Sub-Rural #55, Yoko

Most of us who were conscious in the late 1960s, or students of that era, would recall the growth of a peripheral body of work previously undetermined by the art media. A new discourse became established by artists who took over the production and dissemination of a core narrative, transformative with regard to collective value and audience. Artists, rather than art officials, re-defined significance and evaluated new aesthetics for a new family of collaborative change agents. There were not, like now, hundreds of revolving influencers, innovators, and collectors for every social and educational agency. The institutions that effectively endorsed young artists were mostly academic.

Emerging artists didn’t bargain for coherent disciplinary standards but cultivated unique expressions of virtuosity and sites for exhibiting them. Issues of power and access were pushed beyond a critique of form and replaced by a shared interrogation of the visual regime. Artists cared less about magnitude – becoming the most prosperous, radical or connected. Contemplative reflections of art language increasingly underscored art as a body of knowledge in liaison with dramatically propagating MFA programs.

Design and structure were transformed and the most statistically heterogeneous population on earth exploited scholarly differences. A new consciousness was becoming local without being provincial. Ruralism and regionalism offered different aesthetic options, creative enterprises, and audiences. The 60s also began the long road in representing place and tip-toed around racial and gender equity. Trans-national subjects emanating from waves of immigrants that struggled with America’s shifting construction of meritocracy and technology, waited on line.

It’s hard to imagine any quality of the mid-20th century as creatively more incomplete. But there wasn’t the punishing economic disparity that today inflames cultural isolation and despair. Nonetheless, every assembly and discipline had a luminary or two who represented a specific range of cultural competencies, a confederation of artist/teachers/experts. It was satisfying and participatory, as the art nation leveraged its protagonists beyond the past notion of artists genius. The new cultural heroes reverberated from Hannah Arendt to Malcom X, and the brave new artworld adopted palatable replicas.

This was the background  for the emergence of a different kind of art career. By the early 1960’s an artist appeared whose work coalesced masculine and feminine, Asian and Western, Pop Art and the avant-garde, and ultimately, activism, pleasure, and tragedy. Nothing in the artworld could compare to Yoko Ono’s method or body scrutiny, which tendered poetry with design. She disturbed the disciplinary coding of the reductivist studio system while defying expectations of class and normative artist conduct.

This wasn’t art about treasure, at least not initially. Ono absorbed progressive subtexts in the fine arts that challenged the artworld’s socio-political banality and its voracious market. Her audiences became committed to both an underground and more democratic cultural schedule, one ironically that insisted mass culture was not a wasteland. With her independence and radicalism, she recalled the charismatic tribulations of the early Modernists, and became a giant. Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol, who are rarely linked in critical texts, are nonetheless uniquely related in that they were the first of their generation to be recognized by artists, art-educated enthusiasts, and the broader public as hard-line anti-heroes. You have to go back to Picasso and Pollock before art radicalism generated that kind of controversy across class and generation.

Both artists took deep dives into popular culture, perhaps to inoculate themselves from the vestiges of otherness discrimination. They were at odds with the cultures that also fascinated them. Despite risks, and critical fire, each artist peaked in the ascendancy of 1960s youth culture. Ono had an untouchable independent oeuvre. Her exhibition register was elite, intermittent, and rigorous, and designed to be as literate as visible. After an immersion in New York’s downtown avant-garde arena, and soon after the shock of her partner’s homicide, she concentrated on recording music for almost two decades. While Warhol was deeply mythologized, Ono never had that sort of career sponsorship. On the other hand, no one ever had her sort of career. She began a methodical climb beginning with Fluxus dean George Maciunas, then interpreted and modified fundamentals of conceptualism, sound, and text-based art that included hybrid projects with John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Jonas Mekas and, of course, her most visible venture collaborator, John Lennon. Instead of shrinking behind the former Beatles’ shadow she sustained an interactivity of art and experimental music for decades.

Ono’s relationship with the neoteric Lennon, however, was challenging for her otherwise virtuoso nature. “Lennonism” generated much drama. Nothing in the artworld could compare to the union of their public images. Their rapport was more typical of compatriot writers, actors, and architects who enlightened, but also alarmed, audiences in the century’s most turbulent decade. But Ono conducted business and her personal life out of synch with the recklessness of the 1960’s, even as she became a model of the decade with free-style experimentalism, medium hybridity, and a principled political agenda. She sustained the interactivity of the avant-garde and mass-media in visual art and experimental music for more than 50 years. Who else had that blend of social consciousness plus an expansive catalogue of visual and sound media influenced by Kabuki performance, German Expressionist opera, and electronic music? In 2007 Ono christened the “Imagine Peace Tower” on Videy, Iceland, establishing a permanent site for her long-time anti-war allegiance. In 2009, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53^rd Venice Biennale. In spite of her Fluxus core steeped in anti-aesthetics, anti-elitism, and anti-institutions, MOMA and the Tate seriously lauded her work over  20 years. In “Yoko Ono, Music of the Mind” the selection of works at the Museum of Contemporary Art peel back layers of a luminous career to find the labor, intimacy  and pleasure of her reputation.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is organized byTate Modern, London in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Gropius Bau, Berlinand curated by Juliet Bingham, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern with Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern. The MCA presentation is organized (curated) by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant.