BWW Reviews: Liberating Art with YOKO ONO: ONE WOMAN SHOW at MoMA

"Making art," in Yoko Ono's vocabulary, is frequently synonymous with "doing whatever the hell you want." Whether you find this conception exciting, puzzling, or inane is a fairly good measure of how you will receive Yoko Ono: One Woman Show at the Museum of Modern Art. Situated in a long, austere gallery on the very top floor, this exhibition is the apotheosis of "what on earth is this doing in a museum?" post-modernism. I know that that sounds like an insult, but I mean it more as a compliment to curators Christophe Cherix, Klaus Biesenbach, and Francesca Wilmott: though propelled by celebrity just as much as MoMA's Tim Burton or Björk, One Woman Show demonstrates that a celebrity exhibition can subsist without the usual surface praises, career trivia, and underlying boredom. Instead, this installation is a well-proportioned combination of the dour and the hilarious, a perfect response to the tone and tenor of Ono's work that doesn't, to its credit, enshrine her as a perfect artist.

One Woman Show takes its lead from a guerrilla exhibition, Museum of Modern (F)art, that Ono staged in 1971 and that has become a curious point of MoMA pride in the years since. Consisting mostly of advertisements (all crafted and planted by Ono, not MoMA) and flies sprinkled with perfume and released on MoMA's premises, that show (if you can call it that) was informed by the same spirit of whimsy, evanescence, and silly-serious concepts that informed so much of Ono's preceding work. The years 1961 to 1971 are the focus of One Woman Show: this was probably Ono's single most important decade, even though she started off with the 1950s avant-garde of John Cage and George Maciunas and has continued making art up to the present day. In any case, it's the decade everybody remembers. Performance art like Bag Piece (1964) and Cut Piece (1965), film clips of moving buttocks, the seeming nonsense of Museum of Modern (F)art -- these are the gestures and spectacles that would define Ono for generations to come. As Ono herself might put it, she's gone from posteriors to posterity.

This time, the museum is going-all out to promote Yoko Ono, and not just because over-eager tourists might mistake One Woman Show for an exhibition about the Beatles. (You were wondering how long it would take me to mention them, weren't you?) If you visit the MoMA main page, you will be greeted by Ono messages such as the following: "Painting to be watered. Water every day. 1962." If you open the exhibition catalog, you will be greeted by Ono's Map Peace: a map of the world with the caption "Color the map with your heart. I love you. Yoko." Ono's unabashed approach is her greatest draw; perhaps MoMA learned from the Whitney's Jeff Koons retrospective that an artist without obvious self-doubt is an artist with unlimited marketability.

All this, described in brief and from a distance, sounds like it was the doing of one of those caricature hippies from Mad Men. From the perspective of 2015, Ono's work can indeed appear rather blinkered. After all, a body of art that takes evanescence as one of its first principles will, inevitably, include a lot that won't stand the test of time. One amusing lesson here is a segment of One Woman Show that consists of a pretty much empty room and a sign exhorting visitors to touch one another. In this day and age? Not without a release form, or at least some hand sanitizer. There is nonetheless something winning about such whimsy in the face of such encompassing 21st-century cynicism, and that "something" finds its funnest expression in the listening room that Cherix, Biesenbach, and Wilmott have devoted to Ono's music. Here, you can bond with other MoMA visitors over music and memorabilia from the Plastic Ono Band. It's a good thing because out there, on the streets of New York, you won't be bonding with anybody.

From another perspective, perhaps Ono's work is not dated enough. If there's a purely aesthetic problem with a lot of the work on display, it's that too few of these Onos push back in any meaningful way against traditions, standards, narrative, anything -- the way a good Abstract Expressionist painting or (yes) a good Beatles song, for all its weirdness, is consciously anchored in a meaningful past. Notable as a performance artist, video artist, and provocateur, Ono was an astonishingly dull and lazy painter. (On the evidence of Painting to Be Stepped On and its ilk, she thought that asphalt-colored gloops of eroded canvas would make interesting works. They don't.) For some of the same reasons, her installations are disorientingly uneven. The 1967 Half-a-Room, for instance, is fantastic; it could be a life-sized Joseph Cornell box or a desiccated piece of Pop Art. Yet the 2015 To See the Sky -- which may mostly indicate that Ono should have quit while she was ahead -- is an unpleasantly neat and flimsily poetic work, even though it consists of a well-selected spiral staircase. The visitor walks to the top of this imposing metalwork and sees -- nothing. I get it, and it doesn't matter.

Yet with an uncanny art-historical foresight, the better entries in One Woman Show anticipate and foil most of the criticisms that could be lodged against them. Ono's Bag Piece -- get in a black cloth bag, gesture around, get back out -- is both a piece of mesmerizing fun and a brilliantly tossed-off symbol of birth and oblivion, vitality and darkness. Decidedly '60s, but decidedly universal. And decidedly in clever continuity with the art that came before: all that gesturing makes Bag Piece something like an Abstract Expressionist canvas without the canvas, or with the artist inside the canvas. The manipulation of old and new is just as pointed in the Plexiglas-mounted Apple (originally 1966), which is positioned right at the entrance to Ono's retrospective. That apple -- a younger relative of the green apples that appear here and there in Magritte's paintings -- will decay over the course of the exhibition's next few months. You'll probably be tempted to stop back and see where that apple is on its journey toward decomposition, not because this is a thoroughly poetic show, or a truly groundbreaking one, but because this will be your best chance to get acquainted with a 20th-century original. Ono will always be with us, in terms of pop culture, but there's a side of her I'll miss after One Woman Show leaves.

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