ART : Yoko Reconsidered : Just because she became Mrs. John Lennon doesn’t mean she stopped being an artist

In the liner notes for “Onobox,” Rykodisc’s year-old six-disc survey of Yoko Ono’s recording career, music critic Robert Palmer comments that “it’s quite likely that having John Lennon fall in love with her was the worst thing that could’ve happened to Yoko Ono’s career as an artist.”

Pop culture’s blinding light is inarguably so intense that it tends to wash out anything of greater subtlety that might surround it, and Ono’s persona as a Beatle wife and widow did pretty much eclipse the career as an avant-garde artist she’d been developing for 11 years before marrying Lennon.

“Falling in love didn’t interrupt my career as an artist--it was how society dealt with it that was disruptive,” Ono says of that fateful meeting in November, 1966. “The world decided I was gonna be Mrs. Lennon and nobody wanted to hear from me as an artist anymore.”

Artist Allan Kaprow met Ono in New York in 1957 at a class taught by John Cage and was in contact with her throughout the ‘60s when she was making the works that are currently the subject of a flurry of exhibitions worldwide. He remembers her exit from the art world differently.

“Yoko wasn’t rejected by the art world. Rather, she turned away from it for a long time,” Kaprow says of the 60-year-old Ono, whose first solo exhibition in L.A. runs Saturday to May 29 at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery. “And, the renewed interest in her work is a result of the simple fact that she’s decided to return to the art world. Having moved through a painful interlude in her life, I think, she was ready for it, and you don’t need to take out an ad--word travels fast and museums and galleries get curious again. So, the interest in her art isn’t terribly mysterious, nor is her impulse to work. If you’re a real artist, after a while you begin to get an itch, and there’s no question she’s for real--Yoko is undeniably authentic.”

Whether Ono was given the bum’s rush out of the art world or she left of her own volition is open to debate; what’s indisputable is that interest in her art--both old and new--is now at an all-time high, and that her conceptual and intensely political sensibility is remarkably in sync with current art world trends.

Ono first made a name for herself as part of the Fluxus movement, an international affiliation of radical artists that synthesized ideas of Dada, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and operated in the United States from 1960 to 1978 under the stewardship of artist and impresario George Maciunas.

Ono formally launched her career in 1961 at New York’s Village Gate as part of an evening of three contemporary Japanese composers; her contribution was “A Grapefruit in the World of Park,” a multimedia piece that included a tape of mumbled words and laughter, live musicians playing an atonal score and an actor speaking flatly about peeling a grapefruit and counting the hairs on a dead child.

From that beginning, Ono’s work blossomed in several directions at once. During the next decade she made films, produced sculpture and paintings, published “Grapefruit,” a book of instructions for the creation of conceptual artworks and films, composed and recorded a good deal of experimental music and did installations, sound pieces and performances. (One of her most critically acclaimed installations, the 1967 “Half-a-Wind,” will be re-created at her L.A. show.)

A 1962 performance titled “Wall Piece for Orchestra,” for instance, was nothing more than Ono kneeling on a stage and repeatedly hitting her head against the floor, and a 1964 work, “Cut Piece,” involved the artist sitting on a stage while audience members came forth and cut off pieces of her clothing until she was nearly naked. A feminist long before it was fashionable, Ono courted ideological and experiential extremes during the ‘50s and ‘60s that were decidedly at odds with her aristocratic Japanese upbringing, and are initially hard to reconcile with the woman she seems to be today.

Meeting with Ono at the Dakota, the Gothic Manhattan apartment building freighted with complex meanings for anyone with an interest in the ideals and aftermath of the ‘60s, one encounters a shy, small woman dressed in black slacks and a sweater who seems as though she would like to disappear into the large chair she’s curled up on.

Chain-smoking and nervously raking her hand through her short-cropped hair, Ono seems to gird herself against the latest invasion that’s about to take place as she says hello. Favoring short, to-the-point answers, she’s actually quite good natured about being interviewed, considering that she’s been through this drill hundreds of times and that she just got off a long plane flight and is soon to embark on another one.

Ono’s career as a visual artist is keeping her very busy right now. Returning to exhibiting in 1988 when she was invited to participate in a show in Cincinnati honoring Cage, a friend who had a major influence on her work, she was the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum the following year, and invitations have been pouring in ever since. She’s well into a new body of work (which largely consists of bronze castings of her pieces from the ‘60s--a reinterpretation that critics say drastically alters the works’ original meaning), and during the past four years she’s had 28 solo shows and been included in 44 group shows--most of which dealt with various aspects of the Fluxus movement--in 13 countries.

The respect being accorded her work comes as a surprise to Ono: “I never thought this would happen and feel very lucky to be getting a second life out of my artwork. But, although most people think I suspended my activities as an artist for several years, I never stopped making work--my work just took a different form for a while. Handling the legacy of my marriage was an artwork of sorts, and I consider ‘Strawberry Fields’ (a memorial garden Ono created for Lennon in Central Park) a site-specific sculpture that’s one of my best works. As far as the art world, sometimes that circuit is receptive and sometimes it’s closed, and though it was closed to me for many years, that doesn’t mean I stopped being an artist.”

Ono’s activities in the years after her meeting with Lennon were largely ignored by the art world, but that too appears to be changing. In an article last year in the journal Art Criticism, scholar Kristine Stiles makes a plausible case for the idea that Lennon’s transformation from a macho, working-class bloke and spoiled pop star into an ardent feminist and political activist was one of Ono’s greatest creative acts.

This view is shared by curator Elizabeth Armstrong of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, who organized (with Joan Rothfuss) “In the Spirit of Fluxus,” an exhibition touring worldwide through 1995. “People think Yoko rode on John’s coattails, but I think it was the opposite,” says Armstrong, who believes Ono was one of the key figures in the sexual revolution of the ‘60s. “Lennon seemed like a man who’d worked himself into a corner, and his partnership with Yoko gave him a whole new life.”

Barbara Haskell, who curated Ono’s 1989 Whitney retrospective, has also come to take a revisionist view of Ono’s activities of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “Actions like the 1969 ‘Bed-In’ and ‘War Is Over’ billboard campaign are definitely artworks,” she says. “Those projects were rooted in an agitprop approach that’s very much in keeping with what artists are doing today, and that period of her work was way ahead of its time.”

The wildly subversive nature of Ono’s creative sensibility is quite remarkable in light of her background. Born in Tokyo into a prominent banking family, Ono was raised in a rigidly conservative world of privilege and tradition. “I grew up in a time when the creative needs of women were basically ignored,” she says, “but I knew what I was doing when it came to art from the word go . I think that had a lot to do with the fact that I was shy and art allowed me to communicate in a way that didn’t require so much courage.”

In 1951, midway through a program of studies at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Ono left school and moved with her family to Scarsdale, N.Y., and enrolled at nearby Sarah Lawrence College. She stayed there for three years but left without a degree. Shortly after leaving school, Ono began creating the austere instruction pieces that were to become central to her oeuvre. A 1955 work, “Lighting Piece,” for instance, was nothing more than the written instruction: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” Just how advanced this reductive, meditative work was in its time becomes clear when one considers that it was created when Abstract Expressionism was roaring along at full throttle.

“I found the classical art training I’d been given stifling,” Ono recalls in explaining what attracted her to Conceptualism. “I thought art needed something more, and Conceptualism was wide open as far as what was allowed. Then I met John Cage and he taught me that it’s all right to do anything--his work was like seeing a big green light that said ‘Go!’ ”

Ono met Cage in 1957 at a class her first husband, Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, was attending, and over the next three years she became increasingly immersed in New York’s art community. From December, 1960, to June, 1961, she hosted the now-legendary Chambers Street Series at her loft, a program organized by composer La Monte Young that brought together for the first time many artists who would soon be waving the Fluxus flag.

That same year Ono began making paintings and sculpture that fused the rigor and whimsy of Fluxus with the simple purity of Zen. Exploring themes of transformation and the passage of time, her art of this period was designed to heighten the viewer’s awareness of ephemeral phenomena and often employed images of flying and the sky as metaphors for freedom.

Ono launched her performing career in 1961, as well, and she continued to do formal performance pieces until 1968. As was true of most Fluxus Events--which were, for the most part, single-gesture actions presented in a deliberate, studied fashion--Ono’s performances explored insignificant everyday phenomena, pain and conventions of sexual morality. Coalescing into a recognizable style at the same time as the Pop Art Happenings, a Fluxus Event differed, Ono says, in that an “Event is not a ‘get-togetherness’ as most Happenings are but a dealing with oneself.”

There are no filmed records of Ono’s early performances, but they left a lasting impression on many who saw them. “The thing I remember most about her performances was the degree of vulnerability she permitted herself,” recalls artist Carolee Schneemann, who was launching her own career in performance at the same place and time. “Yoko was extremely shy, but she was so totally absorbed by her work that she was able to reveal herself completely onstage.”

“She was very concentrated, very in herself, focused and intense,” says seminal underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who met Ono in 1960. “There was clearly something in her that had to come out, and in her performances she created explosions and moments of hysteria that were highly calculated and controlled.”

In 1964 Ono married her second husband, filmmaker Tony Cox, and that same year published “Grapefruit,” a book of conceptual artworks that’s appeared in several different editions over the years (the most recent in 1979). A collection of instructions for creating artworks that exist only in the mind, the book was initially published in Japan by Ono herself.

“I remember carrying the first edition around in an orange crate and giving copies to people,” Ono recalls. “I sold a few, but mostly I gave them away.” Though the book was regarded as a weird curiosity by the mainstream audience that read it after Ono married Lennon, it was, and still is, well regarded by the art community.

“ ‘Grapefruit’ was formally derivative of (artist and writer) George Brecht, who influenced almost all the Fluxus artists,” says Allan Kaprow, “but the more elusive content of the book is distinctly hers. As with her performances, there’s a conceptual softness to it that I like very much.”

Included in “Grapefruit” was a series of instructions and scripts for films, and two years later Ono began executing some of them. From 1966 to 1982 she completed 16 films, several of which were made in collaboration with Lennon. Though Ono’s films were out of circulation for years, they were re-released in 1991 by the American Federation of Arts, and a retrospective of her films has been presented at venues throughout the United States and Europe during the past two years.

As with all her art, Ono’s films were reductive works that eschewed any trace of traditional storytelling. Many were single-shot films--”Smile,” for instance, was simply a film of Lennon smiling--while others employed the serial structuring that was to become common in avant-garde film by the late ‘60s. Her most critically acclaimed films--”Bottoms” (1966), “Rape” (1969) and “Fly” (1970)--explored themes of the human body and surrender. “Yoko’s films don’t feel at all dated today, because they’re so rigorous,” observes John Hanhardt, the Whitney Museum’s Curator of Film and Video who presented a program of her films there in 1989. “They make no reference whatsoever to any fashion of the time--like all her work, her films are essentially elegant ideas that are given simple, visual form.”

In 1966, Ono traveled to London to participate in the Destruction in Art Symposium, a controversial gathering that many artists disavowed at the time because they felt DIAS took an ambiguous position on the role of violence in art and society. Ono remained in England for a series of exhibitions, and it was at her show at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966 that she met Lennon--a meeting that she says “marked the end of the quiet conceptual games I was playing.”

Hooking up with Lennon put a wildly different spin on Ono’s place in the art world, as it yanked her into an entirely different realm--that of the hugely famous. Accused of breaking up the Beatles, she was shackled with a “dragon lady” persona she’s still trying to shake, and she encountered tremendous hostility from the popular press and audience. Nonetheless--and much to the dismay of Beatles fans--Lennon and Ono collaborated only with each other from that point on. “We felt very exclusive about each other,” Ono says.

On the evidence of much of the work Lennon and Ono produced in the late 60s, they seem not to have given much of a damn about public perceptions of them; Ono’s work of the late ‘60s is perhaps the most radical of her career. Her musical output of 1968-71, in particular, was unrelentingly experimental, and though her unique vocal style--which pivots on her ability to sing three notes simultaneously--has been the subject of much derision, her recordings of the late ‘60s anticipated subsequent developments in rock in several ways.

Influenced by the operas of Alban Berg, the Japanese Kabuki singing style known as hetai , Indian and Tibetan vocal techniques, and free jazz, Ono synthesized those elements into sound collages that had no precedent and haven’t been matched yet in terms of sheer adventurousness. These intensely challenging sound pieces made in collaboration with Lennon were viciously attacked.

“I wish they’d let John and I go on with that, but artists are sensitive people and if the whole world is putting what you’re doing in a garbage can, we’re not going to make it, thank you,” said Ono, reflecting on her music of the late ‘60s in an interview in the 1986 book “The Guests Go in to Supper.” “The inspiration that led to that music faded for us because every time we’d do anything like that in the studio the engineers would go to the toilet.”

Shortly after their marriage in 1968, Ono and Lennon began using their high profile to create artworks like the Amsterdam “Bed-In” and the “War Is Over” campaign, intended to promote messages of peace and pleasure. The public, however, refused to take these art actions seriously, and the hostility against Ono seemed to grow more virulent with every month of their marriage. “There was an inherent racism in the hostility toward Yoko,” says the Walker’s Elizabeth Armstrong. “Watching ‘Bed-In’ today, that racism really comes through in some of the reporters’ questions.” It became increasingly difficult for Ono to pursue her career in visual art, and she produced few works during the 70s. Lennon’s murder in 1980 led to the creation of three videos made in 1981-82, in which Ono tried to deal with her feelings of loss, but she then fell silent again until 1988 when she began the bronze recastings she’s currently making. A piece from 1966 titled “Apple,” for instance, was a real apple on a pedestal; the 1989 reworking of the piece is a bronze apple with a bite taken out (the new “Apple” is an homage of sorts to Lennon, who took a bite out of the first “Apple” when he saw it at the Indica Gallery). Of her return to production and the renewed interest in Conceptualism, Ono says: “After the excess of the ‘80s, the art world is sober again, and I think that’s one of the reasons Conceptualism is having a resurgence. The new Conceptual art being made today isn’t much different from the old stuff either, because the values of Conceptualism are essentially unchangeable--I don’t see a big difference between the work I made in the ‘60s and the work I’m doing now.”

Ono could be disingenuous in saying that--works like the 1967 “Keys to Open the Skies,” originally a set of four keys made of glass, take on a decidedly different meaning when cast in bronze. Speculating on Ono’s shift to bronze, her friend artist Nam June Paik muses: “Museums and collectors adhere to certain conventions, and if you give them a dirty condom they don’t buy. (Paik is referring here to “You and Me,” a 1966 Ono work that incorporated condoms). But I don’t think that’s the only reason Yoko’s using bronze--I think she believes that the past must be recast.”

Armstrong finds the bronzes more problematic. “One of the most compelling aspects of Yoko’s early work was its ephemeral quality,” she observes. “Many of those pieces were made from materials that were scavenged or were very simple, and that was an important idea in Fluxus. Bronze solidifies beautiful ideas into objets and transforms them into a commodity, which is not what those pieces were originally about.

“I’m not so interested in the bronze recastings, but that doesn’t change my belief that Yoko’s a tremendously important artist,” Armstrong continues. “She came to the Walker a few weeks ago to introduce a program of her films, and she had the audience wrapped around her finger--I think everyone there would agree there’s an aura around her that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s famous. She’s still a political activist in the best sense of the word, when she talks about human nature and the world she’s quite enlightening, and the body of work she’s created over her life is amazingly broad.

“When you look at it altogether it becomes clear that she’s developed a creative voice that’s uniquely her own, a voice that’s very smart, brave and moving.”