Review of Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (here).
Included in the exhibit is Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail from 1961. What she knows about painting could fit in a can with room left over for the paint.
Target Practice makes a terrific case for the artists who cut, stomped, burned, melted and made fun of painting in the middle of the 20th century. Lest we get carried away by the thrill of it all, however, curator Michael Darling also included the self-righteously smug, always a big part of this movement.
And when it comes to smug passing itself off as deep, nobody tops Ono. With her Fluxus credentials and her weird luck of marrying John Lennon, her knack for engaging banalities gave her a major career.
The list of critics who’ve fallen for it is long. Here’s Kenneth Baker discussing a billboard that accompanied Yes Yoko Ono in 2002 and bore the legend, War Is Over! If You Want It — Love and peace from John and Yoko.
Ono’s conceptual works are thought experiments. Performing them — or
even thinking about performing, which often amounts to the same thing — can
alter one’s sense of the power of inner reorientation. Do we want war to be
over or merely think we do?
Be the ball, Kenneth. Visualize world peace. Up with people. We are the world.
The problem with the world is, it continues to be the world.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Back to Ono. Painting to Hammer a Nail invites the audience to pick up a nail and pound it into a wood panel painted white. Why this exercise qualifies as an attack on painting is beyond me. It has nothing to do with painting. It’s all about Ono telling people what to do.
But over the weekend, this oft-seen piece took a weird turn. In Seattle, people didn’t follow her instructions. They started to, but then they gave up.
Here’s the piece on Friday:
Here it is Tuesday:
Instead of a place for pounding out the artist’s message, it became a community bulletin board. (Anybody seen my puppy?) Credit for inspiring it goes to Ono, as all of it qualifies as a homage.
” ‘luck’ to marry John Lennon” you say?
I’ve always felt comfortable with Yoko Ono doing her thing. I also sympathize with the horror of her watching her love get shot and die. I am a bit younger, was newly single with a child of similar age to hers when Lennon was shot. (Sometimes the artist’s life and art don’t get separated, such as you began with her marriage.)
A word on Yoko Ono “doing her thing”: she had the independence (of money and spirit) to do what she wanted and never seemed to care what people thought…and that’s preJohn Lennon.
The people “not doing what she wanted” in Seattle, putting notes on the nails, seem to follow a crowd – after the first person had the idea. Another way to look at it.
Hi Regina. Great post.
Thanks for your comments on my blog!. I responded to them on the blog and made the correction and a link.
Don’t know if you can read it. Your profile wouldn’t come up.
I am still a techno begininner.
See you soon.
Susan
Yoko is over! If you want it.
Kind of a mean-spirited post, Regina. Yoko is an extraordinary artist, and though you seem to object to sincerity, she is a sincere peace activist. Her sincerity seems impossible to you, and perhaps you are more comfortable with the attitude of cynics who inspire apathy and a world of Sara Pailn supporters.
But here is a 76 year-old woman who has worked as an outsider all of her life, whose poetic response to life in the late 20th-century is profoundly moving, and who is interested in making art that reaches outside of the stuffy confines of the art world, and you dismiss it.
She was “lucky” to marry Lennon? Well, yes you can say anyone who find the love of their life is lucky, as that relationship transformed her (and him). He was lucky to marry her, as it opened him up in ways he would have never predicted (or imagined).
Regina,
I think you are working from a false premise. The Seattle piece is not a “weird” development at all. Yoko Ono wrote in 1966:
“Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot foresee, and brings the concept of “time” into painting. It immediately eliminates the usual emphasis put on the original painting, and art comes down from the pedestal.
Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the concept of time and space. And then, sometimes later, the instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.”
What you know about the Fluxus movement could fit on a white canvas full of nails with room left over for Post-Its – if you want it.
It’s 2009. Are we still having this conversation? Well then, mission accomplished. The idea that rules were posted and that the entire work became something else is the point. If you can’t feel why something is, then at least do some research. As a “Critic” you should wonder why legions of others developed these forms and yet you don’t feel it. For good or bad – you don’t feel why it’s here. It doesn’t matter if this is your cup of tea or not – you don’t get it so why write? Leave it to those who do, whether they like the work or not.
The real failure of the modern critic is that they lack the genetic chip for artistic perception and then take it out on the public.
People will follow their own variation on ‘instructions’.
Painting To Exist Only When It’s Copied or Photographed….
Let People copy or photograph your paintings.
Destroy the originals.
1964
I know Yoko and I certainly know her work. She is what she is and that is a major talent that many people are finding all over again. Fluxus is definitely her forte but her conceptual pieces have moved me to tears many times. Who can ever forget the day after 9/11 the double centerfold spread she took out in The New York Times that said only two words “Imagine Peace” and if that is not a true artists working at the top of her game then I dont know what is.
yoko deserves the nobel peace prize she is wildly beyond us a muse and i a simple dreamer of her love
Regina: In 1998 or 1999, I reviewed the major survey of performance art at LA MoCA for the Wall Street Journal (I don’t have the catalogue with me in DC). Yoko Ono’s “Painting to Hammer a Nail” was on display there too – with one key difference. There was a small sign next to the piece saying “Please Don’t Touch.” I’m glad to see that the piece has now been re-activated (and/or re-hammered).
I always figured it was the other way around- John Lennon had the wierd luck to marry Yoko Ono, instead of bland supermodels like all his contemporaries.
And smug passing itself off as deep pretty much nails all pre-Ono Lennon.
She had a “major career” before Lennon- to anybody who was paying attention to art. Which, of course, is almost nobody, which is why her post Lennon “major career” is still pretty meaningless to all but the few who care about art.
It seems pretty obvious to me that it was taken as a comment on painting, and a pretty outre one, at the time this piece was done, to put a rectangular object on the wall in a gallery, and then invite the public to pound nails into it.
Maybe its a sign of how far we have come that this is no longer such a self-evident comment on painting, but at the time, it could not have been mistaken for anything else…
Surely you jest, Ries. Lennon was one of the major artists of the 20th century, and he stayed major even after taking a year off to be a house husband and prove by walking away from his music that he wasn’t a sexist. She convinced him that her screaming in a studio was art, and his singing was entertainment. As Nathanael West would have advised him, “Never marry the enemy of your excitement.”
What we are discussing here, Regina, is taste.
And it varies.
I own most of the Beatles catalog, and have not intentionally listened to any of it in probably 20 years.
But I find the “screaming in the studio” stuff Ono and Lennon did together infinitely more interesting than any of the Beatles treacle.
I saw the Beatles, live, in, I think, 67. They werent that good. And I have seen hundreds of bands live, so my standard of reference is not small. For example, the Sonics, from Tacoma, could have wiped the floor with the Beatles on a bad day.
To call someone a “major” artist is pretty meaningless- unless you qualify how and why. Lennon did not sell anywhere near as many albums as many much less respected artists, his band was only together for a few years, and while his influence is significant, I would argue it is mostly in a relatively saccharine pop arena. He was an elevator music influence, for sure. But many other musicians I could name were much more influential in terms of musicians, who, it turn, made the music we listen to today.
Do we judge someone solely on sales, and money made? If so, then many great musicians are irrelevant. Do we look at influence on other music? Context? Who do we remember now, from the 30’s, and why?
So, no, I do not jest in the slightest.
I’m a fan of both artists, and would agree with Ries that meeting Yoko Ono was the best thing that happened to John Lennon, especially in terms of his personal development. I will never discount what the Beatles accomplished, but before Lennon met Ono, he was just another obscenely successful rock star; married to a woman who was not his soul mate and growing increasingly aware of a nagging feeling in his soul that something was missing. Ono saw in him the potential to put his actions where his heart was and helped him make it happen. Their relationship was stormy, to be sure (remember the Lost Weekend!?) but it was also one of the most honest things John Lennon did with his life.
Meeting La Monte Young was undoubtably the best thing that happened to Yoko Ono, career-wise. It put her in the center of the beating heart of the New York avant-garde in the early sixties. By the time John Lennon came around, not only did she have a “major career,” she was ready to put her social consciousness and personal well-being ahead of that career.
Yoko had a lot to teach John. All he had to do was realize how much there was to learn.
My niece and I saw this piece on the Wednesday after the Tuesday picture was taken. The piece is a living, growing, breathing “thing”. We made small contributions to it at noon and came back at 3 and it had been totally transformed. We met a bunch of art students who said it was their favorite piece in the museum and they contributed drawings, ties and other goodies to it. We contributed an old eye glass prescription, a folded peace crane and a business card. You are not only invited to hammer a nail, you are invited to decorate, desecrate and to touch it. It is a marvel and I hope that someone is taking a picture of it hourly because if we saw so much transformation in 3 hours, who can imagine what it looks like today? Or yesterday? Or tomorrow? So “whatevv” with the snarky comments. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder or the person with the hammer in their hand at that moment. Go Yoko!
Hi MelindaLu: What you’re praising is the art of the audience. The audience (including you) has gone way beyond their instructions. Praise also should go to the Seattle Art Museum, which is permitting it to happen. As Washington Post critic Anne Midgette noted in this thread, when she reviewed an exhibit with this piece in it in the late 90s at MoCA, it had a sign next to it saying, “Please do not touch.”
The second photograph doesn’t show the dollar bill I attached to Ono’s work way, way up above. Did someone remove it?
Paul Pauper
Curator and Janitor
Form/Space Atelier
This artist followed her instructions my her way a few years ago and made this series of photographs documenting this experience, take a look at her site to see the images if you are interested in these ideas:
http://lanazcaplan.com/portfolio_instructions.html