| From www.yahoo.com/headlines/entertainment/ (used w/o permission)
Wednesday February 19 3:28 PM EST
FEATURE: After 30 Years, Yoko Ono's Art Returns To London
By Scott McCormack
LONDON (Reuter) - Yoko Ono has long been branded as the woman who destroyed
the Beatles by stealing John Lennon's heart and dragging him into the
free-spirited chaos of the 1960s peace movement.
But what has largely been forgotten is that Ono was an artist -- or an art
revolutionary -- in her own right long before she met Lennon. In fact, they
met at an exhibition of her work in London in 1966.
The diminutive Ono, now in her 60s, pioneered the so-called "Fluxus"
movement, a loose grouping of artists in New York bent on turning the
conventional art world upside down and rejecting what they saw as its
rampant commercialism.
The movement attracted widespread attention -- and significant scorn --
with its staged "happenings" and sales of rubbish on the streets of New
York.
Now, more than 30 years after the exhibition where Ono met Lennon, her work
has returned to London for a show at the Royal Festival Hall.
"To me, it is like the homecoming that could never be," Ono writes in an
introduction to one of her pieces on display.
A stroll through the hall quickly shows that the movement did indeed reject
conventional notions of art. Some of Ono's exhibits even beg the question
of whether the person behind them was an avant-garde artist or an
anti-artist.
Particulary eye-catching are Ono's numerous films, including one that
features a black fly crawling slowly over a naked female torso, pausing on
the breats and genitalia.
"Absolutely vile," declared one black-clad woman, who said she was too
embarrased to give her name but lingered by the screen with a group of
gasping onlookers.
Nearby, another film called "Bottom" shows 80 minutes of bare jiggling
buttocks, spots and all, edited to fill the entire screen.
"Rather provocative, isn't it?" said art student David Lester. "Ono was
very individualistic, but she drew on a long line of artists who challenged
the very notion of what is art."
Ono hoped the fleshy cheeks would show future generations "that the 60s was
not only the age of achievements, but of laughter."
A constant banging in the hall shatters the normal tranquility of an art
show and suggests that the exhibition is not yet fully installed.
But the hammering comes not from workers putting on some finishing touch,
but from visitors dutifully pounding nails into three mounted white boards,
per Ono's instructions.
Ono dubbed the piece "Painting to Hammer a Nail In" and modeled it after
the one that she showed in London in 1966 when Lennon first approached her
and asked if he could hammer a nail.
When Ono told Lennon that it would cost him five shillings, he asked if he
could use an imaginary nail.
"I thought, so I met a nice guy who plays the same game I played," Ono
recalled.
After carefully hammering a nail into the center of the middle board,
Martha Tocker from Buenos Aires giggled and said: "It's just kind of fun."
"What does it mean? I haven't any idea," she said, echoing many other
visitors by emphasising that she was not an art expert and could not be
expected to grasp such a modern work.
"You should ask my friend, she works in the art community," Tocker said.
"It embodies the spirit of the '60s and is very American," replied the
friend, Caroline Jamieson, an administrator at a London art college. "But I
have to admit, I'd much rather get some paint to splatter on it than a
nail."
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