In light of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s retrospective of Yoko Ono, it seemed appropriate to present an introduction to an artist who pioneered a unique approach to conceptual art. As a member of Fluxus, an international avant-garde movement that wanted to expand what could constitute artworks and how art could be presented, she was integral to the New York art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Her loft apartment became a hotbed of emerging practices, attracting performance artists, musicians, composers, writers, and more. She ought to be revered as a household name. However, Ono has unfairly been derided and falsely accused of breaking up The Beatles. She has been demeaned, reduced to a footnote of the 1960s culture due to, I believe, sexist and xenophobic sentiments. Such discriminatory perspectives vulgarly deny the recognition she more than deserves. This primer will elucidate Yoko Ono’s philosophical background and development, as well as key works which reflect her intellectual acumen.

        Ono’s art challenges the boundaries of what could constitute a work of art. Her pieces are ephemeral and paradoxical. As Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno contended in his monumental book Aesthetic Theory, “Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: they do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them… The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as imminent problems of form.”1 The experimental forms found in Ono’s art speak to a transformation which occurred in society during the latter half of the twentieth century. As the capitalist mode of production expanded globally, aided by the rapid development of technology, the experience of daily life grew increasingly digitally augmented. The layers of experience introduced by this augmentation from films, music, television, the internet, smartphones, and virtual reality fragmented our experience of existence.

 

        An early work like Painting to be Stepped On provides a relatively straightforward model of Ono’s conceptual operations. She placed a slight scrap of painting on the floor; a freeform rhombus with a stalk jutting out into a fluke-like shape. The title invites participation from the viewer to intervene. Discarded on the floor, the dark scrap is ancillary to the interaction of the viewer stepping on the painting. The essence of the piece was meant to be found in the idea presented by the artist instead of the object on display.

She would push this idea further in her series of Score Paintings. These paintings consisted of poetic instructions, neatly written out in pencil, carefully aligned by an erased grid in the center of a rough, porous sheet of paper. The instructions read like a Zen koan—inscrutable yet charged with implied meaning.

 

PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD

Observe three paintings carefully.

Mix them well in your head.

Collect the figures you remember.

Select a number that you associate with it.

Place the number on a canvas.

Instead of paintings, you may use photographs, wrapping papers, newspapers, recipes, etc.

 

        By closely examining this particular Score Painting, Ono breaks down the act of appreciating artworks. Initially, the viewer is asked to observe three different paintings and memorize as much detail from them as possible. Next, to mentally recount these details, the figures that remain from our observation. Finally, to construct in the mind a new painting, a collage collated from careful observation and recollection. This is the process by which we de facto understand and exist in the world. Ono’s work positions interpretation as a gesture of participation, invitations to flex the imagination.

        Much like other early conceptual artists, Ono sought to democratize art, to liberate it from the confines of institutions like museums and galleries. In reaction to the strict materialism of Abstract Expressionism, the initial impulse of conceptual art was to question the frameworks within which art was exhibited and understood. Her contemporaries like Lawrence Wiener and Sol Lewitt also aimed to achieve both a universality and a specificity through reducing art to an idea expressed in language. Others like Joseph Kosuth raised age-old philosophical questions regarding the fraught relationship between subjects, objects, and linguistic representation. While this kind of art may appear silly or trite, the underlying deconstruction of logic was profoundly rigorous.

        Her conceptual installation Blue Room Event which elaborated on the Score Paintings and is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago, was a prime example of this early conceptual art, consisting of sentences written on the gallery walls. The prompts describe events, qualities, and states of the room which had to be imagined—“stay until the room is blue,” “a statue was here,” or “this room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end.” It remains an empty room regardless. However, Ono is encouraging the audience to imagine and change the state of the room in their mind. It opens up an interesting question about the necessity of fabrication in art.

        The barebones presentation of Blue Room Event recalls the later works of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who precisely examined and unpacked the way in which reality and experience are mediated and expressed through thought and language. Wittgenstein proposed that words were the method by which we communicated our conceptual interpretation of the world to others. However, the way we use words in different situations is dictated by various sets of rules. These rules change depending on the situation, and by extension, the meaning of words change under different sets of rules. Wittgenstein designated these interactions as “language games.” Miscommunication, therefore, is born out of the misalignment of languages games. One person is playing a particular language game, while the other is playing a different one. Neither can communicate because they are using the same words, but under conflicting rules of usage. 2

        Thus Yoko Ono, much like Wittgenstein, investigated the way in which we discover meaning through interpretation. The viewer is invited to the realization that interpretation is not just a mental skill we use in viewing art, but in our everyday lives. She ended her instructions in Painting to be Constructed in your Head by clarifying that the score can be conducted using “photographs, wrapping papers, newspapers, recipes, etc.” The actions of participatory interpretation can be applied to any situation. What starts as obscure and nonsensical in the art becomes a lesson in how we attempt to gain clarity in our real lives.

        In examining two other projects, her book of scores entitled Grapefruit and her Film No. 4 (Bottoms), it becomes easier to understand Ono’s use of language. Grapefruit was a book of instructions similar to the Score Paintings.

 

Number Piece I

Count all the words in the book instead of reading them.

1961 winter

 

        In an interview Ono asserted that her experimental short video piece, Film No. 4 (Bottoms), was a petition for peace. Ono upends rules of language in order to draw attention to how these rulesets develop. For example, in both cases the viewer is confronted with an act of ruleset substitution such as using a numerical system to understand the alphabet or images of buttocks in place of signatures on a petition for peace. What value is one set of rules versus another? Where Wittgenstein discovered and articulated how language games operated, Ono pushed this philosophical project even further by asking metatextual questions about how said language games and their associated rules are developed socially over time.

 

        If Ono’s early works were defined by the deconstruction of language and concepts, her later work would become even more radical. One can only come to understand how a system works by deconstructing it, but how does one change that system? In David Schiff’s biography, Ono was deeply inspired by Gustav Metzger and his auto-destructive art.3 Metzger’s own work consisted of using caustic materials like acid to burn holes in sheets of plastic. Metzger asserted in his manifesto that this new movement in art was about “change, growth, movement.”4 This all might sound like a call for wanton barbarism until one considers that for artists who had been raised in the shadow of World War II like Metzger and Ono, the world of their childhood had already been all but destroyed. There was no choice but to rebuild, change, and grow from the ashes of war. Ono would align herself with the values espoused by Metzger and create pieces which explored how deconstruction could become a path toward growth and creation.

        Yoko Ono’s most infamous work, Cut Piece, displays an obvious influence from Metzger’s manifesto. Sitting in front of a crowd, the artist allowed audience members to approach her and with a pair of scissors, cut pieces of her dress off until she wore a tattered remnant, framing her naked body. The performance was an act of extreme vulnerability.

 

        Another adaptation of her newfound strategy of growth through destruction appeared in Mend Piece. Broken pieces of ceramic, formerly a tea set, were laid out on a table with twine, tape, and glue. The audience is encouraged to mend the shattered ceramic pieces into new sculptural forms. This work was a holistic incorporation of all of Ono’s previous conceptual investigations and her new influences from Metzger into a single piece: the use of destroyed objects to create new forms, the invitation of the audience to participate in creating new from the old, the engendering and encouraging of the audience to express themselves and give themselves over to the creative process.

 

 

        Lisa Crystal Carver put it best in her article Yoko Ono: A Reconsideration, “We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, [Yoko] commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete.”5 She continues to produce art, music, films, and events to this day. She possesses a rampant imagination that is constantly striving to promote her values of freedom and world peace. Even if you find her lofty aspirations or her art ridiculous, you cannot deny the deep influence she has had on culture and the ambition of her goals. She does not make art which tells you what to think or what to do, but invites you to consider and question the status quo, ultimately revealing that we can change the course of history, of society, of our individual lives if we are willing to maintain an open-mindedness about the world.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Notes

1.  Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 6.

2.  Sergio Torres-Martínez “Complexes, rule-following, and language games: Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and its relevance to semiotics” Semiotica 2021, no. 242 (2021): 63-100. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0113

3.  David Schiff, Yoko: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025): 52.

4.  Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto (1959),” 391.Org, 15 Jan. 2019, 391.org/manifestos/1959-auto-destructive-art-manifesto-gustav-metzger/.

5.  Lisa Crystal Carver, “Yoko Ono: A Reconsideration,” New York Times, October 19, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/how-i-learned-to-love-yoko-ono.html