Several of them are based on instructions published in Grapefruit – for instance, the film No. Yoko Ono’s films have a unique position in the field of 1960s experimental film-making. Yoko Ono’s artistic voice oscillates sharp wit and haiku poetry that encourages contemplation, and like few others she has succeeded to create an interesting dialogue between the Eastern and Western avant-garde. She built an enticing platform for her work on the avant-garde scenes of New York, Tokyo and London, long before she met John Lennon, with whom she lived until his death in 1980. Her legendary series of loft concerts on Lower Manhattan attracted fellow-artists such as John Cage, David Tudor, La Monte Young and Marcel Duchamp. Yoko Ono was one of very few women artists in the circle where conceptual art developed around 1960. Yoko Ono was born in Japan in 1933 but moved back and forth between Japan and the USA with her family throughout the 1940s, while the Second World War shook the relationship between East and West. When asked why the book is called Grapefruit, Yoko Ono has often referred to the popular notion of the grapefruit as a hybrid between a lemon and an orange, and this hybrid as a metaphor for her own identity. Over the past 15 years, more and more museums around the world have had an increased interest in her work, starting with the major retrospective YES YOKO ONO, which featured nearly 50 years of groundbreaking creativity. Since then, she has also been a peace activist, and musician and composer. In the 1960s, Yoko Ono emerged as an influential artist on the New York avant-garde scene and in the Fluxus movement. Grapefruit is a book about the power of thought and the art of becoming. Grapefruit is a collection of suggestions for works of art – ideas that can be carried out, or simply take shape in the viewer’s imagination, revealing the poetry of trivial everyday things and rituals. The texts can be described as short instructions for making paintings, events, objects, music and films. The book is a collection of texts, so-called instruction pieces, and has been reprinted in many editions over the years. This exhibition highlights the book Grapefruit, which Yoko Ono self-published in Japan in 1964. In recent years, Yoko Ono’s work has been featured in various contexts in Sweden. The enacted situation consists of Yoko Ono sitting on a stage before an audience, with a pair of scissors in front of her, inviting the audience to cut pieces from her clothing. One of Yoko Ono’s most famous instructions is Cut Piece from 1964, which the artist herself has performed on several occasions. In each new context, new expressions and nuances arise, depending on who is doing it and where. With a background in classical music composition and studies in philosophy, Yoko Ono began writing “scores” for art, that is, instructions that could be interpreted again and again by audiences and colleagues. She used the concert and event formats as a place where the audience was encouraged to enact her ideas, or simply to think and develop them in their own minds. In the 1950s, Yoko Ono had already begun experimenting in the borderland between music, performance, poetry and visual art.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |