Transmodern Yoko: a retrospective organized by New York's Japan Society Gallery, now touring, maps out Yoko Ono 40-year oeuvre of conceptual instruction pieces, objects, installations, performances, films, music and more

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

--Lawrence Weiner, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," 1969

At the time I don't think the public liked Yoko very much ... It may have been because of the press, but I also think because of the avant-garde stuff. The public just didn't understand it, and I tend to find that if you don't understand something you're likely to be prejudiced against it.

--Neil Aspinall, The Beatles Anthology, 2000

In the third room of Yoko Ono's retrospective exhibition at the Japan Society in New York was a small Plexiglas case containing four glass keys. The piece, dated 1966, is titled Glass Keys to Open the Skies. Rhetorically, the work represents several impossibilities at once: that an elemental openness like the sky could be further opened, that a mechanism for doing this might exist, and that a glass key could instrumentalize crossing such a threshold. For Ono, the range of questions this concept triggers is what makes the keys a work of art. What she is reaching for is mystery, not absurdity. Her pieces require a viewer's belief that the intangible about which she speaks is more than a personal imaginative act. She wants to offer a fresh source of creative possibilities that feel poetically transpersonal; her art is not just about herself but also about her vision of a collective universe. Despite the passage of almost 40 years, Ono's work still seems radical, beautiful and not easy to characterize. Transmodern? Only a new word may fit what she was and is trying to do.

In contrast to so much contemporary art, the glass keys carry no irony and no self-conscious criticality. According to Ono herself, writing in 1988, they are reminiscent of the times in which they were made. "The air definitely had a special glimmer then. We were breathless from the pride and joy of being alive. I remember ... carrying a glass key to open the sky." As plainly as these words embody an imaginative grandiosity that was a common element in '60s counterculture, they also reflect Ono's basic verbal theatricality. Behind this lies a broader cultural platform on which the piece stands: her traditions, both Eastern and Western. Ono's conceptual and performative gestures are hybrids, as dependent on Beat strategies and Japanese esthetics as they are self-consciously futuristic. This hybridity is characteristic of Fluxus, the only artists' group with which she is identified, described in the 1965 Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas, her friend and the movement's founder, as "the fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gag, children's games, and Duchamp."

Oho began her work as an artist in the ambience of postwar Beat culture, a fusion of Japanese Buddhism and European existentialism that was as prevalent in Japan as in New York City. Ono had the cultural background, the intentions and the survival money to step meaningfully into a life of art-making in the mid '50s--if she was willing to abandon the traditional role of becoming a well-to-do businessman's wife. The daughter of a wealthy banker and a mother of aristocratic birth, she spent half her childhood in America, attended an elite school in Japan, studied voice and declared her interest in composing as a teenager, and for a year was the first female student in the philosophy department at Gakushuin University, before she and her family went again to America. At Sarah Lawrence, she studied music and began writing the poetry that would soon be transformed into her first instruction pieces, before dropping out in 1955 to marry Toshi Ichiyanagi, a dedicated avant-garde pianist and a student of composer John Cage. The couple moved to Manhattan, and Ono's downtown loft on Chambers Street became an active performance space by the early '60s, hosting such choreographers and artists as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, La Monte Young, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer. (Ono and Ichiyanagi split permanently in 1963, while living in Japan.)

What gave Beat culture its gravitas was the memory of the Second World War and its aftermath, from the Holocaust to the Bomb. Ono's own memories of having struggled to obtain food for herself and her brother during her wartime evacuation to a Japanese country village were vital, she has said, in informing her sense that existence itself is provisional and vulnerable. These feelings were reinforced by the existentialism she imbibed in her philosophy studies. According to Webster's Third International Dictionary, existentialism holds that "human existence is not exhaustively describable or understandable in either scientific or logical terms and relies upon a phenomenological approach that emphasizes the critical analysis of borderline situations in man's life...." In Ono's emerging esthetics, existentialism gave her a philosophy

that justified her address of borderline situations. And her chosen identity as an artist offered her a license to create them.

Fluxus, with Ono as a founding member, drew together in the early 1960s as an artists' collective supporting the openness of an artist's choice to act. The key issue was possibility. Artists were enfranchised to make anything, anywhere, with whatever means they might conceive. The most radical notion was that the concept of an art work was an art work in itself. Ono's presence in Fluxus reflected her preexisting agreement with its principles.