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(Un)see and Be (Un)seen: Yoko Ono between Avant-Garde Art and Popular Culture – From Bag Piece to Bagism

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2018, (43), pp.35-58
  • DOI : 10.17057/kahoma.2018..43.002
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : April 24, 2018
  • Accepted : May 27, 2018
  • Published : June 30, 2018

SooJin Lee 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the early years of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s collaborative events and media activities between 1968 and 1969. In particular, by tracing how their much-publicized performance events such as Bed-In (1969) and Bagism (1969) were derived from Ono’s Bag Piece (1964), conceived in the early 1960s during her underground period, I suggest that the media spectacles were an extension of Ono’s avant-garde art concepts that she consciously (if not strategically) staged in order to engage the mass media audience. Her romantic relationship with Lennon, which became public in 1968, changed the direction of her artistic career. As the Beatles’ notorious Japanese partner, she became a public figure whom cameras always followed, and she knew that the ‘world’ was now her audience. But the fame also came with a price that she would be for long known as Lennon’s wife rather than an independent artist. Considering the various movements of experimental art and youth culture in the late 1960s, this paper examines how Ono negotiated, utilized, and extended not only her art but also her public image when she was straddling between her avant-garde art background and the new pop culture wonderland.

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