Retrospective
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The London museum is dedicating a luminous retrospective to the visual artist, a welcome spotlight on the work of this pioneer of performance, long caricatured and reduced to her Beatles husband.
“Have you seen the Yoko Ono exhibition?” “No, but I intend to,” assures a passer-by in 1971, in a short film type of street interview. Another, confused, unfortunately did not “not found” in the corridors of MoMA. And for good reason, contrary to what the advertising for the «One Woman Show» by Yoko Ono published in the pages of Village Voicethe exhibition in question simply did not exist. At the time, the New York museum did not think much of the Japanese artist. She did not give up, however, turning this ostracism to her advantage and into an artistic gesture, buying an insert in the press and cultivating the myth of this imaginary exhibition where she would have orchestrated a noisy release of flies soaked in perfume in the corridors of the museum to signify, despite everything, her presence, discreet, flowery, talkative and, already, subversive.
Feminist, pacifist, environmentalist
It was not until 2012 that the New York museum offered an exhibition to Yoko Ono. It limited it to the decade 1960-1971 preceding the self-proclaimed exhibition. In France, it was the MAC Lyon in 2015 which celebrated in the wake, “and in the long term”, the ever-fertile productivity of the woman who for so long struggled to be separated from the spectre of John Lennon, whose companion she was between 1968 and 1980, the date of his assassination.
The retrospect
