ART; Yoko Ono's New Bronze Age At the Whitney (original) (raw)

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ART

ART; Yoko Ono's New Bronze Age At the Whitney

Credit...The New York Times Archives

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February 5, 1989

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Section 2, Page

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As well as being one of the world's most fabled widows, Yoko Ono is one of its wealthiest artists. Yet even stranger for one so famous is that her art is actually little known. A participant in New York's underground scene of the early 1960's and one of the very first members of the international Fluxus art movement - a loosely knit group of musicians, artists, poets and film makers who tried to blur the boundaries between art and life, and in some ways were the first hippies - Yoko Ono became the personification of way out, experimental art after she met John Lennon in 1966.

As an artist, Ms. Ono was a curiosity, and a bit of a shock. She was also an occasional whipping boy for the press through the late 1960's and the 1970's - blamed for splitting up the Beatles and denounced as an artistic opportunist. Once she published a sales list of her art's prices as a work of art. On another occasion, in 1965, she offered 200 shares in herself for sale at $250 each. As a joke on the newly invented label of Conceptual Artist, she proudly dubbed herself a ''con artist.''

The Whitney Museum of American Art begs to differ, and beginning Wednesday (through April 16) will present ''Yoko Ono: Objects, Films,'' an exhibition of her art from the early 60's on.

''Yoko Ono was an artist who was part of a movement involved in exploring conceptual issues. Younger artists are again interested in these themes, so it seems a good time to bring them back into view,'' said Barbara Haskell, curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney and co-curator of the exhibition. This show, comprising two dozen of the artist's sculptures and films - some of which are nominally familiar to avant-gardists and Beatles fans alike - will be held in the museum's lobby gallery and film and video theater. Financially and spatially, it is a modest project for the museum. But in terms of attendance, the Whitney expects a blockbuster.

Clearly, the life and work of Yoko Ono, who turns 56 this month, continues to inspire debate. The jury is still out on her art. Recollections of her work in the early 1960's vary wildly. Richard Bellamy, who directed the influential Green Gallery in New York, says, ''I thought of her as a particularly severe case of 'suffering artist,' and was sympathetic. But there was little I could do about it practically except, for example, to ask Bob Scull to buy her 'Sky Piece,' and later to send her $50 when she appealed from London. I wanted to help on a personal level, but I couldn't get behind her art.''

To David Bourdon, however, former art critic at The Village Voice and Vogue, ''Grapefruit,'' Ms. Ono's book of instructions for musical and artistic pieces, is ''one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960's.


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