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CHAPTER FOUR Between Material and Matrix Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and the Unmaking of Collage All my works in the other ‹elds have an “Event bent” so to speak. People ask me why I call some works Event and others not. They also ask me why I do not call my Events, Happenings. —Yoko Ono, “To the Wesleyan People” Introduction:Getting toYES A Ceiling Painting so small that a magnifying glass was necessary to decipher its content: this is what awaited John Lennon when in November 1966 he climbed the ladder placed beneath the painting that was mounted to the ceiling of the Indica Gallery in London. That journey up the ladder was Lennon’s ‹rst introduction to the work of Yoko Ono, whom he also met for the ‹rst time that evening. It’s hard to say whether Lennon was aware of the nihilism traditionally associated with the historical avant-garde, but when he scrutinized the painting with the magnifying glass attached by chain to its frame, he was relieved to discover “YES” minutely inscribed on the otherwise blank canvas. “It’s a great relief ,” he later told Jann Wenner, “when you get up the ladder and it doesn’t say no or fuck you; it says YES.”1 Never mind the fact that Lennon overlooked the semiotic conundrum that Ono created by selecting a word as an object of painterly representation or that he overlooked the dialogue between Eastern and Western aesthetics that was summoned by the piece’s allusion to calligraphy. Never mind that he disregarded the ladder’s playful, critical allusion to high and low art or that he ignored his own re›ection in the Plexiglas covering the canvas. Never mind that he overlooked how the magnifying glass attached to the frame of the painting not only transformed the painting into a three-dimensional collage 93 but also, together with the ladder beneath the canvas and the re›ections on the Plexiglas across it, actually structured a collage event as well—a performance event—since it required the spectator’s action, the spectator ’s literal and ‹gurative re›ection and, of course, the spectator’s interpretation to realize the canvas’s multivalent semantic potential. However limited Lennon’s initial grasp of the subtleties of the piece called Ceiling Painting (YES Painting) might have been—and we really don’t know how limited his grasp actually was—his introduction to Ono’s work strikingly focused precisely on an af‹rmation that critics have gradually recognized as a crucial tenet of Ono’s aesthetics. Given the close association that Ono developed with John Cage in the early 1950s, it is tempting to ‹nd in her “YES” an echo of Cage’s de‹nition of art as “an af‹rmation of life,” the life that he famously found to be “so excellent,”2 and to cite Ceiling Painting (YES Painting) as yet another example of the sweeping in›uence that Cage exercised across the landscape of America’s postwar avant-garde. But before yielding, it is worth pausing to better understand not just what this temptation entails but what it perpetuates. Above all, it perpetuates the questionable tendency of translating the enormous critical (and well-deserved) attention that Cage has received over the years into credit for breaking a path that, while perhaps running parallel to his own, was nonetheless distinct in the contours of af‹rmation that it facilitated. For if there is a lesson to be learned from Lennon’s ascent to the ceiling of the Indica Gallery, it is that getting to “YES” is only as signi‹cant as the questions motivating the search in the ‹rst place. Indeed, Joan Rothfuss has suggested that Ceiling Painting is “reminiscent of those stories in which a man climbs a mountain to ask a monk the meaning of life, but for all his arduous effort receives an indecipherable reply.”3 The subtext of this parable, if we might venture into the obvious, is that the problem lies not with the monk’s answer but with the traveler’s question, and the wiser traveler learns to reformulate the question to match the answer that she encountered by surprise . This is another way of saying that once the relief at having discovered “YES” subsides, it behooves us to ask ourselves what we’ve just delighted in af‹rming. Not only do such questions underscore the fact that af‹rmation is never unmediated; they also remind us that while the...

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