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Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono's relationship and partnership with John Lennon have given her access and opportunities she might never have achieved on her own, but her status as pop icon has largely obscured her own achievements as an artist. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of filmmaking. Between 1966 and 1971, Ono made substantial contributions to avant-garde cinema, most of which are now a vague memory, even for those generally cognizant of developments in this field. With a few exceptions, her films have been out of circulation for years, but fortunately this situation seems to be changing: in the spring of 1989 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a film retrospective along with a small show of objectseighties versions of conceptual objects Ono had exhibited in 1966 and 1967and the American Federation of Arts re-released Ono's films in the spring of 1991.
Except as a film-goer, Ono was not involved with film until the 1960s, though by the time she began to make her own films, she was an established artist. At the end of the fifties, after studying poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College, she became part of a circle of avant-garde musicians (including John Cage and Merce Cunningham): in fact the "Chambers Street Series," an influential concert series organized by LaMonte Young, was held at Ono's loft at 112 Chambers. Ono's activities in music led to her first public concert,
A Grapefruit in the World of Park
(at the Village Gate, 1961) and later that same year to an evening of performance events at Carnegie Hall, including
A Piece for Strawberries and Violins
in which Yvonne Rainer stood up and sat down before a table stacked with dishes for ten minutes, then smashed the dishes "ac-