Word: ono
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Like Queen Victoria and Jackie Kennedy, Yoko Ono was fated to be a Major Public Widow, making her way in the world while hauling around the husband's eternal flame. But because she was also the woman blamed for breaking up the Beatles, Yoko was Victoria without the authority, Jackie without the glamour. Now 67, she's briskly tending her own flame too. She cooperated fully with "Yes Yoko Ono," a show that opened last week at Japan Society in New York City and will travel to six cities in the U.S. and Canada. It reverently brings together her lifetime...
Long before she met John Lennon, in 1966, Ono had been part of the group of New York musicians and artists who would call themselves Fluxus, pioneers of conceptual and performance art. For her 1964 Cut Piece, Ono sat onstage at Carnegie Hall while audience members came up one by one to scissor off pieces of her clothes. Her "instruction paintings" of 1961 were just typed directives like WATCH THE SUN UNTIL IT BECOMES SQUARE...
...funny how easily the ineffable verges into the insufferable. Conceptual art has a way of churning minor ground into dust, and Ono's work is full of attenuated Surrealist gestures, as in Four Spoons, a plaque holding three spoons and the crater of a missing fourth. In Pointedness, a crystal ball sits atop a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the words THIS SPHERE WILL BE A SHARP POINT WHEN IT GETS TO THE FAR CORNERS OF THE ROOM IN YOUR MIND. You can try lending weight to this by comparing it to the gentle paradoxes of Zen and the subtleties...
...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...
Actually, they're too late. There are already enough Beatles-related books out there to fill the Albert Hall, and in the next few weeks several more are arriving. They include YES Yoko Ono (Abrams; 352 pages; $60) by Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks, a survey, complete with a CD by Ono and her son Sean Lennon; Paul McCartney Paintings (Bulfinch; 146 pages; $50), which features the cute Beatle's artwork; and In My Life by Debbie Geller (St. Martin's; 208 pages; $24.95), a biography of Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager...