And get close to the clouds
man could have guessed it: the eighty-nine-year-old is familiar with the kind of fireballs that are currently raging in the skies of Kyiv. During the hail of bombs over Tokyo, Yoko Ono and her younger brother looked at the sky through an opening in the roof and thought they saw food and other scarce goods in it. They were moments of escape that she laconically recorded in a biographical self-description in 1966: “Early childhood: captured heaven”. Not that the daughter of an upper-class banking family later belonged to it. In her first exhibition at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery in New York in 1961, she still collected the famous “Instruction Paintings”, which animated the public to conspiratorially carry out instructions. Or better: to realize an immaterial work of art. Which could also mean that it should splatter the screens or burst into flames.
Japanese American grapefruit
At the same time, the square book “Grapefruit” was created in the spirit of conceptual art avant la lettre. It listed countless instructions in five hundred examples. They do not need to be listed in full, whether they were poetic aphorisms or ideas for films. And “Grapefruit” already referred to Ono’s hybrid identity between Japan and America in the title. So it is not surprising that in her homelessness she once again grabbed the promise of freedom in the firmament.
In the more than sixty years of creative work, which she co-designed, the solo show “This room moves with the same speed as the clouds” at the Kunsthaus Zurich, the ethereal works form a group that set a counterpoint to the meanwhile morbid image of invisible air particles – not as substitutes for mortal danger, but a precious commodity for all who die as a result of the circumstances. The young, dreamily subversive Ono offered air in vending machines, called “Air Dispensers”, for sale with the aim of “seeing the sky vending machine on every street corner instead of the coke vending machine”. Was it also influenced by Yves Klein, who in 1946 gave his signature to the Mediterranean sky of Nice and named it his first “Monochrome”?
In any case, the impulse to flee upwards, away from the same misery in the world, did not let go of her. One encounters in the idiosyncratic early work, which is at the same time the focus of the show, glass keys that open the sky, celestial machines and “Sky TV”, one of the earliest video installations ever, which provided a surveillance camera on clouds and transmitted it live to the respective location. No coincidence, of course, given that Ono was friends with Fluxus member Nam June Paik, who ennobled television as a work of art in a zeitgeist-dictated defensiveness. “Television has been attacking us all our lives – now we’re fighting back,” said the pioneer of the media age. Such a martial battle cry would never have occurred to Ono, who poked fun at the overflowing egos of artists. Instead, in her flux films, she concentrated on frontal close-ups of the advancing naked buttocks of people who were ready to show their “second sight” – a provocative foretaste of body art, which was mainly practiced by women at the time. In this concept Ono like Carolee Schneemann not only himself, but also the bodies similarly as material capable of suffering. Even in these performances the sky played a role, as in 1965’s “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ”.