Y E S Yoko Ono [Hardcover]

Alexandra Munroe (Author), Yoko Ono (Author), Jon Hendricks (Author), Bruce Altshuler (Author), David A. Ross (Author), Jann S. Wenner (Author), Kevin C. Concannon (Author), Reiko Tomii (Author), Murray Sayle (Author), Edward M. Gomez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2000

"Yes Yoko Ono" accompanies the first major museum retrospective of the work of this pioneering avant-garde artist. In her prolific 40-year career, Ono has embraced a wide range of mediums, defying traditional boundaries and creating new forms of artistic expression. This volume is the first comprehensive art book devoted to her challenging and influential work.

Yoko Ono has created revolutionary forms of music, film, and the visual arts since the 1960s, when she emerged as an avant-garde force in New York, Tokyo, and London. This richly illustrated book includes essays by eminent international scholars and critics that not only explore Ono's life and career, including her contributions to the Fluxus movement and Conceptual art, but also enrich our understanding of her complex role as artist, filmmaker, poet, composer, performance artist, activist, and rock star. An anthology of Ono's writings and an illustrated chronology further mark this book as the most extensive survey ever published on the art and life of Yoko Ono.

The book includes a CD with new music by Yoko Ono, performed by Ono, her son Sean Lennon, and others.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Don't be fooled by the metallic cover: although this extensively documented book finally gives Yoko Ono her due as a protean conceptual and performing artist, YES Yoko Ono is no celebrity bio. It is actually a rigorous analysis--by experts in modern Japanese and contemporary Western art, performance, video, and music--of the innovative approaches that made Ono a seminal avant-garde figure in the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and continued to influence her work during the next three decades.

Ono was born in 1933 in Japan to a wealthy and pedigreed family. In her early work, the pan-artistic classical Japanese approach to culture mingles with her Zen-like search for moments of concentrated sensory experience and the anti-heroic stance of the young American artists she would meet in New York upon her arrival (with her first husband, a composer) in 1956. Also significant was her sense of herself as an outsider. She spent her early childhood in the U.S. with her family, only to be snubbed by Japanese schoolmates on her return.

In Secret Piece, from 1953, Ono wrote a musical score consisting of nothing but two half-notes in the bass line and a scribbled notation: "With the accompaniment of birds singing at dawn." It became one of the brilliantly inventive instructions for making art pieces in her 1964 book, Grapefruit, an early conceptual work. Since those heady days, she has continued to explore the possibilities, stumbling sometimes (the inert bronze sculptures of the '80s) but never abandoning her fascination with elemental feeling and observation.

YES Yoko Ono accompanies an exhibition at the Japan Society Gallery in New York (October 18, 2000, through January 14, 2001) that will travel to numerous venues in North America and Asia, beginning with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. --Cathy Curtis

From Booklist

Some, tongue-not-so-firmly-in-cheek, claim that before Yoko Ono met John Lennon, she was an obscure artist, hanging out on the fringes of the New York art world in the early '60s. Still others think of Ono with Lennon only, and their point of reference will be her work as an antiwar activist and then as a composer. But for each of the aforementioned guises one impression is ever present and can be summed up in one word--dilettante. Now comes this stunning catalog of the Ono YES exhibition that opened at the Japan Society Gallery in October and will travel to several venues for the next two years. The exhibition displays Ono's early conceptual paintings and objects, documentary photographs covering her early concert and performance work from 1961, photographs of Ono and Lennon's happenings, and her recent efforts to transform much of her early, ephemeral works into bronze. Japanese art historian Munroe is the curator and provides the introductory essay to the work of a well-trained and productive artist. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810945878
• ISBN-13: 978-0810945876
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 10.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book about an amazing artist of our times, March 15, 2005

By 

Keri "Librarian" (Kentucky, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Y E S Yoko Ono (Hardcover)

This book is wonderfully informative about Yoko and her art. If you want to open your mind and stop believing the racist and sexist garbage the media has shoveled out about her (and about any woman who dares be anything but a worshipping dormat for men- especially any Asian woman) this is absolute a must read book. Yoko was the first Asian woman who dared in the West to publically be a Feminist. She has inspired a whole generation of women in Japan to publically stand up for their rights. She is also an inspiration to many women in the West as well, she was an equal partner in her marriage with John, both their careers were of equal weight. She and John inspired people to stand up and protest for peace, and Yoko continues this activism. She is respected by both Israelis and Palestinians for her peace activism, through her art. She also uses her art to speak out in favor of feminism, In the 80's she also began to do art activism in support of Gay and Lesbian rights. The media critics are finally beginning to open their eyes past the racist and sexist stereotypes Yoko has been the victim of. This book goes a long way toward informing readers of the real Yoko Ono and her amazing range of artistic talent, intelligence and humanitarianism. She will someday be called one of the greatest talents and visionaries of our times. Read this book and find out why.

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encyclopedia of Ono!, October 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Y E S Yoko Ono (Hardcover)

A thousand words are not enough and too many. Of the hundreds of art books I've bought, borrowed or stolen, this is the most elegant and *useful* one I've ever had. Munroe writes with economy and humor in language that crosses over boundaries between academia and the language of the gallery -- and everyone else who has wondered what sort of a book would attempt to encompass this wholly original and much maligned multimedia artist. This is the book to have!

And the CD *rocks*. I suspected that was Sean doing some of the background vocals and certainly the bass. There are no credits in the book or on the CD itself. I wonder if that was deliberate.

Buy this book. If you want your kids to know about modern art, read it to them like bedtime stories. The essays are wonderful. The photos and other reproductions of Ono's prodigious works of commercial and fine art showcase her innate sensitivity with typography as demonstrated in Grapefruit and even before that. We have treasured stills from her films, with and without her husband. And thrillingly, CLEANING PIECE, first installed in the Jerusalem Museum this year, is beautifully photographed. Yoko has arrived back at herself, and YES is the best autobiography we could have wished for. Brava Yoko Ono!

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exquisite and thorough "art book" of a diverse artist, November 7, 2000

By 

Thomas Lapins (Orlando, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Y E S Yoko Ono (Hardcover)

If you like Yoko Ono as an artist, poet, musician or as an individual you will find this book priceless. This book covers all the avenues in which Ono created and expressed herself. "Yes Yoko Ono" accomplishes in book form what "OnoBox" achieved on disc (an extensive collection of an extraordinary woman and artist.) The reviews, letters and material covered all provide the reader with an insightful and intelligent look at not only Yoko Ono but, also, into the darkly luminous catacombs of the creative force behind this woman. This book is multi-layered with information and photographs that will need to be read and read again and again. This will be a well in which I draw from for years to come. A book I will keep near my bed for late night readings. As Yoko grows older she reminds me more and more of Georgia O'Keeffe, another extraordinary woman and artist. I truly believe that the history books will one day recognize Ono as being as significant as the Beatles and Dylan were to our culture, except that Ono was a more diversified and cutting edge artist and thinker than her contemporaries.