Rewind: Yoko Ono
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
"Yes Yoko Ono" is one of the finer historical installations of contemporary art that the AGO has mounted. If you missed this survey, the superb catalogue incisively furnishes the context for appreciating the fragile conceptual art produced by Ono and her peers during the 1960s.
It was a period best known for the dematerialization of art. Strolling through the show, I had the spooky feeling that I had stepped into a time machine devoted to mind-expansion. Ono is finally getting the attention she deserves. Looking into the always hopeful mirror of her enigmatic, poetic, sad, funny and inspiring objects, instructions and events (which, in true conceptual fashion, she never distinguished or separated from the life that lived them), we glimpse important parts of the hidden history of the 20th century.
But time machines work both ways, and Onos work has always been just as much about the future. Her ethereal assortment of living dreams, especially those from the early Fluxus phase of her long career, remains fresh and clean after nearly 40 years.
This retrospective of her multi-media art (suitably haunted by the avuncular ghosts of seminal figures such as Duchamp and Cage) proves a vertiginous show that quickly moves from the heroic to the comedic to the tragic in the blink of an eye. Given the current spirit of contemporary art, the most shocking part of Onos oeuvre is its complete lack of irony.
Some of the work is very small, so small you have to approach it intimately, almost as if to kiss it, in order to "get it." Other pieces are so big (in principle) they can barely be contained by the physical space of the gallery. One piece isnt even in the building. It comprises the filmed sky above, shown on closed-circuit television, in a reprise of Onos sole video work (and one of the earliest video works ever), Sky TV (1966).
Ono is very, very good, and more influential than people realize. Her highly personal works manage to achieve a universal quality that makes them function as both intimations of mortality and approximations of infinity. During my visit to the show, a telephone on a pedestal rang. I picked it up. Ono was on the line. Imagine.
Summer 2002
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