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I’m still writing about my trip up to SF last month. I just saw too much stuff. Anyways, Michele and I were advised that a new Bruce Nauman show had opened up at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. We were going to be in the area the following day, so we added it to our already packed itinerary.

After finding an amazingly good parking space, we entered the museum to discover GRAPEFRUIT, an exhibition of works by Yoko Ono in the entrance area to the museum. Yoko Ono is one of my favourite artists. I’ve always been able to connect deeply with her works, and they do something humbling to me. Confronted with her works, I fell naked and given license to be more alive than I am. I find the idea of her mental presence terrifying and comforting at the same time.

I’d always loved her work, but I first encountered it in person at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, around Christmas of 2000. The piece was Film Number 4 (bottoms), which consisted of nothing more than an ass level shots of bottoms walking. One of the most mesmerising and intimate pieces of conceptual film I have encountered, like the rest of her work, it has a capacity to engage me in a way that other art does not.

Mentally wrestling with the very broadness of “what is art” has been an almost constant feature of my mental landscape for the past several years. Work like Yoko’s really forces me to ask the question where does art begin and end. For the past year, I’ve been far more engaged in my martial arts practice than I am in my “artistic” practice, I feel more artistically satisfied as a martial artist than I ever have felt as a “visual artist”. Early into my practice of naginata, my sensei responded to an almost ridiculous descriptive statement made by a student about kendo by ejaculating the statement “Kendo is an art form”. I can’t presume to have knowledge as to her general perspective and interest in art, it’s been the most thought provoking art related statement I’ve heard in a long time. I see some kind of synonymity between my experience of the martial arts and my experience of Yoko Ono’s work that I lack the words to explain.

Back to Yoko. So experiencing her work, especially her instruction paintings, the part of me that wants to limit things, to give them names has to ask “Is this really art, and if it’s not art, what is it?” Another part of me is so engaged by and transformed by the experience of her work that I cannot help but as “Is this something way better than art, like a nameless virus that changes you forever?” To the best of my knowledge, there is no right or wrong answer to any of these questions. I know that I am deeply moved by her work, and that something in it tickles a part of me that I cannot reach myself.

On to the show. The show occupies a lobby area and a hallway that leads to the main floor of the museum. The walls were all painted a sky blue, and the show primarily consisted of Instruction Paintings presented as white vinyl text. In addition to the Instruction Paintings, there were some physical objects in vitrines, a copy of imagine, a copy of the book Grapefruit, a white telephone and a bowl of “Imagine Peace” buttons from her last Venice Biennale project.

At first I was all “Who the fuck put a Yoko Ono show in a goddamn lobby!”, until I realised that a lobby/hallyway is the perfect location for a Yoko Ono exhibition. Upstairs in the main museum sits the Bruce Nauman show, struggling for legitimacy, wrapped in curatorial justification. Downstairs lies a Yoko Ono show, needing no edification or assistance whatsoever. There was a piece on a spare patch of wall between the doors to the men’s and women’s rooms in the hallway, and it was perfect there. I spent a lot of time hanging around in that hallway/lobby, and I could have spent a lot more.

The images below are all a little on the lo-fi side, because they were taken on the sly with Michele’s super sneaky Casio camera. I really like them, probably because of the content, but I’m really into the shadows in the corners and the grainy quality, so they’re as is, straight from the memory card.

Above - Telephone Piece for Berkeley - This telephone, a 1966 ITT Model 554 wall telephone, occasionally is called during the course of the exhibition by Yoko Ono. Seeing this piece made me want to just sit down against the wall and wait. I have nothing better to do, and the realisation of that is at the center of my relationship to the piece. There’s something so staggeringly viewer dependent about her artwork, it almost only exists due to the “observational presence” of the viewer.

above - TOUCH POEM - Some of Ono’s Instructional Paintings are mechanically impossible to do and some of them seem like challenges. This is the latter type, made all the more challenging to the 48% of us that can’t even complete the first step on our own.

above - MAILING PIECE I, II & III - In my Kyudo (Japanese archery) dojo, we are often engaging in moving meditations that require us to engage in thought processes very much akin to these three pieces. Some of the Instruction Paintings occupy a grey area where conceptual art and meditative practice overlap.

Yoko Ono once said something dismissive about conceptual artist, declaring herself not as a “conceptual artist” but as a “con artist”. This topic has been brought up before, in questioning the motive for the past several generations of “institutionalised artists” that have been oozing out of grad programs - the idea that contemporary art has become a con where suckers buy meaningless junk backed up by over-intellectualisations designed to create illusory relevance, creating a self perpetuating cycle of bullshit. Ono’s con is of a different nature, she’s conning the art audience and hopefully the larger public into mental territory that is largely avoided in Western philosophy.

above - DANCE PIECE FOR STAGE PERFORMANCE - One of my favourite Instruction Paintings, because it combines some of my favourite things, dance, darkness or night, matches, audience participation and rules. One of the interesting things about this piece is the wording. The second sentence begins with the word “Ask”, rather than the word “Tell”. I’m not sure if this is an accident of English being her second language, but I feel that it gets to the heart of her own relationship with her audience, this action of asking, rather than of telling.