Word: ono
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...found objects, these artists saw their work as vehicles for dissent, stand-ins for forbidden speech and catalysts for thought. This is, in itself, another major problem with Global Conceptualism: the contradiction of a museum exhibition of works of art which were intended as protests against museums. Yoko Ono's "Painting in Three Stanzas," for instance, was meant as a set of instructions for the creation of a painting, not as an art object itself. Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg's "Life with Pop," in which the two artists sat in a Dsseldorf department store posing as "living sculpture...
...without the support from the likes of fast-improving freestyler Jill Ono and versatile sophomore Arianne Cohen, the Crimson will find it hard to match up against the depth and star-power of it rivals, Brown and Princeton...
...Ono's underground films, much heard about but not often seen, that turn out to have some wit and brains. For No. 4 (Bottoms), made in 1966, Ono invited friends to drop their pants and walk in place while she filmed the piston motions of their bare behinds. On the soundtrack you hear their nervous chatter as the rear ends--plump or scrawny, smooth or furry--rise and dip and bunch up on-screen. The point that we're all human has been made before, but not usually with tongue so literally in cheek. Four years later, she made...
...then there is Ono's music. She took seriously the example of the avant-garde composer John Cage, who incorporated actual noise into his work. For the soundtrack of Fly, Ono simply makes a succession of nerve-jangling vocal sounds--ululations and sudden shrieks, weird cooing and feline melismas--that are unworldly but unmistakably human. To put it mildly, her voice is not the ideal instrument for mainstream pop, but it can have the cracked charm of Neil Young's or Kurt Cobain's. If she had not been too famous by the late '70s to make a name...
...Ono's greatest conceptual project was marriage to Lennon. It let her inflate her thought balloons to global scale, but they burst. Those "bed-ins" for peace were sweet but also hard to distinguish from pure exhibitionism. The dreamy directives of her conceptual art became harder to square with the iron-clad narcissism of so much else that she did. "After unblocking one's mind," she once wrote, "by dispensing with visual, auditory and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder." By the end of this show you may still be wondering...