What Might David Bailey And Yoko Ono Have In Common?
If you watched the video recommended on yesterday’s entry in which Artists Catherine Batten and Tom Weld took a group of residents from a hospice to Burton Bradstock Beach in Dorset you may well have wondered what the activity had to do with art?
Performance art attempts to find its roots in the work of John Cage, at least in the USA. But Cage was himself a traveller in his youth and much influenced by work that he’d witnessed in Europe. That said Cage does have a significant place in developing art where the boundaries between music, graphics, and sculpture are blurred. Even more significantly the work of him and his contemporaries during the 1960s heralded the breaking down of the barrier between performer, and audience. One such contemporary is better known for being the widow of Beatle John Lennon, she is of course, Yoko Ono.
When one first encounters Ono’s work it’s difficult to understand exactly what she is attempting. In one of her ‘pieces’ she enters a large cloth bag with an assistant and they both undress. The audience can only see the bag moving. Once undressed the couple dress themselves again and then appear. The audience find themselves confused. What have they seen? Has something sexual taken place? What was the artist attempting to convey? The answers of course are as much a part of Ono’s art as the performance itself.
Yoko Ono also made films. The most celebrated is called ‘The Bottoms Of 365 Saints Of Our Time’ but usually referred to as ‘Bottoms’. The film came up against England’s strict censorship laws when first released in 1966. It consists of a series of shots of bare backsides, which are framed to fill the entire cinema screen one at a time. The soundtrack is simply the comments of the ‘participants’ commentating on what it is like to be filmed. Another film called ‘Up Your Legs For Ever’ was made using a moving camera that pans up a number of peoples legs until it reaches their thighs. It then starts again with a new person. The most detailed picture in the series, however, if called ‘Fly’ and follows the path of a fly as it walks around a nude model’s body.
The effect of all the films is to de-eroticise the body.
More recently photographer David Bailey has done something similar in his collection of nudes taken over a three year period. The collection is published in a book called Bailey’s Democracy
We must ask ourselves what are Ono and Bailey attempting to convey through these works? Is this fine art, or does it have a purpose?
My conclusion is that if there is a purpose to the works, it is to cause our perception of life, and possibly self to shift a notch. It’s not necessarily the aesthetic art that we are conditioned to appreciate, but its affect may be just as profound.
And it must be observed that the fact that such works may be produced, even if Yoko Ono had problems with the British Censor, is an achievement in a world where much of what people are allowed to see, or believe, continues to be restricted by political, or religious groups.
Kindly note: The bottoms used in this post were obtained from publicly accessible archives and appear as ‘fair use’ for academic discussion purposes only. They were extracted from a publicly accessible archive. Text and images available over the Internet may be subject to copyright and other intellectual rights owned by third parties.
