Assignment 5 : Artist - Yoko Ono
March 4th, 2009 by Jina ParkYoko Ono
Yoko Ono Lennon, born in Tokyo on Feb 18, 1933, is a Japanese artist and musician. She is known for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician, and her marriage and works with musician John Lennon.
Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is “Cut Piece”, performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: “Cut.” Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security. An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: “Hide and seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.” The book, an example of Heuristic art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono’s career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York that was nearly closed by a fan riot.
( Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, performance, Japan/England, 1964-1966 ) http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=529
John Lennon once described her as “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono)
A paragraph on my piece
I chose to work off of the third video of from last time, which played with the notion of time. I wanted to further explore how the visual (without any sound) and certain images provoke the thought of time moving in a certain direction. As in Yoko Ono’s “cut piece,” I use myself as a central subject(placing myself in the middle). On crucial difference between My video and Ono’s, however, is that unlike Ono’s Cut Piece which focuses more on the interaction with the audience, my piece focuses more on my personal space and time.