I’ve told you before, but it’s well worth repeating: Lisa Carver’s Reconsidering Yoko Ono, it’s a marvelous book. Carver’s book isn’t a traditional work of art history, or an artist monograph; it seems rather to touch upon the soul of Ono’s life-long project. Carver’s style is essayistic and free, her work a body of inspired writing. Here is what I read today, which of course could – and should – be taken as a piece of good advice to all of us;
To be accepted, to be thought nice, is Woman’s power. That is something Yoko doesn’t need.
Ono has made a career and a life out of doing exactly what she was not supposed to do, and not being what she was supposed to be. And when she does tell us what to do, it’s the undoable. Because if you cannot do that, what else might you not do? The possibilities of the impossible is endless! Let banking and engineering deal with the doable, the possible. They build our houses and put food on our tables. But if we have no impossible as well, it is all rectangles and calories and dreamless sleep …
Lisa Carver: Reconsidering Yoko Ono (18-19)
sub rosa 
Sounds interesting! I will definitely keep an eye out for this one.
you must!
🙂
fabulous; ‘doing exactly what she was not supposed to do’. will write the title down, this seems to be very interesting.
I also find her feministic approach intriguing, and it is rather strange that she isn’t more studied by feminists.
I like to think of it as a world of managers, who have replaced parliaments (talking places) with managements (places of damage control, damage prevention, ordering, and statistical averages, spoken from elite positions of order and command). I have also come to the perspective that this has been a long time coming and that this group of people, now dominant in the West at least, have been chipping away at the logics of art and spirituality for a long time and that, in fact, the standard history of Western Progress has been the story of the rising dominance of this class, to the detriment of the human species as a whole and the planet. I see their main tool as being a confusion of language, in which, for instance, art (as an elite, rational activity akin to science) is privileged over art (what people do), or culture (an elite form of courtly behaviour) is privileged over culture (what people do), with the added confusion that today the non-intellectual class runs intellectual activity and the intellectual class is working at physicalizing their activity. Pure power politics. It will lead to some very strange effects over the next couple decades. Against manipulation, though, we have our common tongue.
Thank you, Harold!
We have just had a very strange government election here in Norway, resulting in the blue-blue coming into office.
As a nation we get top score on all kinds of “quality of life” scales, still people complain and want to spend more on themselves, more on personal consumption, rather than sharing with those in need.
It makes me very sad. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290550.stm
I just saw the Magritte exhibit at MoMA in New York, and the quote about Ono reminded me a bit of the painting “Attempting the Impossible.”
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/rene-magritte/attempting-the-impossible-1928
GREAT – thank you, one could absolutely say that there also is something surreal in Ono’s work.