Saturday I visited the Yoko Ono exhibit at The Broad Museum and learned that she was a pivotal figure in the New York avant-garde art scene of the 1960s. Viewing the surviving film of Cut Piece, in which Ono kneels motionless while strangers cut away her clothing with scissors, I found it uncomfortable to watch her stifle her grimaces and disappointment while men luridly treated the artwork as license to undress her rather than as a performance piece. At the re-creation of Ono's Bag Piece, I watched a stranger climb into a black sack and writhe around while the audience waited to see what shapes the blob would incarnate. I was blown away by how consistently, over seventy years, Ono's art interacted with viewers — well before Marina Abramović — and was an integral part of New York's most consequential postwar art movement.
The downtown postwar New York art scene that Ono entered in 1960 belonged to a particular tranche of art history defined by the use of abstract expression as a tool for raising consciousness instead of paintings that were decorative or as recording of the visible world. Around that time Mark Rothko famously canceled his contract with the Four Seasons restaurant and returned the advance payment after deciding it was the wrong environment for his paintings. Like Rothko, Barnett Newman "indicated" the sublime with massive, provocatively colored tableaus. Jackson Pollock's drip paintings taunted viewers to interact with their own subconsciouses in order to try to make sense of the work. Marcel Duchamp had abandoned painting for readymades and ideas on the theory that art made only to please the eye was a dead end. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns pushed back against self-seriousness while sharing the goal of raising consciousness. This is the milieu into which Yoko Ono entered and where she launched many of the performance and interactive pieces displayed at The Broad.
In particular, I was transfixed by her sculpture entitled A Hole — a freestanding pane of glass shot through by a bullet, radiating hairline cracks, with an instruction etched at its base telling you to walk to the far side and look back through the puncture. This sculpture immediately reminded me of Duchamp's 1918 To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour at MoMA.
Duchamp's title is itself the instruction and it turns looking into a private, almost voyeuristic discipline. It is a genuine instruction and a joke at the same time. Ono's glass borrows the identical structural trick but I would argue that A Holeis Ono's political rejoinder to Duchamp: where his glass isolates the viewer in private fantasy, hers insists that on one side of the glass is a shooter and on the other is a victim. You can occupy either position simply by walking around the frame. It is difficult to stand in front of A Hole, knowing that Ono's husband, John Lennon, would one day be on the wrong side of that glass.
Having spent much too much time at the Chateau Marmont in the 1990s and 2000s, I found it heartwarming to see the photo of Ono and John Lennon's 1969 billboard, "WAR IS OVER! If You Want It," next to the hotel — the billboard itself is a performance piece staged on a rented sign instead in a gallery. As you already know, last week two climbers scaled the Empire State Building's spire and unfurled a banner reading "When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace" before getting engaged and then arrested. Their hijacking of an iconic landmark and turning the skyline itself into a canvas would not have been possible without the bravery of predecessors like Yoko Ono.
