MoMA | Tag: Yoko Ono

Posts tagged ‘Yoko Ono’

July 14, 2010 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

From a Whisper to a Scream: Following Yoko Ono’s Instructions

Posted by Jason Persse, Editorial Manager, Marketing and Communications

Yoko Ono. Selections from Whisper Piece (four of sixteen total; installation view at The Museum of Modern Art). 2010. Pen on wall, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Photo: Jason Persse

Yoko Ono. Selections from Whisper Piece (four shown of sixteen total; installation view at The Museum of Modern Art). 2010. Pen on wall, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Photo: Jason Persse

I first heard about Yoko Ono’s so-called “instruction pieces” as a high school student, when a friend told me the (possibly apocryphal, certainly embellished) story of Ono’s first meeting with John Lennon. History according to the poorly fact-checked lunchtime ramblings of rock ‘n’ roll–obsessed seventeen-year-olds: During a visit to London’s Indica Gallery in 1966, Lennon encountered Ono’s Ceiling Painting. Climbing to the top of a tall, white ladder, he used a magnifying glass dangling from a thread to read a message printed in tiny letters on the ceiling: “YES.” Profoundly moved by the work’s unalloyed positivity, he demanded to meet the artist right away.

Bottoms Up! Fluxus Wallpaper

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Yoko Ono. George Maciunas. Fluxus Wallpaper. c. 1973. Offset. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift

During recent months, Fluxus has begun making waves in MoMA galleries. This past October, Fluxus Preview opened on the fourth floor and continues to provide a sampling of the diverse activities carried out by artists engaged with a rebellious approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, true to Fluxus’s irreverent sensibility, derrières—hundreds of female asses—have taken over a space on the third floor of the Museum. The work is Yoko Ono and George Maciunas’s Fluxus Wallpaper, which repeats black-and-white close-ups of a human behind from floor to ceiling.

A still from Ono’s Film Number 4 (Bottoms), this wallpapered image is of one of the (allegedly) 365 individuals who walked for the artist’s camera in London during the early 1960s. As Ono once described Film Number 4, it is “like an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses”—a collective mooning in support of the absurd. Maciunas took one of these signature back ends, possibly Ono’s own, and printed it in fashion that enabled the provocation to occupy any receptive surface.

The wallpaper is part of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, acquired in 2008. It is currently on display in conjunction with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.