![]() ![]() ![]() (“Imagine your friends without the baggage / you know them by / See how you feel about them then,” reads part of “Connection Piece II.”) In “Grapefruit,” one of the instructional pieces reads: “Get a telephone that only echoes back your voice. “Acorn” is a watered-down, sanitized version of the earlier book, with a vaguely self-help vibe. “Grapefruit” was a revolution, demonstrating that works of art could be reduced to a set of rules that anyone could execute. “Smoke everything you can / including your pubic hair,” she offers in “Smoke Piece.” The tone is unpredictable, even wild, and it contains goofy drawings of odd little potato-like figures. “Grapefruit,” which also consists largely of instructions, reflects the raw, playful, uninhibited character of the sixties. Though most of her work is explicitly pacifist, some pieces disturb: in “Cut Piece,” a performance she did at Carnegie Hall in 1965, she passively allowed audience members to cut her clothing into shreds. She was also well known for her startling 1969 film, “Rape,” which depicts a woman as she is chased by men bearing movie cameras, her hysteria mounting as they follow her into her apartment. These had much appeal in corners of the avant-garde crazy about the East. She made sculpture, drawings, and music, and a number of pieces influenced by Zen Buddhism that prodded viewers to perform acts like imagining a painting in their heads. Soon after she arrived in New York in the late fifties-already groomed for public life having grown up among the Japanese aristocracy-she was embraced by the art world. She never considered herself a member of Fluxus, or any movement. ![]() Ono chuckles at the memory-that was George’s art, she says, referring to George Maciunas, the passionate founder of the group. Lennon climbed a ladder to read a tiny piece of text on the ceiling, the word “yes.”) Pre-Lennon, Ono was one of few women-and even fewer non-Western artists-active in the Fluxus movement in New York. (She met him when he visited her exhibition at Indica Gallery, in London, in 1966. “Acorn” is a sort of sequel to “Grapefruit,” Ono’s influential first book, which was published in 1964, before she became involved with John Lennon. The new book started as an online project in 1996: she gave an instruction every day, for a hundred days. She was about to walk into a party celebrating her new book, “ Acorn,” a hundred haiku-like instructions (“Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.”) accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page. Emphasizing the reciprocal way in which viewers and subjects become objects or each other, Cut Piece also demonstrates how viewing without responsibility has the potential to harm or even destroy the object of perception.On a recent summer evening, on the second-floor suite of the Refinery Hotel, in midtown, Yoko Ono, who is eighty but looks sixteen, was perched on the edge of a couch wearing very dark black sunglasses, a military-style black denim jacket, and a fedora jauntily cocked to one side. Challenging the neutrality of the relationship between viewer and art object, Ono presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body, which served historically as one such ‘neutral’ and anonymous subject for art. “In this performance Ono sat on a stage and invited the audience to approach her and cut away her clothing, so it gradually fell away from her body. For example here’s how our book Art and Feminism puts it: How should we regard it today? Perhaps as a work that, despite its novelty, keys into earlier artistic concerns. This work, first staged on Jat Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, examined in a disarmingly simple way, the role the female body has played in art throughout the ages. Photographer unknown courtesy Lenono Photo Archive. Cut Piece performed by Yoko Ono on Jat Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan. ![]()
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