21/6/2002
Yes Yoko Ono
SFMoMA, San Francisco
In her prolific 40-year career, Ono has embraced a wide range of media, defying traditional boundaries and creating new forms of artistic expression. The exhibition features approximately 150 works from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on her early period, and includes objects and installations; language works, such as instruction pieces and scores; film and video; music; and performance art.
In her prolific 40-year career, Ono has embraced a wide range of media,
defying traditional boundaries and creating new forms of artistic expression.
The exhibition features approximately 150 works from the 1960s to the
present, with a focus on her early period, and includes objects and
installations; language works, such as instruction pieces and scores; film and
video; music; and performance art. YES YOKO ONO was organized by Japan
Society, New York, and curated by its gallery director, Alexandra Munroe, in
consultation with Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks. Overseeing the San Francisco
presentation are Janet Bishop, SFMOMA curator of painting and sculpture,
and Clara Kim, SFMOMA curatorial associate. The exhibition was awarded the
2000-2001 International Association of Art Critics/USA Award for Best Museum
Show Originating in New York City.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon
War is Over!, 1969
Billboard installed in Times Square, New York
Courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE
YES YOKO ONO offers the first comprehensive reevaluation of Ono's work, exploring her position
within the postwar international avant-garde and her critical and influential role in originating
forms of cutting-edge art, music, film, and performance. The exhibition examines her early and
central role in Fluxus, an avant-garde movement that developed in New York in the early 1960s;
her important contributions to Conceptual art in New York, London, and Tokyo; her concerts;
experimental films; vocal recordings; public art, including works made with John Lennon; and
recent works, including interactive installations and site-specific art. Avant-garde figures such as
John Cage, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, and Ornette
Coleman collaborated with Ono, and their resulting works are also represented. Accompanying the
exhibition is the catalogue YES YOKO ONO, the first major art publication surveying Ono's artistic
career, co-published by Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. The catalogue features an essay
by former SFMOMA director David A. Ross and includes a CD of new musical works by Yoko Ono.
The exhibition title, YES YOKO ONO, refers to the interactive installation known as Ceiling
Painting, an important work shown at Ono's historic 1966 Indica Gallery show in London. The
viewer is invited to climb a white ladder, at the top of which a magnifying glass, attached by a
chain, hangs from a frame on the ceiling. The viewer uses the reading glass to discover a
block-letter "instruction" beneath the framed sheet of glass - it says "Y E S." It was through this work
that Ono met her future husband and longtime collaborator, John Lennon. (Note: Due to the
fragile nature of its materials, the installation is no longer interactive.)
Born in Tokyo in 1933 into a prominent banking family, part of Japan's social and intellectual elite,
Ono received rigorous training in classical music, German lieder, and Italian opera. She attended an
exclusive school where her schoolmates included Japan's present emperor, Akihito, and Yukio
Mishima, the world-renowned novelist who committed ritual seppuku, or suicide by disembowelment,
to protest Japan's Westernization. Ono, raised partly in America, witnessed Japan's devastation in
World War II, and by the time she entered Gakushuin University in 1952 as its first female philosophy
student, she was swept up by the intellectual climate of the postwar Japanese avant-garde. This
movement was characterized by a spirit of rebellion against all orthodoxy, a yearning for individual
self-expression, and a desire for spiritual freedom in a landscape reduced to absolute nothingness by
the ravages of warfare.
Disillusioned with academic philosophy, Ono left Japan to join her family in New York. Attending
Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, she soon gravitated to the vibrant art community of lower
Manhattan. At the time, non-Western cultures, especially those of China and Japan, were inspiring
new forms of artistic expression.
A loose association of these artists was eventually formed under the name of Fluxus. The group
experimented with mixing poetry, music, and the visual arts through a wide spectrum of activities
including concerts and exhibitions. As a member of Fluxus, Ono presented work and launched a career
that would take her back to Japan, where she became an active member of the Tokyo avant-garde,
back to New York, and then to London, where the 1966 Indica Gallery show took place.
In the decades since that seminal show, Ono has continued to expand the boundaries of her art in
diverse media. After her marriage to John Lennon in 1969, she collaborated with him on a number of
projects in music, creating a bridge between avant-garde and rock in releases such as Unfinished
Music for Two Virgins (1968), Wedding Album (1969), and Double Fantasy (1980). Their happenings,
Bed-Ins for Peace, and the billboard campaign, War Is Over! If You Want It, were landmark projects
created to promote world peace, a continuing theme in their work together.
During the 1980s, influenced by the rampant materialism of the decade, Ono revisited some of her
1960s objects, transforming works that were originally light and transparent into bronze, symbolizing a
shift from what she calls "the sixties sky" to the new "age of commodity and solidity." In the 1990s, Ono's
prolific output of interactive installations, site-specific works, Internet projects, concerts, and recordings
were widely represented in numerous venues across Europe, America, Japan, and Australia
DOCENT-LED TOURS
Highlights from YES YOKO ONO
Daily (except Wednesdays)
1:30 p.m.
Free with Museum admission. Meet in the Haas Atrium.
__________
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
PROGRAMS, CLASSES, AND EVENTS
Saturday, June 22, 2002
SOLD OUT
An Afternoon with Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
2:30 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Spend a scintillating, once-in-a lifetime afternoon with Yoko Ono. The artist will participate in a
moderated conversation about her work, a performance, and an open-ended question-and-answer
period with the audience.
$20 general, $15 SFMOMA members. Tickets are extremely limited; advance ticket purchase is
strongly recommended. Limit two tickets per person.
Friday, June 28, 2002
Art and Conversation
Live Actions: The Avant-Garde Art of Yoko Ono
Clara Kim, SFMOMA Curatorial Associate
11:30 a.m.
Phiyllis Wattis Theater
Kim talks about the groundbreaking nature of Yoko Ono's work within the context of international
performance art, language art, sculpture, and film in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Free with Museum admission.
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Video Screening
An Afternoon with Yoko Ono
2:00 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
In this video of the June 22 event at SFMOMA, Yoko Ono talks about her work with Paul Schimmel,
chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, gives a performance, and engages in a
question-and-answer session with the audience.
Additional screenings
Friday, July 26 / 2 p.m.
Thursday, August 1 / 6:30 p.m.
Free with Museum admission.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
Lecture and Performance
Live Actions: The Avant-Garde Art of Yoko Ono
Clara Kim, SFMOMA Curatorial Associate
7:00 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Kim discusses Yoko Ono's events, performances, and films. The lecture is followed by Ono's Sky Piece
for Jesus Christ (1965) performed by the Del Sol String Quartet.
$12 general; $8 SFMOMA members, students with ID, and seniors.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Video Screening
An Afternoon with Yoko Ono
2:00 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
In this video of the June 22 event at SFMOMA, Yoko Ono talks about her work with Paul Schimmel,
chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, gives a performance, and engages in a
question-and-answer session with the audience.
Additional screening
Thursday, August 1 / 6:30 p.m.
Free with Museum admission.
Thursday, August 01, 2002
Video Screening
An Afternoon with Yoko Ono
6:30 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
In this video of the June 22 event at SFMOMA, Yoko Ono talks about her work with Paul Schimmel,
chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, gives a performance, and engages in a
question-and-answer session with the audience.
Free with Museum admission.
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Free Tuesday Program
Strawberries and Violin: An Afternoon of Performances
Participants include Blevin Blectum, Felipe Dulzaides, Mads Lynnerup, Margaret Tedesco, and others.
Noon
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Bay Area artists and composers will perform a selection of Yoko Ono's instruction poems and musical
scores from the book Grapefruit and other sources in this program organized by Clara Kim, SFMOMA
curatorial associate, and Randy Nordschow, a San Francisco-based performance artist and composer.
Y E S YOKO ONO is organized by Japan Society, New York. The
exhibition is made possible in part by major support from NTT
DoCoMo, Inc. Assistance from Apple Computer, Inc.; EMI
Recorded Music, EMI Records Ltd. and Capitol Records, Inc.; EMI
Music Publishing; and Signatures Network, Inc. is gratefully
acknowledged. Generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts; the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter
Foundation; The David Geffen Foundation; and Marilyn and Jeffrey
Katzenberg, has also made this exhibition possible. The tour of Y E
S YOKO ONO is supported in part by the National Endowment for
the Arts, Washington, DC, a federal agency.
Image: Photo: by Iain Macmillan.
Courtesy LENONO PHOTO ARCHIVE, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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San Francisco, CA 94103-3159
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