[Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Eriko Osaka, Theirry Raspail]
Yoko OnoLondon, UK: Phaidon, 2024
160 pp., 25 x 29 x 1.5 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
The Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series is a consistently reliable collection of monographs surveying important contemporary artists. Titles in the series each include an interview, survey, focus, artist’s writings, “artist’s choice”, and an extensive chronology. They feature good reproductions, thoughtful writings and - perhaps most importantly - excellent distribution, bringing contemporary art to suburban shopping mall bookstores.
First launched in 1996, the series includes books on Marina Abramovic, Francis Alÿs, Lynda Benglis, Vija Celmins, Tacita Dean, Mark Dion, Tom Friedman, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Mary Kelly, On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Christian Marclay, Wangechi Mutu, Lucy Orta, Nancy Spero, Simon Starling, Sarah Sze, Gillian Wearing, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ai Weiwei, and many others.
As far as I can tell, this is the first instance in which the artist appears on the cover, instead of an art work. Abramovic and Alÿs are both pictured on the cover of their titles, but mid-performance, their faces obscured. Yoko Ono is pictured posing for the camera while installing her 1966 Indica Gallery exhibition.
This may be the result of trying to grapple with the fact that Ono herself is better known than any of her works. “The world's most famous unknown artist,” is how her husband John Lennon frequently described her, “...everyone knows her name but no one knows what she actually does."
Or perhaps it’s a response to Ono eschewing a signature style or medium. In her essay Yoko Ono: Transcendent Freedom and Hope, Eriko Osaka observes “Having come to the art world via a training in music, literature and philosophy, with only a passing interest in painting and drawing, [Ono] was freer in her thinking, less fixated on any one technique or medium than others who went to art school.”
This site is dedicated primarily to Artist’ books, Multiples and Editions, with a secondary focus that
reflects my interests in Artists’ Records, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Mail Art, Advertisements, Text, etc. Yoko Ono has not only created works in each of these often disparate media, she has frequently produced defining examples.
Grapefruit is the quintessential Artist Book, and in some ways functions as a blueprint for the rest of Ono’s seven decades-long career.1 The title is still in print over fifty years later, and has been translated into Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and back to its original Japanese.2
Her Fluxus edition Box Of Smile ranks among the best of the hundreds of boxed works George Maciunas produced for the group. It is simple, poetic, funny and participatory: a small square plastic box with the title foil stamped onto the lid opens to reveal a mirror reflecting the viewer’s face, who completes the work with a grin of recognition.
White Chess Set - first exhibited in the Indica Gallery show featured on the book’s cover - is an all-white chess board with white playing pieces, emphasizing concentration over competition. Sometimes known as Play it By Trust, the piece has been editioned a few times, made into large scale public art, presented as public participation pieces, and in performances reminiscent of the Toronto chess match by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
Cut Piece is as powerful and influential a work of Performance Art as anything by Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, or Carolee Schneemann. Ono sits on the stage in her best dress and places a pair of scissors in front of her. Audience members are invited to come up one by one and cut away pieces of her clothing. Osaka notes that the work “brought out people’s latent feelings of desire, anger, vulnerability, destructiveness, confrontation, dedication, forbearance, acceptance”.
Film works like Fly or Film No. 4 (better known as Bottoms) are rightly celebrated as important early examples of artists’ cinema, but lesser known works like Erection (not what you think), Self-Portrait (what you thought) and Apotheosis are equally compelling. Apotheosis [1970] is a 17-minute film shot from an ascending air balloon. Following the initial landscape view, audiences are presented with a test of their patience by several minutes of white-out, when the balloon reaches the clouds. The pay off is the “huge poem”3 of the reveal once the balloon ascends above the clouds.4
Ono’s use of advertising spaces such as public billboards5 anticipated Jenny Holzer’s public works and the Time Square Jumbotron by over a decade. Her presentation of text-only works predate Joseph Kosuth and can rightly be considered the first exhibited examples of Conceptual Art.6
Phaidon’s Yoko Ono examines these works and countless others, from pieces made in the artist’s childhood, to projects realized in the last few years. The two essays are well-researched and share little overlap. The Artist’s Writings section features early examples of Ono’s essays, often presented in facsimile.
The Artist’s Choice section presents Ono’s 9 Concert Pieces for John Cage, from 1966, which were originally intended for inclusion in Cage’s 1969 Something Else Press book Notations. Only a single example made its way into that legendary collection, but all nine are reproduced here, one to a page.
The major disappointment in the book was the thing I was most highly anticipating: an interview with Ono conducted by Laurie Anderson7. The latter’s questions are interesting enough, but Ono opts to answer in single sentences only. This was likely a deliberate strategy - and nod to the direct short Event texts of Grapefruit - but is not particularly illuminating. I would have preferred a long rambling conversation.
The most interesting takeaway from the exchange was the fact that Ono provided comforting words to Anderson following the loss of her husband. She tells Ono “You were very encouraging and consoling to me when Lou [Reed] died. You helped me see that he had become a sum of all the thing he was in his life. This completely changed my ideas and feelings about time and loss, life and death. And it helped me accept that he would always be a part of my life in ways that continuously change.”
Grief is a difficult subject for an artist to explore without succumbing to over-indulgence, or saccharine platitudes. Both Ono and Anderson have brilliantly worked through the loss of their partners in their practice: Anderson with the 2015 feature film Heart of a Dog8 and Ono with Season of Glass9. Recorded and released only half a year after Lennon’s murder, the LP features several heart-breaking songs about loss, the sound of gunshots, and a cover graphic of Lennon’s blood-stained glasses.
There is very little in the book about Ono’s musical output, which includes thirteen solo studio albums, six in collaboration with Lennon, and one with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore10. Her activism also, is mostly overlooked, other than when it dovetails with her visual art.
The book is - of course - not intended as comprehensive biography or catalogue raisonné. There would not be enough room to do justice to Ono's multi-faceted practice within the confines of the Phaidon series’ 160 pages. It is a welcome and long-overdue addition to the ongoing series.
If you own no monographs on Ono, this is a good a place as any to start. If (like me) you have dozens, this book will be a necessary addition to the library.
1. Curator Thierry Raspail proposes the opposite: that Grapefruit represents Ono’s first retrospective, including pieces that date back more than a decade prior to its publication.
2. When translated back into Japanese the title somehow ends up as Grapefruit Juice.
3. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas described the moment as: "suddenly the cloud landscape opened up like a huge poem, you could see the tops of the clouds, all beautifully enveloped by sun, stretching into infinity..."
4. Apotheosis is similar to Michael Snow’s Wavelength (a work which Ono greatly admires), in that the image is limited by a particular camera movement: Snow used the zoom of the camera, and Ono employed the ‘pedestal’ shot.
5. From the groundbreaking War Is Over (If You Want It) campaign, to the more recent Imagine Peace billboards and full page ads in newspapers.
6. The rightful credit denied to Ono is unsurprisingly owing to racism (or "cultural differences", if we’re being generous). Presented in her native Japanese, the all-text works featured characters that were ‘drawn’ in a calligraphic style by Ono’s first husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and were therefore dismissed as being ‘graphic’ works, and not strictly ‘conceptual’.
7. Laurie Anderson herself is a perfect candidate for the Phaidon treatment. I’d also like to see titles on Kay Rosen, David Hammons, and Cary Leibowitz.
8. Heart of a Dog is ostensibly about remembering her late beloved dog Lolabelle. I don’t recall Lou Reed’s name mentioned at all (maybe once?) but it’s clear that Anderson is working through grief from his loss two years prior.
9. Songs from Season of Glass have been covered by Anohni, Apples in Stereo, Deerhoof, Roberta Flack, Japanese Breakfast, Holly Miranda, Harry Nilsson, Sudan Archives, Sharon Van Otten and others.
10. In addition to the studio albums, Ono has released two live recordings, several EPs, compilations, a collaboration with The Flaming Lips, and an ill-advised off-Broadway musical.
