" Yes Yoko Ono "
At the MIT List Visual Arts Center through January 6.
" Ellen Gallagher: Watery Ecstatic "
At the Institute of Contemporary Art through December 31.

My favorite piece in Yoko Ono’s chock-full new exhibition at MIT’s List Gallery is a playful plexiglass maze called Amaze, 1971 that challenges your visual perception as well as your trust in the world as you see it. The boundaries that you use to orient yourself have been rendered virtually invisible, so you’re forced to navigate using your outstretched arms and the wavy reflections in the plexiglass. Every so often, the klonk of someone bumping into a misperceived wall adds to the many weird noises emanating from this exhibition.

Yoko Ono is a serious artist, and this well-organized, scholarly retrospective of her work reveals and explores her innovative contributions to the post-war international avant-garde. It’s also uncannily prescient, since Ono’s own work and her collaborations with John Lennon have contributed to our vocabulary of peace and protest. Although this show has been traveling since it opened at the Japan Society in New York last fall, " Imagine " and " War Is Over! " are suddenly being sung again, and this chance to think about the power of language and love to effect social transformation is timely, to say the least.

Speaking in Cambridge before the show’s opening, Ono discussed her work, the current political climate, and her own history. She is a small woman, and she looked dignified in a black jacket with shoulder epaulets and a jeweled American flag pin that she explained she had bought as a present for John Lennon in 1975, when he received his green card. Raised between Japan and the United States during the rise of World War II, Ono found that her experience in wartime Japan contributed to her commitment to peace. In New York after the war, she was drawn to the avant-garde art community. At that time, non-Western ideas about finding beauty and art in everyday existence and chance events were inspiring new forms of artistic expression, and she became involved with a group of artists who formed under the name of Fluxus.

Ono believes in the oneness of the world, and she trusts in the flow of ideas to and through her. When an apparent similarity between her own work and the spontaneous memorials that have recently appeared throughout Lower Manhattan was pointed out, she smiled and talked about another instance of connectedness between her own work and world events, saying, " I just found out that it was on August 11 that I wrote a liner note for my new CD, which referred to an experience I had in Japan after the Second World War. While I was writing, I thought to myself, why am I writing about war, when it’s such a peaceful time, and has been peaceful for so long. Then, sadly, the world changed for us. " But the artist also works very playfully, with a sharp wit. Asked about the importance of humor in her art, she replied, " When somebody is in pain . . . you can delve into it, or just switch the channel. And you can do that. We can all laugh together. In a situation like this, we almost feel guilty about it, but I think it is very important. "

Words are a powerful component of Ono’s art, and significant early works take the form of poetic written instructions typed on small cards, hand-lettered on paper, or written directly on walls. Her use of language as art, rather than simply in art, is one of her pioneering contributions to conceptual art, which emphasizes ideas rather than objects. Also groundbreaking is her film documentation of Cut Piece, which she performed at Carnegie Hall in 1964, inviting members of the audience to come up on stage and cut off her clothing while she sat silently on stage. The artist’s vulnerability is clear — you can sense her heart beating faster as her clothes are slowly and deliberately cut away — but so is the essential immutability of the self. The feminist aspects of this piece are apparent, as is its significance in the development of performance art. It remains a moving work.

Ono offers viewers a chance to participate in virtually everything she does — her art often stresses things that are unfinished or missing, inviting you to complete it in your own way. Here you can play chess on an all-white chess board, fill a tree with your wishes, and move stones to express joy or sorrow. Or simply imagine doing these things. In her work from the early 1960s to the present, Ono has played an influential role in originating forms of avant-garde art, music, film, and performance, but she has not been widely recognized for her contribution. Perhaps this MIT show will change that.

The ICA feels brightly open-ended as you enter " Watery Ecstatic, " an exhibition featuring paintings and drawings by Ellen Gallagher, a young artist whose trajectory to art-world fame began in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, from which she graduated in 1992. Gallagher caught the art world’s attention with her idiosyncratic vocabulary of doodly hotdog-bun-shaped lips and googly eyes arrayed across canvases covered with the blue-lined pages of children’s penmanship-exercise books. The source of these images in stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans in black minstrel shows, their disembodied state and repeated, serial, depiction, brought Gallagher to the forefront of art’s dialogue on race, gender, and abstraction. And " Watery Ecstatic " confirms that she’s pursuing this dialogue with increasing assurance and complexity.

The illusion of bright light emanating from the ground-floor gallery is an indication of how subtle Gallagher’s paintings appear from a distance. Most of these paintings are what a Caucasian person would call flesh-colored, with the exception of one warm, watery pink canvas. The paintings explore Gallagher’s multifaceted use of personal iconography: besides the lips and eyes, we find a little mermaid-type figure, with her blond hair in a flip and her pink tongue sticking out, flitting across the stream of images and marks delineated by the copybook paper. The lines of the cheap paper morph into lanes on a highway, or perhaps roils of waves on a long journey through a suggested landscape. But for all the movement, these works remain strangely mute, offering no real access. It is as if they were looking at you. Perhaps you are the landscape they are traveling through.

It was upstairs that, for me, Gallagher’s work started to click, and to speak. The series of eight drawings after which this exhibit is titled are practically white-on-white, the artist effecting many of her marks by slashing into paper and gluing cutout forms and words onto it. Each one seems to draw a sharper bead on a particular aspect of Gallagher’s terrain — which, as it begins to grow clear, is the landscape of dreams and the body, of history and the collective unconscious. One drawing sets out an illustrated list of a variety of wig styles marketed to African-American women. Afro-Swirly, Curly Cascade, and Marie Antoinette promise transformation, or else a place to hide. Gallagher says that for her, the wigs refer to the fugitive nature of race and identity. The marks on the paper, like scars on the skin, are deep and often ugly, the cutouts clumsy and often dirty. Are they childlike, like the lined paper Gallagher is so closely identified with? Everything is open to interpretation, but beware: the arena the artist opens up is vast, murky, and treacherous.

In another drawing, Gallagher has arranged the hairdos and their names around the edges of a land mass, adding the association of navigation and geography into her mix. These wigs become references to the disembodied African body, the dark journey of the Middle Passage. Several other works involve a big fish and many small heads and bits of wigs and land. Gallagher says she has been dreaming of a large fish that is trying to eat her. Moby Dick? Jonah’s whale? These drawings grow richer and more elegant as the full nightmare of the imagery sinks in and the subtlety of the white-on-white becomes suffused with the darkness of their content.

In the midst of so many white and pale-colored works, the pieces that hold the center of attention are two large, entirely black paintings. These works are glossy and imposing, easily read from a distance, yet up close you can see they are made up of countless tiny cut forms, like raised welts or amœbas arranged on a constantly shifting grid. They paintings act like a black hole in the exhibition, exerting their pull on many aspects of Gallagher’s iconography. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop (name taken from a Parliament Funkadelic song from the 1970s) reveals the image of an African-American woman’s face as an iconic circle built up in the center of the canvas. Her hair looks natural, and she is serene, like the moon reflected on a black sea, a repository for much information and much pain, but with a quiet wisdom.

Issue Date: October 25-31, 2001