“War Is Over! If you want it” is a beautiful proposition. But, if all you need is love, where does that leave critics? The Museum of Modern Art found itself at war with the art press in recent months, justly taken to task for its deplorable Björk show. Less just, however—link-baiting, in fact—were the demands for the dismissal of the show’s curator, Klaus Biesenbach, who was accused of squandering the museum’s credibility by cozying up to celebrity. During the drubbing, I couldn’t help think: Where were all these watchdogs during MOMA’s Tim Burton stinker in 2009?
Another show, co-organized by Biesenbach and Christophe Cherix, the museum’s chief curator of prints and illustrated books, was dragged into the argument: a survey of Yoko Ono’s vanguard career from 1960 to 1971, which opened on Sunday. It would be naïve to deny that Ono’s fame will draw more visitors to the museum than will Fluxus, the movement of avant-gardist freewheelers with which she’s most closely associated. But the implication that Ono’s new show comes down to V.I.P. pandering perpetuates moth-eaten sexism. Never mind that John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who is now eighty-two, first met when he dropped by a London gallery in 1966, where she was installing a one-person show.
Why is MOMA surveying eleven years of Ono’s work and not rounding it off at a decade? Because, in 1971, when the institution was in the bad habit of ignoring women artists, to say nothing of Asian ones, Ono released flies in its sculpture garden as part of an unauthorized but well-advertised (the Times, the Village Voice) one-woman show. If you like off-color humor, this one’s for you: its title was “Museum of Modern (F)art,” a feminist critique disguised as a Whoopee Cushion. (You can argue that Ono’s conceptual provocations lean toward the lightweight, but she has a knack for deflating pomposity.) As with “War Is Over!,” the ongoing project Ono conceived with John Lennon during their infamous honeymoon “bed-in,” the fly piece exists if you want it. But, like a lot of the era’s conceptual art works, it never actually happened (look up the great Robert Barry), although it is documented in a book Ono made, and in a hilarious film of on-the-street interviews with people who went to the show and either got the joke, were confused by it, or just lied about what they saw. (Both the book and the film are in the current show.)
The first piece by Ono that visitors see on the Sixth Floor at MOMA is a Granny Smith apple on a Plexiglas pedestal, a hybrid of Duchamp and Magritte. An absurdist brass plaque that reads “Apple” assures us of its existence. The fruit stays in place until it rots, at which point it may or may not be replaced, according to its instructions. (Whim is to Ono what chance was to John Cage, whose scores clearly inspired her.) This vanitas in real time is as good a keystone as any for Ono’s oeuvre, which has darker tones that its reputation as a delivery system for feel-good bromides allows. Arguably the most significant work of her career is “Cut Piece,” which she performed in New York in 1965, at Carnegie Recital Hall, where it was captured on film by the ace documentarians Albert and David Maysles. Wearing a suit, Ono knelt down, placed a pair of shears on the stage, and allowed the audience to cut off her clothing. “Cut Piece” predates Chris Burden’s “Shoot” by six years, and is yin to its yang.
A few days before the show opened, I met briefly with Ono in her spacious kitchen at the Dakota, having first removed my shoes at her apartment’s front door, near a portrait of the artist as Mona Lisa by Lennon. (I also spied a fantastic Basquiat.) Whether the removal of shoes is a holdover from Ono’s Japanese childhood or a method of keeping her white carpet white, I couldn’t say; our conversation was restricted to a list of questions about the show submitted before my arrival. In her signature dark-tinted glasses and a black openwork shirt that split the difference between frilly and fugly, she looked like the world’s hippest grandmother. Her conversation—which was recorded not only by me but by an assistant, who also took notes during our interview—was endearingly peppered with sixties lingo. She met Biesenbach when he was “working in Europe, in a very heavy way,” she said of his early commitment to avant-garde performance.
At times her answers were gnomically blunt. Asked if she thought she had influenced Marina Abramović, who has also put herself in harm’s way with her audience, Ono said, “Who knows what an artist is thinking?” But she was expansive on the subject of “Cut Piece,” if impatient with the notion that it was her most significant work. “You know, I didn’t think it was the most important piece at all when I did it,” she told me. “But I thought it’s a good piece because there’s some messages there—they were hidden messages, of course, in those days. I understood that was the kind of thing women were being asked to do—to just accommodate. But at the same time there’s a certain dignity and courage in allowing yourself to be in that position. And that’s how all women survived then.” When I mentioned how eerily serene she appears throughout the performance she said, “I was immediately meditating. I was on a different plane kind of thing. I didn’t particularly feel that it was so dangerous. But recently I reversed the role”—cutting the clothes of a model during a shoot for W—“and I was amazed at how difficult and dangerous and scary it felt to handle those scissors.”
Her assistant said that it was time to wrap up. I asked Ono which other artists’ work interests her. She said, “I think about all artists. I’m not saying it to be tactful. People think being an artist must be the easiest thing in the world. But it’s not. So I admire their courage. And I’m always hoping that all of them are going to very successful. Because one day there will be so many artists that together we’re just going to float.”
