BASTET
by Yoko Ono
Several cat sculptures called 'Bastet' created by artist Yoko Ono are shown at Kunsthalle Bielefeld. EFE/Oliver Krato.
------------------------------------------------
BASTET
by Yoko Ono, June 1996
Suddenly one morning, 100 cats landed in my mind. The image was specific, the posture, the size and the colors. They all had large gleaming phosphorus eyes, come in groups of nice with one on the centerfront, and seemed to be demanding to be materialized. On one hand, I felt like a fool. I regarded myself an intellectual. I was not about to materialize the cats as my work. But on the other hand, I thought, wasn’t that what I was precisely against – to allow my petty intellectual snobbery to block the marvellous flight that art allows us to make? Anyway, to go with the flow and materialize these cats seemed to be the most natural thing to do at the time, and I followed it. I shaped the cats after the one Egyptian cat which permantly looked over the Strawberryfields from our white room in Dakota.
Then there was a question of what to call them, Usually, I had no difficulty in titling my work since the physical part if the entities seemed to be merely an instrument to enact the concept I expressed in the title. But I didn’t know what to call these cats since I only had a vague clue of what they were. It was a totally new game for me. I knew that they were some kind of carriers of a message that descended on us. Should I call them “Transmitters”? That sounded more like parts of electric gadgets. How about “Descendents?” That sounded like a TV soap opera following “Dynasty?” Not only was I embarrassed tat I could not find a title for them, but I felt worse that I materialized something and I didn’t what it was about. Finally, exasperated, I called a friend in New York. “I don’t have my Webster Dictionary here. Could you look up some words for these cats? They’re some kind of messengers – from far away – I don’ know from where tough. Could be from Atlantis or something – or another planet – from way back is hat I’m getting.” It was interesting that my mind kept playing tricks even at that point. Though I already shaped the cats after the Egyptian cat, somehow I didn’t think Egypt. I thought Atlantis. That was my gut feeling; Atlantis or another planet. Five minutes later, my friends called and said that he also did not have a Webster Dictionary at hand and instead he had looked into a theosophical dictionary. A word jumped into his eye from the first page he opened. The work was BUBABSTE and it followed with the explanation.
“A city in Egypt which was sacred to the cats, and where was their principal shrine. Many hundreds of thousands of cats were embalmed and buried in the grottoes of Beniassan-el Amar. The cat being a symbol of the moon was sacred o Isis, her goddess. It sees in the dark and its eyes have phosphorescent lustre, which frightens the night-birds of evil omen. The cat was also sacred to BAST and thence called (BASTET) the destroyer of the Sun’s enemies.”
“Oh dear. If you didn’t know that I had materialized the cats before reading this information about Bastet you would think that I had made the cats according to what was said here, wouldn’t you?” My friend agreed. So what did this mean? I still wasn’t sure. Maybe my mind was not playing tricks after all. Maybe Egypt had something to do with Atlantis and the Space.
The inspiration and materialization of Bastet happened in parallel to my initial thought and the performance of hammering nails in a cross in public. On hindsight, I think Bastet may have come to me as my protection. Somehow I know that the two events are connected, that unless I have decided to hammer a nail in the cross, Bastet would not have come to me.
y.o. June 1990
------------------------------------------------
In Egyptian mythology, Bastet or Bast was a solar deity and a goddess of fertility and protector of pregnant women. She also has power over solar eclipses. Bastet was represented as early as the Second Dynasty of the Old Kingdom as a woman with a feline head. Domestic cat-headed Bastet, as she appears in the Middle Kingdom, is a content goddess; lioness-headed Bastet is potentially dangerous.
She is also considered by some to be another aspect of Sekhmet. Her cult was centered in Bubastis. After the period of Hellenistic civilization, Bastet became a lunar deity whom the Greeks associated with their Artemis. She was considered the daughter of Isis and Osiris, and was associated with Hathor. She was the wife of Ptah, with whom she was the mother of Nefertum and Mihos. She was also the patron goddess of cats. Mummified cats were dedicated in her honor.
------------------------------------------------
IELEFELD, GERMANY.-Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi.
On her mother’s side, Ono is a member of one of Japan’s most respected families, and so, as a child, she attended a school for members of the Japanese imperial family. Her father, who originally intended to be a pianist before he ultimately became a leading Japanese banker, insisted she take piano and voice lessons at an early age. Her parents and relatives acknowledged that Yoko had a strong will and an irrepressible desire for freedom. The lengthiest publication on the artist to date says that her main intention was “to think the unthinkable—and then do it.” After beginning a relationship with John Lennon in 1967, Ono began working on no less an ambition than to bring inner peace to different peoples. Representing one of her chief messages, her work Imagine Peace will be presented in front of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle.
As a young artist, Ono left New York in the early nineteen-sixties in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In 1962 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in several editions. Some of the works in it date back to 1953. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she has remained interested in the process of tearing apart various forms of presentational media to the point where their boundaries dissolve.
Therefore, for the 2008 exhibition in Bielefeld (featuring a selection of Ono’s work from 1961 to the present), works placed outside the museum will relate to the city itself. One of these will be a Wish Tree. The Wish Tree differs greatly from the “wish pieces” in Japanese temple gardens or the “fortunes” in Chinese fortune cookies. While those preprinted prayers and fortunes are materialistic, the Wish Trees invite the public to express hopes and dreams. Just before the opening of the exhibition, children and teens from three schools in Bielefeld will hang their wishes on a selected tree outside the Johnson building.
A Golden Ladder, which is an allegory for the exhibition’s title, Between the Sky and My Head, will be installed in the Kunsthalle park. The work is an imaginary, spiritual space centered between sky and earth Since Ono works not only with grand dreams, but also with poetic visions of how one can change, she plans a third work that will take place outside the Kunsthalle. It will be the realization of a work she originally noted down in 1962: titled Riding Piece “Ride a coffin car all over the city.” During the run of the show, visitors to the Kunsthalle can decide to be chauffeured around the city in a hearse for a short time.
Inside the Kunsthalle, visitors will experience three floors of sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, and sound installations. An interview with the artist, filmed in Bielefeld, will accompany the exhibition. One of the earliest works is Cough Piece, first written down in 1961; and Keep Coughing a Year, a sound installation featuring the artist’s cough and other sounds, will be heard in dark rooms. Laughing and coughing were important anchors in Ono’s work at the time she began creating conceptual art: they considerably expand the sense of time during a performance. In the entrance to the Kunsthalle is Play It by Trust, a chess game that has been set up several times in various places since 1966. In Bielefeld, it will be in marble, with chess pieces one meter high, on a surface measuring five by five meters. One can imagine playing the game with the heavy, fragile marble pieces, all of which are white. Morning Beams, consisting of one hundred nylon threads running throughout all of the floors of the Kunsthalle, illuminates the twelve-meter-high staircase. Since the mid-1990s, Ono has been working with ink on paper, and the show will feature a drawing called Franklin Summer. Other pieces in the exhibition include a labyrinth made of Plexiglas, titled Amaze; the famous film Fly, showing a fly on a woman’s body in a six-part installation; and a participatory piece, My Mommy is Beautiful, in which visitors are invited to put photographs and other thoughts of their mothers onto the bare canvas of the work, or other feelings that they themselves write.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. To celebrate the re-opening of the sculpture park on 27 September, 2008, at 6 p.m., the work Golden Ladder, made in Bielefeld at Ono’s behest, will be installed on a temporary basis.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will run until 16 November, 2008, and is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Pro Bielefeld.
BASTET
by Yoko Ono
Several cat sculptures called 'Bastet' created by artist Yoko Ono are shown at Kunsthalle Bielefeld. EFE/Oliver Krato.
------------------------------------------------
BASTET
by Yoko Ono, June 1996
Suddenly one morning, 100 cats landed in my mind. The image was specific, the posture, the size and the colors. They all had large gleaming phosphorus eyes, come in groups of nice with one on the centerfront, and seemed to be demanding to be materialized. On one hand, I felt like a fool. I regarded myself an intellectual. I was not about to materialize the cats as my work. But on the other hand, I thought, wasn’t that what I was precisely against – to allow my petty intellectual snobbery to block the marvellous flight that art allows us to make? Anyway, to go with the flow and materialize these cats seemed to be the most natural thing to do at the time, and I followed it. I shaped the cats after the one Egyptian cat which permantly looked over the Strawberryfields from our white room in Dakota.
Then there was a question of what to call them, Usually, I had no difficulty in titling my work since the physical part if the entities seemed to be merely an instrument to enact the concept I expressed in the title. But I didn’t know what to call these cats since I only had a vague clue of what they were. It was a totally new game for me. I knew that they were some kind of carriers of a message that descended on us. Should I call them “Transmitters”? That sounded more like parts of electric gadgets. How about “Descendents?” That sounded like a TV soap opera following “Dynasty?” Not only was I embarrassed tat I could not find a title for them, but I felt worse that I materialized something and I didn’t what it was about. Finally, exasperated, I called a friend in New York. “I don’t have my Webster Dictionary here. Could you look up some words for these cats? They’re some kind of messengers – from far away – I don’ know from where tough. Could be from Atlantis or something – or another planet – from way back is hat I’m getting.” It was interesting that my mind kept playing tricks even at that point. Though I already shaped the cats after the Egyptian cat, somehow I didn’t think Egypt. I thought Atlantis. That was my gut feeling; Atlantis or another planet. Five minutes later, my friends called and said that he also did not have a Webster Dictionary at hand and instead he had looked into a theosophical dictionary. A word jumped into his eye from the first page he opened. The work was BUBABSTE and it followed with the explanation.
“A city in Egypt which was sacred to the cats, and where was their principal shrine. Many hundreds of thousands of cats were embalmed and buried in the grottoes of Beniassan-el Amar. The cat being a symbol of the moon was sacred o Isis, her goddess. It sees in the dark and its eyes have phosphorescent lustre, which frightens the night-birds of evil omen. The cat was also sacred to BAST and thence called (BASTET) the destroyer of the Sun’s enemies.”
“Oh dear. If you didn’t know that I had materialized the cats before reading this information about Bastet you would think that I had made the cats according to what was said here, wouldn’t you?” My friend agreed. So what did this mean? I still wasn’t sure. Maybe my mind was not playing tricks after all. Maybe Egypt had something to do with Atlantis and the Space.
The inspiration and materialization of Bastet happened in parallel to my initial thought and the performance of hammering nails in a cross in public. On hindsight, I think Bastet may have come to me as my protection. Somehow I know that the two events are connected, that unless I have decided to hammer a nail in the cross, Bastet would not have come to me.
y.o. June 1990
------------------------------------------------
In Egyptian mythology, Bastet or Bast was a solar deity and a goddess of fertility and protector of pregnant women. She also has power over solar eclipses. Bastet was represented as early as the Second Dynasty of the Old Kingdom as a woman with a feline head. Domestic cat-headed Bastet, as she appears in the Middle Kingdom, is a content goddess; lioness-headed Bastet is potentially dangerous.
She is also considered by some to be another aspect of Sekhmet. Her cult was centered in Bubastis. After the period of Hellenistic civilization, Bastet became a lunar deity whom the Greeks associated with their Artemis. She was considered the daughter of Isis and Osiris, and was associated with Hathor. She was the wife of Ptah, with whom she was the mother of Nefertum and Mihos. She was also the patron goddess of cats. Mummified cats were dedicated in her honor.
------------------------------------------------
IELEFELD, GERMANY.-Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi.
On her mother’s side, Ono is a member of one of Japan’s most respected families, and so, as a child, she attended a school for members of the Japanese imperial family. Her father, who originally intended to be a pianist before he ultimately became a leading Japanese banker, insisted she take piano and voice lessons at an early age. Her parents and relatives acknowledged that Yoko had a strong will and an irrepressible desire for freedom. The lengthiest publication on the artist to date says that her main intention was “to think the unthinkable—and then do it.” After beginning a relationship with John Lennon in 1967, Ono began working on no less an ambition than to bring inner peace to different peoples. Representing one of her chief messages, her work Imagine Peace will be presented in front of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle.
As a young artist, Ono left New York in the early nineteen-sixties in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In 1962 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in several editions. Some of the works in it date back to 1953. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she has remained interested in the process of tearing apart various forms of presentational media to the point where their boundaries dissolve.
Therefore, for the 2008 exhibition in Bielefeld (featuring a selection of Ono’s work from 1961 to the present), works placed outside the museum will relate to the city itself. One of these will be a Wish Tree. The Wish Tree differs greatly from the “wish pieces” in Japanese temple gardens or the “fortunes” in Chinese fortune cookies. While those preprinted prayers and fortunes are materialistic, the Wish Trees invite the public to express hopes and dreams. Just before the opening of the exhibition, children and teens from three schools in Bielefeld will hang their wishes on a selected tree outside the Johnson building.
A Golden Ladder, which is an allegory for the exhibition’s title, Between the Sky and My Head, will be installed in the Kunsthalle park. The work is an imaginary, spiritual space centered between sky and earth Since Ono works not only with grand dreams, but also with poetic visions of how one can change, she plans a third work that will take place outside the Kunsthalle. It will be the realization of a work she originally noted down in 1962: titled Riding Piece “Ride a coffin car all over the city.” During the run of the show, visitors to the Kunsthalle can decide to be chauffeured around the city in a hearse for a short time.
Inside the Kunsthalle, visitors will experience three floors of sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, and sound installations. An interview with the artist, filmed in Bielefeld, will accompany the exhibition. One of the earliest works is Cough Piece, first written down in 1961; and Keep Coughing a Year, a sound installation featuring the artist’s cough and other sounds, will be heard in dark rooms. Laughing and coughing were important anchors in Ono’s work at the time she began creating conceptual art: they considerably expand the sense of time during a performance. In the entrance to the Kunsthalle is Play It by Trust, a chess game that has been set up several times in various places since 1966. In Bielefeld, it will be in marble, with chess pieces one meter high, on a surface measuring five by five meters. One can imagine playing the game with the heavy, fragile marble pieces, all of which are white. Morning Beams, consisting of one hundred nylon threads running throughout all of the floors of the Kunsthalle, illuminates the twelve-meter-high staircase. Since the mid-1990s, Ono has been working with ink on paper, and the show will feature a drawing called Franklin Summer. Other pieces in the exhibition include a labyrinth made of Plexiglas, titled Amaze; the famous film Fly, showing a fly on a woman’s body in a six-part installation; and a participatory piece, My Mommy is Beautiful, in which visitors are invited to put photographs and other thoughts of their mothers onto the bare canvas of the work, or other feelings that they themselves write.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. To celebrate the re-opening of the sculpture park on 27 September, 2008, at 6 p.m., the work Golden Ladder, made in Bielefeld at Ono’s behest, will be installed on a temporary basis.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will run until 16 November, 2008, and is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Pro Bielefeld.