A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

Yoko Ono (right) and Alexandra Munroe

I have written here several times about how highly I rate the Guggenheim’s current show “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989”.  I have called it “Exhibition of the Year!” and celebrated its “trust in the chance gesture and the unconsidered act … which for someone of my sensibilities is an utter delight.” But the point of giving attention to chance gestures and unconsidered acts is that you learn from them, and on Thursday evening at the Guggenheim I attended an event of such jaw-dropping inanity that I feel I really have an obligation to post something about it. 

“passages for light: A Conversation with yoko ono and Alexandra Munroe” was the latest in the “Third Mind Live” series that has, in truth, been a real curate’s egg. On Tuesday we had Merce Cunningham’s wonderful presentation; Thursday we were treated to Ms Ono. 

Yoko Ono enjoys a level of celebrity that no one else connected with “The Third Mind” even approaches. She was – as she clearly never tires of reminding us – married to a Beatle. She and John Lennon married in 1969, separated between 1973 until 1975, and then lived together again until Lennon’s murder outside the Dakota on West 72^nd Street in 1980. This relationship not only marked the first (and last) acquaintanceship that a vast and uncomprehending popular audience had with the beguiling art of the Fluxus generation, it also brought mass opprobrium down on Ms Ono who was widely accused of breaking up of The Beatles. Because of this I have always been inclined to give Yoko Ono the benefit of the doubt, and willing to assume the best of her apparently facile efforts. It must have been hellish for her to be blamed (entirely irrelevantly) for the implosion of the world’s favorite pop group, and as the only vanguard artist who the vast majority of people had heard of, she seemed often to carry the can for the rest of us. 

But I can only call them as I see them. Even the best parts of Thursday evening’s event were rehashes of things Ms Ono has done before. More to the point, they were also – and I can think of no kinder word – amateurish. Neither she nor anyone else involved in the event seemed sufficiently prepared. She showed a number of video clips: black and white home movies from her childhood; that toe-curling sequence of her and John Lennon sitting at his white piano as he warbles “Imagine no religion …”; and a promotional clip of her and a winningly irreverent Ringo Starr inaugurating the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland. She clearly knows these clips off by heart. The home movie section came complete with on-screen captions that she was able to speak without even looking at the screen. Despite this, the running of these clips was repeatedly miscued, with Ms Ono left either staring in incomprehension at technicians at the back of the room, or mouthing instructions at them, or shouting to her offstage assistants.

She also seems to have a conception of what is provocative in art that would not be out of place among first year undergraduates making their first delighted acquaintanceship with Dada or street theatre. To demonstrate how the world is rich in potential interest, she did a little routine with an Arne Jacobsen chair, in which she did everything with it but sit on it as we might expect. This involved her performing something close to a full halasana, which for a 76-year-old is pretty impressive, but the rest of it was frankly embarrassing. 

Things hit rock-bottom when she and “Third Mind” curator Alexandra Munroe sat down together for a frankly embarrassing “interview”.  Ms Munroe is clearly utterly star-struck in Ms Ono’s presence, and the exchange between the two of them was reminiscent of nothing so much as those cozy sit-downs that one of the Muppets would have with that week’s special guest: “Gee, Mr Denver, we all love that song you sing about country roads taking you home. Do you think we could all sing it now?” 

Ms Ono’s utterances are so ill-formed that I can only conclude that she either still struggles with English as a difficult second language (despite the fact that she has lived on and off in this country or England almost all her life); or old age is robbing her of her memory and her ability to think coherently; or – most probably, I am forced to conclude – she simply isn’t very bright. I suspect that in Yoko Ono we have a real-world Chance the Gardener, whose wisdom is entirely in the eye of the perplexed and overcompensating beholder. None of this was helped on Thursday by the fact that – despite having both a clip-on remote and a regular table-top microphone – she was often inaudible, particularly as her non-sentences trailed away. Or by Ms Munroe’s tendency to ask Ms Ono questions, and then to answer them on her behalf.

This is verbatim from their conversation (ellipses here indicate pauses, rather than my edits):

Yoko Ono:  I think that everybody has a chance of deciding to be themselves rather than anybody else.

Alexandra Munroe:  “Deciding to be themselves …” Ahhh! So … who do you decide to be?

YO:  Me. I decided to be me, and that was the most comfortable thing to do … You might even say I was lazy.

AM:  Comfortable? Comfortable? Comfortable?! But you did it as such expense. Your family nearly … you know … threw you out of the house! Uhm … I mean, you say it’s comfortable, but … but … but it took such dare and such … again, such violence to be you in that calm and coping way …  

Then again:

AM: In 500 years, my dear, I think there’s going to remain … you’re going to be the greatest artist of the period.

YO: Thank you.

AM: I really think so.

And again:

YO: But what I really think … the most important message that I can give to people is the fact that they should not be, uhm … not concerned about the form that uhm, I was expressing, but that the fact that … that they can … and they … they can be themselves … to have freedom of mind, the freedom of just going on from what uhm, makes sense of my form. It doesn’t mean anything. The form, it doesn’t mean anything. Just the freedom … how to get … how to attain freedom. Freedom of life.

AM: That’s so beautiful …

None of this was helped by the fact that while this love-in was going on, a couple of performers were crawling around the stage in black fabric bags, and that when it occurred to them, Ms Ono and Ms Munroe would get up and look through a pair of binoculars or opera glasses. During the evening’s Q & A, Ms Ono  had a couple of performers sitting to one side of the platform “measuring” the questions and answers with yarn and rulers. Nobody seemed to know what this was about, and the whole measuring thing quickly became pretty desultory.

The evening concluded with a group of assistants bringing a large-scale image of a ceramic vase on to the platform, and a canvas sheet containing smashed fragments of a similar vase. “These pieces,” Ms Ono explained, “were once like this,” (she gestured to the picture of the vase) “exactly like this. And I broke them, and I invite you to take one piece each home and keep it for ten years. And in ten years we will meet again and put that vase back together.” This prompted rapturous applause from the audience, who then fell over one another to get on line to claim their very own chunk of a Yoko Ono performance. Very nice. Except that two years ago she’d done almost exactly the same routine in exactly the same place at the memorial night for Nam June Paik. She’d had us promise to come back in ten years’ time then as well. Does she really expect us to come back in ten years? (And eight, if we were at that other event?) Of course not, which for someone who has benefited from the industry of belief that she has built around herself (remember “War is Over … if you want it”?) seems an act of remarkably callous bad faith. 

In my dissatisfaction with this event I suspect I was very much in the minority. Most people lapped it up, prefacing their questions to Ms Ono with statements of how influential her music has been on a whole generation of younger musicians, or how she inspired one young woman to be “strong”. In fact, after all those years of popular derision, Ms Ono is now clearly nothing less than a sacred cow. I have learned the hard way how much trouble you invite if you say the wrong thing about such individuals – particularly in communities as tight-knit as performance art – but Thursday evening made me realize that it’s rather pointless celebrating what you think is good if you don’t also sometimes point out those things that are bad. Take it from me, “passages for light” was about as bad as it gets.

[Photo credit for all images in this post: passages for light: A Conversation with yoko ono and Alexandra Munroe, Guggenheim Museum, April 2, 2009. Photo by Enid Alvarez ©  Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.]