ART REVIEWS : Yoko Ono Offers Game of Life for Viewers

In Yoko Ono’s new work, life’s ordinary rhythms are halted by the intrusion of the extraordinary. A table setting, a box, a hairbrush--these are the most mundane of objects. Ono, however, renders them in the least mundane of materials--bronze. Placed high on glass pedestals, like jewels or icons, these now-precious objects are still vulnerable to attack. Indeed, they have been rudely splattered with red paint.

The metaphor is none too subtle. This work is about blood and money; as such, it is about the artist’s own life. About this, she is not coy. In fact, Ono will not permit us to sidestep an autobiographical reading of the work. Why else display a bronzed pair of the granny glasses favored by her late husband, John Lennon, slathered in crimson paint?

What Ono conjures is not only Lennon’s tragic 1980 murder, but the strangulated, oddly intimate relationship between fame and fandom that certainly precipitated it. Lennon was a victim of voyeurism; yet, so too has been Ono.

Indeed, from the moment of their marriage in 1968, the media has been so busy monitoring her life with a man who once claimed to be more famous than Jesus, that her independent achievements as a performance artist, object-maker and filmmaker have been obscured.

This exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, works both to deconstruct and to redress that situation. Along with the new work, the gallery offers a mini-survey of Ono’s provocative oeuvre. Here are clippings relating to her early, Fluxus performances; a re-creation of the “Half A Room” installation of 1967; a trio of paintings dating from 1966-67, and four altered antique scales of 1990.

Ono has long been interested in questions of equilibrium, in searching out the balance between art and life. Like many avant-garde artists of the 1960s who were inspired by John Cage, Ono refuses to grant art a room of its own. Her art occupies the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. Asserting itself as a part of--rather than apart from--life, it is aggressively unexceptional: a performance consisting of a clock being placed on the middle of a stage; a film portraying a hand lighting a match; a painting made by throwing leftovers against a canvas.

The work likewise presents itself as a collaboration between artist and spectator. Years before conceptual artist Daniel Weiner won a place in art history by declaring of the art object that “the condition rests with the receiver on the occasion of receivership,” Ono insisted that the artist is merely the one who establishes the rules. The viewer plays the game--or not.

Photographic documents relating to the “instruction” paintings enact this dynamic. Here, Ono offers her audience pieces of canvas and written instructions such as “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. . . .” By 1962, she had eschewed the object entirely, and was exhibiting only the instructions: “Add color in your mind”; “Observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head.”

One wishes that more space had been devoted to the early work and related archival materials and less to Ono’s current projects. Along with the bronze pieces, there are new computer-generated photo montages--images of children superimposed on abandoned buildings and dark alley ways, splattered with the same red paint--that are over-saturated with significance, top-heavy with meaning. At its best, Ono’s work turns matters such as significance and meaning over to the audience. She offers us a glass key said to open the very skies. But she leaves it to us to place it in the lock, and turn.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through May 29. Closed Sunday and Monday.

“The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.” So Susan Sontag--in her typically fascinating manner--describes the fascination of fascism. In a new installation at Ruth Bloom Gallery, Dominique Blain likewise interrogates fascism’s perverse allure.

The initial effect is startling. Blain refashions the main gallery as a massive grid consisting of 90 pairs of shiny, black, military-style boots. One boot from each pair is planted on the floor with the firmness of conviction; the other is suspended slightly above it, tense with anticipation.

So, too, are we tense as we wait for the shoe to drop--for the crisp, syncopated snap, the sound of military precision, the rhythm of state-sanctioned violence, the music of messianic ritual.

Here, then, is fascism’s peculiar dramaturgy--history transformed into theater, passivity turned into manic energy, aesthetics pressed into the service of a grand fiction. What’s missing, of course, is the linchpin of fascist aesthetics--the young, athletic body. Blain has evacuated the body so as to bare the device. That is, in the absence of the masses, we are made acutely aware of the footwork--the choreography, mechanisms and structures through, and by which, order is maintained.

Order, repetition, regularity, purity of structure and a will to power are tropes associated not only with the fascist mise - en - scene, but with Minimal art; this installation becomes a comment not only on history, but on art. Indeed, much has been written recently about Minimalism’s brutal “rhetoric of power.” Interestingly, this reading has become the new dogma, itself endlessly replicated by art historians marching in lock-step. What Blain materializes is not only art’s rhetoric of power, but that of art history as well. In the process, what she affirms is the necessity of her own brand of practice, which moves doubly against the grain.

Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through May 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.