Thursday 21 June 2012

Yoko Ono: To The Light - Serpentine Gallery

Yoko Ono, still from Film No. 4 [Bottoms], 1966 (Watch the film here)
Yoko Ono: Into the Light is at the Serpentine Gallery until 9 September.
Ono was associated with the Fluxus Group in the 1960s: a loose, international collective founded by George Maciunas taking its cues principally from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The optimistic aims of Fluxus were, according to Joseph Beuys, to purge the world of bourgeois sickness... of dead art, to promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote non art reality, and to fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action. (Walker, J.A. (1973) Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design, p94)
Ono's most celebrated work is, probably, Cut Piece (1965) a performance in which Ono knelt on the floor with a pair of scissors at her side: the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing. Ono remained unflinching until there was no more to cut away.
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Carnegie Hall, 21 March 1965 (Watch a film of the perfomance here)
Read a review of Yoko Ono: Into the Light by Adrian Searle, a profile by Charlotte Higgins, watch Ono perform with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; follow Yoko Ono on Twitter.

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