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<\/p>\nThe Broad\u2019s \u201cYoko Ono: Music of the Mind\u201d is more mind than music. She opens your mind; you make the music. Look into an empty \u201cBox of Smile\u201d and maybe you will. \u201cGive Peace a Chance\u201d \u2014 of course.<\/p>\n
She breaks, and she mends, and not just your mind. Something tells me the Broad won\u2019t go along with Ono\u2019s \u201cCollecting Piece II\u201d from 1963, which has the following instructions: \u201cBreak a contemporary museum into pieces with the means you have chosen. Collect the pieces and put it together with glue.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a smile piece, too, although Ono looks all business holding a crystalline hammer on the catalog cover photo. I still smile when I recall how her piece for an orchestra that asks the players to bang their heads against a stage wall utterly delighted an audience and musicians at a performance in New York. Only Ono remained deadpan.<\/p>\n
There were more smiles Saturday evening when The Broad, in collaboration with REDCAT across the street, presented a program of two Ono performance pieces. It began with six members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra playing Boccherini\u2019s First Sextet. This happens to be the first work ever written for pairs of violins, violas and cellos, as an expression of freedom that, in 1776, felt revolutionary.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that is why LACO chose the Italian composer to represent a contemporary revolutionary artist in the wake of our 250th July 4. The actual piece being performed was Ono\u2019s \u201cSky Piece for Jesus Christ,\u201d in which she instructs an orchestra, whatever size (although she tended to like something larger than a sextet), to begin by playing a work, say, by Mozart. <\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t much matter what is chosen, because at the premiere in a 1965 Fluxus concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, Ono and a couple of colleagues crept on stage and began wrapping the musicians in gauze. After a few minutes, they could no longer play.<\/p>\n
Amusing, yes, but this is also an act of silencing, maybe even passive-aggressive violence. You smile (and a player or two at REDCAT couldn\u2019t suppress a smile), but you don\u2019t feel so hot doing so.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Members of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra covered in gauze while performing Yoko Ono\u2019s \u201cSky Piece to Jesus Christ\u201d at REDCAT.<\/p>\n
(Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
There is, in fact, more to this \u201cSky Piece\u201d than meets the smile. Ono meant Jesus Christ to stand for John Cage. Cage was a key inspiration for Ono\u2019s art. When the Beatles broke up and Ono and John Lennon moved to New York in the late 1960s, they first wanted to be as far from the limelight as possible, Ono having been demonized in the popular press over supposedly breaking up the Beatles (she didn\u2019t!!!!). Cage found them a small two-bedroom apartment next door to him and his partner, Merce Cunningham, in their modest West Village building (a significant fact curiously ignored in the otherwise illuminating new documentary \u201cOne to One: John and Yoko\u201d about the couple\u2019s new New York life there).<\/p>\n
Ono and Cage had a long, meaningful but not always easy relationship. Cage, who wrote music to suppress his ego, had a problem with Ono\u2019s exhibitionism. In 1962, he dedicated a piece to Ono titled \u201c0\u201900\u201d (4\u201933\u201d No. 2),\u201d an Ono-like composition with a single sentence of instruction: \u201cIn a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback) perform a disciplined action.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cage later added other qualifications. One insistence is that the action should fulfill an obligation to others. However much Ono\u2019s \u201cSky Piece\u201d comes across as a playful Cage rejoinder, Ono did, the year before in Kyoto, create what could be called a version of \u201c0\u201900\u201d,\u201d although an actual silent piece. <\/p>\n
This is her famous \u201cCut Piece,\u201d which the performance artist known as MPA performed at REDCAT following \u201cSky Piece.\u201d It was clearly the draw that caused the program to be sold out months in advance.<\/p>\n
There are many meanings that have been inscribed to \u201cCut Piece,\u201d in which Ono invited the audience to come on stage and, with a pair scissors, cut off a small piece of her dress. Along with questioning social and sexual taboos, feminism and acts of aggression, Ono also confronts her own issues with ego from a Buddhist perspective, just as Cage had.<\/p>\n
\u201cCut Piece\u201d has a central place in Ono\u2019s work as do film clips of her performing it in the Broad exhibition. Ono sits without a trace of emotion as she is stripped bare. Attention is directed away from her to the cutters. But the action is nullified by the fact that Ono assumes the stoic posture of the Buddhist monks seen in the news at the time setting themselves aflame in protest of the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
War had, indeed, inspired Ono in her shocking, exhibitionist (however ego-denying) disciplined action. It\u2019s fulfillment of an obligation to others is, like so much in Ono, a two-edged sword forcing us \u2014 be we active cutters or passive observers \u2014 into contemplation of violence.<\/p>\n