Does Yoko’s art have a sense of humour… or is the joke on us?
How nice that Yoko Ono, the acclaimed conceptual artist (and, in case you had forgotten, consort of the late John Lennon, a musician with a boyband known as The Beatles), is being honoured with a 50-year retrospective at the Baltic Contemporary Art Centre on Tyneside. It includes a “coffin car” (hearse) in which one can take a spin and ponder on death, and a wall on which she has scrawled deep and meaningless statements such as “This room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end,” and “This room slowly evaporates every day.” Profound, man, yeah! John, of course, gets a mention. He always does. Art lovers are encouraged to participate in the exhibition by writing any random thoughts they have about their mothers on canvases kindly provided by Yoko. This is inspired by John’s devotion to his own mother, Julia, she says. Apparently, Yoko is a leading figure in what is known as the Fluxus art moment, a fact which had passed me by. Fluxus was an often “impenetrable” movement of the Sixties
