Instruction for Destruction: Yoko Ono's Performance Art

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intersections online

Volume 10, Number 1 (Winter 2009)

Whitney Frank, “Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono's Performance Art,” intersections 10, no. 1

(2009): 571-607.

ABSTRACT

What is currently known as “destruction art” originated in the artistic and cultural work of

avantgarde art groups during the 1960s. In the aftermath of World War Two, the threat of

annihilation through nuclear conflict and the Vietnam War drastically changed the cultural

landscapes and everyday life in the United States, Asia, and Europe. In this context,

“destruction art” has been situated as the “discourse of the survivor,” or the method in which

the visual arts cope with societies structured by violence and the underlying threat of death.

Many artists involved in destruction art at this time were concerned with destroying not

just physical objects, but also with performing destruction with various media. By

integrating the body into conceptual works rather than literal narratives of violence, artists

contested and redefined mainstream definitions of art, social relations and hierarchies, and

consciousness. Yoko Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and began her work as an artist

in the late 1950s, addresses destruction through conceptual performances, instructions, and

by presenting and modifying objects. Ono’s work is not only vital to understanding the

development of the international avant garde, but it is relevant to contemporary art and

society. Her attention to the internalization of violence and oppression reflects

contemporaneous feminist theory that situates the female body as text and battleground. By

repositioning violence in performance work, Ono’s art promotes creative thinking,

ultimately drawing out the reality of destruction that remains hidden within the physical and

social body.

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Instructions for Destruction

Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

By Whitney Frank

University of Washington, Seattle

oko Ono is famous for her avant-garde conceptual music, artworks,

performances and, of course, her marriage to John Lennon.

She completed

some of her biggest and most well-known projects with Lennon during the 1960s

and 1970s. Both Ono and Lennon channeled their efforts for world peace into

very public artistic, musical, and political endeavors, such as the billboards

reading War is Over (If you Want it) and the televised Bed-Ins for Peace that started

in their hotel room. She continues to campaign for peace — in 2007 she unveiled

her Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavík, Iceland: a wishing well from which a giant

beam of light shoots toward the sky, symbolically projecting a unifying and

powerful message of peace into the atmosphere. Ono is perhaps best known as

the source of the Beatle’s breakup and as having compelled Lennon to enter her

seemingly strange world of the avant-garde. Details about her marriage with

Lennon and study of their artistic collaborations reveal that this is not the case.

This misunderstanding of Ono’s life and work suggests that continued research

and reevaluation will help further the under-standing of Ono and her place

within the history of performance art. I examine her work in the context of what

is currently known as “destruction art,” which originated in the artistic and

cultural work of avant-garde art groups during the 1960s.

After World War II, and in particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, the western

world was frequently reminded of both the threat of nuclear annihilation and the

everyday violence of the Vietnam. Within this context, art historian Kristine

Stiles situates destruction art as the “discourse of the survivor”: the only method in

which the visual arts can cope in a society structured by violence and the under-

lying threat of death.

Destruction art therefore becomes an ethical matter, an

instance where artist-survivors attempt to expose histories and systems of

violence, and reinscribe such experiences into society’s current consciousness.

In these terms, art production indeed becomes a matter of survival. Many artists

involved in destruction art at this time were not only concerned with destroying

physical objects and materials, but also with using various media to create

I would like to thank Patricia Failing, professor of Art History at the University of Washington, for her

guidance during this project.

Kristine Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art,” Discourse 14, no. 2 (1992): 74-102.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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performances that confront the very issue of destruction and violence. By

integrating the body into conceptual works rather than simply performing literal

narratives of violence, artists contested and redefined mainstream definitions of

art, social relations and hierarchies, and consciousness.

From the beginning of her artistic career, Yoko Ono defied contemporary art

conventions by exploring the power of the concept to convey aesthetic and

philosophical meaning. She began studying and working as an artist in the mid-

1950s, focusing on alternative models for musical scores. Soon she turned these

scores into creative instructions and performances that anyone could do if their

mind was open.

Throughout her body of work, Ono addresses destruction through conceptual

performances, instructions, and by presenting and modifying objects. Her

cultivation of fully conceptual artworks predates not only the development of

“conceptual art” in form, and as discourse, but she often engages in proto-

feminist commentary as well. Her attention to the internalization of violence and

oppression reflects contemporaneous feminist thought that situates the female

body as both text and as a battleground. By repositioning violence in

performance work, Ono’s art promotes creative thinking, ultimately drawing

out the reality of destruction that remains hidden within the physical and social

body.

he development of Ono’s conceptual art and her involvement in avant-garde

groups are linked with her unusual experiences in her early life living in and

traveling between Japan and the United States. Ono was born in 1933 in Tokyo

to mother Isoko and father Yeisuke. She grew up in well-to-do society as her

parents both descended from wealthy and noble families and her father worked

and traveled often for the Yokohama Specie Bank. When Ono was young, she

attended exclusive schools both in Japan and the United States—she even went

to school for a while with Emperor Hirohito’s sons—and her father encouraged

her to follow her passion for musical and artistic training. In Japanese aristocratic

culture of this time, there existed an ideal model of the literati or bunjin in which

“[refining] the soul” consisted of moving between “elegant pursuits” or various art

forms.

Though her artistic training was initially very formalized and rigorous,

Ono’s aristocratic heritage and encouragement from her parents allowed her to

pursue several artistic and musical endeavors from an early age.

Alexandra Munroe, “Spirit of YES: the art and life of Yoko Ono”, in Yes Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra

Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler (New York: Japan Society, 2000), 14.

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Yoko One, Cut Piece. Source: Japan Society

Exposure and participation in the cultures of both the United States and Japan

also influenced Ono’s relationships with artistic production. By 1941, the Ono

family had moved between Japan and the United States twice because of

Yeisuke’s work. Art historian Midori Yoshimoto considers the stress involved

with moving back and forth between two countries to have had a significant

influence on Ono’s developing thinking about performance art. For Yoshimoto,

“the performance of a life negotiating between the private and public self may

have started at that time.”

Living between countries and cultures resulted in a

kind of “hybrid identity” for Ono, as she did not fully inhabit either realm, and

was pressured to perform extremely well in order to represent Japan in the

United States, or to fulfill her duties as a child of aristocrats in Japan.

Although

she felt encouraged to study music and art, this part of her life seemed to be

scripted according to her social positioning as aristocratic outsider and foreigner.

Midori Yoshimoto, Into performance: Japanese women artists in New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 2005), 81

Ibid.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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Several art historians cite Ono’s experience in Japan during World War II as not

only insight into her positioning as an outsider within her home country, but also

as further development of her philosophical attitudes regarding art. Yoshimoto

explains that after the Ono family’s home was bombed and they escaped to the

countryside, “Ono experienced hardship in daily life for the first time” because in

addition to the stress and fear she felt during the war, “local farmers were not

hospitable to [the Onos]…ostracizing them as a rich, Americanized family.”

addition to already feeling like outsiders and after witnessing Japan’s devastation

and surrender, local children did not accept Ono and her brother into their

groups. The two would hide together and spend afternoons imagining a different

life; Ono stressed that they “used the powers of visualization to survive.”

Here

is a glimpse at the potential beginning of Ono’s life-long focus on visualizations

and concepts as art in them. Not only did she experience life as a constant

struggle to perform, but she also utilized imagined actions and objects—indeed,

replaced real life with an imagined one—to escape the effects of wartime

violence, a strategy that becomes a major theme in her art.

Ono and was not alone in grappling with her position within a confusing postwar

society in Japan. Several avant-garde art groups arose in Japan after the war and

they brought together themes of destruction, irrationality, and political

commentary in their actions, objects and performances. Art historian Shinchiro

Osaki situates the development of various radical art groups in Japan in the early

1950s as part of the process of renegotiation and regeneration of art after World

War Two. Artists in groups like the Gutai Art Association, Kyūshū-ha, and

Group Zero built new relationships between the artist, action, and the body

through innovative performance methods that reassessed the superiority of

“formalist orthodoxies” of art from Europe and the United States.

After a

violent defeat in war and the extended American presence in Japan, artists

resisted conventional art forms such as social realist work popular prior to and

during the war. Japanese art groups that began to “emphatically [use] their bodies

as the locus of artistic expression” greatly influenced the international avant-

garde and specifically in the west where many artists were in search for new

forms of expression.

Ibid.

Munroe, 13.

Shinchiro Osaki, “Body and Place: Action in Postwar Art in Japan”, in Out of actions: between performance

and the object, 1949-1979, eds. Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles (Los Angeles, Calif: The Museum of

Contemporary Art, 1998), 121.

Yoshimoto, 3.

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Gutai was officially formed in 1954 and members published a journal to expose

the public to their exhibitions and activities. Group Zero formed around the

same time and included artists who eventually joined Gutai. Their exhibitions

became more like events; the “Experimental Outdoor Modern Art Exhibition to

Challenge the Burning Midsummer Sun” of 1955, for example, was held along a

river and artists conducted destructive actions and creatively incorporated junk

into the surroundings. The theme of construction through destruction was strong

in this exhibition: Kazuo Shiraga wielded an axe and built a large log statue and

Saburo Murakami ran over and tore a large canvas sheet on the ground. Such

actions were radical and unparalleled at the time as the Japanese art scene had

not experienced such violent performance work before.

Later in 1955, “The

First Gutai Exhibition,” held in Tokyo, continued to challenge assumptions about

contemporary art with Murakami and Shiraga’s physical and destructive

actions.

In addition to struggling against the assertion of Western culture and artistic

practice into Japanese culture after the war, avant-garde artists were also fighting

a history of government control over the art world. Yoshimoto explains that at

this time in Japan, there was a gap between traditional and modern art and the

influence of modern Western styles and theories produced artistic hierarchies

that changed according to needs of the government and society.

For example,

before World War II, the government promoted Western artistic developments,

while during the war, such art was banned to make way for war propaganda.

Young artists after the war like those involved with Gutai thus developed radical

techniques to oppose and defy sanctioned art practices.

The Gutai Group’s manifesto emphasizes that artists and materials engage with

each other through action. The group explains, “Gutai art does not change the

material but brings it to life…the human spirit and the material reach out their

hands to each other” and therefore “keeping the life of the material alive also

means bringing the spirit alive.”

For Gutai members, the artist and materials

Osaki, 123.

In Shiraga’s performance Challenging Mud, Shigara wrestled with a large heap of clay. In Murakami’s

performance Paper Tearing, Murakami burst through layers of paper. Osaki explains that these two

particular actions still retain a “near-mythical” status today because they were both shocking and

innovative. Gutai (along with other groups in Japan) influenced the development of avant-garde groups

around the world. Their performance-oriented work predates, for example, Allan Kaprows’s

happenings and the founding of Fluxus.

Yoshimoto, 11.

Ibid.

Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Out of actions: between performance and

the object, 1949-1979, eds. Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles (Los Angeles, Calif: The Museum of

Contemporary Art, 1998), 237.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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seem to share authorship when creating an artwork, suggesting that the both

process and the final product are significant. Shiraga’s Challenging Mud,

performed at the “First Gutai Exhibition,” implies that the clay actively and

defiantly responds to Shiraga’s full-bodied movements; both Shiraga and the clay

must make efforts to create a muddy form. Stiles suggests this new relationship

between the materials, the body, and the spirit became an urgent signifier of

human existence — a means to

rebirth at a time when war and

expansion of nuclear weapons

programs brought about mass

obliteration of bodies all over the

world.

Through direct and

assertive contact with each other, the

artist’s body and the material with

which she works are enlivened; the

artist does not just seek to

manipulate the material in order to

create an object to be viewed, but

rather to bring out the life of the

material through active work which,

in turn, indicates that the artist too,

is living. In postwar Japan, the mere

act of asserting one was living after the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

seemed, for these artists, to be vital to the process of recovery and renewal. The

Gutai Manifesto ends with a declaration that affirms a resilient and assertive

commitment to life and art: “We shall hope that there is always a fresh spirit in

our Gutai exhibitions and that the discovery of new life will call forth a

tremendous scream in the material itself.”

The conditions of war and its aftermath affected women artists in a similar way

to men, prompting both to question what it meant for them to exist after World

War II. Both women and men explored various methods to assert their existence

through actions and performance work with materials. Though Gutai and Group

Zero did not specifically limit the participation of women in their activities, there

certainly was a lack of equal participation in art production within and outside of

these avant-garde circles. Ono herself was not part of Gutai or Group Zero, as at

the time they were established and became active she was attending Gakushūin

University as their first female student in the philosophy department. Then in

Ibid., 235.

Jiro Yoshihara, The Gutai manifesto, 1956, http://www.ashiya-web.or.jp (accessed February 10, 2008).

Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, 1955.

Ashiya City Museum of Art History, Japan.

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1952 and after only a year at Gakushūin, Ono and her family moved back to New

York and she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence to study music composition and poetry.

Though she missed the developing stages of these artistic groups, they set

precedence and created interest in avant-garde performance work specifically in

Japan, but their innovations also influenced artists in the west. Later in the

1960s, Ono returned to Japan to further explore and execute her conceptual and

performance work.

Though Gutai’s membership included several women—more than other avant-

garde groups in fact—Yoshimoto emphasizes that the general attitude toward

women artists in Japan was that they were “at the very bottom of the social

hierarchy” and were therefore scrutinized more harshly than male artists.

Both

their gender and their interest in the avant-garde arts were limiting factors in

Japan. Though women’s access to education and institutional began to expand

after the war, there were still few institutions of higher education available to

them, and women artists were viewed with contempt for “indulging themselves

in an artistic hobby.”

A woman’s role in society had little to do with art—at the

university, as a profession, or for recreation—in that artistic production would

take away from their duties to the family and state.

Ono’s father Yeisuke was passionate about music and he happily structured his

daughter’s early education around rigorous formal training in music,

but later

discouraged her from being a composer because that field was “too hard for

women.”

Ono was restricted to certain types of training and artistic pursuits

deemed appropriate to her gender and her social position. Even in the face of

inequalities in attitudes, treatment, and access to resources and education that

made artistic and economic success difficult for women in Japan’s avant-garde,

artists like Atsuko Tanaka and Takako Saito achieved some degree of success.

Both, however, moved to New York to strive for greater success.

Saito and other immigrant artists like Shigeko Kubota and Mieko Shiomi moved

from Japan to the United States in the early 1960s and became involved with

Fluxus, founded by George Maciunas. An avant-garde coalition of artists,

composers, and designers, Maciunas monitored the group membership, ejecting

those who did not seem to commit to Fluxus ideals. He invited the newcomers

from Japan to take part in Fluxus activities and productions, as there was mutual

Yoshimoto, 12.

Ibid., 14.

Munroe, 14.

Yoshimoto, 81.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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feeling that Fluxus was a space compatible with the work of groups like Gutai.

Though Maciunas was demanding and often imposed his own ideas on group

members, Saito viewed Fluxus more so as an opportunity to “[explore] her

artistic direction rather than as a full commitment to the group.”

The word

“Fluxus” itself indicates a state of fluctuation and change and its membership and

production changed over time. It is therefore difficult to absolutely define all

characteristics typical of the group’s art.

Similar to Gutai’s opposition of past art forms and the influence of modern

Western art, Fluxus art is positioned against established notions of artistic genius

associated with western Modernism and Abstract Expressionism. Fluxus does

this by inhabiting realms somewhere between materiality and thought, where

there is no apparent demarcation of what constitutes life and what counts as art.

Therefore, Fluxus artists did not create any paintings or other traditional gallery

objects, but rather focused on inviting the viewer, the environment, or a group

of performers to participate in the creation of art, allowing for an array of

outcomes and a multitude of interpretations. They produced films,

performances, installations, mail art, books, and boxes of objects in an effort to

reveal the “non-existent visible in life” by facilitating experiences that combine

the subject and the object.

Their experiential work was intended to be non-

precious and ephemeral and to have transformational power; if art originates

within life, then art like life, will change and fade as life constantly changes and

will eventually end.

Ono began creating “event scores” several years before she became involved with

Fluxus officially. Around 1956, Ono became acquainted with soon-to-be Fluxus

members through her first husband, musician Toshi Ichiyanagi, as well as John

Cage, one of the most influential musicians and Fluxist theorists. Frustrated with

the restrictions of conventional music scores, Ono began creating work that

included poetry and instructions such as Secret Piece (1953) in which the

performer chooses one note to play and plays it in the woods “with the

accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn.”

Conventional music scores

restrict the inclusion of natural sounds, imagination, and the chance encounters

and incidents that, for Ono, make up a piece of music. The instructional quality

Ibid., 120.

Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: the history of an attitude (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press,

1998), 235.

Hannah Higgins, Fluxus experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 20.

Yoshimoto, 82.

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580

of this score make it seem more like an event that anyone can perform, not just a

traditionally trained musician.

Her event instructions and her perspectives on music and performance meshed

with Fluxus, as artists became increasingly invested in performance activities like

Allan Kaprows’s happenings. Happenings became multi-media evenings where

any number of artists and audience members participated in scripted or

improvised actions. Fluxus was influenced by happenings and was also shaped by

Cage’s revolutionary musical work and deep interest in Zen philosophies. Instead

of composing music according to traditional methods, Cage utilized unusual

means that included chance (as sometimes dictated by the I-Ching), periods of

silence, and interruptive noise. In his piece for piano, 4’33’’ (1952), a performer

steps on stage, opens the piano, then sits on the bench silently for exactly four

minutes and thirty-three seconds, and finally closes the piano and exits the stage.

Sounds that happened during the performance made up the composition and

could include coughing, the rustling audience, traffic, birds—anything from real

life. Cage’s goal for this piece (and his modus operandi in general) was to “[wake

people] up to the very life we’re living”. In 4’33’’, Cage turned the audience into

active participants as their sounds made up the music.

His desire to “wake up”

audiences and include their authorship in an artwork derives from theories of

Zen and its accompanying aesthetics.

Zen artists focused on individual understanding through meditation, separation

from rationality through the use of space and reductive graphics, and the search

for universal understandings deriving from individual experience and

meditation.

Cage and Fluxus artists defied traditional Western artistic doctrines

because they were interested in exploring the area between art and life. By

transgressing its boundaries and conflating the two — through the inclusion of

raw, personal experience— lay the potential to discover universal meanings.

Cage’s influence on artists associated with Fluxus and its philosophy should not

be underestimated. Ono recognized that Cage’s investment in Zen philosophy

and acknowledgement of her Japanese heritage helped her open new paths for

artistic exploration.

In 1960, Ono hosted performances by Fluxus artists at her Chambers Street loft

where artists like La Monte Young, Ichiyanagi, and Jackson MacLow were able

Helen Westgeest, Zen in the fifties: interaction in art between east and west (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders,

1997), 57.

Ibid., 36,

Yoshimoto, 84.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

581

to present experimental works. According to Yoshimoto the events in Ono’s loft

“proved to be quite influential because [they] inspired George Maciunas to

organize his own concert series, which became the base for Fluxus.”

She was

therefore an integral part of the development of Fluxus and was in a position of

reciprocal, artistic inspiration.

he compatibility between Ono and her newly found community of artists,

however, did not guard against experiences of sexism within and outside of

the group. During the Chambers Street performances, Ono was regarded by

many of her peers as merely the owner of the loft, not an independent artist.

Ono believes that she was not taken seriously because she was a woman: “Most

of my friends were all male and the tried to stop me being an artist. They tried to

shut my mouth.”

Despite the availability of education, an artistic community,

and resources, like other women artist in Japan, Ono struggled with sexism.

Furthermore, Ono inhabited the position as a “double-outsider;” in addition to

living in between the cultures of Japan and the United States, she holds double-

outsider status within the U.S. because she is an Asian woman. Just as her

“friends” had tried to discourage her from making art, the press was also as

unfriendly, regarding her attempts to assert herself in a male-dominated field and

her later relationship with John Lennon as overly aggressive and opportunistic.

Ono defied societal conventions that regulated the behavior of women of color in

the United States. She did not hide her heritage or ascribe to cultural

stereotyping and was determined to showcase her conceptual art works despite

negative press.

Stiles observes that Ono’s life between and outside of cultural groups informs

her art, manifested in the manner Ono constructs the body and mind as a

dichotomy. Through her conceptual instructions, she creates events as analogs

for passing from one experiential sphere to another, from one conceptual plane

to another. In them, she sought aesthetic melding as a process and means for

perceptually transcending the boundaries of material phenomena in order to gain

an epiphany, thereby transforming conditions of Being.

Recalling the time in

Ono’s childhood when she and her brother played imaginative games to escape

Ibid., 85.

Ibid., 86.

Kristine Stiles. “Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono’s Experience,” Art Criticism 7 (Spring

1992): 21-52.

Kristine Stiles. “Being Undyed: The Meeting of Mind and Matter in Yoko Ono’s Events”, in Yes Yoko

Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler (New York: Japan

Society, 2000), 147.

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their life in the countryside during World War II, Ono creates conceptual

artworks to transcend societal boundaries that restrict thinking, living, and art

production. Anyone can execute her instructions, if only the mind can allow the

imagination to run free; the body will inevitably follow. Her works provide a

means to change the self and society because they require creatively thinking

outside of society’s conventions and then inventing one’s own.

no began creating instructions and performances in New York during the

mid-1950s . She had felt she had more freedom to investigate these

methods outside of college and therefore left Sarah Lawrence. Alongside Fluxus

and work by other avant-garde artists, Ono developed her own style of

performances that she called “events”— an effort to differentiate them from the

happenings that were becoming popular at the time. Ono’s own description of

her early events as more like a “wish or hope” than strictly an evening of

performance, which may seemingly have little to do with the concept of

“destruction art.” Wishing and hoping are optimistic activities that involve

excitement, good feelings, and luck. However, wishing or hoping often originate

from devastating circumstances that cause a person to desperately wish for

improvement, as there may perhaps be no plausible means for an individual to

change the circumstances.

Ono’s work — her texts, and her objects and her performances — have origins

in negative experiences of her past — and it is in this context that her work

exemplifies what art historian Kristine Stiles refers to as “destruction art,” which

“is the visual corollary to the discourse of the survivor” and “the only attempt in

the visual arts to grapple seriously with both the technology of actual annihilation

and the psychodynamics of virtual extinction.”

Not only does Ono incorporate

physical and conceptual destruction in much of her work, but themes of healing,

connection and communication between people and nature and imagination also

position her body of work under the realm of destruction art.

Stiles positions her model of destruction art within a social and historical analysis

to explain the aesthetic tendencies of destruction artists. Specifically relating to

Ono’s experiences, Stiles views the violence of World War II and its protracted

aftermath in the Cold War era as examples of how society, worldwide, fostered

a “genocidal mentality.” During times of international conflict, nearly everything

in a nation is restructured: the economy, educational system, industry,

advertising, and employment could all be altered to meet the demands of war.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art,” 76.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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This total restructuring of life was more extreme than ever: new technologies

such as state-of-the-art air planes and atomic bombs were used in World War II,

redefining modern warfare and the lengths to which violence could reach. Stiles

emphasizes that the experience of such tremendous violence results not only in

societal systems that focus on “the destruction of all life,” but also cultures that

exhibit “dissociative behavior” like “psychic numbing…disavowal, and denial” to

cope with an all-pervading sense of destruction.

For Stiles this “genocidal mentality” necessarily denotes the destruction artist’s

status as a survivor and includes a range of survivor experiences regarding literal

and social death and destruction. She describes their artistic processes as creation

via destruction, which becomes a means of reducing the “psychic stress…to

combat the threat to survival” that pervades everyday workings and the structure

of many societies in the post-World War Two and nuclear eras.

During this

time, the threat of annihilation through nuclear conflict in the aftermath of

World War Two, and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s greatly changed

the cultural landscapes and everyday life in the United States, Asia, and Europe.

In addition to major international conflicts, survivor-artists deal with destructive

or violent events from their personal lives as well.

The combination personal history with social commentary was expressed within

this genre by the use of diverse variety of media, style, presentation, and level of

violence. A comparison of Murakami’s work with that of Ono’s illustrates the

possible modes of expression found in destruction art. In Murakami’s At One

Moment Opening Six Holes (1955), he rapidly punched through large paper

stretched over frames, while Ono’s work Pencil Lead Piece (1962) requires the

participant to imagine that pencil lead fills her or his head, then destroy it and

finally, tell someone about the destruction she or he experienced. Both of these

works differ greatly in their suggestion and expression of violence. Though many

of Ono’s pieces either require participants to destroy something or an object

itself might already be destroyed, Ono focused her events and instructions

primarily on the imaginary destroying of objects, ideas, institutions, and

sometimes even people. In Painting to Hammer a Nail (left), viewers used the

hammer attached to a wood panel to hammer in nails in any way they wanted.

This act would typically be viewed as destroying a piece of art, the act of

hammering also signifies creation in the building of an object, and thus Ono

creates a new and collaborative artwork. Similarly, Smoke Piece (1964), asks

participants to “Smoke everything you can. Including your pubic hair.” This piece

Ibid., 74.

Ibid., 75.

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is about conceptual destruction of both the material surroundings and the self,

and like Painting to Hammer a Nail, the creation of art is possible through the

destructive act.

Whether relaying a traumatic experience

from their past or embodying destruction

from another sector of society, Ono and

Murakami act as survivors, both through

their testimony of their performances.

Stiles explains that through presentation of

questions regarding destruction, artists

“[bear] witness to the tenuous condition-

ality of survival,” which therefore makes

them act as or become survivors them-

selves.

By interrogating the means of

destruction and survival, artists in effect,

produce new ways to combat or deal with

violence, sharing this knowledge through

their artwork. Both At One Moment and

Pencil Lead Piece attain creation through the

destruction, imaginary or actual. Like his

fellow Gutai members, Murakami

“intended [his] actions to result in the creation of paintings.”

Though Gutai’s

destructive actions resulted in innovative artworks, they differ from Ono’s work

because they were mainly solitary acts that had explicit endings. Ono, however,

did not intend for her works or events to have a static presentation or ending,

but rather she approaches art-making “as a practice, an unfinished process of

concept transmission.”

Her openness and creativity allow for collaboration, a

variety of outcomes, and the spectator’s use of the imagination. Ono’s

employment of these strategies indeed makes “wish and hope” an accurate

description of her work and events. By expressing a concept through simple

actions or instructions, she facilitates creation through the destruction, which

often results in affirmation. She allows participants to turn a public performance

with violent undertones or actions into intimate introspection that art historian

Alexandra Munroe calls “mental freedom.”

Ibid.

Osaki, 125-6.

Munroe, 13.

Ibid.

Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1961/66.

Painted wood panel, nails, painted hammer,

chain. Photo by John Bigelow Taylor. Source:

Japan Society

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

585

Discovering and experiencing this “mental freedom” is a vital part of Ono’s

destruction art. This freedom can be realized through her artworks that directly

deal with the violence and destruction permeating society in overt and subtle

ways, as they encourage participants to open the mind to new and seemingly

impossible possibilities. By working as a collective, Ono and her participants

create connection and understanding that facilitates liberation.

hough Ono’s family was able to avoid much of the violence Japan

experienced during World War Two, Ono came of age in the aftermath of

the war, a time that involved radical changes, confusion, and conflict. Initially in

Japan, the devastation of war created a “post-surrender psyche of exhaustion,

remorse, and despondency, an outpouring of relief, optimism, and liberation”

flourished and eventually produced “a spirit of freedom and openness

unprecedented in modern Japanese society.”

Acknowledging the openness that

developed is not to ignore the protests against the postwar Americanization of

Japanese society that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, but rather to

emphasize the pervasiveness of the experience of war and how remarkably

Japanese society overcame such devastation and fostered creativity. In regards to

the conditions of life during an era of unparalleled globalization, Ono herself

asserted that the world “need[s] more skies than coke.”

Destruction artists or “survivors” utilize experiences—some personal, some

affecting society at large—and direct them towards and out from the physical

body. According to Stiles, the survivor discourse of destruction art entails

“present[ing] the „imagery of extinction‟ localized in the body” as artists

“recapitulate the technological conditions, effects, processes, and epistemologies

of terminal culture” she describes as maintaining a “genocidal mentality.”

Through demonstration and by spreading awareness, destruction artists use their

bodies as a means for understanding and recreating the experience of violence

and hope to influence society to enact positive changes to curb destructive

activity. Localizing destruction performances in the body emphasizes not only

the literal effects of violence on the individual body but it also alludes to how

society violently conditions and organizes individuals and groups. Performances

can be overtly brutal to match outrageous violent events such as the bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or they can be more contemplative exercises in

understanding destructive activities in the realms of the personal and political.

Munroe, 15.

Yoko Ono, Imagine Yoko (Lund, Sweden: Bakhall, 2005), 101

Stiles. “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art,” 76.

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Ono’s Blood Piece (1960) for example, is both explicitly violent as well as

intimate, as she instructs participants to paint with their blood:

BLOOD PIECE

Use your blood to paint.

Keep painting until you faint. (a)

Keep painting until you die. (b)

Painting with one’s own blood is simultaneously a deeply personal act, as the

artist uses a foundational substance of life to paint, and an extremely violent act

as death is the final stroke of the painting. Ono of course, did not intend for

people to literally complete this instruction; but she herself originally composed

Blood Piece with her pricked finger.

This piece also relates to Fluxus values and practice because with her instruction

to paint with one’s own blood, Ono illuminates the absurdity of being so serious

about art production that one is willing to die for it—a seriousness projected in

Western modern art and the source of Fluxus’s counternarrative. Blood Piece is a

macabre demonstration that shows how anyone can become an artist since the

tools are already within each person. In this case, it is not natural talent running

through an artist’s veins that makes them worthy of recognition, but rather the

blood, a basic feature of life all humans share, is an artistic medium worth

exploring. While Fluxus values insist upon obscuring the boundaries that

separate life from art, Ono uses the body and its interior functions in her

instructions to “[direct] interplay between internal concepts (manifest in words)

and external actions (the actual events…)” so that living things and life

experiences can be used to illustrate artistic work.

In this case, Ono locates artistic practice and an encounter with violence within a

life-sustaining element not to express the view that life and art are the same, but

rather to demonstrate the transformative powers of violence: the artist is no

longer living by the end of the painting. In a related instruction, Beat Piece

(1963), Ono asks participants to simply “Listen to a heart beat.” Though there is

no element of violence here, Ono again focuses her audiences on a basic

component of life through intimate contact, drawing attention to the meaningful

Ono, Grapefruit.

Barbara Haskell and John G. Handardt, Yoko Ono: arias and objects (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith

Publisher, 1991), 19.

Stiles. “Being Undyed”, 145.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

587

potential of the body itself. Beat Piece demonstrates Ono’s insistence that since

life is experienced as a fusion of sensations, her art must conversely focus upon

isolating sensory experiences.

She requests that participants stop all other

actions to focus solely on this often overlooked but continuous phenomenon to

facilitate an isolated sensory experience central to the body. Ono isolates a

beating heart from other physical events and if for only a short while, separates

the participant from any other activity to concentrate on this action. She again

demonstrates how people can utilize the body for artistic performances as it is

constantly in action whether or not the mind is conscious of it.

Ono often envisions life and death as a continuous circuit played out again and

again over time and throughout her work, she explores how individuals as social

beings experience and remember violence and death. The premise of Stiles’

conception of society’s “genocidal mentality” suggests that although collective

social experiences like war impact the social structure of culture in a general

way, individuals will inevitably be impacted and react differently to one another.

Ono’s art calls for interaction and confrontation with the self and society and

therefore raises awareness about violence that may be hidden within societal

institutions or is experienced by only certain cultural sectors. Blood Piece prefaces

Ono’s later involvement with Lennon in peace actions concerning the Vietnam

War, as the letting of blood recalls the practice of sacrificing life for a national

cause. Their world-wide Christmas billboard campaigns, “War is over (if you

want it),” demonstrate the role of individuals within larger circumstances: here

they emphasize that people can make the decision themselves to stop something

as destructive as war. The public and noticeable quality of billboards emphasizes

Ono and Lennon’s point that individual actions become more powerful as more

and more people take action. Unlike the message Ono and Lennon proclaim in

their billboards, people engaging in war must follow orders and protocols and

have little room to make individual decisions outside of the rules. War itself is

supposed to unite people against a common enemy and at the outset of conflict;

participants certainly know that some will die. As in Ono’s instructions for

destruction, soldiers volunteer knowing there is a possibility of being killed and

must continue fighting even while others die or until they get injured or die

themselves. One purpose for engaging in a destructive activity like war is that it

will eventually facilitate peace—another instance of creation via a route of

destruction. Death in war is therefore valorized, viewed as a selfless act made for

national interests. In Blood Piece, death would be a result of obsessive and

Ono, Imagine Yoko, 109.

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subversive behavior, a gross overestimation in the name of art practice. The

outcome becomes absurd in both scenarios.

hough destruction art and Ono’s pieces are often located in the body, the

body in and of itself does not constitute the artwork. In her January 1966

meeting address, “To the Wesleyan People,” Ono discusses philosophies of

her art and continually emphasizes the interconnectivity of different aspects of

life. Ono further discusses her continual endeavor to facilitate isolated sensory

experiences, “which is something rare in daily life,” because she believes that “art

is not merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life is different from art

duplicating life”.

Her performances and instructions may include aspects of

daily life, such as writing, a heartbeat, or conversing with others, but these

actions are not merely glorified replications of routine events. Although she

composed instructions that seem straight-forward, they require participants to

step outside of the routine and focus on one action or concept in order to

experience a new level of awareness. Blood Piece and Beat Piece do not simply

draw attention to aspects of life and the body “for art’s sake,” but they push the

participant to further contemplate the potential radiating meanings of a close

encounter with the body. Like destruction artworks in general, Ono’s pieces

“operate both as a representation and a presentation, an image and an enactment

of effacement that recalls but also gives substance” to experience, personal

understandings, feelings, and all things hidden within the body.

It can be

exceedingly difficult to express feelings regarding experiences of violence,

especially if the violence is institutional rather than an overt event or if it makes

the person feel shame. Thus, such experiences become forgotten and disappear

into the body—either that of the individual or of the collective—or the bodies

and identities themselves disappear.

Instead of keeping violent experiences hidden and thus, allowing them to vanish

from the landscape of discourse and consciousness, Stiles explains that

destruction art “reinscribes the psyche of the social body with a memory of the

finite which must function as an affective agent in the reaggregation of a

survivalist consciousness.”

Here, the term “finite” refers to memory and

recognition of the experience of destruction and its causes and effects. Through

use of the individual body and physical actions, Ono relates collective memory

and experience to that of the individual. For example, Ono’s Shadow Piece

(1966), performed at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London in

Ibid.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 80.

Ibid.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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September 1966, and illustrates the relationships among individuals, society, and

violence. Onto a long cloth she traced the bodies of twenty participants in an

area that was bombed during World War II and their outlines left eerie

reminders of citizens who died in the war. Stiles directly connects this

performance with the “imprints of bodies left on the sidewalks of Hiroshima after

the bomb,” explaining that the drawn figures become “negative double[s]” of the

actual bodies of those that died.

War is a social and international conflict and is

mainly discussed in large terms, as in how many thousands can be committed to

or died in a campaign, how much money each player spends, and how supplies

are produced in factories and moved en masse. In Shadow Piece, Ono pares down

the discussion to specifically focus how war impacts individuals. Through body

performance, Ono gives an imagined voice to those who died and can no longer

share their experiences, keeping them from disappearing from the social body.

Destruction art like Shadow Piece pulls up histories of devastation and violence—

recently occurring or otherwise—and recreates them in the present, which

repositions them in current consciousness. Ono emphasizes this point when she

discusses how art can directly focus on past events in order to enhance

consciousness in the present when she states:

The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone and the history is

forever increasing its volume. The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At

this point, what art can offer…is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through

which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of the mind. After that you may

return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you

may never return.

Ono acknowledges several important points related to destruction art theory in

this statement. First, though events in history technically occurred in the past,

they are not suddenly lopped off of the tail of historical time to make room for

new events to occur. Rather, she implies that new events occur with respect to

past histories, which makes life and thought complex. Furthermore, she suggests

that events in history are witnessed and remembered by some people, though not

all. Referring back to Stiles‟ initial analysis, destruction art serves as a means to

recall hidden violations against humans and relocate those histories in

performance or actions with the body. According to Ono, once such histories

become clear via the focus of an artistic event, participants could potentially be

changed forever. By calling attention to the tendency to forget or overlook past

experiences, Shadow Piece becomes a statement against war and the excessive

Stiles. “Being Undyed”, 168.

Ono, Imagine Yoko, 110.

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death it brings; it is an appeal to the memories of individuals and society to

remember such suffering so that it could be stopped from happening again. In

this case, the death Ono refers to is most likely linked to Japan and World War

II, but the destruction continued on in the Vietnam War as more people were

reduced to mere shadows by napalm.

Ono’s version of destruction art shows how violence invades and combines the

public and private spheres — or as in the case with Shadow Piece, the individual

and society. Announcement Piece I (1962) demonstrates her awareness of the

inevitable relationships between the past and present and also with the living and

dead and she again situates individual actions within a larger social group. The

instruction reads as follows:

ANNOUNCEMENT PIECE I

Give death announcements each time you

move instead of giving announcements of

the change of address.

Send the same when you die.

Ono’s prompt to repeatedly produce “death announcements” functions as an

attempt to “reinscribe” the present with the experience of death—death itself

only lasts a mere moment and therefore always occurs in the past. However, the

very act of giving a death announcement to a friend is also a comical activity; it

seems as if Ono is taking a jab at how seriously society engages with death. If

Ono indeed believes that a “genocidal mentality” structures reality, then one

creative way to escape it is through humor. Here, she makes society’s obsession

with destruction seem ridiculous.

Destruction artists also combat this “genocidal mentality” by directly drawing

attention to modes of violence and devastation as well as to their appropriate

place in current discourse. A member of the Gutai Group believed that as a

citizen of post-war Japan, he could deal with the experience of extreme violence

and “keep the spirit alive” by “keeping the life of the material alive;” destruction

performance and actions were therefore a method of reconciliation and

renewal.

Similarly, in Announcement Piece I, Ono stresses that the experience of

death is tangible, unexpected, and is not necessarily limited to physical demise.

Moving and the “change of address” could be metaphors for moving within social

Ono, Grapefruit.

Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions”, 237.

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categories, such as when people hide part of themselves in an attempt to pass for

white or straight, or when groups are targets for violence and marginalization.

What dies in this case, is identity or social status and it then becomes vital that

the deceased announce their loss and need for assistance. This is not unlike the

experience of Japanese citizens during World War II, where cities were

completely destroyed and American soldiers, culture, and values influenced how

Japan developed its culture and government after the war.

Though the goal of destruction art is to incorporate lost memories, histories, and

experiences of violation into current consciousness, a literal reinscribing of the

past in terms of writings is at odds with destruction art practice, according to

Stiles. Language and writing miss the expressive quality of performing

destruction as well as its potential to be transformative. Stiles explains that

destruction artists resist extensive use of language because linguistic expression is

an abstract representation of events that necessarily displaces or fails to capture

essential qualities of an experience; in this way, language “unwittingly

contribute[s] to the perpetuation of the destructive epistemology of Western

culture.”

Written accounts of violations and death separate the event from the

present moment, making them seem distant and less real. Performance, on the

other hand, simultaneously encompasses broader contexts and specific moments

in time, as well as private and public experience. Situating the body (the personal

and private) in the public sphere of events transforms the act because it is “self-

consciously realized in the public arena as collective social intervention and

political action.”

Here, the body provides a concrete signifier of the seemingly

intangible experiences and histories as its physicality or its absence demonstrates

the transformation of consciousness. If only for fleeting moments, the body

becomes the “text” and bodily performance—by using something that everyone

has—unites participants and makes tangible ephemeral and concealed

experiences. Furthermore, the experience and expression of pain fundamentally

destroys the imagined separation between the body and communication through

art. Pain necessarily destroys language because it evokes a “reversion to a state

anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before

language is learned.”

The performance of pain and destruction may be

prompted by writing, but grasping the pain itself as a concept, feeling, and

experience, requires a renegotiation in a new space where body, text, and

history are fused.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 82.

Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon”, 37.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 89.

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To reach this imaginary space, Ono explains that people must shed the

“artificial,” the “man-made framework” of life that floods our consciousness with

made-up truths; she therefore reasons that only by “[assigning] the most fictional

rules...may we possibly transcend our consciousness.”

Assigning rules seems to

be the opposite of imaginative and open performance, and it may seem as if she is

merely grounding her artworks under more constrictions. Her intentions with

these rules, however, are to counterbalance the seemingly arbitrary laws and

codes of conduct that force experiences like violence and understanding of

society’s “genocidal mentality” to hide within the collective and individual

unconscious. In this way, Ono’s rules and instructions themselves become

artistic action, democratic performances that challenge assumptions about

everyday life and provide a means for achieving new senses of reality. Allocating

rules like her simple, repetitive, and fanciful instructions draws stark attention to

the physical actions and the sensations and thoughts that they provoke. Deeply

rooted emotion and memories may burst or trickle to the surface through these

actions, potentially calling for creation of new and potentially life-changing

communication, discourse, and action by those who participate

Ono focuses her work on the rendering or expression of concepts in order to

achieve a different level of consciousness for herself, participants, and audiences.

By resisting the conceptualized forms of consciousness—which she refers to as

“fabricated”—that dominate society and following her own made-up rules

instead, Ono believes that “conceptual reality finally becomes a concrete reality

[through] an enactment of an intrusive, and therefore destructive, outside

force.”

Recognizing and destroying fabrications that rule life allows new

understandings of realities—and new realities themselves—to flourish. For

example, Ono’s Kite Piece I and II (1963) demonstrate her opposition to the

museum’s domination of art as well as the possibility of breaking free from this

tradition and developing new artistic concepts. Like Fluxus practice, for Ono the

museum was a space to be redefined or destroyed. In Kite Piece I, Ono asks

participants to “borrow the Mona Lisa” and fashion it into a kite, then fly it so high

that it disappears into just a dot.

This action changes the function and status of

the Mona Lisa as one of the most popular and revered works in Western art

history and Ono suggests that it has potential to do more than just hang in a

Ono, Imagine Yoko, 115-117.

Ibid., 119.

Gutai members carried out a similar performance in which they flew an abstract expressionist painting

over a Tokyo department store. In both the Gutai action and Ono’s instruction, the artists created

defiant actions in order to position themselves as free from the dominance of art tradition. The

outrageous suggestions in the Kite Piece instructions match the radical nature of Gutai’s action.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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gallery. The act of flying it like a kite is whimsical and celebrates its freedom

from traditional and restrictive environment and allowed to become more than

just an object at which to simply look.

Kite Piece II has similar instructions, but this piece is more ritualistic than the first

version. First, Ono instructs participants to “collect old paintings such as De

Kooning, Klein, and Pollock” on the same day each year. Then they must be

made into kites and flown and once they are high in the sky, the strings are cut to

let them float.

When she calls work by Abstract Expressionists old, she was

making a distinction between avant-garde conceptual work she and her

contemporaries created and the formerly ground-breaking abstract canvases.

Though they were at one time more radical than formal academic work and

indeed, opened the field for the inclusion of action and new visual forms, work

by De Kooning and Pollock remain trapped on the canvas. Though Ono implies

that these paintings could remain part of the collective consciousness as they

hover overhead, in her view (a view shared by Fluxus), the nature of this art is

too subjective. It derives from “the accumulation of „distortion‟ owing to one’s

slanted view,” or a “fictional order” on canvas. By offering conceptual and

introspective performances that require group action, Ono presents a way to

escape this fabricated reality.

Thus, the museum and the canvas’s place within

it are arbitrary inventions and Ono invites the idea that a Pollock painting can be

more than just a Pollock; in the Kite performances, people can simply visualize a

different reality and together, make the visualizations real. Through shared

authorship, there are a potentially endless number of ways that art can be

envisioned; the museum and the canvas are just two of many possibilities.

Both installments of Kite Piece emphasize destructive and imagined action as the

means to constructing new realities and in this case, new understandings and

relationships with art production. Ono connects with the goals of avant-garde

groups working in Japan in her effort to open up the field of art production to

include new varieties of performance, actions, music, paintings, et cetera. Osaki

contrasts the developments of the Japanese and American avant-garde of the

1950s, explaining that in Japan action and “physical expression had an

[overwhelming] superiority” and though Pollock made paintings with violent

movements and gestures, they instead became “highly valued for their visual

quality.”

The canvases of artists like Pollock and de Kooning often included

Ono, Grapefruit.

Ono, Imagine Yoko, 119.

Osaka, 154.

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explosive imagery and emotion, but the end result was still a formalized art piece

hanging on a wall.

Though Gutai artists technically endeavored to make “paintings” and used this

term to describe their work, they redefined what painting was, insisting, through

works like Murakami’s At One Moment Opening Six Holes, that action and explicit

bodily expression should be manifest in painting. Despite the action of painting

and their expressive and often electrifying visual gestures, Pollock’s paintings

were static once they were finished. Paintings by Gutai artists on the other hand,

were meant to embody physical expression and were often enigmatic and

ephemeral, therefore making it difficult for critics to define “within the

framework of formalism.”

Similarly, Ono attempted to release contemporary

conceptions of art from their bonds to the museum and “fabricated” rules about

the production of art, suggesting that an artwork does not have to have a

discernible end. Instead, her own rules make a new and more authentic

consciousness available for anyone willing to simply read her instructions and

visualize or carry out the results.

Through collaborative actions and use of the body in performance and as a text,

the introspective qualities of Ono’s work provide paths to reaching concreteness

through theoretical abstraction. Her instructions and performance pieces present

participants with concrete directions for imaginative and sometimes impossible

actions, such as “Give death announcements each time you move.” Other pieces

are completely unfeasible and Ono intends for participants to just imagine

carrying out the actions, like destroying a museum. Whether or not the action

must be in part imagined, or can actually be carried out, the instructions prompt

participants to consider new and imaginative interrelations between the self and

society. Even imaginary concrete actions can enable participants to reach a

greater plane of consciousness where it is possible to destroy a painting by Klein

or Pollock without getting arrested. Theoretical destruction potentially leads to a

redefining of life and thought, which can return participants back to the

concreteness of everyday life—although, Ono cannot determine whether or not

they will live it differently than before. In her Sense Piece (1968), she proclaims

that “Common sense prevents you from thinking. Have less sense and you will

make more sense.” Despite the propensity to accept conventional ways of

thinking and living, these tendencies can be overcome through creative and

seemingly irrational visualizations of society and the self.

Ibid.

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Dynamic openness and merging of the body and mind through Ono’s imaginative

and conceptual performances like Kite Piece or Blood Piece constitutes what

performance art historian Sally Banes describes as the “effervescent, grotesque

body.” This understanding of the body, developed in a number of site within the

1960s avant-garde, challenges traditional restrictions that classify bodily

functions as too disgusting for society to openly discuss. According to Banes, the

effervescent and grotesque body is “literally open to the world” and has

“permeable boundaries;” qualities that allow it to “[poke] holes in the decorum

and hegemony of official culture.”

This conception of the body fits with Ono’s

conceptual treatment of the physical and imaginary. In both cases, the body is

used to undermine society’s conventions, is free to mingle with other people and

things, and can access deeper recesses of life that have been forced to remain

locked in the body. Banes’ observations coincide with Stiles’ analysis because

Stiles positions destruction art as simultaneously ethical and subversive; artists

use the body to openly critique violent and oppressive ideologies, histories, and

societal practices.

Ono’s frequent focus on the need for intimate

communication and connection with others indicates that her version of

destruction art is indeed an ethical venture. Like Announcement Piece I, Ono’s

score for Conversation Piece (1962) addresses the need to share intimate 659

experiences like suffering through outward action and bodily performance. The

instructions read:

CONVERSATION PIECE (or Crutch Piece)

Bandage any part of your body.

If people ask about it, make a story

and tell.

If people do not ask about it, draw

their attention to it and tell.

If people forget about it, remind

them of it and keep telling.

Do not talk about anything else.

This understanding of the body as open and flexible would allow others to

present and discuss physical wounds, connecting the external and internal

experiences of pain. Stiles writes that Ono employs bandaging techniques to

Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: avant-garde performance and the effervescent body (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1993), 192.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 77.

Ono., Grapefruit.

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“articulate her psycho-physical pain…[and] the unspeakable conditions of interior

life;” therefore the body becomes a personal and historical text and using it in

performance is a way to “repossess and recover a sense of the concreteness of

personal experience.”

Because it will draw attention and prompt commentary,

the bandaged body or body part is in effect a badge that helps bearers share their

intimate experiences. Ono stresses that continued conversations are vital for

reconciliation; sufferers of physical and emotional stress might forever live with

painful memories, but others around them might forget the painful experience or

be unaware of its continued significance. Participants can even make up a story

about the bandages, which suggests that outsiders to specific traumatic events can

embody the victims’ experiences and perform them in order to raise awareness.

The bandage points to interior histories and places them onto the skin where they

can be examined and shared. Collaborative action and performance becomes a

way to deal with deeply rooted and disturbing issues; instead of hiding them

inside the body, using the “grotesque body” in performance to bring pain to the

forefront allows it to disseminate out from the individual body where it becomes

part of a social experience and memory.

Ono’s fusing of the private and public, mind and body, materiality and concept

are further manifest in her series of seven instructions called Card Piece. In this

series, Ono uses the German term Weltinnenraum, roughly translated to mean

“inner world,” to call attention to the interior world of knowledge within each

person:

CARD PIECE I

Walk to the center of you Weltinnenraum

Leave a card.

CARD PIECE II

Cut a hole in the center of your

Weltinnenraum.

Exchange.

CARD PIECE III

Shuffle your Weltinnenraums.

Hand one to a person on the street.

Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon”, 32.

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Ask him to forget about it.

CARD PIECE IV

Place a stone on each one of the

Weltinnenraums in the world.

Number them.

Stiles describes this space as “self-contained consciousness” made up of “aspects of

the self knowable through language” and is “the boundary of mind between that

which can and cannot be accessed through logos, but nevertheless pervades the

body at the level of cellular knowledge.”

Stiles points out that language cannot

fully access this interior space because, as previously discussed, language is too

logical and abstract and this space itself not completely known to the possessor.

The motif of the Weltinnenraum further illustrates Ono’s commitment to creating

seemingly irrational rules as a means for recovering truths and for experiencing a

more authentic reality. Many of her works are playful and Card Piece is set up

very much like a game in which she constructs imaginative scenarios with simple

language in order to penetrate the Weltinnenraum. She directs participants to

frankly engage their interior selves through a “walk to the center of [their]

Weltinnenraum[s]” and “leave a card” there as marker of its presence and perhaps

a reminder or where it is found.

Further engagement with themes of violence, social interaction, and healing

provoke participants to deeply encounter the Weltinnenraum. The next steps in

this game require participants to cut and swap Weltinnenraums with others, mark

every one of them in the world (probably again by leaving a card or other marker

to denote their locations), bet their lives on them in a game of rummy, and open

them up to the outside elements. Ono acknowledges that sharing one’s intimate

experiences with others can be painful and risky because participants must cut

out a piece of themselves and then give it to a stranger. This mingling of inner

knowledge, however, is part of the greater healing process and in effect, raises

awareness even if the receiver forgets about it. Stiles explains that forgetting

about the received interior piece signifies that it has become part of that person’s

The remainder of the Card Piece text is as follows: “Card Piece V: Play rummy with the

Weltinnenraums. Play for money. Play solitaire with your Weltinnenraums. Play for death; Card Piece

VI: Find a card in your Weltinnenraum; Card Piece VII: Open a window of one of the houses in your

Weltinnenraum. Let the wind come in. 1964 spring.”

Stiles, “Being Undyed”, 145

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Weltinnenraum, as that space is not objectively knowable.

It follows that in the

sixth instruction, participants must suddenly “find a card” in their Weltinnenraums,

as there is a continuous process of discovery: the frequency and qualities of

merging Weltinnenraum pieces is indiscernible. Though Ono strives to facilitate

authentic encounters with inner spaces, such encounters themselves are not

rational by society’s standards. Therefore she cannot use rational language or

forms like traditional narratives to illustrate interpersonal discovery and

intrapersonal connections. Locating knowledge deep within the body contradicts

conventional Western conceptions of intelligence and learning that rely on a

rational mind. As the sole locus of intelligence, the mind is supposed to

accumulate information and logically analyze it according to strategies learned in

school. Ono criticizes this system of knowledge in her essay “The Word of a

Fabricator” (1962), as she points out that this system is simply made up and can

therefore be resisted and changed. For Banes, artists in all fields of the avant-

garde used the body for means of expression because they understood the very

fabric of bodies as containing knowledge:

[The 1960s avant-garde] relied on the wisdom of the body—on the heat of kinetic

intuition in the moment—in contrast to predetermined, rational [The 1960s avant-

garde] relied on the wisdom of the body—on the heat of kinetic intuition in the

moment—in contrast to predetermined, rational.

Banes emphasizes that the body is simultaneously a point of information,

expression, and defiance for the 1960s avant-garde. These artists created works

in which people moved their bodies and used their imaginations, employed

spontaneity, and felt the “heat” or passion that is inevitably part of interacting and

intimate bodies. In Ono’s Card Piece, participants must use intuition and

imagination to find and interact with Weltinnenraums and then carry out actions

with this technically unknowable space. These instructions, like most of Ono’s

works, could completely remain in someone’s mind as they could simply

visualize the actions. Or, people could symbolically and creatively act out each

instruction. Both methods—imaginary or physical performance—suggest ritual,

spontaneity, and require the interaction between bodies and minds.

Ono’s insistence upon making up her own rules to follow in life and art practice

closely relate to the Gutai group’s manifesto. They too insist upon forming their

own styles and methods of art and define themselves against formal aesthetics of

Ibid., 146.

Banes, 211.

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the past, desiring to draw out authentic knowledge from materials themselves.

According to the manifesto, the artists believe that in the past, the materials used

to make art-objects were “loaded with false significance by human hand and by

way of fraud” and they charge artists with hiding under “the cloak of an

intellectual aim” in order to present materials that “take on the appearance of

something else.”

Academies of art create and regulate the art world with rules

that seem arbitrary to artists like Ono and those in Gutai. Paralleling the way

Ono follows her own made-up rules via performances and instructions, Gutai

also insists upon their aesthetic aims and methods to combat society’s intrusive

and limiting regulations. They claim that “Gutai art does not change the material

but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material” but rather “leaves the

material as it is, presenting it just as material, [and] then it starts to tell us

something and speaks with a might voice.”

Instead of making materials out to

be representations of other things as indicated above, Gutai artists directly invoke

the spirit of the material by emphasizing its essential qualities in performances

and actions. The focus on achieving authenticity, which is difficult in daily life, is

important for both Gutai and Ono.

Smoke Piece is another example of the exchange between body and mind, concept

and action. This work is more destructive than Card Piece, as essentially

everything, including the body, should be smoked. Smoking everything—not

just burning it all—also suggests a sense of pleasure in this destruction, that there

is satisfaction in physically taking in objects and people. The implication of drug

use in Smoke Piece also fits with the burgeoning culture surrounding the

abundance of psychedelic drugs at this time, as drugs like LSD were viewed as

means to reach a more spiritual plane of knowledge and as an escape from

reality. However peculiar Ono’s work seems, the message probably has less to

do with the motif of drug use and more so with a transition of knowledge source

from the rational mind to the body. Perhaps whatever a person smokes melds

with her Weltinnenraum and therefore becomes a part of her body knowledge.

There it settles in the unconscious, only to be known and expressed through

more performances.

The avant-garde’s introduction of a new, unguarded, and “effervescent body” in

the 1960s was not without problematic aspects. For example, another

development of the new body was an exceptional openness to sexuality, but this

sexuality did not have equal implications for women and men. The longstanding

Yoshihara, The Gutai manifesto, 1956.

Ibid.

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600

discrepancy between genders of authors, subjects, and representations of women

was not suddenly remedied by the development of the “effervescent body,” but

was in fact further complicated. Banes points out that during the 1960s, there

was no feminist analysis in place to critically examine art history and avant-garde

artists presented the female body in different ways: from elaborated versions “of

the idealized female nude, to complexly ironic explorations of the classic figure,

to the rejection of the female figure as the passive subject of the artist’s gaze

altogether.”

Not only was this avant-garde sexuality often a potentially dubious

rehashing of normative gender roles, but only certain sectors of society (namely

the avant-garde art circles and members or proponents of youth culture) were

deeply engaged in this new rhetoric surrounding the body. Moreover, the

growing presence of women in art circles signified that women’s roles were

changing, that they were increasingly becoming authors of art, rather than just its

subject. Despite the increasing authorship of women and the increasing openness

to sexuality in avant-garde circles, Ono often experienced the restrictions and

difficulties women artists encountered in Japan and the U.S., demonstrating how

inequity and discrimination were still overt and tangible.

Ono’s body in particular was a source of difficulties because she was a woman of

color. Though artists like Cage helped foster sincere interest in teachings of

Buddhism and other Eastern systems of knowledge, Ono was still pressured by

societal conventions in the U.S. regarding her gender and her race. Stiles

describes the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism as “Ono’s double-

articulated cultural space—the space of Woman and ethnic Other.” Ono was

also publicly viewed as the “other woman, the adulteress who wrecked [John]

Lennon’s marriage[s]” to his wife Cynthia and to the Beatles.

The media and

public generally criticized Ono for her assertive and unconventional personality.

Ono’s artwork challenged what was expected social behavior for women,

particularly women of color. Stiles writes that the public framed Ono’s

relationship with Lennon as an assault responsible for the Beatles‟ break-up and

believed that she changed him from the heroic mop-top to a strange hippie. But

in reality, their relationship was loving and stimulating, which caused a change in

Lennon’s attitudes and behaviors. Ono remarked that she had to show Lennon

how he was ingrained in an oppressive society that rewarded his body politic; she

blamed society for blinding him to women’s experiences and explained that after

he observed how “society [attacked her],” he began to engage more closely with

Banes, 224.

Stiles, “Unbosoming Lennon”, 23.

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feminist politics.

Though the public generally derided Lennon’s relationship

with Ono, Stiles emphasizes that their intimacy provided a space where different

bodies unequally positioned within society could connect with and absorb each

other’s experiences and feelings in an equitable way. Their appearances nude,

such as on their album cover for Two Virgins, as well as their bed-ins further

promote this mutual “surrendering” to each other through a revealing of

sexualized but equitable encounters with naked bodies.

Stiles maintains that much of Ono’s work before the 1970s has proto-feminist

qualities. In many of Ono’s pieces that relate to or explicitly include destruction,

she challenges issues of identity politics, racism, and sexism. Stiles explains that

most of destruction art made by women starting at this time indeed “explores the

problem of the obliteration of identity and the decentering of the self;” though

women artists often incorporated destructive acts in their art, they more often

than men investigate the violence of oppression and present their results in less

explicitly violent ways.

Women’s interest in producing art that often includes

more subtle expressions of destruction and violence reflects experiences of

oppression that are institutionalized or are socially normative.

Ono’s performance Cut Piece combines explorations of the space between

concept and material with what appears to be a feminist presentation of her

concept of the “stone.” The stone relates to the concept of Weltinnenraum but

refers to a person’s inner space as a whole. She first performed Cut Piece in Japan

and her actions were basically the same in each performance, though it could be

performed by men or women and was later performed by other Fluxus artists

such as Charlotte Moorman and Jon Hendricks.

The performer sits down on

stage, places a pair of scissors next to him or her, and remains still while

audience members cut off pieces of clothing and take them away. Regarding this

performance, Ono remarks that, “People went on cutting the parts they do not

like of me [and] finally there was only the stone that remained of me that was in

me but they…[still] wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.”

Through the

action of having her clothes cut off, Ono aesthetically represents the unveiling of

her true essence of being, a place not accessible by language or the creation of a

tangible object but through a tearing away of outside layers symbolized by her

nicest clothes. Lennon and Ono later revealed their nude bodies; here, Ono

Ibid.

Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 88.

Stiles, “Being Undyed”, 158.

Ibid.

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essentially allows herself to be stripped of society’s coverings and shares her most

intimate self with the audience—not just her skin, but what lies deep beneath it.

Ono and Lennon emphasized how appearing nude together is freeing and uniting

when they said that it shows how “we are all naked underneath and we are all

one” and that the body is “nothing to be ashamed of, be free.”

Not only does

the concept of the “effervescent” body call attention to the knowledge deep

within it, but also the power it has when it is bared to the world.

Though Ono herself emphasized the concept of the stone and inner space and

knowledge in Cut Piece, the performance is generally regarded today as an early

feminist work. Her use of the stone and Weltinnenraum to symbolize knowledge

located deep within the body—and especially in bodies pushed to the margins of

society—relate to the development during the second wave of feminism of the

concept of “writing the body” pioneered by French feminist theorists Hélène

Cixous and Luce Irigaray. They situate the body as a source of information,

creation, and expression in order to contest the privileging of the mind over the

body and in an effort to include women’s creations and bodies in the production

of knowledge. Along these lines of feminist theory, Cut Piece can be further

understood to reveal how feminists would unpack and analyze societal influence

in order to get at more authentic information about women and their

experiences. Previously to Cut Piece, Ono employed the theme of sharing

intimate self-knowledge (the Weltinnenraum) in Stone Piece She instructs

participants to find stones, break them into a powder, and then either throw it

into a river or send it to friends. She also stresses that they are never to explain

to anyone what they did. Here she reiterates how it is impossible to rationally

describe or portray a person’s essence or inner space, but nonetheless she or he

should find ways to share it with others. Similar to the instructions for Card Piece

in which performers share and play cards with their Weltinnenraums, Stone Piece

requires sharing of intimate inner knowledge that is reached through a

destructive act: they symbolically give away a part of themselves by breaking a

stone and grinding it into powder, its essence.

For Ono, the act of giving necessitates an uncovering of the self and this is

sometimes painful. In Cut Piece for example, the act of cutting is intrusive and

even violent and seems especially so in the case of cutting off someone’s clothes.

This invasive and intimate action implies that finding the inner area of the stone

could be painful as it requires removing protective outer layers to reveal the true

Jann S. Wenner. “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” in Yes Yoko Ono, ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York:

Japan Society, 2000), p. 60.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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inner turmoil of one’s being. Stiles also connects this performance with themes

of the objectification of women as well as revealing the “lesions society leaves on

the human body.”

A person is inevitably shaped by contact with other people

and culture and Ono’s comments regarding Cut Piece emphasize that women in

particular are objects scrutinized, formed, and controlled by sexualized violence.

Even the 1960s avant-garde in many ways continued to exploit and limit

women’s bodies as objects of art. Ono’s willingness to let others expose her

body through a violent action draws attention to the sexism inherent in this

process, but also emphasizes the power of deeply sharing oneself with others and

with guards down, or “surrendering” as Ono and Lennon described it.

Another piece that explicitly confronts how women are treated as sexualized

objects is Ono’s Striptease for Three that she first performed at a three-day long

concert in Kyoto, Evening till Dawn, in 1964. This piece has two options: either a

curtain rises to reveal three empty chairs on stage and lasts five minutes, or the

performer sets three chairs on stage and removes them after thirty minutes. The

title raises expectations for a performance in some way resembling an actual strip

show, but instead Ono leaves the audience to confront their expectations of

seeing performers—most likely women—take off their clothes. One recalls how

one audience member, a High Monk who seemed dissatisfied, asked her why she

called this performance a striptease if there were no performers or music. Ono

explains that her show was about the “stripping of the mind” and that “if it is a

chair or stone or women [on stage], it is the same thing.”

No matter what was

on stage, the audience would still have expectations for the performance to

somehow involve women stripping. Ono asks the audience to strip their minds

and investigate the reasons why this is the main association made. Like in Cut

Piece, Striptease for Three also implies that one must take off layers of knowledge

informed by society in order to reach a deeper self-understanding. This time, the

violence is not as blatant as in Cut Piece, but is inherent in the sexist structuring of

women.

Stiles “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art”, 88.

Ono, “Imagine Yoko”, 107.

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Ono further investigates the topic of violence against women in her film Rape

(1969), in which she collaborates with Lennon. For seventy-seven minutes, the

camera relentlessly follows a young woman through town, down an alley, and

eventually to her own home. The film powerfully depicts a constant chase and

intrusion, a violation of privacy as the woman becomes increasingly upset and

paranoid. Though rape is not depicted literally, the implication of social control

over women’s lives is evident in the intensity of the chase and the visible fear of

the woman. In her anthology of instructions Grapefruit, Ono addresses her film,

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece. Performance, Carnegie Recital Hall, 1965. Photo by Minoru

Niizuma. Lenono Photo Archive. Source: Japan Society.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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stating that, “Violence is a sad wind that, if channeled carefully, could bring

seeds, chairs, and all things pleasant to us.”

By the end of the film, the violence

in Rape practically destroys the woman’s ability to function. Ono suggests that

violence is something to use with caution, but is usually employed with little

regard for the broader consequences. Similarly to Cut Piece, this film depicts an

invasion of space and liberty, but instead of revealing and sharing an inner space

in the end, Ono brutally portrays how violence against women damages their

lives.

In Ono’s installation Half-A-Room, she destroys notions of domesticity as well as

household items and furniture. The domestic setting has long been portrayed as

women’s natural environment and place in society and it is where issues of

sexuality, economics, and labor converge. Along with Banes‟ description of the

new “effervescent body” and sexuality comes a reconfiguring of domestic life and

roles. Ono’s room contains white furniture and other objects all cut in half and

arranged like an austere showroom display. Munroe describes Ono’s early

objects, including Half-A-Room as “radically reductive” in order to “[juxtapose] an

idea against a visual situation to provoke a kind of telepathic poetry of irrational

truths…where material stands for content.”

Ono presents these everyday items

stripped of their normal function: a person can no longer sit in the chair, wear

the hat, or use the cabinet and the room seems empty, even sad. Perhaps the

traditional set-up of domestic life for women should no longer be automatically

viewed as functional or natural.

By halving the items, Ono reveals the “psychic and physical” bisection of

everything and nothing that is “a condition of human existence.”

This relates

back to her concern with the spaces between concepts and materiality, the body

and thought and inner knowledge. Though these items are physically incomplete,

viewers inevitably will imagine the rest of them, rendering them whole in their

minds. By arranging the items in a domestic setting, she further emphasizes the

application of the dichotomy of existence/absence in real life. Women are

supposed to be fulfilled by domestic life, but this work suggests that home life

alone is not enough to make someone complete. Just as her superficial layers

were symbolically stripped off by way of others cutting off her clothes in Cut

Piece, thus exposing her deep core of being, Ono searches for true aspects of

human life in this environment. The halving of these household items suggests a

Ono, Grapefruit.

Munroe, 30.

Joan Rothfuss, “Somewhere for the Dust to Cling: Yoko Ono’s Paintings and Early Objects,” in Yes

Yoko Ono, eds. Alexandra Munroe, Yoko Ono, Jon Hendricks, and Bruce Altshuler (New York: Japan

Society, 2000), 126.

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means to escape the limitations of domesticity, for as her body of work makes

apparent, creation of new ways of living, thinking, and interacting result from

performances and understandings of destruction.

oko Ono’s destruction art is imaginative, confrontational, and ground-

breaking. She asks participants to creatively envision realities where people

can smoke bodies and die multiple times. And during postwar life that was

dominated by another war and tense social conflict, Ono’s conceptual work

provided positive affirmations of life and techniques for envisioning reality in

new ways. Ono’s work does indeed fit with Stiles explanation of destruction art

as an ethical endeavor, but rather than only representing violence with violent

actions, she turns it into a point of thoughtful inquiry and discussion, contrasting

subtle destructive undertones with outrageously destructive instructions (such as

smoking your own pubic hair or painting with your blood). As she tackles issues

of sexism, victimization, and war, she does not lose her sense of humor and

creates works that are often light-hearted, comical, and even sweet—all the

more emphasizing her unique viewpoint within contemporary art.

Her conceptual work is innovative because through simple instructions that may

seem strange or trivial on the surface, she penetrates deeply personal and

powerful spaces within individuals as well as the social body. Each person who

encounters her art could have countless reactions and interpretations, which is in

part why it continues to be influential. The instructions, paintings, objects, and

Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room, 1967. Altered readymades. Photo by Oded Lobl. Source: Japan Society.

Whitney Frank Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art

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performances are open-ended, personal, and though I have discussed how much

they are born out of specific cultures and histories, people do not necessarily

have to engage with those specifics in order to engage with the artwork. Ono

frequently challenges assumptions about the body, what lies beneath it, and how

it is positioned in this world, but the process of understanding these questions

will not simply be finished once someone comes up with a new theory. Ono and

her artwork break through bounds of time and place, for creativity, personal and

cultural investigation, and destruction are elements of life immemorial.

Whitney Frank is a 5th-year senior majoring in Art History and Women Studies. In her work, she

concentrates on avant-garde art and politics of the early and mid-20th century, researching connections

between creative expression and analysis of identity formation.