Ineffable Essence: The Spiritual in Modern Art
...d by traditional media (e.g., painting) and where performance art, film, and music are too often separated from museum studies altogether, did not apply to Ono’s work—which is by nature beyond and between genres, open, unorthodox, and inventive rather than fixed in any conventional sense. Attempts to categorize her work are further exacerbated by what may be called the “transformative potential” that has been a consistent feature of Ms. Ono’s work for four decades in a variety of media. “Ono’s art is directed at transformation [italics added], a faith in the mind’s power to realize good through the act of visualization.” Transformation is understood by many to be a spiritual event. Like Spirit, transformation defies boundaries and borders of categorization and classification. The “transformative potential” was in abundant evidence in the works exhibited at the 2002 installation of YES at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA). In the individual pieces as well as the gestalt of the exhibit, there was a gentle but insistent invitation to the viewer to experience the encounter with the Unnamable firsthand, to make their own journey of longing with imagination as the point of departure. The spiritual aspect of Yoko Ono’s work is not of the soothing variety; rather, it is a vital, erotic, dynamic call to the viewer to travel beyond safe confines into the uncharted territory of personal transformation. Ms. Ono’s work succeeds in “provoking, upending, mirroring our received notions so as to incite a new encounter with one’s self and the nature of being.” Yoko Ono’s artistic heritage is a hybrid lineage. Although she has never affixed herself to a particular artistic movement, her work reflects influences of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Conceptual art. The philosophical and psychological similarities between Ms. Ono and the women of the Surrealist movement are particularly intriguing. The Surrealist imagination obsessed on an idealized vision of Woman as Muse, an “externalized source of creative energy…personification of the female Other…” While the concept of an idealized Other inspired the male Surrealist artists, the women of the Surrealist movement found it frustrating. “The image of the femme-enfant, that volatile mix of sexual awareness and childlike ingenuousness that fired the Surrealist imagination, plagued attempts by women artists to achieve artistic maturity.” Like their male counterparts, the women Surrealists strove to uncover and express a personal artistic identity. For many of them, this undertaking was more fully realized by creating art that was “firmly rooted in their experience of their own bodies and in their acceptance of their own psychic reality” as compared to the impersonal abstractions and dreamscapes that distinguished the work of male Surrealists. The body, her own and other bodies, is also a recurrent referent in Ms. Ono’s work --with some differences. One difference between Ms. Ono’s work and that of the Surrealist women is that she refers to her own body thru performance rather than painting. In The Cut Piece (1964), she enters the stage carrying scissors. Moving to the center, she invites the audience to cut off her clothing. Tucking her legs under her, she sits down and places the scissors on the floor in front of her to wait motionless and silent. While certain elements of the piece are fixed, e.g., her posture and attitude, each performance of the piece is shaped and unfolds in a new form because of the environment. Unlike the static paintings produced by the women Surrealists, locale, audience and context are immediate, vital elements of most of Ms. Ono’s performance work. While the work of the Surrealist women limited the viewer’s access to a two-dimensional glimpse of their private psychic landscapes, Ms. Ono’s performance art is a vulnerable unveiling, permitting the viewer to both witness and experience the “journey beyond mind.” Both the Surrealists and Ms. Ono seem to say “Look. Here is my reality” but the physicality and interactivity of Ms. Ono’s work openly challenges the traditional boundary between artist and audience. What emerges from Cut Piece and other performance pieces is “an intimate and painful sensation of self that the public can encounter, watch, and feel. Cut Piece expresses an anguished interiority while offering a social commentary on the quiet violence that binds individuals and society…” Challenge and invitation are no less present in her installation works. Play It By Trust (1966/1997), for example, consists of two chess tables, four chairs, and two chess sets, all made of wood and painted white. A brass plaque on the underside of the tables reads “Chess set for playing as long as you can remember where all your pieces are.” Joan Rothfuss writes about the piece in the catalog for YES Her simple alteration…derails any ordinary play of the game ... Instead, the players lose track of their pieces as the game progresses; ideally this leads to a … new relationship based on empathy rather than opposition. Peace is then attained on a small scale; perhaps the rules will even be revised so that the game can continue. …White Chess Set…is consistent with her wish that her work encourage each of us first to “deal with oneself. In addition to the contributions of historical art movements, ethnic and cultural influences are also visible in Ms. Ono’s work --Buddhist thought as well as haiku and Noh poetics --with their emphasis on minimalist form and suggestive (conceptual) imagery. For most of her childhood, her family belonged to the Japanese upper class where Central to elite Japanese culture is the literati…ideal in which the practice of the “three perfections” of painting, poetry, and calligraphy and the “elegant pursuits” of music and the board game go are universally acknowledged as super ways to refine the soul – …To move among and between art forms, seeking the higher self was the ideal. Traditionally, in the dominant culture of the West, strict lines of division exist between issues of “soul” and formalized education, between “sacred” and “secular” concerns. In contrast, for most other cultures around the globe, refinement of the soul and spiritual health are issues ubiquitous to all human endeavors. Among the Japanese elite of Ono’s ancestry and within the African American Baptist culture of my childhood, care of the soul was of central importance and retained a crucial relevance to all areas of life. Ultimately, both Ms. Ono and I would find the rigid moralistic parameters of our inherited spiritual/religious traditions confining and take on the arduous task of distancing ourselves from our families to explore spiritual philosophies more supportive of our art and lives; however, the early understanding of Spirit as a pervasive presence underlying and infusing all things would remain. In light of these cultural antecedents, three signature motifs of Ms. Ono’s work can be more readily observed and appreciated: the engagement of the viewer in highly interactive ways (both mentally and physically), e.g., The Cut Piece; the assimilation of “the consciousness of art into the fabric of ordinary living” ; and the use of ritual. Among other motifs and impulses, these contribute to the spiritual nature of her work. The breakdown of the boundary between art and everyday life has been a central theme for many artists in the Modern Art era, Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” such as Fountain (1917), being some of the earliest and most notable examples. Ms. Ono’s approach to the inquiry is unique in her juxtaposition of an idea—often in the form of text which she calls “instructions”—against the visual situation. The result for the viewer exceeds the mere intellectual deconstruction offered by her Minimalist predecessors. The work provokes the imagination of the viewer and launches a telepathic journeying into a space where the dissolution of boundaries is both felt and seen. Mind Object II (n.d., probably circa 1985), for example, consists of a clear, empty soft-drink bottle resting on a clear Plexiglas pedestal which bears the inscription “Not to be appreciated until it’s broken.” The object is a mundane artifact whose appearance in the museum shatters traditional boundaries between high art and everyday life. The text invites far-reaching spiritual considerations, e.g., by evoking mental images of a broken bottle and provoking the contemplation of the meaning of “appreciation.” In YES, Ms. Ono’s “instructions” also exist as distinct objets d’art, a hybrid art form combining poetry, Conceptualism and, sometimes, calligraphy. The “instructions” contain some of the most elegant examples of ritual in Ms. Ono’s work. Examples include: Fly. (Fly Piece, 1963) Drill two holes into a canvas. Hang it where you can see the sky. (Change the place of hanging. Try both the front and the rear windows, to see if the skies are different.) (Painting to See the Skies, 1961) Watch the sun until it becomes square. (Sun Piece, 1962) 10th day. Swim. Swim in your dreams as far as you can. [no day given] Hide Mouth. Hide your mouth at all times. (Detail from 3 newspaper eVenTs for the pRicE of $1, 1966) Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. (a) Keep painting until you die. (b) (Blood Piece, 1960) Some “instructions” have transformed over the course of Ms. Ono’s career and exist as both art objects and performance pieces executed by her, the audience or both. Lighting Piece (1955), for example...