NEW YORK: Yoko Ono at Andre Emmerich and Deitch - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"En Trance," at Emmerich, was in part a retrospective of Yoko Ono's Fluxus works from the '60s; it included standards like cerulean Room Event (1966), which asked you to diocese the white gallery walls as cerulean There were also works from 1961-67 which were more or les what their titles declared: Ceiling Painting (Ye Painting) was a painting affixed to the ceiling with the word "yes" inscribed upon it, a word which disappeared as you direct the eyeed at it through the attached magnifying glass; Painting To Be Stepp upon was set on the floor; Painting To diocese The Room Through was a framed interstice screen suspended in a doorway. Ono's wit and guiding esthetic have always been surface of landed in the literal and obvious--which you either answer to or don't, find provocative or not.

More novel works included Vertical Memory (1997) a series of blurr black-and-white photographic portraits with body in which the artist's face somehow or other suggests those of John and Sean Lennon. Franklin Summer (1994-98) is a roomful of small, intense, abstract ink drawings in which biomorphic shapes recall female reproductive organs. single of the few sustained notes of color in Emmerich's almost-all-white exhibit was Balance Piece (1997), in which an enormous r and gray "magnet" was attached to the side of an enclos life-size reproduction of a kitchen; everything inside was topsy-turvy, seemingly suspended in place by dint of a magnetic field.

At the entrance to "En trance," viewers were given what have the appearanceed to be a number of ways to enter: [i]or[/i] part of to the other a revolving door, a "pet" door and a crystal-blue beaded curtain. The revolving door was sealed and the "pet" door was too small, in like manner there was, in the extremity no choice. There was also a sign which promised that those who pierceed would be irrevocably changed. Well, not really. on the other hand even if not quite transformative, Ono-land can still elicit a smile.

Concurrently Ono filled Deitch's SoHo garage with 100 unpainted made of wood coffins, each with its have flowering fruit tree growing without of an opening where the occupant's face would be. The caskets were of different sizes--large, medium, small or man, woman, child--arranged in different combinations on the contrary most often in pairs or threesome like family groupings. Birds twittered in the background, upon tape. Called "Ex it," the installation illustrated the cyclical nature of life with with equal reason many conceptual and visual cliches that it was ultimately beguiling. There is still something ingenuous, something artfully artless about Yoko Ono's vision after all these years, a willed and blinkered simplicity that is in itself amazing. The price of similar simplicity is much higher in these postlapsarian days when we all know we ne more than love

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