More on Conceptual Art

So just in case anyone is reading this blog who isn't in my Internet for Educators class, let me preface this next post by saying I had this really great assignment for the class to follow ten people on twitter who are related to my professional practice and then to profile one of them. I really liked the assignment and wanted to share part of my findings here as well as on our ning.

I chose Yoko Ono.

Yoko Ono is a household name (like Picasso, maybe), but she is often thought of not as an artist but as John Lennon's wife, the source of the Beatles' break up, or a political activist. I am ashamed to say that I too did not know she is an artist until I learned about her in art school myself. John Lennon described her as “the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”

In art school, I learned that Ono's art is conceptual and based in performance. One of my teachers told me about a performance in which Ono took a family heirloom vase and smashed it, giving once piece of it to each member of her audience. She told the audience that they would meet back together in one year to put the vase back together. It was conceptual performances like this one that made Ono stand out in the art community. Her twitter account is full of similar instruction based performance ideas, like the kind she wrote about in her book Grapefruit. The book is made up of instructional poems like “hammer a nail into the center of a piece of glass”. Similar to Sol Lewitt's work, the instructions are the artwork, the performances are records of the work.

One example from her twitter account of these instructional expressions is from 2:00pm on March 8th: “Draw a window on the wall to remind you of the sun”. And again, at 1:01pm on March 18th: “Have as many wish trees as you want in the garden”.

Now I'm wondering if each of these statements (and Lewitt and Ono are not the only ones who do this) are like mini artist statements in and of themselves?

What more would the audience want to know about this work, and why would the artist share more information?

I'll explore these questions next time.