Yoko Ono was about to burn a painting.
Standing alongside curators and conservators in an unused gallery at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, the 82-year-old superstar wanted to copy a cigarette hole that John Cage, the avant-garde composer, had burned into another blank canvas of hers half a century earlier. For the remake, she had asked for the French cigarettes that Cage would have used but ended up settling for one from Nat Sherman. Lighting up in a museum that had not smelled of tobacco for decades, she reached out and, with a sure artist’s touch, scorched a tidy round hole. Velazquez painting the Spanish king could not have been watched more closely than Ms. Ono was — though it was hard to know whether these courtiers were crowding around to witness creation or to prevent conflagration.
“Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” opening on May 17 in one of MoMA’s prestigious sixth-floor galleries, is a major event of the museum’s summer season. On display will be more than 100 vintage works — and in a few cases, as with the burned canvas, facsimiles — that represent the heyday of Ms. Ono’s first career in art, long overshadowed by her better-known image as pop-culture icon and widow of John Lennon. A great deal is riding on the event — for Ms. Ono, for the museum and also for Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at MoMA and a co-organizer of her show. The exhibition could recalibrate the reputations of all three.
“Yoko Ono in the ’60s was a historically important, groundbreaking, influential artist, working in London and Tokyo and New York,” explained Mr. Biesenbach, sitting in a MoMA boardroom, his platinum hair slicked back above one of his trademark skinny suits. Ms. Ono’s achievement as an artist, he said, “is nearly hidden by her fame; we want to uncover it.”
As for Mr. Biesenbach, the show may help counteract the drubbing that he has taken for “Björk,” his celebration of the Icelandic pop star that is now filling MoMA’s atrium. One critic said it had “laid a colossal egg”; another called for his resignation. Working with Ms. Ono satisfies the curator’s well-known love of celebrities, but the artist’s early, conceptual work has an undeniable heft and rigor that may help earn back Mr. Biesenbach’s credentials as someone sober and substantial.
Mr. Biesenbach refused to comment on the Björk exhibition, beyond saying that the two projects were “very different.” But Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints and Mr. Biesenbach’s collaborator on the Ono show, insisted that, though their project was never conceived as some kind of Björk corrective, its difficult works make it stand for “the opposite of celebrity” — for something that will challenge viewers, rather than give them what they already want.
The morning of the cigarette incident, Ms. Ono sat in the kitchen of her Dakota apartment, whose genteel décor is leavened with pictures of her with Lennon, and even with his famous bandmates. She said she has no hesitation about showing alongside Björk, her “incredibly good” younger colleague. Although she’s given hundreds of interviews, Ms. Ono seems to listen to questions with intense attention; her answers don’t feel like pat lines. With her tomboy manner, royal-blue jeans and hip Adidas sneakers, she came off as at least 20 years younger than her age.
If the new exhibition returns us to Ms. Ono’s first persona as a radical artist, it may also be showing that MoMA itself has caught up to a radicalism it slighted for many decades. “MoMA almost totally ignored Fluxus,” said Mr. Cherix, referring to the movement of trickster artists whose orbit Ms. Ono moved in during her youth.
Fluxus was a tribe of cultural radicals brought together under one name by the maverick impresario George Maciunas, in 1961. Its anti-art, anti-object members included Alison Knowles (whose most famous work was the simple act of making a salad) and George Brecht (one piece of his “music” involved pouring water from a height). Sitting in her old-school SoHo loft, the 82-year-old Ms. Knowles said that Ms. Ono never quite espoused the collaborative ideals that defined a true Fluxus member. She was included in so many Fluxus publications and events, however, that Ms. Ono usually counts as a player in the movement, at least in its early days.
If she stood out a bit from her Fluxus pals, it was because of her notably optimistic side (“give peace a chance”) and a touch of flower-power sentiment (“listen to the sound of the earth turning”) that hasn’t been typical of the avant-garde.
Back at MoMA, Mr. Cherix explained that one of the few Fluxus works the museum did acquire, early on, was a book by Ms. Ono called “Grapefruit,” published in 1964. It is a kind of how-to guide for her art, presenting “instructions” for many of the works she will be showing at MoMA — “Painting to Be Stepped On” (“leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor”), “Touch Poem for a Group of People” (“touch each other,” as visitors will do in a designated space at MoMA) and, of course, “Smoke Piece” (“light canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette at any time for any length of time”). These get at Ms. Ono’s major artistic concept: the idea that works of art can be conceived as written “scores” to be realized later, whether by the artist herself or someone else — or that exist only as pure, blue-sky ideas. She feels that’s a model for how we realize any change in the world. “We visualize it, imagine it, and think that it’s not going to happen — and it’s happening,” Ms. Ono said.
Another inspiration for the new Ono project, Mr. Cherix said, was a 1971 “intervention” that the artist staged at MoMA, without the museum’s permission, to which she gave the puckish title of “Yoko Ono — One Woman Show” (yes, that’s also in the title of the new exhibition). Ms. Ono’s guerrilla contribution to MoMA’s program that year took the form of revealing (falsely) that she had released an army of flies around the museum, as a kind of Fluxus fifth column. For the card announcing her fictional show, she retouched a photo of the museum’s signage to insert a naughty letter “f” before its final word, thus creating the “Museum of Modern (f)Art.”
“I did a conceptual show and that was it, for me,” said Ms. Ono, never expecting her fictional solo exhibition to become reality. But now, 44 years later, she’s getting precisely the retrospective MoMA could have given her back then, according to Mr. Biesenbach, if it had been up to speed. His interest in the history of performance art and his long connection to Ms. Ono — she was in one of his first notable projects, in Berlin in 1992 — coupled with Mr. Cherix’s key role in acquiring a major Fluxus collection in 2008, made it seem natural to approach Ms. Ono with the idea for their show. At first she was more keen on current projects than revisiting the past, she said, but her trust in MoMA’s pair of “incredibly sensitive” curators changed her mind.
Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter a single, signature object: A perfectly normal Granny Smith, shiny and green, that is also an Ono work from 1966, called “Apple.”
Then there’s also a room full of objects from Ms. Ono’s landmark 1961 show at Mr. Maciunas’s gallery, reproduced as facsimiles because the originals have mostly been lost. (That’s where she presented the “Smoke Painting.”) The exhibition’s far end covers the Plastic Ono Band that the artist began with Lennon in 1969, along with a few other of their collaborations, and ends with documentation of Ms. Ono’s fictional show at MoMA.
Ms. Ono, who was born in Tokyo, describes her commitment to conceptual art as starting before her first day of school. “When I was about 4 years old, I had all these ideas,” she recalled. She described a moment when she stood with her mother in their fruit garden, and told her, “Why don’t you just take one seed from a fruit and another seed from another fruit, and halve it and put it together and bury it? It might grow something really strange.” She got a playmate to write down this idea, she said, adding, “and that’s the kind of thing that was going on, from the beginning: I had decided that whenever I get an idea I have to show it to the world.”
That balancing act between esoteric ideas and their mass dissemination may make Ms. Ono perfect for today’s MoMA. Her celebrity solo exhibition steers a course between the crowd-bait blockbusters no museum can resist and the substantial shows that artists and critics hope for from the museum.
Ms. Ono said that her renown has never got in the way of her serious ambitions for her art. Fame, first in the art world and then on the world stage, merely amplified her work’s effects. “When she meets someone like John Lennon, it just gives her a bigger platform,” said Mr. Cherix.
On the other hand, it’s never been possible to divorce her life from her art — in fact blending the two is a central tenet of Fluxus (see Ms. Knowles’s salad-as-art). In Ms. Ono’s case, a bad patch she went through after giving birth to her daughter Kyoko, in Japan in 1963, may have pushed her toward her most important work.
Ms. Ono’s old friend Jonas Mekas, the avante-garde filmmaker, owns a letter from her at that time in which Ms. Ono described how “it was painful to be used as an incubator. It is also very hard on the baby when her mother refuse to see the connection with her. I hope the world is kinder to her than her mother.”
If that sounds like full-blown post-partum depression, in our interview Ms. Ono also spoke of more quotidian troubles, of having suffered “exactly what women go through in a classic way” — of getting pregnant and having a baby “and then you can’t get a job.” Or when she did eventually get a decent job, “I had to make sure my breast is not having the milk leak.” (After decades living in the United States, her English is fluent but also cheerfully accident-prone.)
Those troubles give new context for the performance called “Cut Piece,” which Ms. Ono first staged in Japan soon after her maternal crisis. (MoMA will show footage of a later staging, mounted in the recital room at Carnegie Hall in 1965.)
Now considered her masterpiece, the work required Ms. Ono to climb onstage and allow visitors to snip off her clothes with scissors. It’s the ultimate distillation of female victimhood, but turned into heroic forbearance. “There was clearly something in her that had to come out,” as Mr. Mekas once noted.
Ask today’s art students to name their favorite work by anyone, said Mr. Cherix, “and two out of three will say ‘Cut Piece’ — or at least one out of three.”
Hallowed as that piece may be after all these years, Ms. Ono said that she recently got an entirely new take on it. At a recent staging, she decided to turn the tables, letting a young model stand in for her and wielding the scissors herself: “I was so scared that I might just touch her skin or something. And it was a very, very hard job. I thought, ‘Are they going through that when they are cutting me?’ ”
She added, “I was so amazed, how difficult it is.”
But then that’s precisely the point of work like hers: “Art is challenging,” she said. “As life is. I think life is very challenging to each one of us.”
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