Wow! eBook
Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono
Author(s): Lisa Carver (Author)
- Publisher: Backbeat
- Publication Date: August 1, 2012
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 168 pages
- ISBN-10: 161713094X
- ISBN-13: 9781617130946
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
More than a biography, this book is a brilliant and marathon reckoning with Yoko Ono s work and its impact across generations. Assessing Ono s prolific career on its own terms, Carver reaches deep into the culture itself and our bone-deep aversion to paradox, freedom, and change. As Carver observes, Yoko is like LSD. Except an acid trip lasts maybe twelve hours. Yoko goes on and on. Reading Lisa Carver is always one of the greatest pleasures. She s brilliant of course, but more important, she never stops seeking and telling the truth. Chris Kraus, author of Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, Where Art Belongs, and Summer of Hate –Chris Kraus, author of Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, Where Art Belongs, and Summer of Hate
Lisa Carver can reveal surprising depths in Duran Duran lyrics, so imagine what she can do with a subject as rich as Yoko Ono. This book is a searching, brave, weird, great, historically broad, and highly personal interpretation of one of the most confounding artists of the last sixty years. Zoe Zolbrod, author of Currency and contributor to The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown –Zoe Zolbrod, author of Currency and contributor to The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown
What the book expertly lays bare is that Ono has had, and still gets, a particularly tough ride from the general public, and whilst she still occasionally does shoot herself in the foot it’s really about time that the world cut her some slack. –Total Music Book Reviews
Lisa Carver can reveal surprising depths in Duran Duran lyrics, so imagine what she can do with a subject as rich as Yoko Ono. This book is a searching, brave, weird, great, historically broad, and highly personal interpretation of one of the most confounding artists of the last sixty years. Zoe Zolbrod, author of Currency and contributor to The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown –Zoe Zolbrod, author of Currency and contributor to The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown
