If John Lennon tried to meet Yoko the same way he did in the Indica Gallery ca. 1966-67 at the AGO today, he would be tossed out on his ear. The famous ladder that brought pop culture’s most infamous couple together is no longer open for business—you can look at it, though.
Despite this disappointment, Yoko Ono is still important. She was (in pre-Lennon times) associated with such conception-shattering artists as John Cage and Ornette Coleman. She was also the first Japanese woman to enroll in philosophy at Japan’s renowned Gakushuin University in 1952. Much of her work was truly revolutionary for its time—her performance art pieces were totally unprecedented, her participatory and instructional works totally unique. So much of her early work drew its potency from the way it involved the viewer: the viewer was no longer a viewer, but a participant, a pupil, a messenger, or, in the case of the famous “War is Over” ad campaigns, a consumer of ideas and ideals. All of this makes it crushingly ironic that the AGO’s current retrospective, the first comprehensive monograph of a female Asian artist, does much to emasculate the power of her most groundbreaking works by doing exactly what her art fought against: putting pieces on pedestals, and making installations into glorified look-but-don’t-touch paintings.
Case in point: the famous ladder. The original installation features a ladder, leading to a magnifying glass hanging from the ceiling. The participant was to climb the ladder and examine the ceiling with the magnifying glass to discover written the tiny word “yes.” Attempts by the Varsity to imitate the Walrus and climb it were met with horrified squawks from the exhibit’s curator; one can only be thankful that burly security staff were not on hand to forcibly stop art from being participated in. When asked about the relegation of a formerly participatory installation to mere museum piece, Ono replied that gallery-goers could still participate “conceptually,” a vicious irony considering that Ono’s rise to prominence was staked on challenging the idea that art was something hung on walls or cordoned off by velvet ropes in fancy halls for easy, passive consumption. It is almost a work of art in itself that the very forces that made Yoko Ono dangerous in the art world by sheer contrast with her work and drew attention to her have now, in apotheosizing her, emasculated her arguably most interesting and dynamic works by co-opting them into their conservative system.
However, there is only one thing Yoko is really famous for: breaking up the Beatles. Though this is not a comprehensive and all-encompassing assertion, it is as accurate as attributing the explosion of a nuclear warhead to the impacted pellet that pushes the amount of concentrated uranium over the edge of critical mass: sure, all that uranium sitting there probably wasn’t the most stable thing in the world, but it was that one last thing that set off the chain reaction. Whether or not it was her fault per se is difficult to assess, but this much is true: John and Yoko were happy together. When asked if she felt upstaged by her late husband’s successes, she replied, “If I am upstaged, then bless him.” When asked about her favorite Beatles album, she is a little less forthcoming: “Since I deal with the business end, every one of them.”
Though terse in her replies to questions, Ono still had some messages to pass on about art and life. “I’m here for a cultural exchange, and for some fun.” On her motivations for creating art: “Whenever I felt like doing something, I just did it.” Ono was most forthcoming when discussing her own music: “I hear music with a clear visual image, and when I see a clear visual image, I hear a sound. Music is God’s language.”
Though some of her work has suffered from time and some of success’s side effects, many of her pieces retain their power. Conventional provocative objects whose mere existence, be it within the viewer’s reach or not, provokes introspection and reaction in the viewer are those with the greatest staying power. Pieces like “Wrapped Chair” and “Mind Box” still impress themselves viscerally on the viewer, and more conceptual installations like her all-white “Play it by trust” chess sets are disarming in their physically manifesting the conceit that opposes such arbitrary divisions of humans as prevail in wars.
So, while you can’t climb that ladder anymore, some of the things around it are nice and actually important to today’s art. It’s only sad that her artifacts with formerly active pasts aren’t allowed out to play anymore.
