Bottoms up Everyone knows her name, but no one knows how “good” Yoko Ono is as an artist. By Sam Taylor-Wood

FROM:

Monday February 2, 2004 The Guardian

Bottoms, by Yoko Ono ‘Here is something that you see every day in the street – but unclothed.’ Bottoms, by Yoko Ono. Photo: Lenono PhotoArchive I first encountered Yoko Ono’s work at a big exhibition at the Riverside Gallery in London. It was some time in the late-1980s, when I was at art college. I liked her work immediately, because it was beyond any genre or categories I had seen before. Everything in the exhibition felt disparate; nothing seemed to connect it aesthetically. And yet as you looked closer, you realized there were connections, slight ones: everything was linked by intangible ideas.

At that time I had been studying sculpture but was thinking about photography and film, and wondering whether they were part of the art world. And here was someone who seemed to be answering my questions – or beginning to, at least.

Here’s another profound piece of artwork by Yoko where you have to hammer a nail into that wooden whatever.

Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is “Cut Piece”, 1964 as a protest for peace, during which she sat on stage invited the audience to use scissors to cut off her clothing until she was naked. Ono performed this piece in Tokyo as well as London, garnering drastically different attention.