A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

One Woman Show at MoMA highlights Yoko Ono’s work from 1961-1971. There are films that slow time painfully, projected in endless loops on the walls. There’s an installation, Half-A-Room (1967), that collects ordinary household artifacts (a pot, a chair, a carpet) that have been sliced in half. There’s a sculpture, Apple (1966), that is, simply, a green apple. And there’s a sculpture, To See the Sky (1966), that is a monumental spiraling steel staircase that carries visitors to the gallery’s ceiling.

The rooms are packed with art but strangely empty of drama. No narrative seems to connect one work with the next. What’s missing might be the character of the artist herself. We all know who Yoko Ono is: she grew up in a prominent family in Japan, began her career as an artist in Tokyo, had a husband and then a child and then a divorce, became a vital member of Fluxus in New York, married a rock star, and was famously widowed. But who is the woman who made this art?

The most vivid piece in the show is a film of Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1964). It shows her kneeling on a stage in front of a pair of scissors as, one by one, audience members step up and cut away parts of her clothing. Here she looks like moon-faced co-ed, in a dark cardigan with a Peter Pan collar and an A-line skirt, without jewelry and makeup, her hair pulled away in a braid. Throughout the performance her expression remains placid while her eyes scan the room anxiously. There’s thick, quiet drama in the not-knowingness of who will pick up the scissors and what they will do with them. And there’s something in this, the simple mystery of the performance and the fragility of the performer, that’s more compelling than all the other high-art high-concept works in the show. We’re seeing someone take a risk, test her resolve, and construct a fresh identity for herself. We’re seeing a young woman make herself into an artist.

Photograph courtesy of Yoko Ono.

July 29, 2015 by Nalina Moses

If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots. The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings. But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality. They’re strange.

The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is. The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence. This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree. The work’s single-mindedness – its disregard for proportion and balance – make it hard to understand as art. This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses. As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this." Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling. It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is.

August 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses