Yoko's Avant-Garde, McCloud's Comic

Studying The Beatles and learning about John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono, allowed me to compare Yoko's avant-garde artwork to thoughts from McCLoud and McLuhan.
Yoko Ono pushed the boundaries of art, film, music and theatre media, through her interactive conceptual events, which required the viewers' participation, forcing them to get involved in her artwork. We learn from her online biography that Yoko's "most famous piece was the 'cut piece' staged in 1964, where the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing until she was naked, an abstract commentary on discarding materialism." Creating this abstract art, Yoko clearly demonstrates McCloud’s theory of our culture, and why we're "inthralled to the simplified reality...By stripping down an image to it's essential 'meaning' an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't" (McCloud 30).
The cartoon, similar to Yoko's art, "is a vacuum into which your identity and awareness are pulled...an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel into another realm" (McCloud 36). Her artwork in the "This Is Not Here" exhibition in the early 70's included a living room completely painted white with various objects: an armchair, grandfather clock, desk, television set, even an apple, cut completely in half (Celebrity Websites, paragraph 4). The viewer must complete the scenario with a reference memory of the whole object. McCloud describes this phenomenon of observing the parts, but perceiving the whole, as closure. "In our daily lives we often commit closure, mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience...closure are deliberate inventions of storytellers to produce suspense or to challenge audiences" (McCloud 63).
Yoko, like the comics creator, "asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and the unseen. The visible and the invisible" (McCloud 92). Both McCloud and Yoko share the belief that "Participation is a powerful force in any medium," and have realized the "importance of allowing viewers to use their imaginations" (McCloud 69). "The idea that 'less is more' has real practical implications...The mastery of any medium using minimal elements has long been considered a noble aspiration" (McCloud 83).

Yoko's art, relates to McLuhan's postulation of hot and cool media, embracing a "cool" experience. Her artwork requires us to look within ourselves and fill in or complete the image. McLuhan described in an interview with Playboy the idea of hot media excluding the audience, and cool media requiring participation, as one of the reasons "why the medium is the message, rather than the content; it is the participatory nature...itself that is important, rather than the content of the particular...image that is being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins" (McLuhan interview).


The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." 1994. Playboy Magazine. 7 Sept. 2007

Celebrity-websites.com. Love Earth Network. 31 Oct. 2007.