Yoko Ono
Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000
Yoko Ono is one of the true pioneers of conceptual art and a prolific and influential innovator in forms ranging from installation to film. The full range of Ono’s originality and influence is apparent in “Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a major retrospective of Ono’s work at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Covering Ono’s career from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and installations as well as works in photography, video, and conceptual art.
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono studied opera and classical music from an early age. As a girl, she moved with her family to the US, returning to Japan during World War II. She later studied music and philosophy in Japan and in the US.
In the 1960s in New York she helped found the avant-garde Fluxus movement, a loose group of artists, musicians and poets whose works were inspired by the Dada movement and by Marcel Duchamp as well as by John Cage’s radical musical experiments. Key avant-garde figures with whom Ono collaborated included John Cage himself, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas. Throughout the 1960s, Ono traveled between New York, Tokyo, and London, exerting a major influence on the avant-garde art scene and pioneering conceptual art with works involving the participation of the viewer through mental or physical interaction. At her first exhibition in London in 1966, Ono met John Lennon, who would remain her partner and collaborator until his death in 1980. In 1967, her controversial film Bottoms, showing a series of naked buttocks, was promptly banned after its London premiere. Although ignored and even scorned by the art establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, Yoko Ono continued to work steadily.
Many of her works reflect the influence of Zen Buddhism, to which she was exposed from an early age, while more recent work focuses on the complex interactions between women and male centers of authority. “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?” displays a range of Yoko Ono’s conceptual works, including: Ceiling Painting, which frames the word "yes” on a piece of paper; and The Wishing Tree, on which viewers are invited to write their wishes, echoing a tradition from Japanese temples. Half a Room, one of the most striking installations from Ono’s London period, displays the interior of a room whose objects and furniture have been cut in half and painted white. Portrait of Nora, a more recent work, presents the blurred, pixelized face of Ono herself and underscores her connection with the struggle for liberation from male dominance as experienced by Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll House.
The exhibition also includes screenings of Bottoms and other early Ono films, including Fly, Rape, and rarely seen short “FluxFilms.” “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a touring exhibition of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in England, arrives in Jerusalem from Helsinki. Ono’s outdoor installation Ex-It, on display at the Museum since May, remains on view.
James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states: “At the turn of the millennium the Israel Museum is honored to host one of the great creative artists of our time, who is only now receiving the recognition she deserves. We are grateful to Ms. Ono for sharing her vision with the people of Israel, and we hope that her presence in Jerusalem will promote the causes of peace and understanding to which she has dedicated much of her career.”
ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM
Ruppin Boulevard 11, Jerusalem
