Half-A-Room is a 1967 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese-American multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art, which she performs in both English and Japanese and filmmaking. Singer-songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles was her third husband.
The work is made from various objects that have been cut in half and painted white. It was made with the help of Ono's second husband, Anthony Cox, and some local art students. The piece was first displayed at Ono's 'Half-A-Wind' exhibition (also called 'Yoko Plus Me' [1] ) at the Lisson Gallery in West London in 1967. At the Lisson Gallery show the objects were accompanied by a row of glass bottles on a shelf with each bottle containing the words "Half a X" for each cut up object to represent their respective missing halves. The names in bottles was suggested by John Lennon, with Ono recognizing his contribution semi-anonymously with the inclusion of the label "J.L." underneath the bottles. [2]
Anthony D. "Tony" Cox is an American film producer and art promoter. He is a former husband of Yoko Ono.
Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth, Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Ai Weiwei.
John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer, songwriter, and peace activist who co-founded the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. He and fellow member Paul McCartney formed a much-celebrated songwriting partnership. Along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the group would ascend to worldwide fame during the 1960s. After the group disbanded in 1970, Lennon pursued a solo career and started the band Plastic Ono Band with his second wife Yoko Ono.
The installation in Ono's 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao contained:
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain. Built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city of Bilbao to the Cantabrian Sea, it is one of several museums belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. It is one of the largest museums in Spain.
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Half-a-Room was shown at Ono's exhibition from 10 November 2007 to 4 February 2008 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo . [4]
The work was shown at Ono's 1967 Half-a-Wind exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in Paddington, London, from 11 October to 14 November 1967. [5] The cost of the exhibition was underwritten by John Lennon. Ono had been to see Lennon's friend Pete Shotton, who was working for The Beatles company Apple Corps, and had asked to borrow a few thousand pounds to fund the exhibition. Shotton told Ono that he "really not authorised to hand out two thousand quid like that" but upon asking Lennon, Shotton said that he "merely grunted the affirmative without further comment". Lennon later described the exhibition as all "beautifully cut in half and painted white...That was our first public appearance, but I didn't even go and see the show, I was too uptight". [1]
Peter Shotton was an English businessman and former washboard player. He is known for his long friendship with John Lennon of The Beatles. He was a member of The Quarrymen, the precursor of the Beatles, and remained close to the group during their career.
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. The line-up of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr led the band to be regarded as the foremost and most influential in history. With a sound rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock and roll, the group were integral to the evolution of pop music into an art form, and to the development of the counterculture of the 1960s. They often incorporated elements of classical music, older pop forms, and unconventional recording techniques in innovative ways, and in later years experimented with a number of musical styles ranging from pop ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As they continued to draw influences from a variety of cultural sources, their musical and lyrical sophistication grew, and they came to be seen as embodying the era's sociocultural movements.
Apple Corps Ltd is a multi-armed multimedia corporation founded in London in January 1968 by the members of the Beatles to replace their earlier company and to form a conglomerate. Its name is a pun. Its chief division is Apple Records, which was launched in the same year. Other divisions included Apple Electronics, Apple Films, Apple Publishing and Apple Retail, whose most notable venture was the short-lived Apple Boutique, on the corner of Baker Street and Paddington Street in central London. Apple's headquarters in the late 1960s was at the upper floors of 94 Baker Street, after that at 95 Wigmore Street, and subsequently at 3 Savile Row. The latter address was also known as the Apple Building, which was home to the Apple Studio.
Half-A-Room has been described by Ono as a response to her feeling at the time that "there was a half empty space in my life" as a result of the increasing estrangement of her and her second husband, Anthony Cox. Ono awoke one day and noticed that her Cox had not returned from a night out, and so the bed was half empty, and through this realised that there was "a half empty space in my life". The magazine Another Magazine wrote in 2015 that the piece "speaks to the pointlessness of material things without the human connection that gives them meaning; the result is a pure, painful representation of heartbreak that takes the breath away." [6] The emotional impact of the end of her relationship with Cox subsequently inspired Ono to make her piece Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting . [7]
In the accompanying exhibition text Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show, Ono wrote that "I think of this show as an elephant's tail. ...Life is only half a game. Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging. Somebody said I should also put half-a-person in the show. But we are halves already. It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us. It is also nice that we share the air. No matter how far apart we are, the air links us". [8] In an audio guide recorded for Ono's 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Ono said that "You see a room with little – a space between it. Instead of a room that's packed, you know, it has air between there. ...In those days, I still didn't have a life of just being alone. And then I thought, "This is a great one for a work of art to show to people that we're just half." Anyway, everything that I see here, the other half is invisible. And that other half may be something that we might see one day, but now we don't see it". [9]
John Charles Julian Lennon is an English musician and photographer, son of The Beatles member John Lennon and his first wife Cynthia.
Kenneth Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American Color Field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored by a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
Sean Taro Ono Lennon is an American musician, songwriter and actor. He is the son of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Over the course of his career, he has been a member of the bands Cibo Matto, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, The Claypool Lennon Delirium and his parents' group The Plastic Ono Band. He has released two solo albums: Into the Sun (1998) and Friendly Fire (2006).
Some Time in New York City is a studio album by John Lennon & Yoko Ono and Elephant's Memory, and paired with the live album Live Jam as a double album.
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins is the first of three experimental albums released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Apple Records. It was the result of an all-night session of musical experimentation with Yoko in John's home studio at Kenwood, while his wife, Cynthia Lennon, was on holiday in Greece. Their debut recording is known not only for its avant-garde content, but also for its cover which features the couple naked: This made the album controversial to both the public and the parent record company EMI, which refused to distribute it. In an attempt to avoid controversy, the LP record was sold in a brown paper bag, and distributed by Track and Tetragrammaton in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. Two Virgins, while failing to chart in the UK, reached number 124 in the US. The album was followed six months later by Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions.
As the Vietnam War raged in 1969, John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-Ins for Peace, one at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and one at Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth in Montreal, each of which were intended to be non-violent protests against wars, and experimental tests of new ways to promote peace. The idea is derived from a "sit-in", in which a group of protesters remains seated in front of or within an establishment until they are evicted, arrested, or their demands are met.
Season of Glass is a 1981 album by Yoko Ono, her first solo recording after the murder of her husband John Lennon. The album was released less than six months after Lennon's death and deals with it directly in songs such as "Goodbye Sadness" and "I Don't Know Why". Season of Glass reached #49 on Billboard 200 Album Chart, making it Ono's highest-charting solo album to date.
Kenwood is a house on the St. George's Hill estate, Weybridge, Surrey, England. Originally called the Brown House, it was designed by architect T.A. Allen, and built in 1913 by local builders, Love & Sons. The estate was constructed around the Weybridge Golf Club, which was designed in 1912 by Harry Colt.
Anthony Fawcett is a British writer, art critic, and a former personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 till 1970. He took over the role briefly held by Lennon's boyhood friend Peter Shotton, after Shotton's resignation from Apple Corps, and Fawcett's role was later filled by May Pang.
Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact.
Grapefruit is one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s. She has a lyrical, poetic dimension that sets her apart from the other conceptual artists. Her approach to art was only made acceptable when white men like Kosuth and Weiner came in and did virtually the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collectible.
John and Yoko: A Love Story is a 1985 British-American made-for-television biographical film that chronicles the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, beginning just before they met in 1966 and concluding with Lennon's murder in 1980. The movie was made with the co-operation of Yoko Ono, who controlled the song rights. It was directed by Sandor Stern and stars Mark McGann as Lennon and Kim Miyori as Ono.
Lennon Naked is a 2010 television biographical film focusing on the life of John Lennon between 1967 and 1971. It stars Christopher Eccleston as John Lennon and was directed by Edmund Coulthard.
S.I.R. John Winston Ono Lennon is a bootleg album of rehearsals before a concert of British musician John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, recorded in studio in late August 1972.
Wish Tree is an ongoing art installation series by Japanese artist Yoko Ono, started sometime after 1981, in which a tree native to a site is planted under her direction. Viewers are usually invited to tie a written wish to the tree except during the winter months when a tree can be more vulnerable. Locations of the piece have included New York City, St. Louis, Wish Tree for Washington, DC, San Francisco, Pasadena, and Palo Alto, California, Tokyo, Venice, Paris, Dublin, London, Exeter, England, Finland and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Apple is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
