Understanding Yoko

Still from Cut Piece.

Few names engender the shear strength of a reaction as the name Yoko Ono. Sadly, these reactions have more to do with a perceived pop persona than with the actual accomplishments of an incredibly brilliant artist. To truly understand this, her work must be understood in its full context, artistic, cultural and temporal.

Her work evolves out of the Gutai movement in Japanese art.  Gutai was the first manifestation of what would later come to be known as conceptual art, and certainly by the time Ono started making appearances in the west conceptual art had made the crossing.  Still, it seems important when talking about Ono to register the very Japanese origins of conceptual art.

Historically, Japanese Art had always looked abroad.  Originally, to China, but then after the Meiji period to the West, mostly Europe, and then after WWI, increasingly to America.  In Post War American Art, the center stage belonged to the likes of Stills, Dekooning, Jackson Pollock, and Rothko.  These were the young American avant garde pushing the edge of modernism into the future, or so claimed their supporters.  Spearheading their success were the greatest art critics and theorists of their day, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg.  To Greenberg the power of these AB-Exers was the "paintingness" of the paintings.  To him, a painting should only be about the surface of a canvas and eschew all else. Anything outside of his notions of art, were to him kistch.

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952.

His Chief Rival Rosenberg, on the other hand, felt very differently, both about the place of art, and the purpose of the avant guarde.  To Rosenberg, the Abstract Expressionists were great not because of some theoretical notion of a pureness of painting, but because they represented a record of action. The wild markings of a Dekooning, or the dribble marks of Pollock were indices of action, of an event.

Harold Rosenberg, By Elaine DeKooning, 1956.

These thoughts about painting, gained considerable sway in post war Japan. Artists, Such as Kazua Shiraga, built upon this model, Shiraga using his feet to "dance" markings on the canvas, in Painting with Feet 1956.  Ushio Shinohara, began his iconic works painting with punching gloves, (a later video of Shinohara).  These radical actions as art, took on a new theatrical momentum, combining with traditional Zen ideas, and the Gutai was formed.  This movement would see the first happenings, and really give birth to conceptual art around the world.
It is from this world, that Yoko Ono comes on the stage.  In works such as "Cut Piece"( Yoko Ono "Cut Piece")Ono married this conceptual bent to a challenging feminist and anti colonial narrative. In cut piece, the artist brings the art patron into the work, by inviting them to cut pieces off of her clothes.  This illuminates both the privileged position of the viewer, but also leads one to question the presumed nature of the power dynamic, especially of the body of a, here, very vulnerable asian woman.

Ono produces sublime works of art, centered on a conceptual tradition.  In the tradition of performance art that grows out of Gutai and conceptualism, she often repurposes the pop media for the purposes of conceptual art. To those looking for pop music, the affect is calculatingly jarring. Take for example her introduction of distinctly "un-pop" sounds into a performance of John Lennon and Chuck Berry: Yoko Ono on Pop Music.

One must understand these strange sounds as influenced by the theatrical questioning of artistic form, created by the Gutai, and eventually giving rise to performance art.  Ono recognized that she was interpreted in the west as an outsider, as a foreigner, as a woman.  All of these were used in her questioning of even mediums such as of pop music.

As an artists, Ono has matured over time, and the progress of time has been good to her particular style of repurposing in the pop medium for fine art.  One can see the lines between her work, and that of later artists, such as Mathew Barney cremaster.net.

That said I leave you with a lovely bit of repurposed pop, and it's a bit more contemporary:
Bad Dancer