YOKO ONO HONORED FOR FEMINIST ART, SAYS NOT SAYING ANYTHING WITH ART "A WASTE"

Last week, I think I developed a “girl crush” on Yoko Ono.

As a teen, I was a big Beatles fan.  Like many in my generation, when Yoko Ono entered the scene, I resented her for breaking up a family I was a part of—she was the home wrecker.  I didn’t understand her art or her music. I was young.

Last week, at the “Women in The Arts” celebration and benefit luncheon at the Brooklyn Museum on November 15, Yoko Ono was given the “Women in the Arts” award.  Prior honorees included Annie Leibovitz, Maya Lin, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker. The award was established to “recognize the great contributions made by women working in the field of visual arts.”

Yoko Ono & Catherine Morris,courtesy L. Soule

Catherine Morris, curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, sat on a Brooklyn Museum stage with Ono, age 79, in her iconic black tilted fedora and lowered dark shades.  The two women sat downstage of a giant screen projecting the multimedia artist’s works and had a conversation.

“My sense was that Morris was prepared for most anything,” said Narcissa Titman, former theatre director and lecturer. “Ono surprised us. Her answers were short and brief.”

Images and audio of Ono’s avant-garde music and conceptual art–paintings and performance art like the “Bed-In,” 1969 (she and John Lennon invited the press into their honeymoon Amsterdam hotel room every day for two weeks in a in-bed protest for peace) and “Cut Piece,”1964–were compelling but I found her no-nonsense ideas to be performance art in themselves. I made a list of the kind of statements that moved the nearly 200 women sitting in the Brooklyn Museum that afternoon.

1. “When people don’t understand my work, I don’t feel like explaining,” said Ono when asked about her work called “Painting to Be Stepped On.”
2. “When you go through a negative situation, don’t think about it. Make it positive.”
3. “Grapefruit is a mix of lemon and lime and I’m a mixture of two cultures,” when asked why she named a book of her work Grapefruit.
4. “See the picture of the three of us? They cut me out. That says it all.” On being asked about her role as a female artist back when she collaborated with John Cage.
5.  “It’s a waste to not say anything with art.”

In terms of future work, the multimedia artist hinted that she would be reprising elements from her ‘Bottoms’ theme very soon. (Ono was involved in the creation of a film of woman’s nude bottom, perhaps her own, called Film Number 4 (Bottoms) by George Maciunas in the mid 1960s in London.)

Ono is definitely coming from a good place. After listening to her, we all felt like we knew her.

Back in the days of John Lennon, maybe she was misunderstood: now her ideas are honored. Go Yoko.