Ekphrasis:

The Self-Curated Film/Performance Art of Yoko Ono

by Donald Brackett

Yoko 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/journal 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 essay, albeit an embodied essay, and one which is parallel to other feminist artists who use autobiography as a source material for their work. The most notable example of this embodied essay form in literature might be Anais Nin, while a parallel to Ono in the visual/performative arts might be Louise Bourgoeis or Marina Abramovic. Ono is an anomaly, even in the rarefied domain of such peers. She is both a human being with a personal history but also an aesthetic energy source, a radical constellation of experimental ideas with the collective public history of a living myth. She is a highly public persona but also an obscure performer, photographer and filmmaker, a musician and visual pun artist; a celebrity famous for being famous but also an elemental force of nature; a kind of pop-cultural storm of intensely high pressure which sweeps across an ocean and collides with another culture, our own, altering its social definition and artistic parameters forever. Indeed, she is a highly capable installation artist whose mysterious durational gestures, which I call embodied essays, masterfully impersonate simplicity. I am suggesting that Yoko Ono’s works of performed art, including her carefully crafted public persona, are a unique form of embodied essay, one which almost rivals Montaigne’s in terms of its dissolution of the illusory borders between private and public. This artist’s compelling conceptual art, especially her discursive statements known as “Instruction Pieces” (later released as Grapefruit) has 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.

These three zones of engagement also correspond to the subtly layered and connected tissues of her radical interdisciplinary mixed media performative and durational works exploring aura, affect and agency, especially in the context of feminist ideas, ideals and related social issues. Cannily co-opting publicity and advertising as merely another potentially aesthetic and politically engaged medium, after establishing herself as an enduring figure in the early formative stages of developing what today we call conceptual art, she then collaborated with her famous musician husband in conducting an eerily alluring private life in public for the performative purposes of contributing to artistic, political and social change, among other things. As we shall see, her very self was a kind of curated construction, especially in its situationist presentation in everyday life. Many of what I am idiosyncratically referring to as her ‘embodied essays’ took the form of what she identified as her works which contained an idea for a visual occurrence or experience which existed only in the written form of her narrative statements on small cards, composed from 1960-1964. These instructions for experiences were short discursive texts: they were inherently essays designed for us to imagine works that may or may not ever be physically fabricated. Yoko Ono has thus long actively demonstrated the work of art itself even more clearly than her works of art often imply. All of her most confrontational durational performances, whether staged or filmed or both, such as Cut Piece 1964-65, Eye Blink 1966, Bottoms 1966, Match 1966, Wrapping Piece 1967, Smile 1968, Rape (Chase) 1969, Apotheosis 1970, Erection 1971, from her early period, or Blueprint for the Sunrise 2000, and Onochord 2004, a continuous loop from her later period, explore the interconnected realms of the aesthetic aura, the performative affect and the curatorial agency at the heart of her startling alternative agendas. She uses these time-templates as emblems for her feminist ideas, the gender ideals behind them and the larger social issues that arise as implications: the perplexing nature of curated wonderment and the inherent challenges of embodiment and co-existence with other beings. Precisely where the heroic myth begins, and where the human being ends, no one knows. But my essay is the portrait of that performative myth, and hopefully of the radically talented artist behind it. The task is a daunting one, but it is made more survivable by also encountering and exploring a group of like-minded artists in New York in 1960: Fluxus, This was the neo-Dada movement of anti-art (or at least dematerialized art) conceived by George Maciunas and popularized by composer La Monte Young, who began using Ono’s Tribeca loft (long before loft culture even existed) to stage happenings together. A happening is a curated live-action event. 

Once the viewer becomes accustomed to the oddity of everyday life being elevated to the level of art, the most truly revolutionary aspect of these works was their inclusion of ironic humor, not exactly a customary experience in art, as a crucial raw material. In fact, it may well have been precisely that crux of laughter at the center of Fluxus, as well as its anti-commodity stance, which permitted both the art world and the real world to dismiss its artifacts, indiscernible as they were from the world into which they were deposited and the history into which they disappeared. At any rate, artists like George Brecht, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono were among the first to utilize event scores in a manner consistent with Cagean ideas, and the first to conceptually craft language itself at the center of a work of visual art in a conceptual manner.

Certainly in her case, given her status as an apparent time-ghost whose futuristic ideas are perhaps only now coming into focus, her preference for the art of the mind-world is based on the fact that it, and the art it provokes, are evidently beyond time. An ideal example of Ono’s performative philosophical approach to a unique form of timeless duration would be her 1962 instruction piece, “Painting to be Constructed in Your Head”: “Hammer a nail in the center of a piece of glass. Imagine sending the cracked portions to addresses chosen arbitrarily. Memo the addresses and the shapes of the cracked portions”.

The “instruction paintings”, of course, used ideas instead of paint, and for that reason they are still startling in their utopian candor and poetic reverie even today. This is also the early Ono period in which she made one of her most emblematic pronouncements, those that most effectively convey her role as a self-curated durational performative agent: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” That declaration alone seems like the job description of the Fluxus  “movement” as a group enterprise. Fluxus. Whatever else Fluxus may have been, it was a welcomed international, cross cultural train bearing like-minded artists and thinkers on which Ono could find a seat for herself, a comfortable seat which in fact she had earned and which was well-deserved.  Ono turned conceptual art into an even more radical for actual activism. Yoko’s survival mechanism was to become the curator of her own essayistic embodied meanings: by acting in an ongoing filmed performance of her own life, often in real time, she left behind a body of almost immaterial artifacts, a body of work to which the only valid critical response is a rhapsodic and ekphrastic one. One of her most evocative embodied essays or instruction works dates from the Winter of 1960 and encapsulates her efforts at self-curating an immaterial aesthetic experience which is both discursive, essayistic, durational, performative and interactive. It was called “Painting to Be Stepped On”: “Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street.” Sixty one years later, it is still laying there, in our minds. It sometimes takes time to absorb the content of important art works which contain apparent absurdity and to accept artists who use “humorous nonsense for serious intent” but by dispensing with logic and its dictates, an artist such as Ono invites us into a unique dimension, what she called a “mind-world”.

A good example of this strategy is her 1962 instruction painting, “Sun Piece”, which directs the viewer to “watch the sun until it becomes square”. Not surprisingly perhaps, this “mind-world” of Yoko’s (and of other like-minded artists) is preferable for her to the so-called real world we inhabit and which “clutters” our lives. And for us, as we attempt to assemble the peculiar puzzle of her persona in our lives, Fluxus is a mobile and celebratory sub-culture which provided a home, emotionally, artistically, psychologically, even spiritually, for the homeless outsider living in the heart of Yoko Ono. The Penguin Book of Art Writing has an intriguing entry on Fluxus by Richard Dorment, which suggests, quite rightly, that art need not last long in order to be good, and that the ephemeral events and objects created by the Fluxus movement of the 1960’s left virtually no visible residue but they still were great art works nonetheless. Founded by a left-wing Lithuanian-born American named George Maciunas, and heavily influenced by Zen-inspired composer John Cage, Dorment almost quite correctly points out that Fluxus had only one member that anybody has ever heard of: Yoko Ono.  He might have also added, heard of almost by accident, in keeping with the principle of the movement itself. Indeed, even fewer people, at least in the real world, would likely know of Fluxus at all if not for the fame and celebrity of the Yoko brand and her involvement with the poetic group in the first place.  This is because of the inherent qualities of the Fluxus movement itself: an underground anti-art, rearguard action, against the entire museum and gallery system, against the hierarchy of the art object itself as a fetishistic market product for the wealthy, and especially against the cult of personality of the artist, which had been evolving slowly ever since the early humanist period of Petrarch, back in the 14th century. 

Dorment accurately identifies it as “the flip side of Pop”, though it clearly pre-dates Warhol, with its love for poor materials, long before the later Italian style known as “art-povera”, ephemerality, mass production and anonymity. Indeed, some Fluxus works were so collective in nature that it is difficult to ascribe authorship to them at all in the customary sense. The core belief of Fluxus was simply that Fluxus was already inside everyone, a part of who we are, a part of how we live, and that technically anybody and everybody could be a Fluxus artist if they wanted to be.  Not exactly the kind of business attitude that gets your work into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art “That traces of it survive at all seems to me a miracle, but more miraculous still is its continuing influence. In advertising, rock and roll, video and visual art Fluxus is enjoying a comeback. This is because its aestheticizing attitude towards life, its idealistic belief that young artists can change society by turning people’s attention toward the quality of everyday living, is compelling still. The several hundred artists who made up Fluxus wanted to transform society through social change. If that sounds pretentious, in reality Fluxus was light and witty, more Monty Python than Bertolt Brecht. It drew heavily on non-western visual traditions, refusing to distinguish between high and popular art, designating as “art” formal gestures, ritualized actions and a conscious aesthetic appreciation of the mundane. Members of Fluxus were musicians, artists, designers, dancers and poets—but what each individual did, played, made, or wrote was of relatively consequence, since all were working together. It was fun to know someone associated with Fluxus, since communications with them, often by post, were apt to contain bits of collage, poetry or instructions to perform a series of absurd ritualistic acts” . But naturally, that very refusal to recognize any hierarchy was also an ethos fated to follow Fluxus into its own oblivion. When other artists tried to merge high and low, to blur serious art with popular entertainment, they were considered charming and idealistic. When Ono refused to recognize the limits of cultural geography, merging with mass media entertainment, pop music, politics, the peace movement, and even merging with a pop culture icon like John Lennon, she was treated rather roughly, to say the least. It’s one thing, after all, to talk about erasing all boundaries, its quite another to actually try and do it, and even to succeed in doing it, whether this was noticed or not at the time and that is what made Ono more dangerous and radical than some even many more extremist artists. They stayed safely in their little aesthetic zoos: she wandered out onto the Mike Douglas daytime network television show. Ono turned conceptual art into an even more radical for actual activism.

Two more of her pronouncements, separated by almost a whole decade, one written in her 1962 text “Word of a Fabricator” in Japan and the other made to Rolling Stone Magazine in 1971 in New York, managed to encapsulate both her media-saturated decision to embrace lifestyle per se as a performance gesture, at the same time as clarifying the motives and objectives of what she often characterized as real feminism, as opposed to the corporate media’s interpretive notions of it: 

 “Stylization is the materialization of the human desire to free oneself from the irrational rationality of life, hoping to extricate oneself from it by one’s immersion in a fictional world and its order. The ultimate goal of female liberation is not just to escape from male oppression. How about liberating ourselves from our various mind trips such as ignorance, greed, masochism, fear of God and social conventions? Since we face the reality that, in this global village, there is very little choice but to coexist with men, we might as well find a way to do it and do it well.”

However, therein lies the obvious challenge and inherent danger of her decision to try and merge the high art world with that of popular culture via the media events such as her “Bed-In”, which the average member of the public had no way of understanding was a radical form of performance art. What she called “stylization” was in fact the very crux of her lifelong experiment with curating live-action art in a durational mode. Few could ever compete with Yoko for the sheer vertigo of her embodying live Zen koans in apparently innocuous and casual everyday activities presented as art. Even fewer may have grasped the importance of her social, political and aesthetic gestures over the last sixty years. As a result of her accidental fame, and as explored rather sensitively in Peter Jackson’s recent epic documentary Get Back, she was also the sheer personification of a profound sentiment once elucidated by the novelist John Updike: “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

The Instructions of Yoko Ono will be on view at Vancouver Art Gallery until May 2022

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.