Creating transitions and new outlooks, using one medium to look at and into another: there has barely been another artist in the past forty years who has done this as consistently as Yoko Ono. With no one else have the encounters East - West, avant-garde - mainstream, experiment - pop led to results so bizarre that even the fashionable term »crossover« pales in comparison. For, even though the various steps in Ono\'s career have always been both surprising and controversial, and even though she has kept on changing sides, fields and sociotopes with a blithe independence, these seemingly abrupt changes were always accompanied by continuities that are now, in retrospect, beginning to become apparent.

From Fluxus star to filmmaker, from filmmaker to rock musician, from rock musician to political activist, from activist and feminist back to being a conceptual artist specialising in photography and installations, and across all these categories: even though Ono\'s course changes were often attributed to arbitrariness and a predilection for the enigmatic - and met often enough with open hostility -, several connecting factors can be seen throughout. Firstly, there are thematic axes, such as female self-empowerment, a idealistic and utopian belief in intellectual power as a world-changing substance, or simply practices of survival, with tragic historical or familial events - such as the bombing of her native city, Tokyo, by the Americans in 1945 or the violent death of her husband John Lennon in 1980 - playing a significant role in the constant development of these tactics. But apart from these thematic threads, it is the constant »push towards the outside« that is the central and overriding characteristic of Ono\'s multi-disciplinal production: a continual desire to draw in the outside that receives its perhaps most striking expression in the instrument of her voice, which may well also be the most hated of her modes of utterance world-wide.

We may have wanted for some time to hear another of her concerts - and her current musical productions are for the most part still state-of-the-art -, but this year\'s VIENNALE exhibition »From My Window« provided a welcome opportunity to examine at least a small selection of her prolific output. And even if it was not quite clear why a larger institution had not co-operated with the film festival and tried to take over the retrospective »YES YOKO ONO«¹, which was launched two years ago in the USA, the show, spread over two floors of the Vienna Galerie Klaus Engelhorn22, nonetheless provided an outline of the broader framework of her oeuvre. In the - less substantial - upper part of the exhibition, »From My Window« mostly focused on Ono\'s conceptual photography from recent years. For example, the series »Vertical Memory« (1997) loosely combines biographical entries and memories of the men in her life with distorted portraits that, being identical, cannot be recognised at first glance.² Next to these there are several digitally processed photographic prints suggesting windows, frames and other views - like the picture taken shortly after Lennon\'s murder that shows Ono pressed up against the wall in her darkened New York apartment, with the bright window onto Central Park as the only promising opening to the outside. The somewhat fleeting and ornamental Photoshop prints were interspersed with early Fluxus texts and writings, such as excerpts from her »Film Scripts (1964), which, significantly, only exist on paper: »Ask audience to stare at the screen until it becomes black« (»FILM SCRIPT 4«) is one of the instructions, harking back to the countless »Instruction Pieces,« mostly hand-written or typed, of her early years - concentrated ideational concepts which already contain transitions to (real) film or music performances.

A good example of one such topos that has undergone a continual process of transformation over the decades is the project »Fly,« which has figured again and again in Ono\'s work since 1963. Beginning as a short, laconic, Zen-influenced »Instruction Piece,« it soon became a performance instruction that was implemented in various contexts from 1964 on: no lesser names than Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota and Tony Cox, amongst others, »flew« down from a stepladder in the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo, emphasising the participatory character that was later to spread to her art audience and then her (rock music) fans all over the world. »Flying,« which back then was still a fresh metaphor for emancipation and liberty, led first of all to the film concept of »Fly,« made in 1970. This pursues a fly on a naked female body in close-up for 25 minutes. The woman is never seen in her entirety or optically intact; the un-free, fragmented nature of being female as seen from a feminist point of view is thus reflected throughout or, rather, drastically counterpointed by the stochastic movements of the fly over the seemingly passive body landscape.

From the late-Warholian avant-garde film »Fly,« the path leads to the splendid double album »Fly« (1971), which was recorded with the Plastic Ono Band and captures some of the highlights of the experimental-rock genre.³ In addition to film soundtracks, among others that of »Fly« itself, these above all include pieces like »Mindtrain« or »Don\'t Worry Kyoko.« The latter song is dedicated to her daughter from her marriage to Tony Cox, who at the time was temporarily not allowed to visit her. In it, Ono\'s razor-sharp voice, modulating to extremes and often redolent of electronic sound production, performed vocal spasms that had never been heard until then. In this connection, it is interesting to know how her inimitable vocal style came about. It is said that while Ono was experimenting with the simulated cries of a woman in labour, she played the tapes backwards by accident - and decided henceforth to cultivate this very technique - »the scream« - as her own style.⁴

As the next transformational step - excellently documented in a wall tableau in the basement of the gallery -, in 1971 Ono conceived the action »Museum of
Modern [F] Art,« which also integrated the earlier »Fly« concepts. Devised as a (fake) »One Woman Show« - at that time still an absolute rarity at the New York MoMA -, the project again played around with medially treated metaphors of freedom: scented flies were to be released in New York, and a photographer was to document the places where they were »smelt.« The resulting postcards were then, according to the conceptual instruction, to be sent all over the world, thus helping to promote a little bit of utopia via mail art.⁵ Twenty-five years later, Ono took up this topos once again. As part of an exhibition in Richmond, Virginia, she put up posters displaying the word »FLY« in black typeface on a white background on public billboards - not unlike the famous campaign of 1969, during which the slogan »WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT« was displayed in a number of international cities. Press coverage of the 1996 »FLY« action showed how much times had changed; one report stated: »This is not a subliminal selling tactic of the airlines, but - art.« And in an interview, Ono herself answered a suspicious question thus: »I don\'t want to sell anything at all. I only want to communicate the idea of flying.«⁶

A number of other transitional works, largely concerned with the encounter between media art and rock culture, also show to what extent her works kept aspiring to the ethereal, whether sky, air, wind, infinity or spiritual/medial weightlessness. For example, the video installation »Sky TV« (1966) (which can also be seen in Vienna), in which the camera\'s view of the sky is constantly transmitted to a monitor in the gallery, was a continuation of her series of »invisible« media paintings, such as »Painting to See the Skies« (1961) or »Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through« (1961/1966) - the latter being a simple plexiglass pane set up outside. This stereotype freeze frame - a small white cloud on a blue background - also found its way into the musical context, decorating the cover of the record »Live Peace in Toronto« (1969), a recording of the first live performance by the Plastic Ono Band. The 16mm film »Apotheosis,« which Ono and Lennon made in 1970, also works with the abrupt »revelation« of the clear blue sky. At the beginning, the two protagonists are seen, filmed from behind, going up in a hot-air balloon, then the slow ascent, filmed from the balloon with a stationary camera; then comes the long upwards glide through the cloud layer (minutes of enervating white) - before a sudden and unexpected emergence under a crystal-clear sky in the final sequence. Seldom had film history seen such an edifying blue - although Ono\'s works always also had the provisory motto »THIS IS NOT HERE.«⁷

Yoko Ono\'s films deal equally with material and with social unease, and do not just embrace a form of ethereal utopism. This can be clearly seen in »Rape« (1969), which was shown as part of the VIENNALE\'s main programme, making it the only one of her films to be presented in a »real« cinema. In it, the defensive gestures of the woman, pursued by a camera team for 77 minutes, feebly end in the increasingly hollow sentence »Just leave me alone!,« while, on the other hand, the structural voyeurism of the (male) gaze perpetuates its mindless harassment just for the sake of it. Besides this film, many other material feminist statements were included in the six-and-a-half hour DVD projection in the basement of the Galerie Engelhorn - which contained about half of the films produced by Ono and Lennon: »Cut Piece« (1964), for example, the documentation of an early Fluxus action that was performed several times. In it, the audience was asked to cut off a piece of Ono\'s clothing - here, the physical process of putting herself at the mercy of others finally turns into the no lesser horror of being »merely« a visual object as she sits on the stage in her now scanty attire. Or the one-minute film »Freedom« (1970), in which she keeps on trying to rip up her bra - a minimalist, physical attempt to break out from a socially prescribed role. The desire to break out is also echoed in pamphlets like »The Feminisation of Society« (1972)⁸ and in songs like »Women Power,« »She Hits Back, « or »Angry Young Woman (all 1973) - early blueprints of the movement that twenty years later was to become socially acceptable on a discursive level under the genre Riot Grrrl.

Besides her material feminist agitation, which she transferred more and more to the area of music at the beginning of the seventies, Ono also made masterworks of structural film together with her »best friend John of the second sex«: for example, »Erection,« which, in its allusion to phallocentrism and machismo, operates deconstructively - and, in its choice of visual means, not a little ironically. »Erection« is made up solely of freeze frames that over a period of several months record the construction of an office block in London from the window opposite. In this twenty-minute synthesis of the stills, a process is reflected that is self-generated and self-guided, as it were - an empty urban space swells up gradually to become a bulging office structure as if manipulated by magic -, while the soundtrack, improvised and vocally and emotionally fragile, underlines the erotic subtext of what is happening. At the end, the sexual politics depicted - the seemingly unquestioned building up of the male principle or this principle\'s flagrant display - are halted because night comes, the lights go on, and the building now primarily reflects the one opposite. What is left is a skeleton-like graphic frame that during the closing credits is once more recognisable as the outline of the architectural subject. In the sequence of credits, perfectly tuned to the film, the accumulated energy of the »erection« drains off slowly towards its now apparent constructional character.

From sunset or the critique of masculinity expressed in it, to the sunrise. In the past few years, this has become a sort of guiding metaphor in Yoko Ono\'s works, from her CD »Rising« (1995) to »Blueprint for a Sunrise« (2001). Here, the »survival topos« is one of the main focuses, or rather, the urgent question of how »walking on thin ice«⁹ also allows revealing views of the past and the future, or creates new windows giving access to yet untrodden terrain. In the video trilogy »A Blueprint for the Sunrise« (2000), for example, picture memories of sometimes private, sometimes public, political scenes from the seventies take up a central position in the image/music arrangements. The first part, »The Paths,« inserts a fleeting, jerky film image of the couple Ono/Lennon in every second bar of the driving music. In part two, »Are You Looking for Me?«, the face of the sleeping artist emerges from the dark as suggested by the title of the song, and disappears into it once more. And »It\'s Time for Action,« the third part, renders footage of an anti-war action of the seventies in whirring digital animation. It adapts pop-cultural agitprop from the anti-Vietnam time for the present day: not as a nostalgic or leisurely reminiscence, but as a forward-looking, destabilising reactivation - of references, the individual parts of the picture, new political goals, etc.¹⁰

Here, what is given its metonymic echo or its contemporary continuation is the famous legend cited by Ono on her latest CD to date, »Blueprint for a Sunrise.« It is said that, during the German siege of Leningrad, a radio DJ provided the population with music and rallying calls. Until his own strength failed, and he was only able to broadcast a ticking metronome over the ether, that thenceforth kept the rhythm, day and night: »That\'s how St. Petersburg managed not to fall.«

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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