Female Iconoclasts: Yoko Ono

Who is Yoko Ono?

Artland’s article series “Female Iconoclasts” celebrates female artists who were among the most boundary-breaking iconoclasts of our time; women who defied social conventions in order to pursue their passion and contribute their unique vision to society. The focus of this week’s edition is Yoko Ono, the famous multidisciplinary contemporary artist, but also musician and peace activist who made significant contributions to Fluxus, conceptual art and performance art. Her “Bed-in for Peace” with late husband John Lennon remains one of the most famous performative peace actions of all time, and her feminist messages continue to inspire people around the world today.

Biography of Yoko Ono

Event Scores and Instruction Paintings

Yoko Ono was born into a wealthy banking family in Tokyo in 1933. Her father had been a concert pianist but gave this life up to become a banker. Ono herself studied piano from a young age and in 1951 when her family moved to the United States, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence University to study composition. By 1956, she had dropped out of college and moved to New York with her first husband, the avant-garde pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. During her time at Sarah Lawrence, Ono started writing what she called “Event Scores”, which were brief, poetic instructions for performances anyone could enact. Her Lighting Piece from 1955 reads like a haiku:

Lighting Piece:
Light a match and watch till it goes out.
1955 autumn. 

This work echoes themes that would remain central to Ono’s artistic practice for the rest of her life: the ephemeral, the performative, a resistance to commodification and materialisation, art in accordance with everyday life events, self-empowerment, participation, multi-sensual and the permanently unfinished, open-ended nature of art. Ono’s “Instruction” pieces would continue to form the core for her performances, films and objects. With them, she invites her audience to experience the art as she does, while at the same time acknowledging that each person’s experience is different.

Ono’s Instruction Paintings, usually based on her Event Scores, are meant to be completed by the viewer. For example, in Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1961/1966), a hammer on a chain hung from a wooden panel, and a jar of nails was placed on a chair below it. Viewers were invited to hammer a nail into the panel, and when the surface was completely covered, the artwork was considered finished. Another example is Painting to be Stepped On (1960), which read: “Painting to be stepped on: Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street. 1960 winter”

At the beginning of her career, while living in a loft in lower Manhattan, Ono often staged poetry readings and musical performances which attracted many avant-garde figures. One night in 1960, Peggy Guggenheim came by with Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Apparently, Duchamp stepped on Ono’s Painting to be Stepped On but didn’t notice.

Conceptual Art and Involvement with Fluxus

Ono is an early pioneer of conceptual art, positioning the idea over the object. This is clearly recognisable in her Event Scores and Instruction Paintings, which led to her seminal piece of conceptual art Grapefruit, a book first published in Tokyo in 1964. The book is a collection of Ono’s Instruction Paintings, and these works of art are to be completed either literally or in the imagination of the reader. In 2013, Ono released a sequel to Grapefruit, another book of instructions titled Acorn.      

Ono has been associated with Fluxus. Fluxus was a loose international artist collective founded by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas and including the likes of Joseph Beuys, who wanted to integrate art and everyday life. Maciunas admired Ono’s work and gave her her first solo exhibition at his AG Gallery in New York in 1961. She received a formal invitation to join the Fluxus group but declined since she preferred to remain independent from groups and collectives. She did collaborate with various Fluxus artists during the 1960s and 1970s.

Yoko Ono and Performance

Performance has often been a key element in Ono’s work. One of her most important performance pieces is Cut Piece, which she first performed in Kyoto, Japan in 1964 and has re-performed over the years (other artists around the world have also re-performed the piece). During the performance, Ono would invite audience members to cut away pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors, while sitting quietly on a stage. Her instructions required the performer to wear their best clothes and allow them to be cut away. Therefore, the performance became quite expensive for Ono, who didn’t have much money during the ‘60s. Emotionally, the piece was very intense as well to the point that Ono described the experience as “a form of giving, giving and taking. It was a kind of criticism against artists, who are always giving what they want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted to, so it was very important to say you can cut wherever you want to. It is a form of giving that has a lot to do with Buddhism… A form of total giving as opposed to reasonable giving…”