Yoko Ono and MoMA, Together at Last

Yoko Ono was about to burn a painting.

Standing alongside curators and conservators in an unused gallery at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, the 82-year-old superstar wanted to copy a cigarette hole that John Cage, the avant-garde composer, had burned into another blank canvas of hers half a century earlier. For the remake, she had asked for the French cigarettes that Cage would have used but ended up settling for one from Nat Sherman. Lighting up in a museum that had not smelled of tobacco for decades, she reached out and, with a sure artist’s touch, scorched a tidy round hole. Velazquez painting the Spanish king could not have been watched more closely than Ms. Ono was — though it was hard to know whether these courtiers were crowding around to witness creation or to prevent conflagration.

“Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” opening on May 17 in one of MoMA’s prestigious sixth-floor galleries, is a major event of the museum’s summer season. On display will be more than 100 vintage works — and in a few cases, as with the burned canvas, facsimiles — that represent the heyday of Ms. Ono’s first career in art, long overshadowed by her better-known image as pop-culture icon and widow of John Lennon. A great deal is riding on the event — for Ms. Ono, for the museum and also for Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at MoMA and a co-organizer of her show. The exhibition could recalibrate the reputations of all three.

“Yoko Ono in the ’60s was a historically important, groundbreaking, influential artist, working in London and Tokyo and New York,” explained Mr. Biesenbach, sitting in a MoMA boardroom, his platinum hair slicked back above one of his trademark skinny suits. Ms. Ono’s achievement as an artist, he said, “is nearly hidden by her fame; we want to uncover it.

As for Mr. Biesenbach, the show may help counteract the drubbing that he has taken for “Björk,” his celebration of the Icelandic pop star that is now filling MoMA’s atrium. One critic said it had “laid a colossal egg”; another called for his resignation. Working with Ms. Ono satisfies the curator’s well-known love of celebrities, but the artist’s early, conceptual work has an undeniable heft and rigor that may help earn back Mr. Biesenbach’s credentials as someone sober and substantial.

Mr. Biesenbach refused to comment on the Björk exhibition, beyond saying that the two projects were “very different.” But Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints and Mr. Biesenbach’s collaborator on the Ono show, insisted that, though their project was never conceived as some kind of Björk corrective, its difficult works make it stand for “the opposite of celebrity” — for something that will challenge viewers, rather than give them what they already want.

The morning of the cigarette incident, Ms. Ono sat in the kitchen of her Dakota apartment, whose genteel décor is leavened with pictures of her with Lennon, and even with his famous bandmates. She said she has no hesitation about showing alongside Björk, her “incredibly good” younger colleague. Although she’s given hundreds of interviews, Ms. Ono seems to listen to questions with intense attention; her answers don’t feel like pat lines. With her tomboy manner, royal-blue jeans and hip Adidas sneakers, she came off as at least 20 years younger than her age.

If the new exhibition returns us to Ms. Ono’s first persona as a radical artist, it may also be showing that MoMA itself has caught up to a radicalism it slighted for many decades. “MoMA almost totally ignored Fluxus,” said Mr. Cherix, referring to the movement of trickster artists whose orbit Ms. Ono moved in during her youth.

Fluxus was a tribe of cultural radicals brought together under one name by the maverick impresario George Maciunas, in 1961. Its anti-art, anti-object members included Alison Knowles (whose most famous work was the simple act of making a salad) and George Brecht (one piece of his “music” involved pouring water from a height). Sitting in her old-school SoHo loft, the 82-year-old Ms. Knowles said that Ms. Ono never quite espoused the collaborative ideals that defined a true Fluxus member. She was included in so many Fluxus publications and events, however, that Ms. Ono usually counts as a player in the movement, at least in its early days.

Written by Blake Gopnik 
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/arts/design/yoko-onos-1971-moma-show-finally-opens.html