Whilst, the Beatles may have drummed, strung and even blown their way to international superstardom, Yoko Ono was fine-tuning instruments of her own, albeit ones which played to the beat of the fluxus art movement, orchestrated by George Maciunas, and were realised through performances that encouraged observers to do everything and anything by the multi-disciplinarian who once sung “instead of giving what the audience chooses to give, the artist gives what the audiences chooses to take”; whether that meant joining her, alongside her husband in their honeymoon ‘bed in,’ (1969) later trumpeted as an act of advocacy for an end to conflict, or cutting strips out of a long-sleeved black suit as she sat passively on stage, which turned out to be an exploration of “how viewing without responsibility has the potential to harm or even destroy perception.” (1964) ”People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me (and) finally there was only the stone that remained of me that was in me but they…(still) wanted to know what it’s like in the stone” she reflected, of the former. “No matter where it is performed or what reading it suggests the piece is an experiment in group psychology” points out the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. “People are being invited to do something publicly that is normally forbidden —violently remove the clothing of a woman they do not know. The ones who participate can rationalise their actions by telling themselves that stripping a passive woman is not “really” what they’re doing because it’s a work of art. But, of course, it’s really what they’re doing. And people in the audience who don’t go onstage because they find the spectacle repellant or violative can tell themselves that at least they’re not participating. In the film of the New York show, the last person recorded cutting is a young man with a bit of a swagger who lustily shears off all that was left of Ono’s top so that all she has to cover are her breasts. He is heckled. But no one stops him. For the hecklers are part of the show.”
Independently, this spectacle, alongside others, has chorused together into a crescendo that trumpeted her approach to conceptual art, which ultimately echoed the dadaist and surrealist ones before it, before playing to the mixtures of avant-garde tendencies that rose afterwards thanks to diehard composers including John Cage.“Conceptual art, the literal offspring of Fluxus really, continues to this day as a practice, after the acclaim given to Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Ed Ruscha, Carl Andre and others” says Donald Brackett, the author behind ‘Yoko Ono: An Artful Life’, to RE-EDITION.“Transience, mutability, common everyday materials and a mystifying inexplicable poetic aspect continue to embody a theatrical, existential approach to making, and sharing art.”Little much has been done to remix the modus operandi to Fluxus throughout the years either, apart from by Nam June Paik, who embraced videography as her makeshift form of paint and canvas and then Bill Viola. “If Fluxus or Ono had access to computers if computers existed that it is, I feel certain that they would have played with that medium, especially social media (her actual life was lived was already a form of social media)” he points out, turning our eyes to Yoko’s various production works, particularly ‘Chase’ (1969) which, amongst others, demonstrates the belief that, within her work as a Fluxus artist, “ideas are the medium, and the process is the product with the result being a shared sensibility and fondness for the transitory, the ethereal and the impermanent.” Her “own personal karma was not so instant in the end, and instead is of the slow-motion but long-lasting sort” he adds. “That too was the secret ingredient of Fluxus: Time, time transfixed. And Fluxus, as well as Yoko primarily challenged the hegemony of the art historical canon: by accepting and embracing impermanence.”
