Yoko Ono Utilizes to Complete Her Art Works Such as Wish

I consider my shows similar giving an elephant'southward tail. When a blind man says "what'southward an elephant", you lead the man to an elephant and let him grasp the tail and say "that'south an elephant". The existing material in the gallery is similar an elephant'due south tail and the larger function is in your heed. But you have to give a tail to lead into it. The affair is to promote a physical participation that volition pb you into this larger area of mind. What I'thou trying to practice is make something happen by throwing a pebble into the water and creating ripples.

–Yoko Ono Facebook mail, March 16, 2020

Yoko Ono's piece of work is in the world. Information technology's not here in the Museum. What nosotros can practice is bring traces.

– Christophe Cherix, co-curator, Yoko Ono: Ane Woman Evidence, 1960-1971 [1]

Known primarily for her early text-based conceptual works and her proto-feminist performance work, Yoko Ono has incorporated haptic interaction (or interaction relating to the sense of bear on) into her works in various media from the very beginning of her creative career. This essay explores her many and varied uses of the haptic in a series of Impact Poems and Impact Pieces in various media—and various contexts—with vastly different receptions past her many audiences.

Amid the artist'south earliest known works, her outset series of Touch on Poems (fig. ane) was produced in the form of small booklets. Originally made in 1960, the Touch Poems were commencement exhibited in January of 1962 at New York'south Living Theater. In Bear on Poem # 5, for example, lines of record replaced text, and clumps of dissimilar hair glued to the pages were treated every bit illustrations (fig. 2). At beginning glance, they announced to be Braille texts. Upon closer inspection, withal, it becomes articulate that in that location is nothing to exist read in the tape (at to the lowest degree in whatever conventional sense); it is (relatively) smoothen. Though the lines imply a narrative text, it is an opaque language. Similarly, the clumps of hair, in their different textures and colors, imply many dissimilar things. Merely the barest hint, still, is given as to what. Is there a cast of characters, one a redhead and another with black hair? (The black hair is, in fact, Ono's own.) Or is it talismanic? Its impenetrable mystery at once begs and defies any definitive interpretation. Perchance more than importantly, in the way language per se is withheld, the Affect Poems foreground other sensory information, thus encouraging in the viewer a heightened awareness of the nature of perception itself and of the viewer'southward own role in constructing pregnant from sensory as well as extrasensory information.

Fig. 1. Yoko Ono, Touch Poem # 5, 1960. Photos: John Bigelow Taylor. © Yoko Ono

Fig. ii. Yoko Ono, Touch Poem # 5, 1960. © Yoko Ono, Digital prototype © 2014 MoMA NY.

Co-ordinate to the artist,

I was thinking most braille. Braille is a very interesting communication method in which you apply "touch" to become data. It may create a deeper intake of the information with bear on rather than casting your eyes to the words. I thought of creating poems you accept into your body by bear on. [A] Poem is a way of limiting the information of the Universe by framing it. Then I thought of framing poems without words for people to go it by touch.[2] [...] It bridges the conceptual and the sensory.[iii]

Linguistic communication, in fact, became central to Ono's next exhibition. Having returned to Japan in the spring of 1962, shortly after first exhibiting the Bear upon Poem booklets in New York, Ono performed a concert and exhibited her Instructions for Paintings (text-simply pieces) at the Sogetsu Art Centre. Painting to be Constructed in your Head, for example, instructs us to: "Go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle. Choice out any shape in the process and pin upwardly or place on the canvas an object, a odour, a sound, or a colour that came to your mind in association with the shape."

The program also lists Affect Poems.[four] While the literature has focused on the Instructions for Paintings, Midori Yoshimoto clarifies that other works were shown in this solo exhibition equally well, stating that it "included, among other works, the artist'south Bear upon Poems and Instructions for Paintings."[5] For this concert and exhibition, however, the declaration (fig. 3) itself is a touch poem. Headed "Works of Yoko Ono," information technology lists the works to be performed and exhibited in a cavalcade of full-justified type, with no spaces betwixt the words, the words themselves cut off arbitrarily at the end of each line and picked upwards on the next. Immediately to the right of each line, random telephone numbers are embossed (but non printed), 1 telephone number per line, running downwardly the entire column, subtly alerting recipients to the multi-sensory nature of the performance and exhibition. These embossed telephone numbers at one time suggest Braille and, literally, lines of communication—phone lines. In the pre-Internet globe of 1962, phone communication was a uniquely magical medium, allowing average people to connect virtually over boggling distances. The immediacy of verbal communication in the absence of concrete proximity created a strangely disjunctive experience. The implicit demand for the reader's touch in Ono'southward Bear on Poems and embossed exhibition announcement foregrounded the particularly virtual nature of telecommunication through this oddly haptic representation of an otherwise ephemeral communications medium.

Fig. 3. Yoko Ono, Works of Yoko Ono invitation card, 1962. © Yoko Ono

In her fine art, Ono often aspires, not for a direct message, merely rather to institute a seed that is nourished by the viewer, nurtured and fully formed in his or her own mind. In the instance of this 1962 invitation, Ono realized the concept of the seed quite literally, inserting into each envelope a sprouting soybean forth with the printed and embossed announcement.

"I threw all the soybeans in a bathtub with some water in it and made it into moyashi. And it started to grow a niggling. And I put in the envelope that bean that was growing/half-growing. It was to touch on that indented place in the invitation. But the seed that was half-growing was a beautiful thing to bear upon actually."[half dozen]

Thus, at the very moment she introduces a pioneering text-based conceptual do (and these Didactics Paintings are recognized as amidst the earliest examples of what we now by and large refer to as conceptual art[seven]), Ono is producing insistently haptic works. And every bit is often the example with Ono's work, the Affect Poems would be re-imagined into conceptual works, performances, songs, and other manifestations too; it was indeed a seed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, for case, Ono performed Touch Verse form for a Group of People (1963) (fig. iv) in diverse contexts. The instruction, first published in her 1964 volume of instructions, Grapefruit, only states: "Touch on eachother."[viii] In a subsequently publication of Grapefruit, in the "Information" section, Ono included some other variation, Touch on Slice, with the elementary instruction, "Bear on" (fig. 5), noting that this piece was performed many times in different places in Europe, the United States, and Japan.[ix] Usually the lights are put off and the audience touches each other for 10 minutes to sometimes over 2 hours."[10]

Fig. iv. Yoko Ono, Bear upon Verse form for a Group of People, 1963, winter, 1964. From Grapefruit, 1964. © Yoko Ono

Fig. 5. Yoko Ono, Bear upon Piece, from Grapefruit (1970 edition). © Yoko Ono

In a plan notation for a September 1965 performance at the 3^rd Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York, Ono offered a brief history of the work, first the object and so the performance:

Touch verse form was first exhibited in the antechamber of the Living Theater in New York Metropolis on January 8 '62 in the evening of AN Anthology. It was and so exhibited at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo for the evening of WORKS BY YOKO ONO. Impact Poem, the audience participation piece, was first performed in NAIQUA GALLERY, February 1964. Since then, information technology was performed in Kyoto, Nigeria, Berlin, Florence, Aachen, and New York.

Ono describes not just the object and performance manifestations of Touch Poem here, but actual—and purely imaginary—performances too. The Kyoto and New York citations no dubiousness refer to performances that she herself gave in those cities. Midori Yoshimoto notes that in early 1964, Ono performed Touch Piece at Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo, in which she and other participants "saturday in a circle and touched each other in silence."[xi] The Berlin, Florence, and Aachen references stand for to performances of the piece given past her friend Charlotte Moorman on her 1965 European bout with Nam June Paik. The Nigerian performance, however, is imaginary, and refers to a postcard outcome from 1964, Bear upon Poem No. 3 (fig. half dozen).

Fig. 6. Yoko Ono, Impact Verse form no. 3 (for Nam June Paik), 1964. © Yoko Ono

Impact Poem No. 3 exists in 2 versions: English and Japanese. While it appears to be a simple announcement bill of fare, the appointment of March 33^rd 1964 suggests otherwise. The quote attributed to Nam June Paik is actually an unpronounceable phrase written in katakana syllables. Explaining Paik's quote, Ono stated:

It has to do with communication on a different dimension. It is very important that we shouldn't always recall that our communication is on one dimension. There'south another dimension where information technology'southward not communicable in the sense that we're used to. But nonetheless it communicates. Nam June Paik was a very close friend of mine. I actually respected him. By the way, he actually loved Touch Piece. He thought it was a great slice. So I felt skilful virtually making a tribute to Nam June. I call up he would be ane of the very few people who would understand the reason I did information technology that manner.[12]

Another imaginary version is included in a card piece from 1966, Miss Ono's Tea Party (fig. 7). For the January 31, 1956 party, the artist instructs: "Come prepared to touch eachother." Equally with a number of iterations of this score, "each" and "other" abut one some other typographically. Ono's Grapefruit also includes a score for such fictional versions.

Fig. 7. Yoko Ono, Miss Ono's Tea Party, 1966. © Yoko Ono

Touch Verse form Three

Hold a impact verse form meeting at somewhere

In the distance or a ficticious [sic] address

On a ficticious [sic] day.

1964 Spring

Fig. 8. Yoko Ono, Touch Poem III and Bear upon Poem 4, 1964 spring, 1964. From Grapefruit, 1964. © Yoko Ono

An before version, dated to Summer 1963 and simply titled Bear upon Poem, too appears in Grapefruit:

T ouch Poem

Give nativity to a child.

Encounter the world through its eye.

Let it touch everything possible

And get out its fingermark there

In place of a signature

i.eastward., Snowfall in India

       J.C.'due south overcoat

       Simone's equilibrium

       Clouds

        Etc.

Fig. 9. Yoko Ono, Touch Verse form, 1963 fall, 1963, 1964.From Grapefruit, 1964. © Yoko Ono

This version, except for the title, is identical to a text that appears nether the title Instructions for Poem No. 81 on a sheet dated to 1963 that serves every bit a nascence announcement for Ono's girl Kyoko that Baronial and also an announcement for the forthcoming Grapefruit (fig. 10). Here her daughter's handprint—or bear upon—connotes her very identity. Some other iteration dated to 1963 Autumn instructs the reader to haptically explore her environments (fig. 11).

Fig. x. Yoko Ono, Birth Announcement, 1963 © Yoko Ono

Fig. xi. Yoko Ono, Touch Poem 5, 1963 autumn, 1964. From Grapefruit, 1964. © Yoko Ono

Affect Poem Five

Feel the wall.

Examine its temperature and moisture.

Take notes nearly many unlike walls.

On March thirteen and April 2 of that year, at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo, the instruction was realized equally a participatory performance.[13] Midori Yamamura and Reiko Tomii report that, co-ordinate to filmmaker Takahiko Iimura, some participants, while initially tentative, soon "establish their own means of expressing the act of 'touching,'" and they "all awakened [their] sensations past touching, which was rarely an issue in the art world." Nam June Paik kept in bear upon by phone and, according to Iimura, "used the ringing audio [...] to bear upon the participants."[14] For Paik, too and then, his impact was activated though electric transmission, mayhap particularly plumbing fixtures for an creative person who had transitioned from musician to fine art-robot maker to the world'south best-known video artist. (Curiously, this calls to listen Ono's announcement for the 1962 Sogetsu Art Middle consequence with the embossed telephone numbers.)

Paik himself discussed this functioning of Bear on Slice in 1970:

Touch Poem

At 1 time and one place, i fatal disaster was about to happen.........centering effectually Yoko.........at this farthermost situation, the phrase that was inspired paradoxically was a romantic give-and-take. "Affect."

In 1964, at the Naiqua Gallery in Shinbashi, 1 small premier was conducted. I was unable to go since I got a cold. Then, I processed the sound of Ring Ring by telephone as a Serial-style (Tone-series-style), and touched, from this side, with only signal audio without having the other party pick upward. In accordance with a popular word in the previous twelvemonth, this must take been and then-chosen "McLuhan-mode participation", mustn't information technology?

Later, during the German performances with Charlotte Moorman, I brought this slice with me; it was applauded everywhere. This was meant for all of the audience members to caress one another.[15]

Later on in 1964, every bit part of a three-day plan that besides included a concert and a symposium, Ono secured the famous Zen monastery, Nanzenji, for an event she called Evening till Dawn (fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Yoko Ono, Tickets for 3 Kyoto Events/Evening Till Dawn, 1964. © Yoko Ono

On the night of a full moon, approximately fifty people—mostly Kyoto residents, merely also some American and French participants—gathered at the temple gate, where each was given a card with the instruction "silence." Walking quietly to a garden backside the temple, they received another instruction card, "touch on," and spread themselves throughout the garden, the verandah, the corridor, and the tatami-mat rooms. Interpretation of the pedagogy was left to the participants, although Ono explained to them that objects to touch were not limited to physical things. While some literally touched other participants' bodies, others watched the moon or sky, wishing to touch.[16]

The graphic symbol of this performance was quite different. And Ono recalled: "the monks accepted and greeted my work with a very Zen attitude themselves, without being on guard. The evening went so well because of this symbiotic vibration."[17]

While the location of a Zen monastery no uncertainty contributed to a more than solemn performance in Kyoto, subsequently performances took on characters all their own. At the aforementioned 1965 Festival of the Avant-Garde in New York, for case, the idea of touching each other provoked discomfort among participants. Co-ordinate to the artist: "People [were] very, very shy and extremely embarrassed and all giggling.... Everybody was giggling. [and] Men were extremely vocal in expressing their embarrassment."[xviii]

Ono would perform Touch on Piece in London as well. One of these performances occurred on Oct xv, 1966 at the launch party for the undercover newspaper, International Times. She would later on explain the genesis of the piece to journalists for an article in the paper:

When I first thought of the idea [1958] I couldn't sleep at night considering it was so beautiful. I was going everywhere saying to people, Did you realize how beautiful it is to touch each other? And that was a long time before hippie or yippie or anything, right, it was 1958 when I first did that. I don't know how one-time you lot were in 1958 but people couldn't understand it. Touching simply touching and and then I made concrete object poetry that were to be appreciated just by touching them. They were my kickoff touch on pieces. It was then I realized that instead of touching an object information technology was improve to touch each other [...].[nineteen]

At a 1967 performance in a London nightclub, the Electrical Garden, Touch on Slice took on a very different character nevertheless. In a feature article on the opening of the new nightclub, London Look reported that Ono sent blindfolded participants (fig. 13.) into the crowd. According to the magazine, 1 girl said: "It'southward a nice style to come across people."[20] Ono told me: "I explained to the audition that [they] volition be going around the audience to 'bear upon.' It was a bear on piece but a fun 1. [They] went around the audience behind them, and touched their butts."[21]

Fig. 13. Yoko Ono, Touch Slice at the Electrical Garden, London, May 28, 1967. Photo: Ross Benson, "Covent Garden Goes Electric," London Look, June ten, 1967, 12-13. Courtesy of Mikihiko Hori.

In August of 1968, Ono and John Lennon would offering Touch Piece to the audition of Frost on Saturday. As the program ended, with the sounds of Hey Jude playing out the episode, Ono offered: "Nosotros're just trying to communicate. And communication itself is fine art, and art is communication. And so that, um, people are getting so intelligent that yous don't take to explain besides much, all you take to do is just impact each other, just shake easily, then this is a mode of touching each other." And in Feb 1972, when they were invited to co-host The Mike Douglas Show for a calendar week, they invited their starting time-solar day audition to "touch each other" as well. In the latter case, the video shows the participatory performance.[22] Norma Coates, in her essay about the couple'due south takeover of Douglas's show for the calendar week, notes that "Douglas was an able foil for Ono'due south feminist opinions, merely her feminist art baffled him."[23]

The slice threatened propriety, particularly since Ono told audiences to only put their manus on the next person and leave information technology in that location. What could rile a sophisticated audience in a gallery could draw unwanted attention from television regulators, or angry phone calls and letters from offended viewers. Douglas seemed immediately and acutely aware that certain audience members might put their hands in the wrong places [...]. Douglas turned the piece into a comedy routine, running through the audition while shouting "impact touch impact touch on," equally though at a football game. His humour reassured his regular audience and gave his cameras something to follow, yet it did non interfere with the purpose and intent of Ono's piece. It was a tacit recognition that he could not terminate her.[24]

If the Electrical Garden performance reflected the Swinging London of 1967, six years later on in 1973, another performance offered much the aforementioned content, but a very different context. Past then a feminist activist living in New York and married to Lennon, Ono sent three blindfolded women into the audience during her Town Hall benefit concert for WBAI public radio with instructions to find a man with a tail pinned to his bottom. Melody Maker, the British music mag, offered a incomparably popular civilization assessment: "What'south happening is a happening of sorts, and though there are several who happen to the exits, about of us like our ass pinched."[25] While male audience members may have missed it, the joke was on them. Notably, the creative person afterwards insisted that in that location was no feminist agenda here, "merely fun."[26] However, Ono'southward now-feminist humor is conspicuously revealed on the liner notes to her Feeling the Infinite anthology, released a few months later. Ono lists her all-male ring and production staff with rather peculiar statistics. For case: "Jack Douglas—main engineer (581-6505) ⋅ November 6, 1945; 6'; 175 lbs; chest: 40"; waist: 32"; hips: 40"." And a note on the LP's cover reads: "This album is dedicated to the sisters who died in pain and sorrow and those who are now in prisons and in mental hospitals for beingness unable to survive in the male society." (The previous year she and Lennon were given a "Positive Prototype of Women" honour by the National Organisation for Women for their records, Woman is the Nigger of the World and Sisters O Sisters.)

In one case Ono and Lennon became partners, her musical performances, an essential part of her career all along, were preserved on pop singles and LP records. A surprising number of her songs dealt with touch equally well. On 1970'due south Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Ring, for example, two tracks addressed the haptic: a rail titled Touch Me (fig. xiv) and another called Why Not, which concludes with a section in which she wails "touch on me, John." Numerous Ono tracks over the years are marked past the haptic, none peradventure more sensually that 1980's Buss, Kiss, Buss, with its refrain: "Touch, Touch, Touch on, Touch me dear."

Fig. 14. Yoko Ono, Touch Me flick sleeve; B-side of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Power to the People (Apple tree Records, 1971). Courtesy of Yoko Ono.

Today, of course, Ono is still recognized equally a leading feminist artist. And it'due south at present common for her work of all periods to be understood as such. Scholar Peggy Phelan, in her essay for Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, argues that "one of the virtually revolutionary legacies of feminist art concerns the epistemological contours of touch itself."[27] "To think of bear upon epistemologically," Phelan continues, "requires that we put the sentient body at the center of knowing [...]." Elsewhere in her essay, which touches upon Ono's 1964 Cut Piece at some length, only does not accost whatsoever of Ono'southward touch pieces, per se, Phelan describes Ono's visual and performance fine art every bit "among the most explicit meditations on touch, honey, and peace we are likely to see for some time."[28]

Phelan is not the kickoff scholar to connect the haptic with operation. Kathy O'Dell, in her 1997 essay "Displacing the Haptic: Operation Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s" argues that "the reception of performance art—which is to say, the reception of the photographic documents from which performance fine art is inseparable—is not exclusively dependent on visual feel, merely relies heavily on touch."[29] These photographs, she explains, are the medium through which well-nigh people experience functioning art. And in many cases, particularly in the 1970s, performances were staged specifically for documentation destined for magazines, journals, and artists' books, which were most frequently viewed and handled in the dwelling house, soliciting a response both visual and haptic.[xxx]

While Ono's participatory Bear on Piece performances facilitate a straight and unmediated touching (although i could certainly argue that this affect is displaced from the artist'due south own body to those of her audience/participants), with her 2008 exhibition, Touch Me, Ono returned to touch as a major theme, displacing the haptic, as O'Dell describes it, non through photographic reproduction, but through sculptural reproduction of a human torso. Ane piece, Affect Me 3 (figs. 15-17), features a long table with several small-scale compartments, each containing a section of a woman's body cast in silicone. On an adjacent pedestal, a bowl of water is offered with the didactics: "Moisture your index and middle fingers to touch the body parts." Touch Me III speaks at once of separation and connection. The bowl of water, connoting ritual purification for many viewers, also relates to the creative person'southward many H2o Pieces. "We're all water in different containers; someday nosotros'll all evaporate together," she has stated.[31] H2o and air signify for Ono elements that connect us all. Touch, too, offers connection. From shaking hands to embracing, a caress and more.

Fig. 15. Yoko Ono, Touch Me III (details), 2008. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © Yoko Ono

Fig. 17. Yoko Ono at Touch Me opening, Apr 19, 2008. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © Yoko Ono

Reviewing the exhibition for Artnet, Michèle C. Cone describes the work equally "an invitation to feel the common cold of death. Whether these works are inspired by personal concerns of aging and dying or by the current state of the world, they make their bespeak admirably," she concludes.[32]

Ono's interpretation differed, nonetheless. On the solar day of the exhibition's opening, the artist told talk show host Leonard Lopate: "It's to say we are all man. Let's touch each other…. Touching is more to practice with dear, caring, communication."[33] By month'southward terminate, however, the piece told a very different story. A new didactic panel accompanied the piece of work: "Bear on Piece Three was designed past the creative person every bit a participatory piece of work and the audience was invited to touch on the sculpture. Still, the body parts were deformed, and the toe was severed by rough handling. The artist has chosen to go out the harm visible as a sign of the violence women experience through life."

She would accost the fragility of the work when she recreated it in marble the following twelvemonth for the Venice Biennale at which she was honored with the Golden Lion. She spoke to The Japan Times on that occasion.

Ono reflects that although many of her works are generated through instructions, they are not express to a hierarchical human relationship between artist and audience and, every bit in "touch me III," can be inverted or freely interpreted. "I was always interested in that aspect of my work," she wrote to The Nippon Times. "I like the fashion the pieces proceed growing because of the audience participation."[34]

Curiously, the gallery's press release makes no mention of Touch Me III, but touts Touch Me II (fig. 18) as the key work:

The centerpiece of the exhibition volition be a large sail roofing the entire width of the gallery. Openings volition exist cutting into the canvas, and viewers are invited to insert body parts through. Encompassed in this simple human activity are opposing elements of isolation, exposure, vulnerability, and disobedience. The viewer will have the pick to photograph themselves with supplied cameras; these photos will be displayed together on another canvas with the participant's ain comments and thoughts written underneath the photos, furthering the inclusive nature of this work.[35]

Fig. xviii. Yoko Ono, Installation view, Touch Me I and Touch Me 2, 2008. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © Yoko Ono

According to Cone, "the resulting image is a morbid i, showing severed trunk parts strewn across a metaphorical boxing field."[36] The image Cone conjures every bit a "metaphorical battle field," however, is open to multiple interpretations, and recognized as such by the printing release.

At Ono's 1962 concert at Sogetsu Fine art Heart, her Painting to Shake Hands (Painting for Cowards) (fig.nineteen) was on view in the antechamber exhibition. For Painting to Shake Easily, a performer is situated behind a canvas and inserts their arm through a hole in the canvas to greet guests.[37] The connection to Affect Piece seems articulate enough. In announcing the impromptu performance of Touch Piece on the 1968 Frost on Saturday programme, for case, Ono told the studio audience, "All you have to do is only touch each other, just shake hands, and so this is a style of touching each other."[38] Scholar Martha Ann Bari has observed:

When Ono actualized these instructions by sitting behind a canvas with a pigsty in the middle, she became the apotheosis of her painting, with which the viewers were to physically interact. The spontaneous and improvisational interchange between artist and audience places Ono's painting between the media of painting and performance. By adding the "life media" of touch and sign language to the visual codes i usually uses to "know" a painting, every viewing becomes a phenomenological experience that is shared by artist and audience.[39]

Figs. 19 Yoko Ono, Painting to Milkshake Hands (Painting for Cowards), 1961.From "Kemuri no chokoku/Moji no nai shishu" (Fog Sculpture/Anthology of Poem without Letters) Shukan Yomiuri (Weekly Yomiuri), May 6, 1962, 69. Courtesy of Midori Yoshimoto.

A like scene on the Sogetsu stage (although unrequited on the other side of the canvas) was documented in a review in the Asahi Periodical. The bearding critic described the performance of AOS—To David Tudor every bit:

An opera without any sound of instruments, in which all the participants read newspapers in different languages…. Arms and legs came out of the linen curtain and moved quietly equally if they were groping for something. In front of such activities, on the other hand a French human and a Japanese man sabbatum on chairs and systematically connected a strange French lesson.[40]

While this functioning was not a Bear on Piece per se, it clearly resembles the scene Cone describes. Against the backdrop of multiple languages and attempts to empathise them, information technology might also be construed to address frustrated advice, a literal failed "reaching out" not so unlike from Paik's earlier cited gibberish quote on the 1964 postcard result.

It shares the device of "limbs through the drapery" with yet some other performance documented at Badge Chambers in Liverpool in 1967. While the official program for Ono's Bluecoat Chambers performance on September 26, 1967 includes no Bear on Piece, apparently one was performed. An undated document from the artist's athenaeum appears to be a "prop listing" of sorts for the event. Information technology requests items both "For the Lecture" and "For the Operation." The prop list specifies these pieces for the concert: Peek Slice, Touch on Piece, Cleaning Piece, Fly Piece, Wrapping Piece, Fog and Fourth dimension Piece, Promise Slice and Add Colour Painting. Since the Bluecoat engagement is among the few during this period for which both a lecture and performance were booked—and the pieces performed largely correspond with those on the prop list, information technology seems a reasonable assumption that it was used for this consequence. While the prop list and the official program differ slightly, a review corresponds more or less with both. While the official program lists Peek Slice, Line Piece, Fly Piece, Wrapping Piece, Fog Piece + Fourth dimension Piece, and Wind Slice (to be performed quondam during the evening-possibly with the fog machine for Fog Piece), a review of the concert by Spencer Leigh lists Pig Slice (a mis-hearing of Peek), Torch Piece (most likely a mis-agreement of Bear upon Piece), Cleaning Piece (including what the author calls Add Red—actually Add together Colour Painting), Wing Piece, Tuna Piece, Wrapping Piece (including a description of what is in fact Promise Piece), and Goodnight Slice (which describes Fog Piece). [41] The prop list requires the following items for Affect Slice:

Large canvas to hang
Long bamboo sticks and small flash lights [sic] and strings to bind the flashlights [or torches]
One edge razors and scissors
Large flashlight
Baloons [sic] (foreign shaped baloons)

Leigh'south description of Torch Piece corresponds:

A large black cloth is brought to the forepart of the stage and held upright. It contains v holes. From out of iv of them a battery-powered torch on a long pliable stick emerges. From the other, a pair of knickers on a like stick. The audience loves it. The sticks achieve out further and so retreat, to exist replaced by large balloons. A balloon bursts. The black cloth is taken away.[42]

Other than Touch Me II at the 2008 Lelong prove, which shares with it the holes that as well appeared at Sogetsu, this Touch Slice (or Torch Piece) stands alone. The torches might of course exist understood equally lines of communication, their beams of light reaching out as they do, to audience members.[43]

	Bluecoat Chambers
PROP LIST	PROGRAM	LEIGH REVIEW
Peek Piece	Peek Slice	Pig Piece (Peek Piece)
	Line Slice
Touch Slice		Torch Slice (Touch Piece)
Cleaning Piece		Cleaning Piece
Fly Piece	Fly Slice	Fly Piece
Wrapping Piece	Wrapping Piece	Wrapping Piece
Fog and Fourth dimension Piece	Fog Piece + Fourth dimension Piece	Goodnight Piece (Fog Piece)
Promise Piece		Promise Slice (with Wrapping Piece)
Add Colour Painting		Add Red Slice (Add Colour Painting
	Wind Slice	(probable part of Fog Piece-to accident fog)
		Tuna Piece

Throughout her career, Ono has sought with her work to extend our sensory apprehension of the universe—often using touch. The original Touch Poems of 1960 need our touch with a vague promise of information not physically there. Suggesting lines of text, the lines of newspaper record are blank and smooth, leading "readers" to ever more than focused sensory sensitivity in the hopes of "getting information technology by affect." She insists with her conceptual text pieces that we share the responsibility for the creation of images—optical, sensual, or otherwise— using her linguistic "seeds" to brand our own mental objects. And with her participation performances, she urges u.s. to connect with one another through touch—with varying results. Over the course of her career, these performances accept resembled spiritual practices, as at Nanzenji; encounter groups, as at the 1965 Avant-Garde festival; titillating entertainment, as at the Electric Circus; and feminist consciousness-raising—however humorous, as at the WBAI Town Hall concert. The spiritual enrichment, therapeutic benefits, cheap thrills, and feminist pedagogy were all achieved through the sense of touch on.

In a 1966 certificate titled To the Wesleyan People, Ono discussed her ideas of sensory isolation in the context of and then-popular Happenings:

People might say that we never experience things separately, they are always in fusion, and that is why "the happening," which is a fusion of all sensory perceptions. Yes, I agree. But if that is so information technology is all the more reason and challenge to create a sensory feel isolated from other sensory experiences, which is something rare in daily life. Art is non merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life is different from art duplicating life.[44]

Over the course of her now more than sixty-year career, Ono has returned to seemingly simple themes, realizing them in multiple media, with various receptions, over the course of many years.

And as with all of these pieces, with each iteration of her Affect pieces, Ono challenges her audiences to connect in a different way—to focus their deed of perception in a manner that lends a unique intensity, not only to the process of perceiving itself, but to the things perceived every bit well.

Fig. 20. Yoko Ono, Add Colour Painting: Affect Me, 2008. Ed. 300. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. © Yoko Ono

In conjunction with her 2008 exhibition, Ono issued a multiple, Add together Color Painting: Touch Me (fig. 20), of 2008. A small, prefabricated sheet covered with Plexiglas that has the words "Affect Me" dye-cut out of it, the piece conflates the optical, the haptic, the conceptual, and the performative. As with the original 1960 Touch Poems, this piece challenges viewers to transgress ordinary gallery or museum rules and actually touch a painting, information technology relates to multiple other aspects of the artist'southward oeuvre, most evidently, the text-based instruction paintings for which she is distinguished equally a leading conceptual creative person. It's tempting to imagine that this multiple has brought Ono'due south multiple iterations of Touch Slice full circle. But that'due south non likely.

Until his retirement in January 2021, Kevin Concannon served equally Professor of Art History and Director of the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. His scholarship focuses on fine art of the 1960s, especially the work of Yoko Ono. His exhibitions and catalogues include Marilyn Minter: Splash (2020); Willie Cole UpCycle (2018); Laurie Anderson: Invented Instruments (2018); Lynn Hershman Leeson: Torso Collage (2016); Two Trees: Rona Pondick and Jennifer Steinkamp (2013); Agency: Fine art and Ad (with John Noga, 2008); YOKO ONO IMAGINE PEACE Featuring John & Yoko's Year of Peace (with John Noga, 2007); and Mass Production: Artists' Multiples and the Marketplace, 2006. His essay "Cypher Is Real: Yoko Ono's Advertising Fine art" appears in Yes: YOKO ONO (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. and the Japan Gild of New York, 2000); along with "Chronology" and "Bibliography" (both with Reiko Tomii) in the aforementioned volume. In 2008, his essay "Yoko Ono'south Cut Piece (1964): From text to performance and dorsum again," was featured in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Notes

[i] "Inside Yoko Ono'southward MOMA Retrospective," Rolling Stone YouTube Channel, last accessed on March two, 2020, https://world wide web.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=55&v=_YZq2iATnl0&feature=emb_logo.

[2] Yoko Ono, electronic advice with the author, Nov 30, 2008.

[three] Ono, conversation with the author, January 27, 2009, New York.

[4] Plan reproduced in Instructions For Paintings past Yoko Ono May 24, 1962, ed. Jon Hendricks (Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993), n.p.

[five] Midori Yoshimoto, "1962-1964," in Yoko Ono One Woman Show 1960-1971, eds, Klaus Biesenbach and Christoph Cherix (New York: Museum of Modernistic Art, 2015), 79. It too, obviously, contained a canvas version of Painting to Shake Hands.

[6] Ono, January 27, 2009.

[7] The instruction paintings are collected in Jon Hendricks, Yoko Ono: Instructions For Paintings, May 24, 1962 (Budapest: Galeria 56, 1993.)

[viii] Most iterations of this text seem to deliberately barrel the words up against each other.

[9] See, for instance, "Touch on Piece," in 9 Concert Pieces for John Cage, December xv, 1966, reproduced in Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Abrams, 2000), 281.

[10] In the 1971 Simon and Schuster paperback edition of Grapefruit. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), northward.p. The original edition of 500 copies was published by the Wunternaum Printing in Tokyo, 1964.

[xi] Yoshimoto, "1962-1964." She cites Takahiko Iimura, Ono Yoko: Hitoto sakuhin (Tokyo: Bunka shuppan-kyoku, 1985), 83.

[12] Ono, Jan 27, 2009.

[13] There remains some confusion regarding the engagement(s) of the performances at Naiqua Gallery. In the chronology Reiko Tomii and I produced for Yes Yoko Ono, we dated a single physical operation there to "June, 1964." Afterward, Midori Yamamura detailed performances there with specific dates: March 13 and Apr ii, 1964. (Meet next foornote.) Yamamura cites filmmaker Takahiko Iimura every bit a witness—and presumably he dated the two performances, 1 of which included Paik'south remote participation. Interestingly, March 33^rd aligns with Apr 2^nd, more or less, assuming i continues counting within an extended month of March. In Yoshimoto's subsequently text, she cites Iimura'due south story most a performance in Feb. See: Yoshimoto, "Impact Piece," in Yoko Ono Ane Woman Prove 1960-1971, 92.

[14] Reiko Tomii, "Yoko Ono: Tokyo/1964," X-TRA 7, no.one (Wintertime 2004): 43. Tomii is reporting information from Yamamura'southward wall labels in the exhibition under review (Grapefruit: Yoko Ono in 1964, curated by Yamamura). Accessed on April 10, 2020, https://www.x-traonline.org/commodity/yoko-ono-tokyo1964.

[15] Nam June Paik, "Ono Yoko vs. Yoko Ono," in The Book Review one, no. 1 (Apr 1970): 32. Translated by, and courtesy of, Mikihiko Hori.

[16] Yoko Ono cited past Midori Yoshimoto, "Evening till Dawn," in Aye Yoko Ono, 156.

[17] Ono, quoted in Yoshimoto, "Evening…."

[xviii] Ono, interview with the author, January 27, 2009, New York.

[nineteen] Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Jamie Mendelkau, and William Bloom, "Interview Piece: Yoko Ono & Grapefruit," International Times 1, no. 110 (August 12-26, 1971): 15. Cited past Yoshimoto and reproduced in Yoko Ono One Woman Show 1960-1971, 225.

[twenty] Ross Benson, "Covent Garden Goes Electrical," London Look, June 10, 1967, 12.

[21] Yoko Ono, electronic communication with the writer, Dec 1, 2008.

[22] See Norma Coates, "John, Yoko, and Mike Douglas Performing Avant Garde Art and Radical Politics on American Television in the 1970s," in Music and the Broadcast Experience: Operation, Production, and Audiences, eds. Christine Baade and James A. Deaville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) Kindle e-book, Locations 4667-5059, companion website with video clip (example 9.two), accessed April 8, 2020, https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199314706/resources/ch9/ix.3/

[23] Ibid., 222.

[24] Ibid., 223-224.

[25] "Yoko: the lady'due south a winner," Melody Maker, June two, 1973, 33.

[26] Ono, interview with the author, January 27, 2009, New York.

[27] Peggy Phelan, "The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances, 1960-80," in Wack! Fine art and the Feminist Revolution eds. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 347.

[28] Ibid., 350. Phelan'southward essay moves on to discuss work past generally women artists: Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono (Cut Piece, 1964), Marina Abramovic (Rhythm O, 1974), Gina Pane, Orlan, and Valie Export (Touch Cinema, 1968), among others. Significantly, Phelan discusses the human relationship of Export'southward Bear upon Cinema to Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze, as detailed in her influential 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Notions of female person objectification and the male gaze are peradventure nowhere better illustrated than in Consign's performance.

[29] Kathy O'Dell, "Displacing the Haptic: Performance Fine art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s," Performance Research 2, no. one(1997): 74.

[30] Ibid., 75.

[31] See, for example, a Tweet from March 9, 2013: "You are water. I'thousand water. We're all h2o in unlike containers. That's why it's and so easy to run into. Someday nosotros'll evaporate together." Ono's Water Pieces date to the primeval days of her career.

[32] Michèle C. Cone, "Death and the Artist," Artnet, May 20, 2008, accessed April one, 2020, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/cone/cone5-20-08.asp

[33] The Leonard Lopate Bear witness, WNYC-FW (May 1, 2008), accessed Apr 10, 2020, http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2008/05/01/segments/97916.

[34] Andrew Maerkle, "Artist Yoko Ono is honored," The Nihon Times, July 10, 2009, last accessed on Apr one, 2020, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2009/07/10/arts/creative person-yoko-ono-is-honored/#.XoOdGi2ZPyI.

[35] Galerie Lelong printing release for Yoko Ono: touch on me, April 18-June 7, 2008, accessed April 6, 2020, http://galerielelong.com/exhibitions/yoko-ono6.

[36] Cone, "Death and the Creative person."

[37] These images appeared with reviews of the concert by an unidentified author in the Weekly Yomiuri and Toshi Ichiyanagi, respectively. Run into: "Kemuri no chokoku / Moji no nai shishu" [Fog Sculpture/Anthology of Verse form without Letters], in Shukan Yomiuri [Weekly Yomiuri], May half-dozen, 1962, 69; and Toshi Ichiyanagi, "Saizen' ei no koe: Donarudo Richi e no hanron" [Vocalism of the most avant-garde: Objection to Donald Richie] Geijutsu shincho [New trends in fine art] 13, no. 8 (August 1962): 138. My thanks to Midori Yoshimoto for providing the former.

[38] Ono on Frost on Saturday, August 24, 1968.

[39] Martha Ann Bari, Mass Media is the Message: Yoko Ono and John Lennon's 1969 Year of Peace (PhD diss., Academy of Maryland, 2007), 35-36.

[40] "Daitanna kokoromi: Ono Yoko no ivento" [Assuming Experiment: Yoko Ono's consequence], Asahi Journal (June 1962): 45. Quote and translation kindly provided by Midori Yoshimoto, September 15, 1999. In her essay on the concert for Yes Yoko Ono (p. 151), Yoshimoto specifies that they were women's limbs, based on other sources.

[41] See Spencer Leigh, "Strange Days Indeed," beatles unlimited magazine (Jan/February 1998): 50-51. With the exception of Tuna Piece (which seems to describe Bag Slice), Leigh'south reviewed program corresponds largely with the prop list. Line Slice, listed on the program is neither evidenced by Leigh'southward recounting nor the prop list. In email correspondence with Leigh on March 30, 2020, he indicated that he fabricated his notes later on the event, although the "review" was published 31 years later. Regarding the official program, he wrote, "I've never seen this before and I am pretty certain we didn't have programmes. Yoko (or Tony Cox) announced each item. I had heard Peek Slice equally Sus scrofa Piece and probably thought information technology had something to do with the law [...]." As for Torch Piece/Touch Piece, he offered: "Touch could be their typing. Information technology was torches on the end of long pliable sticks." Picture documentation of the concert exists. A short section, assembled as Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, includes excerpts of Cleaning Piece, Add together Red Painting, Fly Piece, Promise Piece, Pocketbook Slice, Wrapping Piece and Fog Piece. Accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/scout?5=PxNJbRtqTPs. Additional footage in the artist's archive includes footage of Time Slice, but no footage of Impact Piece. Thanks to Connor Monahan of Studio Ono (Ono'southward function) for this information. It's possible that Touch Piece was hard to moving picture with lights pointing at the audience (television cameras) in the darkness.

[42] Leigh, "Strange Days Indeed," fifty.

[43] At that place remains some confusion regarding the title. While I am unaware of a work called Torch Piece, I am too unaware of any other performances of Impact Slice that accept this grade. All the same, in the document from the artist's archives that I refer to every bit the "prop listing," except for the knickers, the items required for Touch Piece align precisely with those described in the document. Information technology is possible too that this may have been a typographical error in the "prop listing," as Leigh suggests. The knickers might simply exist a nod to Swinging London or an unauthorized addition by one of the performers wielding the poles and torches. Ono had just recently gained notoriety for her Film No. Iv (Bottoms), which featured a series of bare backsides, so it could as well reference that. The film'due south regular screenings, after months of legal wrangling, had begun in London the previous month. The balloons remain a mystery, at least within the context of Bear on Piece, however. Ono's Half-a-Current of air Show (known also as Half-a-Sky Show, among other titles) would open on October 11, less than two weeks after, and included the piece Air Talk, in the catalogue:

Air Talk, 1967

It's lamentable that the air is the only
matter we share.
No matter how close nosotros go to each other,
at that place is always air between us.

It'due south likewise squeamish that we share the air.
No matter how far autonomously we are,
the air links us.

Thus the balloons, in this context can be understood as connecting us.

[44] "To the Wesleyan People, January 23, 1966," self-published insert in The Stone (New York: Judson Gallery, 1966), northward.p.

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Source: https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/yoko-onos-touch-piece-a-work-in-multiple-media-19602009.html

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