Reaching Out with No Hands

Reconsidering Yoko Ono

Lisa Carver

• Publisher: Backbeat
• Year: 2012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781617134630
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

John Lennon once described her as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Many people are aware of her art, and her music has always split crowds, from her caterwauling earliest work to her later dance numbers, but how many people have looked at Yoko Ono's decades-spanning career and varied work in total and asked the simple question, "Is it any good?"

From her earliest work with the Fluxus group and especially her relationship with John Cage, through her enigmatic pop happenings (where she met John Lennon), her experimental films, cryptic books, conceptual art, and her long recording career that has vacillated between avant-garde noise and proto-new wave, earning the admiration of other artists while generally confusing the public at large who often sees her only in the role of the widow Lennon, Reaching Out with No Hands is the first serious, critical, wide-ranging look at Yoko Ono the artist and musician.

A must-read for art and music fans interested in going beyond the stereotyped observations of Yoko as a Lennon hanger-on or inconsequential avant noisemaker.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Your Very Name, a Curse
• What Is Not Yoko Ono
• Some Pieces
• There Were Fights
• Pretty
• Despair and Loneliness, or, What It Felt Like to Be an Asian Woman Trying to Make Art and Make Her Way in America, 1960
• Fluxus
• Devil’s Advocate…Except She’d Probably Argue with Him, Too
• Burning
• Cut
• Bag
• To Lose Is to Save
• Earthquake Baby
• Yoko Said…
• The $3000 Apple
• Yoko and the Blues
• Nail
• What Is the Sound of No Hands Clapping?
• Just Before the Silence
• John Backed Her Up When She Said There Was Good in Hitler and Every Living Thing
• East and West
• What a Mother Should Be
• What a Good Voice Hides
• Proof
• But Is It Good?
• Surprise!
• Like What Your Elbow or Knee Feels Like When You’re Thrown Off a Motorcycle and Slide Ten Feet
• Messing Up the Old Rockers, Shaking Up the Old Rock
• Live Peace in Toronto, 1969
• Chuck Berry Was Shocked
• Bastard
• Men
• John Ripped Her Off!
• A Film Called Rape
• Equal Opportunity
• Out
• Lonely
• Money
• A Born Widow
• Girlfriend
• People As Art
• Monster
• What a Stepmother Should Be
• Still Making People Mad After All These Years
• Remember
• Life Is Beautiful
• I Just Don’t Know What to Say About This
• Wishing’s for Suckers
• Ambassador of Autism
• Selected Bibliography