Yoko Ono is known for being the famous John Lennon’s wife and the scapegoat that is blamed for breaking up the pop/rock sensation group, The Beatles. Unfortunately, She is lesser known and given less media credit for being a fantastic alternative artist.
Ono focuses on installation, performance, and conceptual art. Installation art is defined by the artist taking a whole space, room, or building like a museum and transforming it into their art exhibit. The patrons walk in to see an exhibit and are encompassed not only by the art, but the emotions that fill the room that is being portrayed by the artwork (DeWitte 240). Conceptual art is made when an artist comes up with an idea but the making and follow through is done secondary, and usually by another group of people that participate in the building or on-looking of the art (DeWitte 240). This form of art usually comes to life when the audience takes action to fully form the idea of the artist. Performance art is when an artist acts out their artistic styles and thoughts. It is emotional, sometimes tells a vague story which is open for interpretation, is done in front of a live audience, and most importantly, are rarely ever repeated (DeWitte 240).Since it is almost never repeated, the audience gets a unique experience. These styles are the best definition of what kind of artist Yoko Ono is; wanting the audience to be captured and to be a part of the art-making process.
The first piece of artwork that jumps out as a beautiful piece of conceptual artwork is her piece, “The Wishing Tree for Liverpool.” Yoko Ono came up with the idea of a tree filled with paper wishes. She was asking for help from the general public of the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool to make it happen. Th...
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...ewer’s core and makes them think positive through simple acts of kindness and reassurance of the self.
Works Cited
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Jones, Jonathan. “Yoko Ono show at Guggenheim Shines Light on Pioneering Conceptual Artist”. The Guardian. 13 Mar. 2014. Web. 1 May. 2014.
Persse, Jason. "Yoko Ono: Voice Piece for Soprano / Whisper Piece / Wish Tree at MoMA [NY, USA]." IMAGINE PEACE.5 Nov, 2010. Archive 11543. Web. 01 May 2014.
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Gallery 19 of the Museum of Modern Art features Pop Art trailblazers of the early 1960s, ranging from Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl with Ball” to Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe.” Alongside these emblematic works of art, there hangs a more simplistic piece: a six foot square canvas with three yellow letters, entitled “OOF.” The work of art, created by Ed Ruscha in 1962, is a painting that leaves little room for subjective interpretation as does the majority of his work. Ruscha represented the culture in the 1960s through his contributions to the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, efforts to redefine what it meant for a painting to be fine art, and interpretation of the Space Race.
“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” (Sol LeWitt - Artform, 1967)
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What do I see in her performance? Her art performance “The Artist is Present” is the first career exhibition the MoMA under took for a performan...
Pollock (1980) begins her article by drawing in her audience in; asking how is it possible that art history does not incorporate any other field beyond the artist in order to explain the meaning behind their work. She then explains that her article is mainly about how she rejects how art historians are depicting artworks and restricting themselves in explaining the work solely based on the biography of the artist who created it. (Pollock, 1980, pg.58)
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... are flipped upside down, skies being taken down like wallpaper, these contradictions depicted. In performance art, Lady Gaga, a contemporary pop singer, also embodies the strange of Surrealism. With her outlandish costumes and ideas, she transforms her stage in a wonderland. Her stage stands for everything society rejects. Her videos and performances are engaging; viewers critically see the underlying comment behind cultural phenomena. For instance, her piece Paparazzi, she comments on society. She is the celebrity she is in real life and at the same time is questioning the conditioning of masses to worship celebrity culture. While only using a few examples, Surrealism has not strayed too far from the fine arts but has spread into all forms of art. In the digital age, the canvas on which we paint or write has widened and evolved from the time Surrealism emerged.
At first, before I did read the readings and watched the lecture, I was thoroughly confused as to what was going on in Cut Piece and found myself cringing at many of the parts. I thought this was some sort of experiment that Ono was a part of. However, after reading the required texts and viewing the lecture, I got a better sense of what was transpiring. The process was that Yoko Ono would just sit on stage and participants from the audience would just come up and cut away certain pieces of her clothing at their own discretion. This eventually progressed to the point in which Ono was almost tripped away of all her clothing. Yoko was involving her audience in her art and probably wanted to see how far people would take advantage of her selflessness.
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Pollack, Allan W.. “Notes on "All You Need Is Love".” soundscapes.info. 1996. 2 October 2009 .