-old work still resonated, Ono said: "I just saw that full moon three days ago and it looked like the full moon I saw when I was 5."
Ono was famous -- in rarified art circles, at least -- long before she met Lennon at a 1966 exhibition of her work in London. Lennon is said to have climbed the ladder in her famous sculptural work called Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting). At the top of the ladder, he picked up the magnifying glass to see what was printed on the ceiling. What he saw was the word "YES." Ono's optimism is said to have enchanted him. They were married in 1969 and until Lennon's tragic murder in 1980, it seemed we heard little of Ono's art and lots about their famous partnership.
But that partnership, according to the exhibition, produced some of Ono's most provocative work.
"What she was doing was hiding in full sight," says MoCA's Clearwater.
There was the famous 1969 Bed-In for Peace, where the couple simply sat in bed as a weeklong media event. That same Christmas, Ono and Lennon launched a Christmas peace campaign in the middle of the Vietnam War. Massive billboards -- "War is Over! If You Want It" -- were placed in urban settings around the world, including Times Square, Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and the Shaftsbury area of London.
Asked if her marriage overshadowed her art, Ono says: "I think that for an artist, the most important thing is when your creativity has been injured in some way, and it hasn't been."
If fact, Ono credits Lennon with rescuing her early work from storage.
While Ono is no doubt a sophisticated and shrewd businesswoman, her work is mostly simple, free of the irony and cynicism seen in much conceptual work. Instead, says Clearwater, it encourages the viewer's participation both physically and in the imagination. It seeks to create a higher level of consciousness that can be carried back into the world.
The most obvious example is her 1971 Amaze, a 16-foot square Plexiglas maze. "A viewer goes through the maze and experiences many different feelings," says Clearwater. "First, there's a certain boldness that this is going to be easy. Then there's a sense of disorientation and even perhaps panic that you might be getting lost. And then there's a sense of relief when you exit it. So you've gone through all of these different feelings when you're in it."
Amaze, like much of her work, hardly looks like what we consider art.
There were the anti-war billboards, and at the MoCA, there's a work called Telephone Piece. It's a simple white phone with these instructions: "When the telephone rings, pick up the receiver and talk to Yoko Ono." Ono will actually call the museum once a day during the run of the show.
That kind of humor pervades much of the exhibition. Consider her 80-minute, 1966 film Bottoms in which Ono filmed the naked, moving buttocks of a group of New York artists and friends. Or a 1967 piece called A Box of Smile. The viewer looks inside the box and sees a reflection that can only make you smile.
As curator Alexandra Munroe has said: "She's using humor to kind of trip you into another consciousness. She wants you to think differently, she wants you to have a flash."
In person, Ono is earnest.
Ask how Lennon's death affected her art, she says: "He was a very warm presence in my life. We were very, very close. I don't know how to verbalize it. It seems too contrived for words."
But ever the conceptual artist, Ono says she found herself eating chocolate. Apparently, Lennon liked it and Ono always made him feel guilty. Eating chocolate, she says, made her re-experience both her love for him and the guilt he might have felt.
Several pieces speak to her grief, but one, a sort of Zen exercise called Cleaning Piece, features a pile of stones that the viewer can move into two wooden bowls. One bowl is marked Mound of Sorrow, the other Mound of Joy.
It seems to be Ono's reflection on the afterlife.
She says too many of us have a idea of heaven where the creator makes a decision on our behalf.
But, says Ono: "We're the ones who put the stone where we want it."
------------------
http://www.beatlelinks.net/ubb/smilies/rocknroll.gif
Song of the moment-My Sweet Lord
shyGirl's Hideout (http://www.geocities.com/smw15/index.html)
"I get shy when they start to stare."