tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/yoko-ono-7964/articles
Yoko Ono – The Conversation
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223939
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind – Tate show explores the artist’s radical legacy
<p><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono">Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind</a> at the Tate Modern delves into the legacy of the Japanese artist and activist. It covers seven decades of Ono’s art, from the 1950s to the present day, and unfolds in a loosely chronological fashion. The show follows in her footsteps from the experimental music and avant-garde art circles in the US, Japan and the UK in the 1960s.</p>
<p>The exhibition draws its title from Ono’s Music of the Mind series of concerts and events held in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967. This makes explicit the crucial role music has played in her development as an artist and activist, and at once attaches and detaches her from the rock ‘n’ roll music context (and shadow) of her late husband, John Lennon. </p>
<p>Ono was a musician in her own right, having studied music composition throughout her life (as well as philosophy and poetry), whereas Lennon had studied art. <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono/exhibition-guide">Ono said</a> on the meeting of their minds: “We crossed over into each other’s fields … from avant-garde leftfield to rock ’n’ roll leftfield. We tried to find a ground that was interesting to both of us. And we both got excited and stimulated by each other’s experiences.”</p>
<h2>Ono’s ‘instructions’</h2>
<p>In 1962, Ono hung 38 sheets of paper featuring a set of instructions, written in calligraphic Japanese script, on a wall of the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo. No artist had exhibited concepts for artworks as artworks themselves before, so the show, Instructions for Paintings, was the first exhibition of conceptual art. Ono elevated art to an intensely intellectual activity, and the concept of art above its physical form.</p>
<p>Ono’s instructions also democratised art, as they triggered the imagination, thought and creativity of the audience who is left to “complete” the works by following the instructions in their real lives. This can be done by anyone, anywhere, at any time, either imaginatively or physically. One instruction entitled Painting To Be Constructed In Your Head reads: “Observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head.” </p>
<p>Ono self-published her book, <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/archive/6/64/20190320203953%21Ono_Yoko_Grapefruit_A_Book_of_Instructions_and_Drawings_2000.pdf">Grapefruit</a>, a collection of over 200 instructions, in 1964. Many of them are scattered across the Tate galleries for visitors to follow.</p>
<p>The Tate show suggests that Ono’s work is a form of “participatory art”, a kind of art that engages audiences in the creative process. But this is reductive. Ono saw her instructions as encapsulations of ideas, and <a href="https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/learn/schools/teachers-guides/the-idea-in-the-work-of-art-2">ideas as stones</a> “thrown into the water for ripples to be made”. </p>
<p>I interpret Ono’s instructions as seeds for the cultivation of the “social imaginary” – an imaginary system of ideas, values, orientations and practices that binds society together. Beyond “creation”, Ono’s instruction project is a catalyst for continuous social change, a process of “construction” that leads to an alternative world. </p>
<p>Her instructions lead to a social balance between the individual and the collective, through reflective everyday acts. These small disruptive acts draw awareness to the fact that society is socially constructed, and so it is down to the power of people’s radical imaginary to change it. </p>
<h2>Ono’s commitment to peace</h2>
<p>For over seven decades, Ono’s radical ideas have contributed to powerful social ideas such as peace, freedom, equality and democracy. Her persistent commitment to world peace is expressed through her conception of art as a radical imaginary act. </p>
<p>Ono’s instructions are <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/2892207133">“meant for others to do”</a>. But precisely what kind of “doing” do they enable? Works such as Shadow Piece – “Put your shadows together until they become one” – and Film No. 4 (Bottoms) – “String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace” – instruct people to play, but to play “with” rather than “against” each other. </p>
<p>Ono’s playful works undermine the systemic causes that drive society’s problems and trigger processes of social imagining.</p>
<p>How do you play an all-white chess set with an “opponent” (White Chess Set, 1966), get undressed under a bag (Bag Piece, 1964), or shake hands through a hole in a canvas (Painting to Shake Hands, 1961) with a “stranger”? This requires working in concert with the other and coming up with a new set of rules – initiating new social relations that lead to radically new modes of thought and action. </p>
<p>Engaging the social imagination can contribute to changing the drives and consciousness of individual people who could collectively change the world – by imagining it not as it is, but as it ought to be. In doing so, they can construct the world they dream of. <a href="https://twitter.com/yokoono/status/1295742125687087105?lang=en">As Ono puts it</a>: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”</p>
<p>Ono’s distinct approach to the empowering social role of art galvanises people in many directions. To discover new constructive principles for creating spaces for critical thinking and artistic experimentation. For knowledge creation and political resistance. And to imagine an alternative world – because to “imagine” is to embark on a process of construction.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabriella Daris received funding from the Getty Foundation, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the British Society of Aesthetics, the British Association for Japanese Studies, the Association for Art History, the British Council, and Kingston University. </span></em></p>
For over seven decades, Ono’s radical ideas have contributed to powerful social ideas such as peace, freedom, equality and democracy.
Gabriella Daris, PhD candidate, Yoko Ono's conceptual art, Kingston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207295
2023-12-04T00:10:22Z
2023-12-04T00:10:22Z
The amazing NGV Triennial 2023 makes us question our world and forces us to see it differently
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563061/original/file-20231202-26-i59fza.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C8%2C2968%2C1639&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Installation view of SMACK’s Speculum 2019 on display at Matadero Madrid © SMACK Courtesy the artist and Onkaos</span> </figcaption></figure><p>What the previous two National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Triennials have taught us is that the visitor should be prepared to be surprised, amazed and challenged. NGV Triennial 2023 does this in spades.</p>
<p>By the third iteration, the NGV Triennial has developed its own DNA signature. It is eager to redefine the parameters of art and design practice; it incorporates the entire curatorial team at the gallery; and the triennial interventions affect every level of the NGV building. </p>
<p>There is a case to be made, when the curatorial staff is large enough, for a project like a triennial to galvanise the staff into a creative collective with each person contributing according to their speciality, as well as working across disciplines.</p>
<p>Although it may be a large show – about 120 artists, designers and collectives from over 30 countries are involved in about 100 projects – it is manageable and is contained at the one site. It is designed to create a single knockout blow and largely manages to pull it off. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/enthralling-dystopian-sublime-ngv-triennial-has-a-huge-wow-factor-152607">Enthralling, dystopian, sublime: NGV Triennial has a huge 'wow' factor</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Newcomers and iconic names</h2>
<p>As with its predecessors, this triennial contains a mixture of iconic names, including Tracey Emin, Sheila Hicks, Maison Schiaparelli and Yoko Ono, all represented by major works, together with those less well known, except to art insiders. </p>
<p>In an attempt to impose some sort of structure, three thematic pillars have been devised – Magic, Matter and Memory – and the artists have been loosely corralled into these categories. </p>
<p>In an exhibition of this nature, it is difficult and perhaps unnecessary to speak of highlights. Perhaps it is more meaningful to comment on the pieces that make you question your reading of reality. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563121/original/file-20231203-75503-mf33xl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Mun-dirra, a collaborative work by artists from the Maningrida Arts Centre. Work on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mun-dirra is a monumental woven fish fence created over two years by 13 Maningrida artists plus three apprentices. It creates a mesmerising installation that runs for about 100 metres. When questioned, the artists simply related how they collected the pandanus leaf, how they made the dyes, and then wove these eel traps to create this most wondrous installed environment in which you lose yourself among the veils. </p>
<p>Almost as a complement to it, Wurundjeri artist Aunty Kim Wandin has installed a bronze eight-metre-long eel trap in the moat in front of the gallery.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563120/original/file-20231203-75446-4r5a5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Aunty Kim Wandin’s work Luk Burgurrk Gunga, on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>American-born French-based veteran artist Sheila Hicks in her Nowhere to Go sculptural installation creates a pyramid, almost seven metres high, where the rounded textile balls become both an architectural structure as well as a celebration of the power of colour. Quite simple in concept, at the same time memorable and effective. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563122/original/file-20231203-30-taxhyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Sheila Hicks’ work Nowhere to go. On display as part of NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dutch digital artists’ collective SMACK has created a tantalising and haunting installation Speculum. </p>
<p>It could be described as a digital animation of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c1500). Here, each of the hundreds of little figures has been given an individual digital identity and is fully animated as it undergoes its various tortures and torments. It is an absorbing kinetic narrative that completely draws you in and reveals many troubling contemporary aspects to eternal questions concerning the human condition.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563146/original/file-20231203-29-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of SMACK’s work on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Questioning our world</h2>
<p>Polish-born American-based artist Agnieska Pilat and her Hetrobots, especially commissioned for NGV Triennial 2023, is one of a number of pieces at the triennial that questions the role of artificial intelligence in art, design and in our lives. </p>
<p>Pilat has appropriated three robot “dogs” from engineering company Boston Dynamics, which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/27/robot-dogs-learning-to-paint-artist-agnieszka-pilat">have been used</a> by militaries and police forces. Here her quite “cute” dogs have their own built environment in which they creatively rearrange the interior, create marks on canvases and shape their environment as a non-programmed act. </p>
<p>In a way, nothing much happens, but incrementally they are changing our world.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563125/original/file-20231203-25-n0zutd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Agnieszka Pilat’s work Heterobota on display as part of NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-spot-a-good-dog-why-were-right-to-worry-about-unleashing-robot-quadrupeds-160095">Is 'Spot' a good dog? Why we're right to worry about unleashing robot quadrupeds</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>One of the more spectacular exhibits comes from the Paris haute couture house Maison Schiaparelli. Artistic director Daniel Roseberry presents a selection of recent costumes, gilded accessories and surreal body adornments within an immersive celestial environment. It is a strangely out-of-this-world experience.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563126/original/file-20231203-17-2rftik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of designs by Maison Schiaparelli on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 to 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A surprising but very effective inclusion is a cameo exhibition of Prudence Flint’s paintings titled Hunting and Fishing. </p>
<p>This Melbourne painter has created over a number of decades a peculiar figurative language where fairly spartan and slightly surreal interiors are populated by a series of scantily clad models. Over the years, her paintings have developed an uncanny atmosphere – calm, accessible and frequently carrying the sense of a suppressed silent scream.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563127/original/file-20231203-23-9ym2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Prudence Flint’s work on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The proof of a great exhibition is that it makes us question our world and forces us to see the world differently. NGV Triennial 2023 assaults our senses as we encounter architecture that breathes, mega-cities that fracture into human fragments, a huge hand that either tells us that all is OK or flicks us the bird and Yoko Ono who defiantly asserts “I LOVE YOU EARTH”. </p>
<p>The NGV has managed to raise A$8.5 million to pay for many of these newly commissioned projects and presents the triennial as a free event. This exhibition celebrates the freedom of the human spirit and will amuse, delight and shock over a million people who will visit it over the next four months. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563128/original/file-20231203-17-6iiwgj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Installation view of Yoko Ono’s work I LOVE YOU EARTH on display in NGV Triennial from 3 December 2023 – 7 April 2024 at NGV International, Melbourne. Photo: Sean Fennessy.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>The NGV Triennial 2023 is at the National Gallery of Victoria until April 7 2024.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207295/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sasha Grishin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Be prepared to be surprised, amazed and challenged at the third NGV Triennial.
Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211830
2023-08-22T05:49:38Z
2023-08-22T05:49:38Z
Why do we make violent art – and what does it say about the artist?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543887/original/file-20230822-29-rk91ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C310%2C2544%2C1571&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">El Tres de Mayo by Francisco de Goya</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The sensationalised media coverage of the recent suspected mushroom poisonings in regional Victoria expanded last week, to include children’s scribblings on a wall. </p>
<p>The pictures, which comprised stick figures, rudimentary drawings and text that referenced death and dying, were removed last year from the former home of the woman who cooked the lunch. Drawn by her primary-school-aged children, and photographed long ago by the tradesman who cleaned the wall, they included tombstones, swords and the words “I am dead” and “You don’t long to live”. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/death-wall-inside-mushroom-chefs-house/news-story/a879b2505a32b22dc16214201659dab4">news story</a> revealing the pictures quoted another tradesperson who saw the wall, saying the drawings were not what you’d “typically expect” from children of that age. “You’d think they’d be drawing flowers and unicorns, not gravestones and death.”</p>
<p>It was implied that these “eerie”, “scary” depictions of violence indicate something troubling. But art history doesn’t bear this out, whether we’re talking about children’s capacity for gruesome drawings, or indeed the tradition of modern artworks by fully fledged artists whose work deliberately explores troubling themes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/violence-is-here-to-stay-we-need-to-understand-it-31411">Violence is here to stay – we need to understand it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Ethical concerns and the human condition</h2>
<p>In fact, the history of modern art suggests depictions of violence are often tied to deep ethical concerns and explorations of the human condition. The idea that violent art must be the expression of a violent individual is simply not true.</p>
<p>In the wake of Freudian theories about the monster lurking inside “civilised man”, early 20th-century modernist explorations of violence were often a means of accessing unconscious human desires and fears. </p>
<p>Much <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-surrealism-52487">surrealist</a> and expressionist art sought to reveal deeper truths, beyond what was sanctioned in bourgeois society. </p>
<p>Man Ray’s 1921 <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/man-ray-cadeau-t07883">Gift</a> (or, <em>Cadeau</em>), a sculpture of a domestic iron studded with tacks, acknowledges the violent drives that unconsciously propel much human behaviour. And Andre Masson’s delicate <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/massacre">line-renderings of massacres</a> (1930-34) confront the viewer with the violence of war.</p>
<p>Such work was often motivated by the desire to outrage polite society and compel it to confront its hypocrisy, particularly in the wake of the horrors unleashed by the ruling classes during the first world war.</p>
<p>A modernist impulse to shock and an attraction to the darker side of the human psyche are still common in art and popular culture. It’s partly about asserting freedom from social norms. But it’s also about highlighting the breadth of human experience – and the social and personal harm that can result when that complexity is denied. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/y/young-british-artists-ybas">Young British Artists</a>, who began to exhibit together after a 1988 exhibition organised by Damien Hirst (perhaps their most notorious member), made a very successful brand of it. </p>
<p>Their work included <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/21/marcus-harvey-margaret-thatcher">Marcus Harvey’s Myra</a> (1995), a portrait of a child serial killer, rendered in children’s handprints. Harvey’s work intends to shock us out of our assumptions about who serial killers are and their motivations, but also to force us to see that our society has produced people capable of such heinous acts.</p>
<p>Another strain of modern art represents violence as a means of holding perpetrators to account. Proto-realist painters such as <a href="https://www.parkwestgallery.com/francisco-goya-disasters-of-war/">Francisco Goya</a> depicted the atrocities of war in early 19th-century Spain in graphic detail as protest. </p>
<p>His contemporary Honoré Daumier was jailed for <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/honore-daumier/gargantua-1831">Gargantua</a> (1831), a caricature of King Louis Phillipe. It was one of a series of engravings illustrating the brutality of the French administration’s class warfare. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543883/original/file-20230822-18-xeifp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Honoré Daumier’s caricature of King Louis Phillipe, Gargantua, had him jailed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Documentary and protest</h2>
<p>The legacy of such artists lives on in documentary photography and film. There, the violence of political and historical events is made widely visible, with the aim of influencing public opinion and forcing governments to act. </p>
<p>Nick Ut’s photograph of “napalm girl” (1972), since identified as nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, photographed naked while fleeing a napalm attack, is an iconic example. It <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-11/nick-ut-kim-phuc-napalm-girl-photo-50-years-later/101139364">arguably helped end</a> the war whose horrors it captured.</p>
<p>And recent exposés about the horrors of factory farming – such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12185108/">Hogwood</a> (2020), a documentary focused on a UK pig farm that features undercover footage – compel us to confront the normalised violence embedded on our dinner plates. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/50-years-after-napalm-girl-myths-distort-the-reality-behind-a-horrific-photo-of-the-vietnam-war-and-exaggerate-its-impact-183291">50 years after ‘Napalm Girl,’ myths distort the reality behind a horrific photo of the Vietnam War and exaggerate its impact</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Violence using the artist’s body</h2>
<p>Violence enacted on the artist’s own body has been a powerful means to explore the limits of the human condition, but also to make literal the violence of social and political repression. </p>
<p>In her early performance work, <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/">Cut Piece</a> (1964), Yoko Ono sits impassively onstage, a pair of scissors before her, awaiting the audience’s response to the invitation to cut off a little snippet of her clothing to take with them. </p>
<p>The audience’s latent gendered violence is gradually manifested, without a word being said by the artist: men take to her clothes with escalating bravado, until Ono is left in tatters.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EWczMBtPa04?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece revealed the audience’s gendered violence.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.lissongallery.com/about/confession">Rhythm</a> series of performances (1973-74), <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-mystical-stillness-of-marina-abramovic-in-sydney-43640">Marina Abramovic</a> variously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, lay at the centre of a burning five-point star, and offered her prone body as an object for the audience to interact with, using a selection of objects that included a gun, a scalpel and a saw. </p>
<p>By subjecting herself to violence, Abramovic tests her physical and psychological limits – and by extension, our own. And she demonstrates the violent tendencies that are normalised and affirmed in patriarchal systems when, during Rhythm 0, her body is repeatedly assaulted by members of the public.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0Qysmjakso?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Select footage from Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm performances.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2002, Australian artist Mike Parr sewed his lips shut and nailed his arm to a wall in his endurance performance <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/flinch-art-20020612-gduail.html">Close the Concentration Camps</a>. It was an act of solidarity and empathy with those in detention centres – and a protest against Australia’s inhumane refugee policy. </p>
<p>Acts of violent destruction can be central to the very artworks themselves, as acts of political commentary. </p>
<p>Ai Weiwei’s <a href="https://theartling.com/en/artzine/artling-exclusive-ai-weiweis-dropping-han-dynasty-urn/">Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn</a> (1995) dramatically focused on how little we value the past. And Michael Landy destroyed all his personal possessions in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160713-michael-landy-the-man-who-destroyed-all-his-belongings">Break Down</a> (2001), in an anti-consumerist gesture. </p>
<p>The history of modern art shows compelling grounds for creating images of violence, including to reflect the complexities of human behaviour and to hold perpetrators accountable. </p>
<p>It tells us there is no clear causation between creating violent images and committing violent acts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211830/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqueline Millner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It’s often implied that violent art means something sinister about its creator – most recently, in news stories about ‘scary’ kids’ drawings of death. But the history of modern art suggests otherwise.
Jacqueline Millner, Professor in Visual Arts, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/176228
2022-02-17T13:11:45Z
2022-02-17T13:11:45Z
Yoko Ono’s prophetic vision of self-care
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446809/original/file-20220216-25-r2jewf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1376%2C207%2C3369%2C2487&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">To Ono, imaginative acts were a form of survival.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/japanese-born-artist-and-musician-yoko-ono-and-british-news-photo/144793650?adppopup=true">Susan Wood/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Light a match and watch till it goes out. Go to the middle of Central Park Pond and drop all your jewelry. Scream against the sky. </p>
<p>When a young Yoko Ono <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Grapefruit/Yoko-Ono/9780743201100">formulated these actions in the 1950s and 1960s</a>, they heralded a bracingly quirky vision for the arts as a therapeutic practice of everyday life – a vision that anticipated an ethos of <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of_self_care.html">self-care</a> that’s widely embraced today.</p>
<p>Self-care, which refers to what individuals do every day to stay mentally, emotionally and physically healthy, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of_self_care.html">has diverse origins</a> in medical research and in the Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The practice has <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of_self_care.html">become more popular over the past decades</a>, so much so that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/21/self-care-radical-feminist-idea-mass-market">the beauty and fitness industries have co-opted it</a> as a powerful marketing tactic.</p>
<p>To Ono, however, self-care means more than just spa indulgence. Instead, it possesses myriad dimensions: focusing the mind, gathering energy for action, connecting one’s imagination with the world, finding empowerment by connecting with others, and stimulating thought through humor and play. </p>
<h2>The young artist and the refugee</h2>
<p>Ono’s celebrity marriage to John Lennon has often overshadowed her individual work and career. </p>
<p>When I came across a cache of poems that Ono had written as a young woman in the 1950s, I knew almost nothing about her personal history and philosophies. The works were mysteriously stashed in the archives of a German-Jewish refugee classical composer named <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stefan-wolpe-and-the-avantgarde-diaspora/2D6F76A341EFD4AA0609903942E62856#fndtn-information">Stefan Wolpe</a>, whose life and work I was studying.</p>
<p>As a teenager after World War I, Wolpe had lived on the streets of Berlin until he made his way <a href="https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/phases/bauhaus-weimar/">to the Bauhaus</a>, the experimental progressive art school, where he embraced ideas of art therapy espoused by social worker-psychotherapist <a href="https://www.beck-shop.de/ludwig-koerner-wiederentdeckt/product/13905320?">Steff Bornstein</a> and artists <a href="https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/people/students/friedl-dicker/">Friedl Dicker</a>, <a href="https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/people/masters-and-teachers/johannes-itten/">Johannes Itten</a> and <a href="https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/training/curriculum/classes-by-gertrud-grunow/">Gertrud Grunow</a>. </p>
<p>Wolpe, forced to flee Germany in 1933 as the Nazis came to power, was separated from most of his family, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Wolpe">his daughter, who spent World War II in a Swiss orphanage</a>.</p>
<p>After the war, Wolpe drew on his education as a resource, turning to music composition as an imaginative realm to model the wonder of fragile beginnings in the midst of dire constraint and unfathomable loss.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man holds two fingers in the air" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446816/original/file-20220216-10384-196bqol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stefan Wolpe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.peoplesworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/960x540StefanW.jpg">Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Around 1957, Ono befriended Wolpe, who was over 30 years her senior, and his wife, the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hilda-morley">Hilda Morley</a>. Ono enjoyed tea in their Morningside Heights home in New York City, <a href="http://imaginepeace.com/archives/8682">indulging in</a> “the intellectual, warm, and definitely European atmosphere the two of them created.”</p>
<p>Ono <a href="http://imaginepeace.com/archives/8682">would later write</a> that she was “surprised by how complex, precise, yet emotional his works were. I don’t know of any other composer of the time who represented atonal music so brilliantly.”</p>
<h2>United by trauma and displacement</h2>
<p>Ono’s poems, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/97/2/181/2324219?login=true">which evoked scenes of hunger, terror and beauty in a snow-filled landscape</a>, seemed strangely resonant with the life of Wolpe, who was haunted by his traumatic flight from Germany. Later, I realized his experiences were connected with Ono’s own story of displacement and violence. </p>
<p>As an adolescent, Ono had begun to discover her own calling as an artist in the cold countryside outside of Nagano, Japan, where she and her family had fled as refugees after the Tokyo fire bombings in 1945. </p>
<p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/97/2/181/2324219?login=true">This was the imaginative terrain</a> of the poems she shared with Wolpe: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> the snow swallowed the sunset
the bright sadness has ended
only insane fingers frozen remained lying
infinitely
in the field
like landed fishes
</code></pre>
<p>Without food or adequate shelter, she had spent her days with her younger brother conjuring alternatives to the hopeless circumstances around her. As <a href="https://www.alexandramunroe.com/books/yes-yoko-ono">she recounted in an interview</a> with curator and Asia scholar Alexandra Munroe, “[l]ying on our backs, looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof [of a barn], we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white vintage photo of father, mother and child." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/446814/original/file-20220216-22-l205ze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 2-year-old Yoko Ono pictured with her father and mother in 1935.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/artist-and-musician-yoko-ono-poses-for-a-portrait-with-her-news-photo/74286613?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ono came to recognize imaginative acts as necessities in life. Under these desperate conditions, <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/into-performance/9780813541051">she wrote</a>, “we needed new rituals, in order to keep our sanity.” </p>
<p>Around the time she met Wolpe, Ono was estranged from her parents after she had made the unconventional choice as a woman to pursue a career in the arts.</p>
<p>Later, writing and sharing poetry with Wolpe would be one example of such an imaginative ritual – an instance of care both for herself and for her émigré friend. Wolpe and Morley preserved Ono’s own typewritten poems as cherished documents, even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/05/archives/stefanwolpe-69-gomposer-isdead-avant-garde-musician-was-feted-in.html">rescuing them from a terrible apartment fire</a>.</p>
<h2>Sharing rituals of care</h2>
<p>Ono’s commitment to regenerative rituals would form the basis for her career in the arts. </p>
<p>At first, these exercises were private and personal. Imagining a menu would stave off hunger. Screaming against the sky would give shape to extreme emotions. Lighting a match and watching its flame extinguish would quiet the mind. </p>
<p>Eventually Ono would come to disclose such rituals to the public, inventing a new form of art in the process. Equipped with these exercises – what she called “<a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/into-performance/9780813541051">instruction pieces</a>” – she established herself as a founding mother of the 1960s <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/movement/performance-art/">performance</a> and <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/movement/conceptual-art/">conceptual art movements</a>. As a Japanese woman artist and peace activist, <a href="http://miyamasaoka.com/writings-by-miya-masaoka/1997/unfinished-music/">she frequently confronted gender and racial bias</a>. But her ethos of art as survival sustained her.</p>
<p>Ono’s book “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Grapefruit/Yoko-Ono/9780743201100">Grapefruit</a>,” first published in 1964, is a cult classic dedicated to the idea of art as a form of self-care. Written in the imperative mood, it instructs readers in how to realign their perceptions, imaginations and actions in relation to the world. </p>
<p>Ono’s directions mix together the earnestly mindful, the psychedelic and the wry: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for one hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The art of survival, then and now</h2>
<p>Ono’s ideas are often far out and witty. Yet the relevance of her ethos of art – and even her instruction to eat a sandwich – is serious. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2021/october-decision-making">According to the American Psychological Association</a>, in the U.S., “32% of all adults are so stressed” that they “cannot make basic decisions such as what to eat or what to wear.” </p>
<p>These numbers are far higher for people of color and young adults who, <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2014/stress-report.pdf">like women</a>, face disproportionate economic insecurity and other forms of hardship. These facts call out for rethinking what self-care actually means and how it pertains to the arts.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"280079152739123201"}"></div></p>
<p>During the current pandemic, it is no surprise that <a href="https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-art-can-help-you-cope-with-the-pandemic/">art therapy</a> has become a focus of debate and experimentation. The tools of this practice, which include <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-mentality/201803/are-adult-coloring-books-actually-helpful">coloring books</a> and <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/emotion-wheel/">emotion wheels</a>, may seem galaxies away from the museum world that celebrates Ono’s legacy. Yet, from a certain perspective, it is oddly close to her spirit. </p>
<p>In an era of political turmoil and economic instability, I believe such an accessible vision of art as Ono’s can be a resource for psychic survival, community and resilience – connecting people with prior struggles in ways they might not have imagined. </p>
<p>Such an approach to engaging with the world can help individuals to shift perspective to simply get through the day, or it can lead to dazzling, incongruous visions that transform ideas about what the future may hold.</p>
<p>[<em>More than 140,000 readers get one of The Conversation’s informative newsletters.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-140K">Join the list today</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176228/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brigid Cohen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Ono’s commitment to regenerative rituals is instructive in an era of turmoil and instability.
Brigid Cohen, Associate Professor of Music, New York University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/171822
2021-11-25T19:01:42Z
2021-11-25T19:01:42Z
Friday essay: Yoko, Linda, Get Back and shifting perceptions of the women of the Beatles
<p>When the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auta2lagtw4">official trailer</a> for The Beatles: Get Back was released in October, commentary across social media often referenced how harmonious and collegial the band looked in the footage. Undoubtedly, much of the anticipation surrounding Peter Jackson’s docu-series was its suggestion that the Beatles’ final years were much less acrimonious than previously believed. </p>
<p>In tandem with this, another set of comments focused on Yoko Ono’s inclusion in the jovial preview. After all, the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg – which was created from the same 60-plus hours of footage – has not only served as supposed evidence of the group’s disintegration, but as “proof” that artist Ono, John Lennon’s then girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, played a major role in the world’s greatest rock band <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why-the-beatles-broke-up-113403">splintering apart</a>. </p>
<p>Given that docuseries director Peter Jackson is also a lifelong Beatles fan, he was likely familiar with how the “Yoko-broke-up-the-Beatles” narrative was often mapped onto Let It Be, and has continued as popular discourse today. </p>
<p>Little wonder that The Beatles: Get Back trailer included Paul McCartney quipping, “It’s going to be such a comical thing like in 50 years’ time: ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.’” </p>
<p>Shots of Yoko smiling, dancing with John, and sitting with Ringo’s wife, <a href="https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/50-years-ago-today-beatles-8634736">Maureen Starkey</a>, depict her as a welcome, observant guest rather than an intrusive figure in the Beatles’ workspace. </p>
<p>Similarly, this can be said for the other major female figure present at the filmed Get Back sessions, Paul McCartney’s future wife, American photographer Linda Eastman. While she did not face the extreme criticism that Ono initially received for partnering with a Beatle, by the early 1970s she would be the punchline for cruel jokes about McCartney’s <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/12/14/wings-was-a-better-band-than-paul-mccartney-or-his-critics-thinks">post-Beatles group Wings</a>, of which she was a founding member. </p>
<p>In this way, Jackson’s trailer suggested the potential to reframe Ono and Eastman in the Beatles story and its continuing cultural legacy.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/on-the-intimate-and-character-revealing-photographs-of-linda-mccartney-pauls-wife-and-a-stunning-artist-170957">On the intimate and character-revealing photographs of Linda McCartney – Paul's wife, and a stunning artist</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Beatles: Get Back</h2>
<p>The Beatles: Get Back, the three-part Disney+ series, follows John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr throughout January 1969 as they practice and record songs that would appear on their final two albums, with the majority of them making up their 1970 swansong, Let It Be. </p>
<p>Since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, filming the group was in conjunction with a proposed TV special. The Beatles also wanted to record an album featuring live performances, which reflected their early history of electrifying club gigs. While the TV program was cancelled, the footage became the documentary Let It Be. </p>
<p>The story that emerges from Jackson’s retelling is how the Beatles worked together during what was a transitional time. Both Lennon and McCartney – to varying degrees – are shown as regularly inviting girlfriends Ono and Eastman to the recording sessions. Though Ono’s presence is the more documented of the two, both couples would marry by March 1969.</p>
<p>In the series, Ono’s attendance at the Get Back sessions is not introduced. She is simply there, often sitting close to Lennon while the band works out new songs or runs through old favourites. Sometimes she is raptly attentive to the music, smiling and rocking along to the beat, while in other moments she is involved in her own activities – often reading and writing.</p>
<p>Mostly, hers is a quiet but constant presence on film, though interspersed with a few avant-garde jam sessions with both Lennon and McCartney. In those moments, her singular voice comes through loud and clear. </p>
<p>Though McCartney has <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/paul-mccartney-165-1259175">said that Yoko’s initial presence at the recording studio felt uncomfortable</a>, such sentiment is not on display here. McCartney seems an enthusiastic participant in these sonic forays – not looking at all annoyed that his musical partner’s girlfriend is getting in the mix, if even just for fun. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433843/original/file-20211125-25-1228pcr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison in The Beatles: Get Back. Photo courtesy of Apple Corps Ltd.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Disney+</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eastman, meanwhile, is introduced to viewers by way of McCartney’s own introduction of her to members of the film crew. Most of the interspersed close-ups of Linda are of her photographing her future husband and his band mates, which references the fact that Eastman was already a rock photographer when she first met McCartney in 1967. </p>
<p>Other shots of Linda depict her quietly regarding Paul as he focuses on his work. Elsewhere, she is depicted as a young mother, when she brings daughter Heather to the studio, and as a true Beatles enthusiast, when she jokingly argues with director Lindsay-Hogg over who is the bigger fan of the band.</p>
<p>For contemporary viewers encountering such scenes, it might be difficult to understand how Ono’s or Eastman’s presence could have been perceived as a disturbance or distraction by some fans and cultural observers when the Let It Be film debuted in 1970. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Auta2lagtw4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Cultural changes since Let It Be</h2>
<p>But there have been many changes in music and culture since Let It Be premiered over 50 years ago. Shifting perceptions of both Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney since 1970 will likely foster different interpretations of the footage – any directorial or editorial decisions aside.</p>
<p>For instance, from the advent of punk and new wave onward – with many women performers adopting those genres – Yoko Ono became a <a href="https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1366-kim-gordon-tune-yards-and-6-other-musicians-on-why-yoko-ono-matters/">musical icon in her own right</a>. Meanwhile, Linda McCartney may have received flak for her involvement in Wings, but her work for animal rights, promoting vegetarianism, and a clear dedication to family life won over some original and latter-day fans prior to her death in 1998, <a href="https://www.thelist.com/387119/inside-paul-mccartneys-marriage-to-linda-eastman/">a trend that continues today. </a> </p>
<p>Posthumously, her photography continues to be exhibited around the world and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/not-just-mrs-mccartney-sir-paul-celebrates-linda-s-remarkable-gift-20210802-p58f2x.html">praised by many</a>.</p>
<p>In terms of wider cultural change, the seemingly fixed nature of women’s roles both professionally and personally was greatly challenged through second-wave feminism soon after Let It Be’s release. Arguably, both women’s reputations within Beatles history likely benefited from a cultural movement that advocated for female individuality and agency. </p>
<p>Though second-wave feminism did not take off until the early 1970s, the 1960s was still a transformative decade for women. This is demonstrated by both Ono’s and Eastman’s careers and their status as divorcees. However, even before these two women entered the Beatles’ sphere, the way the band interacted with women and addressed them in their songs often proved forward-thinking. </p>
<p>Female photographers, journalists, fellow musicians, and fans were included in the Beatles’ world early on and treated respectfully. While the postwar era still favoured men as the dominant participants of society, each band member and the Beatles’ music itself nonetheless created an exciting, new space for girls and young women to boldly engage with cultural life. No wonder their initial presence elicited screams.</p>
<h2>Women and the Beatles: on-set and behind the scenes</h2>
<p>If the footage that comprises The Beatles: Get Back can allow us to review and reconsider Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney within the Beatles’ later history, it can also serve as a jumping-off point for re-examining how women (both real and fictional) are situated within the Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night. </p>
<p>Since the Beatles’ films can help audiences better understand the band’s cultural impact, looking at their 1964 debut as a bookend to Jackson’s docuseries can provide insights into how women fit into an epic story that continues to fascinate contemporary audiences.</p>
<p>A Hard Day’s Night was directed by Richard Lester and premiered soon after the Beatles achieved international fame. The film aims to replicate the band’s experiences during the height of Beatlemania. Performing as fictionalised versions of themselves, John, Paul, George, and Ringo are introduced onscreen running from screaming, mostly female fans as they catch a train to London. </p>
<p>Though girls and young women were often considered their core audience at this time, the band’s subsequent encounters with them in the film are relatively brief: serenading teenage schoolgirls on the train, responding to journalists at a press event, chatting and dancing with young women at a nightclub, or walking past dancers backstage at the TV studio. And, of course, there are screaming girls at the bands’s actual performance.</p>
<p>While the film helped capture girls’ excitement about the Beatles in early 1964, the stories off-camera tell of different relationships. </p>
<p>The then 19-year-old Pattie Boyd, <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pattie-boyd-first-meeting-george-harrison-the-beatles/">who would marry George Harrison in 1966</a>, was cast as one of the schoolgirls in the film. In other words, she met her future husband through her career as a model and actress. And, while some female reporters are depicted interviewing the Beatles early in the film, behind the scenes it was London Evening Standard journalist Maureen Cleave who was one of the band’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/08/maureen-cleave-british-journalist-who-championed-the-beatles-dies-aged-87">very first champions in the mainstream press</a>. Indeed, young women were at the forefront of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/37JQP17zj2rpjKcnNjWy48N/five-women-who-wrote-rock">nascent rock journalism in the mid-sixties, often interviewing the Beatles. </a></p>
<p>While no women are shown in the film taking pictures of the Beatles as they arrive in London, their first (unofficial) band photographer and friend <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/17/astrid-kirchherr-obituary">Astrid Kirchherr</a>, whom they had met four years earlier while performing in Hamburg, was on set taking photos for German magazine Stern. </p>
<p>Kirchherr’s significance in the Beatles story also extends to the different sartorial styles and music genres she introduced into their world. In these respects, though the “screaming fan” became the main female image connected to the Beatles at this time, it is a limited view of girls’ and women’s engagement with the band both before and during Beatlemania. </p>
<p>Women were always important to the Beatles, not just as a fan base, but as people whose opinions and ideas mattered to them. By the time the Get Back footage was filmed, this aspect of the band remained unchanged.</p>
<h2>What we can learn from The Beatles: Get Back</h2>
<p>Returning to The Beatles: Get Back, it is not only the depiction of Ono and Eastman that demonstrates women’s inclusion within Beatles history. Though they are the two most dominant female figures in the docu-series, George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd makes a brief appearance while Ringo Starr’s wife Maureen Starkey – an early Beatles fan in Liverpool – continues to show her enthusiasm for the group’s music in a few key scenes. </p>
<p>Some female employees of the Beatles’ Apple enterprise, as well as two dedicated fans – part of the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/love-them-do-the-story-of-the-beatles-biggest-fans-69186/">Apple Scruffs fan collective</a> who would wait outside the band’s Savile Row headquarters – make brief, if noteworthy, appearances in the film. With the Apple Scruffs in particular, the adolescent, screaming fans of 1964 are now quietly observant teenagers hoping for a brief audience with their favourite Beatle.</p>
<p>Interest in the Beatles remains evergreen with many newly published books and myriad podcasts available to today’s fans. Peter Jackson’s docu-series will undoubtedly inspire new cohorts of enthusiasts. For those with a longer history observing the Beatles, this intimate view of the band at the end of their career may prompt a revaluation of what they have believed about the band’s final years and breakup. </p>
<p>The Beatles: Get Back both provides a new window into the dynamic relationships within the band itself while posing a challenge to those who, for whatever reason, still insist that Yoko Ono’s role in the band’s history was a negative one. </p>
<p>It also reminds viewers that one of the greatest stories of the 20th century is not only predicated on the friendship and talent of four British musicians, but on the people who have loved them. </p>
<p>Paying closer attention to how women have been part of this phenomenal story helps us to better understand the Beatles in their time and the band’s continuing appeal.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171822/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christine Feldman-Barrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Women were always important to the Beatles, yet Yoko Ono, in particular, faced extreme criticism for partnering with John Lennon. How does Peter Jackson’s Get Back present Ono and Linda Eastman?
Christine Feldman-Barrett, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/165127
2021-09-13T12:13:38Z
2021-09-13T12:13:38Z
‘Imagine’ at 50: Why John Lennon’s ode to humanism still resonates
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420554/original/file-20210910-19-y8luzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C694%2C2220%2C1633&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fifty years ago, did John Lennon tell us not to pray?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photo-of-john-lennon-news-photo/80800975?adppopup=true">Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago, John Lennon released <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-lennons-imagine-at-50-a-deceptively-simple-ballad-a-lasting-emblem-of-hope-167444">one of the most beautiful, inspirational</a> and catchy pop anthems of the 20th century: “Imagine.” </p>
<p>Gentle and yet increasingly stirring as the song progresses, “Imagine” is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace. It is also purposely and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-04/imagine-50-years-john-lennon-beatles/100238128">powerfully irreligious</a>. From its opening lyric, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” to the refrain, “And no religion too,” Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message.</p>
<p>While most pop songs are secular by default – in that they are about the things of this world, making no mention of the divine or spiritual – “Imagine” is explicitly secularist. In Lennon’s telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing – something to be overcome, transcended.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/phil-zuckerman/">scholar of secularism</a> and a devout fan of the Beatles, I have always been fascinated by how “Imagine,” perhaps the first and only atheist anthem to be so enormously successful, has come to be so widely embraced in America. After all, the U.S. is a country that has – at least until <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx">recently</a> – had a much <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/">more</a> religious population than other Western industrialized democracies.</p>
<p>Since being released as a single on Oct. 11 1971, “Imagine” has sold millions, going No. 1 in the U.S. and U.K. charts. And its popularity has endured. Rolling Stone magazine named “Imagine” as the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-151127/aretha-franklin-respect-36873/">third greatest song of all time</a> in 2003, and it regularly tops national polls in Canada, <a href="https://radioinfo.com.au/news/imagine-voted-best-gold-hit/">Australia</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jan/07/johnarlidge.theobserver">the U.K</a>.</p>
<p>Countless recording artists have covered it, and it remains one of the most performed songs throughout the world – the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZaXRQIjR68">opening ceremony</a> of this year’s Olympics Games in Tokyo featured it being sung by a host of international artists, a testament to its global appeal.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qZaXRQIjR68?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But not everyone is enamored of its message. Robert Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/07/25/imagine-blared-at-the-olympics-is-a-totalitarians-anthem/">responded to the recent Tokyo rendition</a> by lambasting “Imagine” as a “totalitarian anthem” and “an invitation to moral and political chaos.” His issue: the atheistic lyrics.</p>
<p>Numerous attempts have been made since “Imagine” was released to reconcile Lennon’s anthem with religion. Scholars, those of faith and fellow musicians have argued that the lyrics <a href="https://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/faith-and-reason-imagine-really-atheist">aren’t really atheistic</a>, just <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/imagine-the-anthem-of-2001-83559/">anti-organized religion</a>. Others have taken the sledgehammer approach and just changed the lyrics outright – CeeLo Green sang “And all religion’s true” in <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cee-lo-green-outrages-john-lennon-fans-by-changing-lyrics-to-imagine-202240/">a televised rendition</a> on New Year’s Eve 2011.</p>
<p>In interviews, Lennon was at times <a href="http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/dbjypb.int3.html">ambiguous about his beliefs</a> on religion and spirituality, but such ambiguity is at odds with the clear message of “Imagine.” The song’s irreligious ethos is frank. The first verse speaks of there being “no heaven,” “no hell” – “Above us, only sky.” In such clear, distilled words, Lennon captures the very marrow of the secular orientation. To me, Lennon is saying that we live in a purely physical universe that operates along strictly natural laws – there is nothing supernatural out there, even beyond the stars.</p>
<p>He also expresses a distinct “here-and-nowness” at odds with many religions. In asking listeners to “Imagine all the people, livin’ for today,” Lennon is, to quote the <a href="https://www.upworthy.com/ever-heard-of-union-hero-joe-hill-hes-missing-from-most-history-books-today">labor activist and atheist Joe Hill</a>, suggesting there will be “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8qoB1XwtHM">no pie in the sky when you die</a>,” nor will a fiery eternal torture await you.</p>
<p>Lennon’s lyrics also give way to an implied existentialism. With no gods and no afterlife, only humankind – within ourselves and among each other – can decide how to live and choose what matters. We can choose to live without violence, greed or hunger and – to quote “Imagine” – exist as a “brotherhood of man … sharing all the world.”</p>
<p>It is here that Lennon’s <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-secular-life/202002/what-is-secular-humanism">humanism</a> – the belief that humans, without reliance upon anything supernatural, have the capacity to create a better, more humane world – comes to the fore. Nihilism is not the path, nor is despondency, debauchery or destruction. Rather, Lennon’s “Imagine” entails a humanistic desire to see an end to suffering.</p>
<p>The spirit of empathy and compassion throughout the song is in line with what <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550612444137">scholarship</a> has <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13674670310001606450?src=recsys">found</a> to be strong traits <a href="https://www.stmarys.ac.uk/research/centres/benedict-xvi/docs/benedict-centre-understanding-unbelief-report.pdf">commonly</a> <a href="https://phys.org/news/2021-02-atheists-believers-moral-compasses-key.html?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Phys.org_TrendMD_1">observable</a> among <a href="https://news.berkeley.edu/2012/04/30/religionandgenerosity/">secular men and women</a>. Despite attempts to tie Lennon and “Imagine” to blood-lusting atheists <a href="https://sojo.net/articles/why-john-lennons-imagine-actually-not-great-song">like Stalin and Pol Pot</a>, the overwhelming majority of godless people <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311795/living-the-secular-life-by-phil-zuckerman/">seek to live ethical lives</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/this-week-in-religion-76/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=religion-3-in-1">Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.</a>]</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/21/staunch-atheists-show-higher-morals-than-the-proudly-pious-from-the-pandemic-to-climate-change/">studies have shown</a> that when it comes to things like <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/24/the-group-least-likely-to-think-the-u-s-has-a-responsibility-to-accept-refugees-evangelicals/">wanting to</a> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article/32/3/502/5298199?login=true">help</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/socofthesacred/status/1427973457703211012/photo/1">refugees</a>, seeking to <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13644-020-00396-0">establish affordable health care</a>, <a href="https://www.prri.org/research/fractured-nation-widening-partisan-polarization-and-key-issues-in-2020-presidential-elections/">fighting</a> <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/10/22/religion-and-views-on-climate-and-energy-issues/">climate change</a> and being sensitive to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088868309352179">racism</a> and <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/28/religiously-unaffiliated-people-more-likely-than-those-with-a-religion-to-lean-left-accept-homosexuality/">homophobia</a>, the godless stand out as particularly moral.</p>
<p>Indeed, secular people in general <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-10474-001">exhibit an orientation</a> that is <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1368430211410996?casa_token=lAvYSk5xzI8AAAAA%3AzyF9nW4T0_p6nuM_v2NIiZLkEuar1rhGQdg2J7Qy2NLmu3c-yiWb4zFoeVnMpOKC3FiIpKXO9y17bfQ">markedly tolerant</a>, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0202_5?src=recsys">democratic</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-secular-life/201807/religion-secularism-and-xenophobia">universalistic</a> – values Lennon holds up as ideals in “Imagine.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/11/09/the-unbearable-wrongness-of-william-barr/">Other studies reveal</a> that the democratic countries that are the least religious – the ones that have gone furthest down the road of “imagining no religion” – <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479878086/society-without-god-second-edition/">are the most</a> safe, humane, green and ethical. </p>
<p>“Imagine” was not the first time Lennon sang his secular humanism. A year before, in 1970, he released “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MqKXjclNHw">I Found Out</a>,” declaring his lack of belief in either Jesus or Krishna. Also in 1970, he put out the haunting, scorching “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCNkPpq1giU">God</a>.” Beginning with a classic psychological explanation of theism – that humans construct the concept of God as a way to cope with and measure their pain – “God” goes on to list all the things that Lennon most decidedly does not believe in: the Bible, Jesus, Gita, Buddha, I-Ching, magic and so on. In the end, all that he believes in is his own verifiable personal reality. Arriving at such a place was, for the bespectacled walrus from Liverpool, to be truly “reborn.”</p>
<p>But neither “I Found Out” nor “God” achieved anywhere near the massive success that “Imagine” did. No other atheist pop song has.</p>
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/3b1N670SLd1liunyZXM3KD" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165127/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Phil Zuckerman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Regularly topping lists for ‘greatest song of all time,’ the former Beatle’s classic 1971 song is taken by many as an atheistic anthem.
Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/157557
2021-04-12T20:19:41Z
2021-04-12T20:19:41Z
NFT performance art: Corporations could capitalize on protest
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394134/original/file-20210408-17-x8at4n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C40%2C5400%2C3136&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nike ad in New York in 2018, showing former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after his 2016 kneeling protest. Could a corporation sell an act like Kaepernick's 'kneel' as an NFT? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Russian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/03/roadkill-radical-art-group-apolitical">artist Petr Davydtchenko</a> made what what he claims was the <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/could-this-video-of-a-man-eating-a-bat-be-the-first-performance-art-nft">first performance art NFT</a> in February. According to an article in <em>The Art Newspaper</em>, in a digital recording, Davydtchenko “eats a live bat in front of the European Parliament in Brussels.” </p>
<p>An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a digital record of the stake in ownership of a digital object (but not the copyright), often an artwork. This digital certificate says, “I paid for this special thing, now it’s mine!” </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-nfts-and-why-are-people-paying-millions-for-them-157035">What are NFTs and why are people paying millions for them?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Art Newspaper</em> reports Davydtchenko’s “performance” had received only one bid of 2.5 <a href="https://www.coinspeaker.com/guides/what-is-wrapped-ethereum-weth/">wrapped ethereum</a>, valued <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/could-this-video-of-a-man-eating-a-bat-be-the-first-performance-art-nft">at $3,848</a> when the story was published on Feb. 26. But <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nft-analysis-explainer-1.5933536">profits for some NFTs go into the millions</a>. </p>
<p>Davydtchenko says the <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/155740/activist-who-ate-live-bat-in-front-of-european-parliament-brussels-belgium-taken-into-police-custody-released/">event was a protest</a> against pharmaceutical companies. Davydtchenko’s <a href="https://www.bps22.be/en/exhibitions/petr-davydtchenko">performance art references vaccines and COVID-19</a>. </p>
<p>As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in <a href="https://www.openculture.com/?p=1087781">radical ways</a> by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society. </p>
<p>We should keep an ear open not only to <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/the-nft-craze-encapsulates-the-absurdity-of-the-art-world-and-its-obsession-with-authenticity">questions about authenticity and who profits</a> but also about what these kinds of transactions mean for us as spectators, virtual audience members and human beings. </p>
<h2>Performance check on war</h2>
<p>NFT art may seem new and bizarre, but can rightly be seen as part of a longer tradition of performance art and cultural criticism. </p>
<p>As a response to the trauma of the First World War, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dada">the Dada art movement</a> formed in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1916, performance artist Hugo Ball drafted a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2016.1223488">Dada manifesto</a>. </p>
<p>Ball’s work used nonsense words and costumes, <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ball-hugo/artworks">as he said, to challenge “the rationalized language of modernity,” emblematic of the “agony and death throes” of the age</a>.
Into the 1920s, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Dada_Performance.html?id=jLbWAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">performers continued to reflect on the violence</a> seen in Europe and the excesses of the roaring ‘20s. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EmMTKdUAokM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘The Case for Performance Art,’ PBS video featuring Hugo Ball.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1960s and ‘70s, <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/movement/fluxus/">the Fluxus movement</a>, a revival of many Dadaist ideas, used performance in a similar way. One pioneering example of this was <a href="https://artsolido.com/2017/02/18/yoko-ono-the-cut-piece-that-changed-forever-the-relationship-between-artist-and-audience/">Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”</a> first performed in <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/">Kyoto, Japan, in 1964</a>. </p>
<p>Ono sat on a stage and instructed audiences to use scissors to remove parts of her clothing. Ono told Reuters <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244759/figure/img03">39 years after the first performance that she did the performance “against ageism, against racism, against sexism and against violence</a>.” Some critics <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/pajj/article/30/3%20(90)/81/55361/Yoko-Ono-s-Cut-Piece-From-Text-to-Performance-and">suggested the performance was also a comment on the conflict in Vietnam</a>. </p>
<h2>Role of spectator, purchaser</h2>
<p>“Cut Piece,” and similar performances are living moments of shared human connection and meaning that are time-and-place specific. One can imagine that meanings understood by audience members of “Cut Piece” in Japan 1964 or in France 2003 could differ for many reasons. </p>
<p>Such site-specific resonances are challenged when a performance is tokenized as an NFT. Is Davydtchenko’s “performance” the eating of the bat? Or is it the NFT pointing to a recording of that event? Or is the performance would-be bidders or critics engaging in a public debate about devouring an animal whose species is associated with COVID-19? Davydtchenko’s work raises questions about what is being bought and sold, and the role of the purchaser or spectator. </p>
<p>Performance studies pioneer Peggy Phelan argued <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Unmarked-The-Politics-of-Performance/Phelan/p/book/9780415068222">that performance can disrupt and challenge the capitalist art market that creates value often disconnected</a> from relationships between artists and audiences. From a Marxist perspective, this disconnected “extra” meaning is “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygodsky/unknown/surplus_value.htm">surplus value</a>,” the value that exceeds the money a worker earns for their labour.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Yoko Ono and audience member onstage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=632&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/393259/original/file-20210402-15-11qpmy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono performs ‘Cut Piece’ in Paris, 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(LoveMattersMost/Flickr)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Changing the 'aura’ of art</h2>
<p>Phelan’s analysis suggests how NFTs follow a tradition of art criticism that has questioned moral responsibility in the age of mass production and mass media consumption.</p>
<p>In 1936, German critic and philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/">Walter Benjamin</a>, of the famed <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/">Frankfurt School for Social Research</a>, applied Marxist ideas about how manufacturing workers become alienated from their labour <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm">and applied them to art</a>. </p>
<p>Performance scholar Philip Auslander has explained how in a capitalist society alienation means “<a href="https://www.almutadaber.com/books/book1_13905.pdf">workers become commodities when they must sell their alienated labour in the marketplace, just as other goods are sold</a>.”</p>
<p>Benjamin suggested new media technologies “demystified” art. The reproduction of <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED482090">art challenged what he called its “aura</a>,” or its unique originality. Reproducing visual art, for example, through printing, freed it from the precious spaces of the museum and made it accessible to the working classes. No more would a person need to travel to see the Mona Lisa: It was now available on a postcard or T-shirt.</p>
<p>The problem, argued Benjamin, is that “aura” is also a relationship to meaning. Once the “aura” is gone, artwork can be repurposed for purely economic, and even dangerously political ends. Indeed, the Nazis used symbols, artworks <a href="https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/iron-fists-9780714861098/">and mass branding to legitimize and circulate Fascist ideologies</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-nazis-twisted-the-swastika-into-a-symbol-of-hate-83020">How Nazis twisted the swastika into a symbol of hate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Culture critic Jonathan Beller notes Benjamin recognized how new media could be used to preserve and advance ancient “cultic values” such as genius, mystery and authenticity, <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/fascism-blockchain-art-nfts">and understood fascism as advancing “the introduction of esthetics into political life” to promote “cult worship through mass entertainment.”</a> So far, we haven’t seen NFTs directly associated with fascism, but as Beller notes, through NFTs, political manipulation through art could be a possibility.</p>
<h2>Instability of dissent?</h2>
<p>Such questions of manipulation can be explored through considering Davydtchenko’s performance.</p>
<p>Is Davydtchenko’s bat eating an act of political dissent, as he claims, or <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/155438/russian-performance-artist-activist-petr-davydtchencko-will-eat-a-live-bat-outside-brussels-belgium-eu-parliament/">simply a cruel event</a>? What of those who pay for it or share the publicity: Have they been manipulated into amplifying something grotesque? </p>
<p>There is also the question of the stability of digital work itself. An NFT’s <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-explained-art-crypto-urls-links-ipfs">link to a digital file is based purely on trust and potentially error-prone technology</a>. But what if stolen NFTs could surface in strange places? The site <em>Hyperallergic</em> reports that some buyers say “<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/629328/reports-of-stolen-art-on-nft-marketplace-raise-issues-for-crypto-collectors">hackings have exposed holes in a technology often touted as a foolproof record of ownership</a>.” Could NFTs become the next forms of cybercrime or hate crimes, akin to defacing a public mural, or Zoom-bombing a performance?</p>
<h2>When corporations seek to capitalize</h2>
<p>Applying performance and cultural critiques to NFTs helps us consider how political resistance may be either amplified or co-opted when corporations seek to capitalize on political actions. </p>
<p>As I have <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/post.5.1.29_1">written before</a>,
Nike quickly sought to capitalize on NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7035746/colin-kaepernick-timeline/">2016 kneeling</a> during the U.S. national anthem, an act of protest against police brutality and racial injustice. Could Nike look to sell the “kneel,” or other similar acts, as an NFT? </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yvkf88eSTrI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">CNBC video: How Nike turns controversy into dollars.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When we see <a href="https://mashable.com/article/nyan-cat-meme-non-fungible-token-sale-300-ethereum/">the prices some are paying for NFT art</a>, we must assume that more performances will circulate as NFTs, and consider what this may mean for the possibilities of performance and political dissent.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157557/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lowell Gasoi receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Elements of this research have been explored with this funding.</span></em></p>
When we see the high prices some are paying for NFT art, we must assume more performances, and potentially, acts of protest, could circulate as NFTs.
Lowell Gasoi, Instructor in communication studies, arts advocacy, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111392
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
Ivanka and her tower of crumbs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258528/original/file-20190212-174890-rwe25c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell hired a model to vacuum for two hours each night from Feb. 1 to Feb. 17.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For two hours each evening, an Ivanka Trump lookalike has been vacuuming a hot pink carpet at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C. </p>
<p>As she appears to be on the cusp of completing the task, spectators soil the carpet with bread crumbs. She vacuums them up. The audience tosses more crumbs onto the carpet. The pattern repeats itself. </p>
<p>Jennifer Rubell’s installation, titled “<a href="https://www.culturaldc.org/ivanka-vacuuming-by-jennifer-rubell-press-release">Ivanka Vacuuming</a>,” has already elicited a response from the subject.</p>
<p>Following the Feb. 1 opening, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-performance-piece-ivanka-vacuuming-seems-to-irk-the-first-daughter-even-more-than-fake-news/2019/02/05/fe70801c-296c-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html">Ivanka Trump tweeted</a>, “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter,” to which <a href="https://twitter.com/jenniferrubell/status/1092826529791426561">Rubell parried</a>, “I would encourage you to see the piece and form your own direct response. … Not knocking anyone down. Exploring complicated subjects we all care about.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1092826529791426561"}"></div></p>
<p>As a historian of contemporary art, I wanted to learn more about this <a href="https://forward.com/schmooze/418831/ivanka-trump-family-slams-jewish-artist-sexist-ivanka-vacuuming/">headline-grabbing</a> work. So I followed Rubell’s directive and saw it myself.</p>
<p>The piece certainly pops: It’s pink. Very pink. And the Ivanka double has a plastic sheen that borders on surreal. </p>
<p>It took a moment to adjust to the saccharine visuals. But it soon became apparent that Rubell was drawing from a rich tradition of performance art. She seems to be compelling viewers to think about the huge numbers of women who perform invisible labor – all in exchange for a few crumbs from the great American pie.</p>
<h2>Repetitive, relentless work</h2>
<p>The work of art has been staged at the back of the gallery, in a space surrounded by three white walls. In the foreground, there’s a white cube, approximately three-and-a-half feet high and topped with a two-foot mound of Panko bread crumbs. Text invites the viewers to scatter the crumbs onto the pink carpet to keep the Ivanka doppelgänger busy.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the night I visited, Rubell was in the gallery observing the performance. She told me that she has witnessed the live performance in Washington, D.C., a few times. Otherwise, she’s been watching it on a live feed from her home in New York City.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell’s work has already elicited a response from her subject, Ivanka Trump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Ivanka lookalike is a model whom Rubell hired through an agency. In my brief conversation with Rubell, she mentioned that although she had to make some minor adjustments to the model’s hair color and makeup, it was relative easy to mimic Ivanka’s look because she is already so doll-like.</p>
<p>Rubell cited <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4bcwswEACAAJ&dq=art+since+1900+1945+to+present&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimmtW3rrTgAhXwmuAKHWdfAKEQ6AEIKjAA">pioneering performance artist</a> Vito Acconci as an inspiration for her interest in the medium. You can see his stamp on “Ivanka Vacuuming” in works like “<a href="http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/step-piece/">Step Piece</a>.” Over a performance period of one month in 1970, Acconci documented himself, each day, stepping on and off a stool in his apartment at the rate of 30 steps per minute until he was unable to continue. He wanted to highlight the absurdity of certain repetitive tasks.</p>
<h2>Invisible female labor</h2>
<p>In her work, Rubell is also tackling the seeming endlessness of mind-numbing labor. But she’s doing it in a way that aligns herself with artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who co-founded the California Institute of Arts’ Feminist Art program. </p>
<p>In 1972, Chicago and Schapiro collaborated with other feminists to create installations, performances and discussion groups concerned with the invisible labor performed by women, especially in the home. </p>
<p>Titled “<a href="http://www.womanhouse.net">Womanhouse</a>,” this influential exhibition criticized prevailing attitudes towards femininity and domesticity that had been instilled through a range of cultural messages, from <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/232216924508831346/?lp=true">advertisements for home appliances</a>, to toys like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hhjjhYGQtY&annotation_id=annotation_660006&feature=iv">Barbie doll</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Describing their motivation for the exhibition, Chicago and Schapiro wrote, ‘Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/files/2011/08/gri_2000_m_43_b29_f9_326031ds_d1.jpg">The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition was set up in a dilapidated Los Angeles mansion. A group of 23 artists refurbished the residence prior to installing their work to make the familiar spaces of the home seem strange. For instance, the walls of the kitchen were pockmarked with fried egg sculptures that resembled eyes or breasts, while the shelves of a linen closet were merged into the body of a life-size mannequin doll.</p>
<p>In “Ivanka Vacuuming,” I also see echoes of New York-based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1973, Ukeles got down on her hands and knees <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/special-topics-art-history/seeing-america/work-exchange-and-technology/v/ukeles-washingtracksmaintenance">to scrub the floors and steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum</a>. <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/">In another famous work</a>, Ukeles shook the hand of every New York City sanitation worker.</p>
<p>Like “Ivanka Vacuuming” and “Womanhouse,” Ukeles wanted to bring attention to the drudgery of everyday tasks that are crucial to our well-being but go largely unrecognized and unrewarded. </p>
<h2>The viewer as enabler</h2>
<p>There’s a twist to “Ivanka Vacuuming,” however: It requires audience participation. In order to complete the work, viewers must grab from the pile of crumbs sitting on an abstract cube in the darkened half of the gallery and toss them into the brightly lit performance space.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Audience members are invited to make a mess – and then grapple with what it feels like to have someone else clean it up.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rubell’s invitation to viewers made me think of Yoko Ono’s famous “<a href="http://imaginepeace.com//archives//2680">Cut Piece</a>” from 1964. In it, Ono sat on the floor with her legs folded beneath her body and a pair of scissors by her side. Viewers were invited to approach the artist, one by one, and cut off a piece of her dress. The performance continued until the artist was almost naked. </p>
<p>I was also reminded of the 1990 work “Untitled (USA Today),” in which artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres <a href="https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-it/art/untitled-usa-today/">piled a large mound of candy</a> wrapped in red, blue and silver foil against the corner of a gallery and invited visitors to help themselves. Torres was prompting the viewer to think critically about the sugary news dished out by mainstream newspapers like USA Today and the way many readers uncritically gobble it up. </p>
<p>Likewise, Rubell’s work challenges her audience to engage and to think critically.</p>
<p>Vacuuming isn’t inherently degrading or abject. But it’s difficult to imagine Ivanka, at any point in her privileged upbringing, wielding a vacuum. </p>
<p>The artwork is jolting in the way that it juxtaposes Ivanka’s public image – pristine, professional, camera-ready – with tasks performed by the maids and housekeepers who labor in Trump’s homes, hotels and resorts.</p>
<p>But Rubell slyly subverts the dynamics of control. Who’s in charge? Is it the wealthiest one percent whose needs power the vacuums, start up the hotel laundries every night and turn on the kitchen fryers at 4 a.m.? </p>
<p>Or, perhaps it’s us – the public, the spectator – who keep the crumbs coming, participating in a system that privileges the few at the expense of the many.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Preminda Jacob does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new piece of performance art features a lookalike Ivanka Trump vacuuming crumbs. Not only is it a cutting commentary on labor and gender, but it also highlights the complicity of the viewer.
Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/104505
2018-11-20T11:56:01Z
2018-11-20T11:56:01Z
The Beatles White Album at 50: its avant garde eclecticism still inspires
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245569/original/file-20181114-172710-19vnxrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">badgreeb via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For an LP with a plain white cover, the Beatles eponymous ninth studio album – more commonly referred to as the “<a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/albums/the-beatles-white-album/">White Album</a>” – has generated a mass of symbolism since its release 50 years ago in November 1968.</p>
<p>With its glossy all-white gatefold cover, black inner sleeves and portraits of the Fab Four hidden inside the sleeve, the influence of the White Album can be traced across a huge range of cultural artefacts. For example, the author of New Journalism, Joan Didion, named her study of the end of the 1960s dream, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/martin-amis/joan-didions-style">The White Album</a>. The starkness of the LP’s presentation seemed aligned to the collapse of post-war idealism documented by Didion’s book. </p>
<p>For cult leader Charles Manson, the record <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/charles-manson-how-cult-leaders-twisted-beatles-obsession-inspired-family-murders-107176/">contained a litany of hidden messages</a> that only he and The Beatles understood. George Harrison’s Piggies and Paul McCartney’s (admittedly crazed) Helter Skelter foretold the chaos of a bloody race war, a new apocalypse that Manson was to instigate and alone survive.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/revolution-50-the-beatles-white-album-remixed-106784">Revolution 50: The Beatles’ White Album remixed</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In 2004 Brian Joseph Burton, AKA Danger Mouse, issued <a href="https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/reviews-nme-7347">The Grey Album</a>, a mash-up of The Beatles and rapper Jay-Z’s <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/the-black-album-88686/">The Black Album</a>.</p>
<p>And, as if the cultural and commercial importance of the White Album could be doubted, a re-issue of the record to coincide with its 50th anniversary went into the Billboard top 200 <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8485591/the-beatles-white-album-returns-billboard-200-chart-top-10">with a bullet</a> at number six. Interestingly, of the 63,000 units sold in the week from November 9 to 16, 52,000 were in traditional album sales.</p>
<h2>After Sgt Pepper’s</h2>
<p>The album remains the Beatles’ most intriguing contribution to the art of sound. It’s hard to imagine in today’s landscape of remakes, sequels and parodies that the pop fans of the 1960s expected their favourite artists to keep moving forward and with each new recording to have developed something entirely fresh. So, the lush, psychedelic world of the previous LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its iconic Peter Blake designed cover, was substituted by a stark minimalist aesthetic (albeit one created by another legendary <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-hamilton-1244">British pop artist, Richard Hamilton</a>).</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nN-VmjDnF2s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The music inside Hamilton’s sleeve revealed a similar shift of gear. For practically the first time, Beatles songs appeared as solo efforts – some of the record’s 30 tracks had even been recorded by a single member of the band. This had occurred before (think of McCartney singing Yesterday accompanied by a string quartet or Harrison’s forays into Eastern mysticism) and yet for the first time the group was revealed as a collection of individuals rather than a well-oiled unit. </p>
<p>As the late Roy Carr, who co-wrote one of the best books on the group, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/627259.The_Beatles">The Beatles: an Illustrated Record</a>, put it, “on this double LP they act as each other’s session men”. The individual characters of each group member were also laid bare: Lennon’s dark cynicism, McCartney’s eclectic optimism, Harrison’s mysticism and Starr’s love of country music. The collaborative aspect of a pop/rock group dynamic had begun to dissolve. The White Album in fact marks the clearest instance of the disintegration of the Beatles as a group and was thus the springboard for the various solo careers of the band, with tantalising glimpses – good and bad – of what was to come in the years following the split.</p>
<p>It is the sprawling mixture of music and ideas on the record that makes is so fascinating, especially in hindsight. For example, Revolution 9 is a tape collage put together by Lennon and Yoko Ono echoing the experiments in this field by <a href="http://120years.net/the-grm-group-and-rtf-electronic-music-studio-pierre-schaeffer-jacques-poullin-france-1951/">RTF and GRM in France</a> and the <a href="https://www.soundonsound.com/people/story-bbc-radiophonic-workshop">BBC Radiophonic Workshop</a> in the UK and reviewed by the NME at the time as a “pretentious piece of old codswallop”. Birthday and Helter Skelter contain distorted blasts of guitar <a href="https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/is_helter_skelter_really_the_first_metal_song_ever_made_paul_mccartney_replies.html">prefiguring Heavy Metal</a>. McCartney was here trying to top The Who: “Pete Townshend said I Can See For Miles was the dirtiest, filthiest record ever, so we were trying to out-filth The Who.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8kz6hAn5LyM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There is also Lennon and McCartney’s trademark virtuoso vocal performances set to new diverse means (I’m So Tired, Happiness is a Warm Gun and Martha My Dear) and moments of great beauty such as Lennon’s <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/julia/">tribute to his deceased mother</a>: Julia.</p>
<h2>Growing pleasures</h2>
<p>The Beatles’ closet allies though believed they had gone too far. Their producer, <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/people/george-martin/">George Martin</a>, probably recalling the perfection of albums such as “Revolver” (1966), famously declared on the Anthology documentary: “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” while stalwart engineer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/03/beatles-recording-engineer-geoff-emerick-dies-age-72">Geoff Emerick</a> described the LP as “unlistenable”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9PdpeBpoV9A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Yet ultimately it is the messiness and eclecticism of the White Album that makes it so great – an aspect I tried to capture in <a href="https://headpress.com/product/the-beatles-white-album/">my book</a> of individual reflections on the songs on the LP by artists, poets, academics and performers. The White Album is perhaps the truest deconstruction of The Beatles as a unique group of musicians that we have.</p>
<p>And still the LP continues to fascinate. New York artist <a href="http://rutherfordchang.com/white.html">Rutherford Chang</a>’s response to the record is an obsessive project. Since 2006, Chang has collected as many copies of the LP as he can, no matter the state of decay (he currently holds around 2,200 copies). In fact, it is the individual modifications (markings and collaging on the cover, and so on) that make the collection so unique. Chang has also sonically layered multiple copies of the LP one on top of another so that those so familiar songs become unrecognisable – a phased mush of noise. </p>
<p>This is precisely the kind of iconoclastic experimentation that the Beatles themselves hoped to achieve with the original 1968 project. </p>
<p>The White Album may have contained the first hints at the limits to the Beatles longevity as a group. But its avant garde eclecticism, or what <a href="https://www.thebeatles.com/story-tags/barry-miles">Beatles biographer Barry Miles</a> referred to as “multipurpose Beatle music”, is one of the very things that ensures their work continues to inspire and provoke creativity 50 years on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104505/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Fifty years after its release, the Beatles’ White Album continues to inspire and provoke creativity.
Mark Goodall, Senior Lecturer Film and Media, University of Bradford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/102291
2018-09-04T13:26:00Z
2018-09-04T13:26:00Z
How a Beatles song about ‘revolution’ helped Nike become a billion dollar brand
<p>Fifty years ago the Beatles released a single that sold over 8m copies – their highest selling 45rpm – Hey Jude. While Hey Jude made the greater impression, it was the B-side – Revolution – in which John Lennon addressed the <a href="https://theconversation.com/revolution-starts-on-campus-102243">global political upheaval of 1968</a> that has the more interesting story. Rare as it was for a pop song to address politics, the message in Revolution – which I outline in <a href="https://repeaterbooks.com/product/advertising-revolution-the-story-of-a-song-from-beatles-hit-to-nike-slogan/">my book</a> – attracted fierce resentment within the radical left before re-appearing in 1987 in one of the most seminal and <a href="https://vimeo.com/89811766">ground breaking advertisements ever made</a>.</p>
<p>Lennon wrote Revolution in India where the Beatles were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/dec/09/indian-retreat-where-the-beatles-learned-to-meditate-is-opened-to-the-public">meditating with the Maharishi</a> while the Vietnam War and Chinese Cultural Revolution raged on. There was a major <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/march/17/newsid_4090000/4090886.stm">riot in London</a> and Paris was brought to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/may-1968-the-posters-that-inspired-a-movement-95619">brink of another revolution</a> in May of that year. </p>
<p>Upon their return to London, the Beatles recorded the song with Lennon lying down to sound serene. In one line he sings: “You say you want a revolution … but if you’re talking about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.” And then, after a pause, he sings “in” (because he hadn’t made his mind up).</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BGLGzRXY5Bw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The rest of the band argued that the slow bluesy number was insufficiently commercial and so a faster, rockier version with distorted guitars needed to be re-recorded. Lennon reluctantly agreed, despite worrying that the political message would be more difficult to understand.</p>
<p>The first version (Revolution No. 1) appeared on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/4b8c/">the White Album</a>, which was released later that year. The faster version, simply named Revolution, became the flipside to Hey Jude. A third version – Revolution No. 9 – was also included in the White Album. This was just a scramble of noise, static, and nonsensical phrases – though an early example of electronic mixing.</p>
<h2>‘A lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear’</h2>
<p>Hey Jude was proclaimed as one of the Beatles’ <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/21/how-hey-jude-became-our-favourite-beatles-song">best songs</a> by the pop media which largely ignored Lennon’s more political offering. Yet the radical underground media railed, with Ramparts, the American literary and politcal journal, declaring “Revolution preaches counter-revolution”. </p>
<p>The New Left Review called it a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear”, while the Village Voice wrote: “It is puritanical to expect musicians, or anyone else, to hew the proper line. But it is reasonable to request that they do not go out of their way to oppose it.” The Berkeley Barb sneered “Revolution sounds like the hawk plank adopted in the Chicago convention of the Democratic Death Party” and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/mar/15/popandrock.pressandpublishing">Black Dwarf dismissed the song</a> as “no more revolutionary than Mrs. Dale’s Diary”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/89811766" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Then in 1987 the song reappeared when the small advertising agency, <a href="http://wklondon.com/">Wieden+Kennedy</a>, selected it for a Nike advert. It was the first major television advert Nike ever made. Wieden+Kennedy had previously attracted industry attention by featuring Miles Davis and Lou Reed in their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6y9_0gsEg">adverts for Honda scooters</a> and were becoming the agency that could deliver coups. </p>
<p>They also managed to <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/story-behind-nikes-controversial-1987-revolution-commercial-192421/">secure Yoko Ono’s support</a>. She explained that she didn’t “want to see John deified” nor for “John’s songs to be part of a cult of glorified martyrdom”. Instead she wanted his songs to be enjoyed by a “new generation” who would “make it part of their lives instead of a relic of the distant past”. So Revolution was licensed for a media campaign that cost between US$7m and US$10m.</p>
<p>The advert consisted of a jerky black and white, hand-held camera film that showed Nike athletes and ordinary people participating in a variety of sports at various levels of seriousness. It became a massive success. Nike sales doubled in two years and the advert’s theme of empowerment and transcendence with a personal philosophy of everyday life formed the basis of Nike’s branding for the following years and allowed them to dominate the newly emerging “sign economy” of brand culture (how brands started to gain value at a more cultural and aesthetic level). </p>
<p>By 1991, Nike held 29% of the global athletic shoe market and its sales had exceeded US$3 billion.</p>
<h2>Selling out?</h2>
<p>Yet the ad attracted controversy. Time magazine wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mark David Chapman killed him. But it took a couple of record execs, one sneaker company and a soul brother to turn him into a jingle writer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Chicago Tribune described the advert as “when rock idealism met cold-eyed greed” and the New Republic said: “The song had a meaning that Nike is destroying.” </p>
<p>Revolution, it seems, had apparently morphed from a “petty bourgeois cry of fear” into a sacred text, twisted and spoiled by a sneaker company. The most significant response was the US$15m lawsuit <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/05/arts/nike-calls-beatles-suit-groundless.html">filed by Apple Records</a> in an attempt to halt the commercial. Apple claimed that the advert used the Beatles “persona and good will” without permission. Reportedly, the action was settled out of court after the campaign had run its course, with Apple, EMI and Capitol agreeing that no Beatles version would ever be used again to sell products – truly the Nike Revolution was a one off.</p>
<p>Yet the critical attention generated by the advert appears to have had long term consequences for Nike. The <a href="https://business.nmsu.edu/%7Edboje/nikerpts.html">negative press coverage</a> on the brand accumulated, focusing on allegations of a “patriarchal culture” and <a href="https://qz.com/1042298/nike-is-facing-a-new-wave-of-anti-sweatshop-protests/">labour abuses</a>. The Nike Revolution advert did not just launch Nike into the stratosphere of brands. It singled it out for critical attention.</p>
<p>Yet it also helped normalise the everyday wearing of sports shoes.
Thirty years later, the everyday wearing of shoes designed for professional athletes is a normal part of consumer culture, demonstrating how society can live in the legacy of extraordinary marketing campaigns. Indeed, the possibility that so many people are wearing these shoes because Lennon, meditating in Rishikesh, decided to address the politics of 1968, is a reminder that the collision of culture and politics in the medium of advertising can often create the most unpredictable outcomes imaginable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102291/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Bradshaw is co-author with Linda Scott of Advertising Revolution: The Story of a Song From Beatles Hit to Nike Jingle, published by Repeater.</span></em></p>
John Lennon’s Revolution was panned by the radical media as a ‘petty bourgeois cry of fear’ in 1968. Then, in 1987 it was claimed by Nike to be the controversial soundtrack of its most seminal advert.
Alan Bradshaw, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84113
2017-10-09T23:15:47Z
2017-10-09T23:15:47Z
50 years ago, John and Yoko came to Canada to give peace a chance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189109/original/file-20171006-25749-1t45lwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C2000%2C1392&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">On Dec. 23, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono went to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to meet Pierre Trudeau. The Canadian prime minister was the only world leader to meet with the peace activists.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Peter Bregg)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago this Christmas season, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to Canada to launch one of the most unique and celebrated counter-cultural protests of the turbulent 1960s.</p>
<p>Lennon and Ono visited Canada several times in 1969, a year when the Vietnam War and the massive demonstrations against it reached new levels of intensity. </p>
<p>The famous Beatle and his new bride <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1969/12/15/john-lennon-yoko-ono-war-is-over-poster-campaign-launched/">arrived in Toronto on Dec. 15, 1969</a>, as part of the launch of their global “War is Over!” billboard campaign. A few days later, the couple <a href="https://happymag.tv/watch-a-long-lost-interview-where-john-and-yoko-discuss-their-war-is-over-campaign/">sat down with Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan to discuss the billboard initiative</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1107256010773798913"}"></div></p>
<p>And on Dec. 23, Lennon and Ono achieved what seems to have been among their top priorities as the leading peace activists of the era: they met the prime minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau. According to the Beatles Bible website, it was <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/1969/12/23/john-lennon-yoko-ono-meet-canadian-prime-minister-pierre-trudeau/">the only time the couple was able to take their peace campaign directly to a world leader</a>.</p>
<p>Canada was a favourite place for John and Yoko in 1969. During their first visit in the spring of that year, they staged their famous “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/on-this-day-in-montreal-john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-s-bed-in-1.3602576">Bed-In for Peace</a>” at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal, lying down together for eight days in front of the world’s media to publicize their message of peace and, in the middle of it all, <a href="https://youtu.be/OF91o0HenhU">recording their anti-war anthem <em>Give Peace a Chance</em></a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0yU0JuE1jTk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal: Dozens of journalists and celebrities attended, many of whom are mentioned in the lyrics. Lennon and Tommy Smothers on acoustic guitar.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Following Montréal, the couple travelled in June to the University of Ottawa, where <a href="http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/rock-fights-for-gun-control/">student leader Allan Rock hosted them</a>. Rock, Canada’s future United Nations ambassador, then took them in his car on a tour of the city, which included a stop at the prime minister’s official residence. Trudeau, they learned, was not in, but Lennon stood at the doorstep and wrote him a note before he returned to the car and they pulled away.</p>
<p>The second visit took place in September 1969 when Lennon, Ono and a hastily assembled version of the Plastic Ono Band (which for this gig included Eric Clapton) flew at the last minute from London to Toronto to take part in an all-day rock ‘n’ roll festival held at the city’s Varsity Stadium — and produced a <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/people/john-lennon/albums/live-peace-in-toronto-1969/">live recording</a>. Less than a month earlier, another <a href="http://www.woodstock.com/about/">rock ‘n’ roll festival — at Woodstock</a> in upstate New York — had taken the American youth movement to its highest peak and given it a heady, almost fantastic, sense of its own power and purpose. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189428/original/file-20171009-9731-10wst3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono perform in their first public appearance as the Plastic Ono Band, at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium in September 1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In their crusade for peace, Lennnon and Ono asked difficult questions, crucially relevant today. </p>
<p>How do we effectively protest against social injustices and war? It’s easy to deplore it. How do we all come together to <em>stop</em> it? Lennon and Ono did not, of course, put an end to violence. But they thought creatively and courageously about uniting people in opposition to it, and their example can inspire us today.</p>
<h2>New hope for peace</h2>
<p>In Europe, Lennon said: “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beatles-McLuhan-Understanding-Electric-Age/dp/0810884321">We got a lot of hope from Woodstock</a>.” If so many people could gather together for peace and not war, he said, perhaps counter-cultural forces could actually change the world for the better.</p>
<p>Their Toronto show was a fraction of the size of Woodstock, but Lennon was exhilarated by the experience. He closed his set with the song he most wanted the crowd to hear: <em>Give Peace a Chance</em>.</p>
<p>Almost three months to the day, Lennon and Ono returned to Canada, this time to announce a music festival to take place outside Toronto in the summer of 1970, billed to be far bigger than Woodstock.</p>
<p>The couple had renewed their efforts to meet Trudeau, and formal negotiations between their staff and Trudeau’s office were under way. Other world leaders — including British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and U.S. President Richard Nixon – did not want to know John Lennon. He was the dangerous Beatle, the “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/when-john-lennons-jesus-controversy-turned-ugly-w431153">we are more popular than Jesus</a>” Beatle. </p>
<p>Just a year earlier, he had been convicted on drug possession charges and posed naked with Yoko on the jacket of their <em>Two Virgins</em> album. A month earlier, he had returned his MBE medal to the Queen in yet another snub to “The Establishment.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189104/original/file-20171006-25749-u9s22w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s 1968 ‘Two Virgins’ LP Sleeve.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>None of this stopped Trudeau from agreeing to meet him. From a political point of view, of course, Trudeau undoubtedly recognized that posing with one of the most famous rock stars in the world was an opportunity to boost his popularity among younger voters. But it’s also easy to imagine that Lennon’s iconoclasm appealed to Trudeau, and that he saw in Lennon an ally on issues such as effective peace activism and the escalating horrors of the Vietnam War.</p>
<h2>A meeting of the minds</h2>
<p>Lennon and Ono met Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. After introductions and a brief photo session, they were ushered into Trudeau’s office. Lennon was nervous when the meeting began but, according to Ono, Trudeau immediately put him at his ease by telling him that he liked his book (<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-his-own-write-a-spaniard-in-the-works-by-john-lennon-book-review-all-you-need-is-love-of-wordplay-9920692.html">presumably either <em>In his Own Write</em> from 1964 or <em>A Spaniard in the Works</em> from 1965</a>). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uEqnT6Pr3iY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">John Lennon & Plastic Ono Band, Live at Toronto, Varsity Stadium, 1969.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their primary topic of conversation was the Cold War. They agreed mutual trust had to be created so that “disarmament and peaceful diplomatic relations could begin.” Each of them — Trudeau and Lennon — would work “<a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=jrv4ZPlub2UC&rdid=book-jrv4ZPlub2UC&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_viewport">in very different ways toward this goal</a>.”
Although Trudeau was more than 20 years older than Lennon and the two men came from such very different worlds, it was a remarkable meeting of minds, personalities and agendas. The meeting was supposed to last 15 minutes. It lasted 50. </p>
<p>After Lennon and Ono left Trudeau, they met the media. “If all politicians were like Mr. Trudeau, there would be peace,” Lennon told them. Later, Trudeau remarked: “<em>Give Peace a Chance</em> has always seemed to me to be sensible advice.”</p>
<p>Nine days later, the 1960s were over and a new decade had begun. Lennon, back in London in January, wrote and recorded <em>Instant Karma!</em>, one of his greatest singles as a solo artist: “Why in the world are we here? / Surely not to live in pain and fear.” By the spring, however, plans for the massive peace concert outside Toronto had collapsed, and soon after Lennon’s life was overtaken by public disputes and personal demons. </p>
<p>Trudeau, meanwhile, entered his third year as prime minister in April, and by autumn, faced the biggest challenge of his political career with <a href="http://historyofrights.ca/history/october-crisis/">the FLQ crisis and the invoking of the War Measures Act</a>. Within a year of their meeting, peace for both Lennon and Trudeau must have seemed further away than ever.</p>
<p>It’s easy to look back on Lennon’s activism and dismiss it as naive, as many did at the time and more have done since. That’s unfair. What Lennon was trying to do was to create hope.</p>
<p>Lennon looked squarely at the violence, misery and abuse that still thrives all around us. He responded with a model of peaceful protest, both on an individual level and in much larger ways, to activate the energies of resistance and to unite the popular with the political. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189229/original/file-20171006-25752-wae8b4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Lennon, right, and his wife, Yoko Ono, at The Hit Factory, a recording studio in New York on Aug. 22, 1980, four months before the former Beatle was murdered.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Steve Sands</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon was a peace activist who died at the hands of an assassin. Three years after Lennon’s death in 1980, Trudeau set out on the final major undertaking of his political career: his “peace initiative.” It was different from Lennon and Ono’s peace mission to Canada, yet it is possible to see in their crusade a precedent for Trudeau’s own initiative. </p>
<p>After visiting several countries on both sides of the Cold War divide, Trudeau brought his peace mission to a close with a speech to the Canadian House of Commons in February 1984. His initiative may not have accomplished all that he had wished. But as he recalled in his 1993 <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau/dp/0771085885">Memoirs</a></em>: “Let it be said that we have lived up to our ideals; and that we have done what we could to lift the shadow of war.” In 1969, and especially in their three visits to Canada, Lennon and Ono, too, did what they could “to lift the shadow of war” and give peace a chance. </p>
<p>With violence raging and political movements of intolerance and isolation gaining so much ground today, we might draw inspiration from their words.</p>
<p>It’s now commonplace for pop icons and political leaders to meet and use their respective positions to champion progressive ideals. Half a century ago, when Trudeau opened his door to Lennon, that was not the case. Their extraordinary meeting marks the first time that a rock hero and a world leader met face to face to discuss the past, the present and the future. Their 50 minutes together highlighted the importance of peace to both men, as well as their shared commitment to raising political consciousness and mobilizing the popular forces of compassion and acceptance. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3bUrEcxj2g?wmode=transparent&start=60" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan interviews John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Toronto in December 1969.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84113/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p>
John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited Canada on a peace mission: They met with leaders and asked difficult questions, relevant today. How do we effectively protest against social injustices and war?
Robert Morrison, British Academy Global Professor, Queen's University, Ontario
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/79702
2017-06-21T11:16:23Z
2017-06-21T11:16:23Z
Anita Pallenberg: how music’s muses are shortchanged by rock and roll misogyny
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174905/original/file-20170621-8977-1asyi8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anita Palllenberg and Mick Jagger in Performance, 1969.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Two items of recent news will have captured the attention of anyone interested in rock and roll history. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jun/14/anita-pallenberg-dies-aged-73-rolling-stones-performance-keith-richards">death of Anita Pallenberg</a>, aged 75, on June 13, was greeted as the end of an era, the passing of a true 1960s icon whose role as a muse to the Rolling Stones it is hard to overestimate. A couple of days later, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/arts/music/yoko-ono-to-share-credit-for-imagine-john-lennon.html">it was reported</a> that another prominent muse, perhaps the most famous of them all – Yoko Ono – was to be given a writing credit for Imagine, previously credited to John Lennon alone.</p>
<p>Pallenberg was best known for dating not one, but two members of the Rolling Stones (Keith Richards and Brian Jones). She is also widely believed to have had on-screen sex with Mick Jagger while filming Nic Roeg’s arthouse movie Performance. Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s former squeeze, led the tributes, posting on Facebook: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anita used to say that we (the two of us) are light years ahead of the Rolling Stones. Witty and probably true!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Born in Italy, Pallenberg belonged to the <em>dolce vita</em> crowd and hung out with Andy Warhol in New York before embarking on a relationship with Jones, the most musically experimental and ethereal-looking Rolling Stone. Faithfull, meanwhile, descends from Austrian aristocracy (masochism came into being as a word due to her great-great uncle <a href="http://www.local-life.com/lviv/articles/venus-sacher-masoch-furs">Leopold von Sacher-Masoch</a> – the author of Venus in Furs). Accent and family tree alone suffice to turn her rendition of John Lennon’s Working-Class Hero into arguably rock’s most idiosyncratic cover version.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/174911/original/file-20170621-30190-1vh8mom.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Anita used to say that we … are light years ahead of the Rolling Stones,’ Marianne Faithfull pays tribute to Anita Pallenberg on Facebook.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Facebook</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Stones never sounded as good as when Pallenberg and Faithfull were in their orbit – a relatively brief imperial phase lasting from 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet to Exile on Main St in 1972. The band’s musical and lyrical palettes were expanded by Faithfull and Pallenberg, who introduced them to cosmopolitan European cultural references, providing an effective counterpart to their schooling in the American blues. If you don’t believe me, just give Sympathy for the Devil (1968) another listen. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/26xQx7hUvZs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Faithfull, who split from Jagger in 1970, was not credited for co-writing Sister Morphine on the initial release of the Stones’ album Sticky Fingers’ (1971) – an omission only rectified with the remastered version of the album in 1994. She is hardly the only victim of Jagger’s and Keith Richards’ effective patenting of songwriting credits for the Stones – irrespective of duties carried out. But any discussion of contributions Faithfull, Pallenberg or Bianca Jagger (Mick’s wife from 1971 to 1979) might have made is exacerbated by the systematic objectification of female companions.</p>
<p>The default setting of rock’s institutional sexism has repeatedly denigrated women as groupies, trophy items and distractions from the serious work of writing and recording rock and roll. A playlist of misogyny could fill your iPod for a marathon run – but just start off by downloading Kiss’s Beth, Rainbow’s All Night Long or, indeed, the Rolling Stones’s Star Star.</p>
<p>Grunge rock ostensibly sought to dispel the macho posturing of yesteryear, but the <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/03/love-story-of-kurt-cobain-courtney-love">union of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain</a> was construed through traditional paradigms. Love was the more famous of the two when they met – but the lead singer of Hole (who the Nirvana frontman famously referred to as “the best fuck in the world”) was often presented as a modern day Yoko Ono, a parasite feeding off his talent.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5wMWj2yn7BM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Credit where it’s due</h2>
<p>Any divorce lawyer can testify to the difficulties in ascertaining what different partners bring to a relationship, but Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan provide an all-too-rare example (<a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/why-robert-wyatt-s-wife-alfie-is-his-most-important-collaborator-1.2032866">Alfreda Benge and Robert Wyatt</a> also spring to mind) of a canonical male singer-songwriter recognising his wife for satisfying his creative as well as emotional and sexual needs. In public statements and copyright alike, Waits has been scrupulous in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/oct/29/popandrock1">acknowledging Kathleen Brennan</a> for the experimental turn in his musical production between Heartattack and Vine (1980) and Swordfishtrombones (1983).</p>
<p>If this is the exception rather than the rule, general patterns are inscribed within a broader tendency to underplay female influence on male musicians. Ann Powers, the LA Times rock writer, has <a href="http://www.academia.edu/14626423/_Bring_it_On_Home_Robert_Plant_Janis_Joplin_and_the_Myth_of_Origin">given the example of Janis Joplin</a>, who had an incredible influence on heavy metal that has gone largely unacknowledged. A similar case could be made for Tina Turner. Her semi-autobiographical song Nutbush City Limits remains a concert staple for Detroit rocker, Bob Seger, and was used to audition the Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson when Australian metal superstars, AC/DC, needed a new singer following the death of Bon Scott. </p>
<p>It is <a href="http://people.com/archive/tina-turner-the-woman-who-taught-mick-jagger-to-dance-is-on-the-prowl-again-vol-16-no-23/">well documented</a> that Jagger appropriated many of her stage moves after the Stones opened for Ike and Tina Turner in the mid-1960s. Ike has rightly been <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-flashback-tina-turners-abuse-871542">vilified as a wife-beater</a> – but the fact that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/290080.No_Woman_No_Cry">Bob Marley</a> and <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/john-lennons-dark-side-domestic-6481985">John Lennon</a> are generally seen as global ambassadors for peace despite having abused their female partners is evidence of a wider culture of sexism, the effects of which still resonate today. </p>
<p>Yoko Ono may not have endured the physical and psychological violence to which Lennon <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/john-lennons-dark-side-domestic-6481985">subjected first-wife Cynthia</a>, but she was almost universally vilified for reputedly breaking up the Beatles alongside her reputed personal and professional affectations. </p>
<p>I’ve always found Imagine schmaltzy and hypocritical mush – in my alternative canon, Voice of the Beehive’s Perfect Place would have trumped it to being awarded Song of the Century by the National Music Publishers Association. But Ono being retrospectively granted co-authorship as she collected the award for a composition – whose sentiment and style were little in evidence in Lennon’s life or songs prior to their meeting – is a symbolic milestone worthy of applause.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Duncan Wheeler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
All too often the women beside rock music’s giants are not given credit for their influence.
Duncan Wheeler, Professor in Spanish Studies, University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/20212
2013-11-15T00:59:17Z
2013-11-15T00:59:17Z
Yoko Ono: the most famous Japanese person outside Japan
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35289/original/whtj7cys-1384407406.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Still giving peace a chance: Yoko Ono at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the pre-internet, pre-“Cool Japan” era, Yoko Ono was arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan – and she’s about to get more famous in Australia. Ono’s life and work is the subject of a <a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/war-over-if-you-want-it-yoko-ono/">major retrospective</a> that opens at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) today. </p>
<p>Refined but aggressive, simplistic yet startling, Yoko Ono is the Japanese artist, musician and peace activist who found worldwide fame in the 1960s and 1970s through her relationship with John Lennon. Despite her significant body of work, some of which is on display at the MCA in Sydney, she is best (or perhaps worst) known as <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sacamoto2003/3795814085/">the woman who broke up the Beatles</a>.</p>
<p>Vestiges of Ono’s overseas fame are still seen when the Japanese press writes her name in syllabic script as オノ・ヨーコ – as if her name is that of a foreign person and not the one her parents used to register her birth in Tokyo in 1933 (小野 洋子).</p>
<h2>A contradictory public image</h2>
<p>Born into an elite family during the war years, Ono experienced social privilege as well as poverty during her childhood in Tokyo. The contrast between her early years as a classmate of aristocrats at Gakushuin Academy and a war refugee in the 1940s may have created the many contradictory aspects of her public image. </p>
<p>Not everyone sees her art as complex, but all admit that her personality and her politics are. Yoko Ono’s life follows a narrative of great peaks and valleys. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35295/original/bkj7wbcy-1384408344.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono poses for photographs in Sydney.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As mentioned already, she came from privilege yet experienced great hardship as a child; as an adult, she married Beatle John Lennon, one of the most famous men in the world, was despised for her relationship with him, and then lost him in horrific circumstances. </p>
<p>At the start of her relationship with Lennon, much of the criticism levelled against Ono was racially motivated. But the colour of her skin was not the only mitigating factor. She did not conform to stereotypes of Japanese femininity in her behaviour or appearance. </p>
<p>Her multiple marriages (she was married to Japanese composer <a href="http://www.schott-music.com/shop/persons/az/toshi-ichiyanagi/">Toshi Ichiyanagi</a> and American jazz musician <a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20092860,00.html">Anthony Cox</a> before Lennon), her screeching voice and fuzzy, unfashionable hairstyle didn’t fit with the modest manner and the gracious and harmonious tones with which well-bred Japanese women were supposed to speak.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35296/original/djqhgtqc-1384408571.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono’s 2006 installation, We’re All Water.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA/Yoko Ono</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Traditional stereotypes die hard</h2>
<p>Today, foreigners tend to conflate traditional and contemporary Japanese femininity into a mash-up of geisha girl cum <em><a href="http://www.animenewsnetwork.com.au/encyclopedia/lexicon.php?id=8">kawaii anime</a></em> heroine but they don’t always know that women have always played pivotal roles in radical politics, since at least the <a href="http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2130.html">Meiji era</a> (1868-1912). </p>
<p>Long before John Lennon sang “I gotta ask you comrades and brothers/ how do you treat your own woman back home?” in his 1971 song <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wos-dDxpJlQ">Power to the People</a>, Ono was challenging sexism around the world. </p>
<p>One notable example of her pre-Lennon work is Cut Piece, first staged in 1964, and performed around the world. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Sc47KfJjcI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Yoko Ono performs Cut Piece.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During this performance piece, audience members were instructed to cut off pieces of Ono’s clothing with scissors. How far would the audience members go to provoke a response from the artist? Sitting in silence, motionless, Ono made a blunt statement about art and gender. </p>
<p>She, as a potentially naked female body, could only shock the audience as much as they desired, forcing them to acknowledge the active role audiences play in marginalising feminist art.</p>
<h2>Lennon’s collaborator</h2>
<p>Her collaborative work with Lennon was also a roller-coaster of highs and lows in the public eye. While their “<a href="http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRjjiOV003Q">bed-ins</a>” in Amsterdam and Montreal in 1969 created some ripples, the enduring status of songs such as Give Peace a Chance and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8">Imagine</a> shows their politics have now been integrated into mainstream popular culture. </p>
<p>Unlike the bed-in theme Give Peace a Chance, and the seasonal <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN4Uu0OlmTg">Happy Xmas (War is Over)</a>, songs such as 1971’s Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow), were met with critical derision. </p>
<p>Even the most liberal Western audiences only wanted to see Yoko at John’s side rather than hear her voice expressing a mother’s agony over her daughter Kyoko’s disappearance in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Worry_Kyoko_%28Mummy%27s_Only_Looking_for_Her_Hand_in_the_Snow%29">custody battle</a> with Tony Cox.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/swG6Rry9Tss?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Yoko and John sing Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over the years, criticism of Ono waned, likely in sympathy as she transitioned into her public role as the world’s most famous widow after John Lennon’s tragic death in 1980.</p>
<h2>War is over</h2>
<p>Ono’s work today focuses on preserving Lennon’s legacy of peace. Recently, she has also been involved with <a href="http://artistsagainstfracking.com/">environmental activism</a>. Her sensitivity to nature as well as her ability to cross cultural borders is evident in the video trailer for her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. </p>
<p>The movie tag contains http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/war-over-if-you-want-it-yoko-ono/, which is an unsupported URL, in the src attribute. Please try again with youtube or vimeo.</p>
<p>We see a eucalyptus tree against the Sydney Harbour, adorned with white paper tags that show handwritten messages about family, love, and politics. </p>
<p>Here, Ono integrates the Australian landscape with the Japanese spiritual practice of making wishes by writing a message on a piece of paper or wood and hanging it on a tree at a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple (<em>ema</em> and <em>tanzaku</em>). </p>
<p>Her wish here, unchanged since the 1969 bed-in, remains the same: War is Over (If You Want It). </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/war-over-if-you-want-it-yoko-ono/">War is over! (If You Want It)</a>, a retrospective of the works of Yoko Ono, runs at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art from November 15 2013 to February 23, 2014.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyn S. Stevens receives funding from Australian Research Council, on a DP13 project entitled 'Sonic Practice in Japan'</span></em></p>
In the pre-internet, pre-“Cool Japan” era, Yoko Ono was arguably the most famous Japanese person outside of Japan – and she’s about to get more famous in Australia. Ono’s life and work is the subject of…
Carolyn S. Stevens, Professor of Japanese Studies, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/20213
2013-11-14T19:42:15Z
2013-11-14T19:42:15Z
Why Yoko Ono still matters
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35236/original/chw8dh9q-1384389566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Peace, performance and participation: Yoko Ono's daring art practice has been breaking new ground for decades.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA/Matthu Placek</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“The world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” That’s how John Lennon once described Yoko Ono. It’s a description that would be less apt now. Today a <a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/war-over-if-you-want-it-yoko-ono/">major retrospective</a> of Ono’s work, War Is Over! (If You Want It) opens at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, giving an insight into the work and career of the Japanese artist, musician and peace activist.</p>
<p>Largely as a result of feminist art historical and curatorial hard yards, Ono’s work is now widely recognised in the art world both for its contemporary relevance and its formative influence on current practice. Given the length of Ono’s career, however, this wider recognition is surprisingly recent. </p>
<p>An important watershed was the comprehensive retrospective <a href="http://www.arttowermito.or.jp/art/yokoono.html">Yes Yoko Ono</a> held at New York’s Japan Society in 2000. In the following years, Ono has exhibited consistently around the world, creating installations and performances, some of which re-stage works from the 1960s.</p>
<h2>Participate in the performance</h2>
<p>The currency of Ono’s work coincides with a number of developments in contemporary art, in particular the fashion for works that invite viewers to actively participate, and the renewed interest in performance. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35239/original/vs4hmq3p-1384389993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono with her 2010 installation, Balance Piece.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA/Yoko Ono</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a sense, both of these developments arise from the perceived need to differentiate contemporary art from other cultural experiences, such as the mass media. The drive to make art participatory assumes that most of the time we consume images passively, unthinkingly absorbing messages that numb our critical faculties. </p>
<p>To be forced to act out a different way of being by taking part in a contemporary artwork, by contrast, can potentially shift our habits and release new ideas. </p>
<p>In a similar way, the physical presence of the artist can communicate far more forcefully than a mediated representation. We seek in a live performance the promise of authenticity and accountability, the longed-for value of truth in a world where it has proved increasingly elusive.</p>
<p>Ono’s practice from the beginning blended participation and performance.</p>
<h2>Fluxus happenings</h2>
<p>Ono’s early works date from her association with <a href="http://www.fluxus.org/">Fluxus</a>, an international network of artists who in the 1960s pioneered new interactions between art and everyday life, including through random public interventions known as “happenings”. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35237/original/8vtw6r54-1384389758.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono performs her work Cut Piece (1964) at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1965.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA/Yoko Ono</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ono’s <a href="http://onoverse.com/2013/02/cut-piece-1964/">Cut Piece</a>, first staged in Kyoto in 1964 as part of an event billed as a “Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert”, is iconic of her approach and now ranks among her best-known works. </p>
<p>Alone on stage and wearing her best black dress, Ono knelt in the polite Japanese pose assumed in formal situations. She placed a large pair of scissors in front of her, before inviting the audience to come up, cut off her clothes, and take a piece with them. These were the only words she uttered. Throughout the performance, she sat as impassively as possible while viewers, hesitant at first but gradually building up momentum, took turns to slice open her dress.</p>
<h2>Feminist art</h2>
<p>Cut Piece has for some decades been part of the canon of feminist art, that roll-call of significant works by women that was not included in the official history of modern art until feminist scholars, curators and artists undertook the huge task of historical revision. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/35238/original/ws8w7q7x-1384389822.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yoko Ono performs Cut Piece (1964) in Paris in 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA/Yoko Ono</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With its confronting tension between exhibitionism and voyeurism, masochism and sadism, and victim and assailant, it has been mostly interpreted as an enactment of the physical vulnerability of women in a world where they are reduced to mere objects to be looked at. </p>
<p>And it has been rightly hailed both as prophetic of feminist activism and of performance art as a form. But more recently, with the growing acknowledgement of the contribution of feminist art and theory to contemporary art more broadly, the performer in Cut Piece is no longer viewed as “the universal female victim”. </p>
<p>Rather, Ono’s specific ethnicity and personal history – the artist lived through the atrocities of the second world war in Japan – and the fact that she invites the audience to act and gives them a token in return moves the work into the terrain of war, protest and memorialisation.</p>
<h2>A witness to violence</h2>
<p>We might see Ono less as a victim than as a witness, one who calls on us to remember the consequences of violence, be it historical, cultural or personal, and to be guided by that memory in our everyday thoughts and actions. </p>
<p>As Ono <a href="http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2006/10/yokos_35-year_tempestuous_love.html">once said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment does not know how to fight back.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2008, I attended Ono’s performance of Promise Piece, a work that premiered back in 1966. </p>
<p>The diminutive artist cut a lithe and youthful figure that belied her age, her mystique helped along by dark shades and a fedora. Her first task was to teach us to spell out “I love you” in Morse code using the pencil torches provided to us, and to flash out in unison to the universe. </p>
<p>Her next task was to smash a breast-high Chinese vase, and to ask each of us to collect a fragment to keep safe for ten years, after which time we would all reassemble to put the precious object back together again: an act of destruction and a promise of reparation. </p>
<p>The piece still sits on my mantelpiece as a gesture to remember.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/war-over-if-you-want-it-yoko-ono/">War is over! (If You Want It)</a>, a retrospective of the works of Yoko Ono, runs at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art from November 15 2013 to February 23, 2014.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/20213/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqueline Millner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
“The world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” That’s how John Lennon once described Yoko Ono. It’s a description that would be less apt now. Today…
Jacqueline Millner, Senior Lecturer in contemporary art, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.