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FCG International Visual Arts 2006: YOKO ONO
“Because of her trajectory as an artist since the decade of the 1950s in the most varied aspects of contemporary creation; visual arts, performances, multimedia installations, music etc. Her influence in the Fluxus movement must also be highlighted, along with her decisive contribution to the creation of a conceptual aesthetic language and her most experimental proposals that have been an important reference for recent generations and international artistic movements”. According to the jury that met in Valladolid on June 12, 2006, chaired by: Mr. Miguel Ángel García Rodríguez, Director of Current Affairs Programs, TVE News Services; Mr. Xosé Luis Lorenzo García-Canido, Cultural Director of the Cervantes Institute; Mrs. Catalina Luca de Tena García Conde, President and Editor of ABC Newspaper; Mr. Pablo J. Rico Lacasa, Art Director of SEA (Simposium Escultura Alicante), Cultural Patronage of the Alicante City Council; Mr. Francisco Somoza Rodríguez-Escudero, Architect.
Yoko Ono – Biography
For decades now (since the 1960s) Yoko Ono has been one of the fundamental references of vanguard art and a biographical example for a good majority of unprejudiced iconoclastic and creative risk-takers who have been radically committed to the existential condition of living and feeling in the unexplored bordering territories and their surroundings. Yoko Ono, both the character itself and her work (intimately coherent with each other), have never fallen into the trap of conventionality nor have they suffered the threat of indifference; this woman maintains her exceptional ability to create uncomfortable feelings from simplicity and naturalness and to inaugurate new adventures of knowledge and revelation that are truly moving and unexpected. Yoko Ono, and her conceptual proposals of complicity with the participation of the public, seduce and fascinate with tremendous ease and fluidity, guilelessly and without any trace of perversion… To seduce is to attract the attention of others… those who are numb from routine, from generalized indifference towards what is conventional and daily.
Undoubtedly Yoko Ono represents –as few artists from the second half of the century do- that existential condition to which I referred to previously: living and feeling in the unexplored bordering territories and their surroundings. Fortunately, in recent years, the biography and artistic trajectory of Yoko Ono have been the object of renewed analysis and a more objective interpretation while some of the falsities most often repeated by the popular “media culture” and its myths have also been shown to be untrue and some of the most common characteristics attributed to her have also been revised.
Since her arrival in New York in 1953 to continue her studies in art and complete her aesthetical western training , Yoko Ono started to relate to and to actively participate in vanguard youth circles in the United States, especially in the expressive fields of experimental music and theatre. Yoko Ono, like other young artists, was directly influenced by John Cage, a pre-conceptual artist and experimental composer with an unambiguous oriental background (above all in the Zen thinking and aesthetics)… which became an evident close and familiar referent for Yoko Ono. Since 1960, at the outset of her own artistic trajectory, Yoko Ono started to organize and participate, along with La Monte Young, in a series of concerts and vanguard performances, “Chambers Street Series”, presented in public in her own loft in New York.
In 1961, Yoko Ono undertook her own public concert in the Village Gate in New York. That same year, she exhibited her conceptual works “Instruction Paintings” in the “AG” Gallery in New York, whose owner was Georges Maciunas; undoubtedly this first exhibition of our artist can be considered one of the first manifestations of conceptual art (of which Yoko Ono is a pioneer and one of its most original characters) and the forerunner of some basic aesthetical expressions, which Maciunas was to baptize as the “Fluxus movement” several months later. Indeed, in 1962 G. Maciunas, a highly-talented and inventive theoretical creator and editor defined a new and practical concept of experimental artistic action which we called “Fluxus”, and which spread quickly among vanguard circles in the United States and Europe. As well as Yoko Ono, artists of great relevance and significance took part in this international movement (to a greater or lesser degree and fidelity than the programmatic proposals of Maciunas), artists such as La Monte Young, Emmet Williams, Georges Brecht, Oldemburg, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik, W. Vostell, J. Beuys, etc.
Between 1962 and 1964, Yoko Ono resided in Japan undertaking conceptual work that must be considered the first in Asia. Her exhibition, entitled “Instruction Paintings” in the Sogetsu Art Center of Tokyo (where she presented spectators with only brief poetic texts with instructions so that they could recreate the works and actions in their own minds), or her participation in the “Music Walk” concert performance along with John Cage, David Tudor and Toshiro Mayuzumi, in the same artistic center in Tokyo in 1962, as well as her performance entitled “Cut Piece” in the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, in 1964, are all exceptional events of the most innovative and experimental art of this second half of the century.
On her return to New York, Yoko Ono continued to deepen in conceptual approaches while she also participated in some “Fluxus” projects. In this period she presented her concert-performance entitled “Clock Piece” (in the Carnegie Recital Hall, 1965) and her “Morning Piece” performance (1964), dedicated to Maciunas.
In 1966, Yoko Ono was invited to participate in the activities of the DIAS (“Destruction in Art Symposium”) in England. On that occasion Yoko presented her “Music of the Mind” concerts, in the Africa Center and in the Jeanette Cochrane Theatre in London, as well as in the Bluecoat Chambers in Liverpool. Simultaneously she exhibited her conceptual works in the Indian Gallery in London: objects and instructions for metamorphosis, in which she invited the public to participate and induced them to reach higher levels of perception and creativity. In 1967, Yoko held an exhibition in London for the second time, in the Lisson Gallery; her “Half-a-Wind-Show” project was made up of objects, actions and installations, exceptionally novel for the time, while at the same time she undertook an action of unambiguous vindication in Trafalgar Square by covering the monumental bronze lions of that square –that symbolized the British Empire – with large pieces of knotted cloth. Those exciting times in London–experimental, provocative, and committed to a pacifist ideology, with dangerous feminist action lived to the limit – were the culmination of an extraordinary creative period for Yoko Ono, while at the same time inaugurating a new period in her work, in which her first encounter and friendship with, and her later marriage (in 1969) to, John Lennon were to play a significant role.
Since their marriage, Yoko and John worked alternatively and successively on individual and joint projects, mainly in the field of music, but also in cinema, video and some “Fluxus” actions, above all in actions of unambiguous ideological commitment towards peace and towards the end of the Vietnam War. Their “honeymoon”, in the bed of an Amsterdam hotel, surrounded by the means of communication and public attending the vindication performance, was a highly-significant artistic and political performance in the pacifist “fight”. “Bed Piece” was surely the first artistic action in which the media power was perversely used in a justified way by the two stars, Yoko and John, to get greater backing for their peace proposals. In the same way –i.e. as political activism and art committed to pacifism - must we view the setting up of great advertising posters in the most-transited places in New York, Rome, Berlin, etc. with a Christmas message in 1969: “War is Over. If you want it.” This multiple installation and its international public diffusion, making use of the resources of communication and publicity of commercial advertising, may be considered one of the most important and transcendental works of ideologically committed art in our century. Highly innovative and greatly and visually effective, this urban communication action excellently solved the “Art – Life – Society” equation, with a tremendous power of influence and intervention on a whole generation, almost up to our own days...
Between 1969 and 1980, the year in which John was assassinated (8th December), Yoko mainly worked in the field of music along with her husband or her group, the “Plastic Ono Band”. Her previous vanguard experiences were recreated in a new situation of diffusion and massive audiences. From this period we can highlight her composition and album work as well as other cinema and video projects. Among the first we should cite “Two Virgins”, “Wedding Album”, “Imagine”, “Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band” (1970), “Fly” (1971), “Feeling the Space”, “Approximately Infinite Universe” (1973), “Double Fantasy” (1980), etc. From her filmography, we can highlight her most experimental pieces (also pioneers of a new way of understanding cinematographic and videographic language, unfortunately not well known): “Rape” (1969), “Fly” (1970), “Freedom” (1970), “Imagine” (1971), “Erection” (1971), and her posthumous homage to John Lennon, “Walking on This Ice” (1981) and “Goodbye Sadness” (1982). Even though more sporadically, Yoko Ono also worked in that period in the area of conceptual objects and actions that were more personal: “Retrospective” (Syracuse Everson Museum, 1971) and “Museum of Modern (F)art” (New York, 1971).
Following John’s death, Yoko suffered a long and painful depression. From 1980 until 1989, her main creative activities were the undertaking of videos in remembrance of her assassinated husband, in which she emotionally expressed his terrible absence and her loneliness, along with other musical projects: “Season of Glass” (1981), “Alright” (1982), “Star peace” (1985), etc. Approximately in 1986 Yoko Ono re-commenced her public activity as an artistic and visual creator; in the first place, undertaking a series of bronze sculptures, interpreting previous conceptual works she had made in the 1970s - “Bronze Age”– and later developing the production of her retrospective exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1989).
Since then, Yoko Ono has increased her presence in the international artistic circuit, in dozens of individual and collective exhibitions in the Contemporary Art Biennials, in retrospective exhibitions organized by museums in Europe and America, in exhibitions dedicated to the “Fluxus” movement, in specific installations, etc... Over the years Yoko Ono has slowly taken up the space and time she fairly deserved, that of one of the most important and outstanding artists of the second half of the century, that of a star with its own light…
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