You Should Love Yoko Ono, and Here's Why.

I'm not really going to do much writing here. Literally, I'm just copy and pasting my research lol #SorryNotSorry

YOKO ONO: Or as I like to say, Life Goals.

• What did she do?
• Cut Piece (1964)
• Grapefruit (1964)
• A book of ‘instructions’ and things that read like poetry
• Event
• “Two Telegrams”
• 1) COMING THIS MORNING WITH SPRING AIR LOVE
  2) CANNOT BELIEVE YOUR STUPIDITY BELIEVING I WOULD ACTUALLY COME STOP YOU KNOW I DONT HAVE A CENT STOP DONT CALL COLLECT ANYMORE PHONE BILL HOPELESSLY HIGH
• “ Announcement pieces”
• ANNOUNCEMENT PIECE 1
  Give death announcements each time you move instead of giving announcements of the change of address.
  Do the same when you die.
  1962 Summer
• ANNOUNCEMENT PIECE 2Give a moving announcement each time you die.1963 Summer
• Poetry
• “Touch Poem for a Group of People”
• TOUCH POEM FOR GROUP OF PEOPLE
  Touch each other.
  1963 winter
• “Closet Pieces”
• CLOSET PIECE I
  Think of a piece you lost.
  Look for it in your closet.
  
  
• CLOSET PIECE II
  Put one memory into one half of your head.
  Shut it off and forget it.
  Let the other half of the brain long for it.
  
  
• CLOSET PIECE III
  Kill all the men you have slept with.
  Put the bones in a box and send it out into the sea with flowers.
  
  1964 spring
• A section of actually performed pieces.
• Cut (1964)
• Pieces of clothing are cut off of artist
• Beat (1965)
• Listen to a heartbeat
• People coming on stage and lay on each other’s chest to listen
• Fly ()
• Everyone ‘flies’ in some way
• Once performed where audience comes up on stage and jumps off of prepared ladders
• “The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music in the mind of people.”
• “The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all - to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem”
• “People talk about happening. They say that art is headed towards that direction, that happening is assimilating the arts. I don’t believe in collectivism of art nor in having only one direction in anything. I think it is nice to return to having many different arts, including happening, just as having many flowers...People might say, that we never experience things separately, they are always in fusion and that is why “the happening”, which is a fusion of all sensory perceptions. Yes, I agree, but if that is so, it is all the more reason and challenge to create a sensory experience isolated from other sensory experiences, which is something rare in daily life. Art is not merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life, is different from art duplicating life.”
• Goes on to explain that divisions of art do not mean dividing experience; can still use other things to emphasize one sensory experience i.e not just using sound to create music; giving instructions of fire for 10 days to create a vision in someone’s mind.
• “I can just see a Bronxville housewife saying to her guests “do add a circle to my painting before you have a drink”, or a guest saying “I was just admiring your painting by taking the previledge of adding another hole to it”, etc. That is my dream, and something to come very later, I suppose.
• “Mirror becomes a razor when it’s broken. / A stick becomes a flute when it’s loved.”
• “I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will. First of all having it outside your body is terribly dangerous. If I were a man I would have a fantastic castration complex to a point that I wouldn’t be able to do a thing. Second, the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance time alarm or something. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself. Humor is probably something the male of the species discovered through their own anatomy. But men are so serious. Why? Why violence?”
• Why did she do this work? Why did she use body?
• Ability to directly link ideas and images; encourages involvement and thought
• Seeing the environment and life through the eyes of an artist
• People getting the experience of being an artist, making them part of the piece
• Historical Context
• Active in 50s through 60s
• Vietnam War
• Ideas + Theories from reading and discussion
• Similar idea of wanting audience interaction--force the audience to think as the Futurists
• Instructions/building an image in the mind, the mind is more important than the physical/makes the physical important

• Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution [BOOK]
• Created art since mid 1950s, met John Cage and George Brecht, George Maciunas, and La Monte Young (Fluxus)
• Worked with Cage’s musical experimentation approach
• First to use ‘event scores;’ using language of instruction to conceive a work conceptually with the intention of allowing for multiple iterations and performers.
• Less of a theatrical performer; Wack! Book describes as ‘infused with own unique sensibility’
• Cut Piece elicited many different reactions
• Japanese audiences were more discreet than those in New York
• A man in Kyoto made a motion to stab her, which was ‘disappointing’ because it was too theatrical.
• Follows themes of ‘invasion or violation’ themes that pop up in her other work
• Freedom, a film, follows a struggle of her own choice to remove clothing, but when she gets to bra, the film ends, implying an ongoing struggle/unresolved
• When asked about works being gendered through appearance of female subject, maintains idea that struggles are not limited to women. “Making art is a feminine activity in the world as compared to other activities. When i say that art is a feminine activity I don’t necessarily mean that it is an activity for women, I’m talking about the feminine quality in us, which could be seen in men and women in various degrees.”

• Voice Piece for Sopranos
• Video of Performance with Lady GaGa
• Sings like this out of choice, memory of hearing a woman scream while giving birth.
• “that experience stayed with me. And I thought: why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that’s what the world wants. They don’t want a woman to sound too strong. We feel we shouldn’t scream out. So I thought we have to show what women are, we’re the birthgivers of the human race.”
• Wanted to be disruptive and provactive