Instruction as form: Yoko Ono in the 1960s

The aim of this thesis is to provide the first critical and theoretical study of Yoko Ono's instruction project in the 1960s. To do this, it critically reconstructs the concept of instruction through a philosophical, social-political and critical art theory of the instruction form and its social content from the viewpoint of a historical ontology of art. The central argument is that the instruction form figures a praxis of freedom. Ono's instruction pieces trigger the radical imagination and in doing so they contribute to a change in the ontology of art and its institutions. More specifically, the radical potential of the instruction project lies in its contribution to the autonomous self-institutionalization of the individual and of society at large. Drawing on extensive archival and object research conducted across six continents, the thesis develops its arguments immanently out of the object of reflection from within a critical-theoretical tradition grounded on a transdisciplinary conception of philosophy used as an apparatus for a transformative art criticism. The central problem from which the research sets out concerns the current literature on Yoko Ono. The tendency to examine her work purely from biographical and traditional art-historical frameworks, neglects the critical character of Ono's instruction pieces: their ontological distinctiveness, metaphysical-existential importance, social significance, and experiential and political productivity. The thesis investigates the critical constellation of Yoko Ono's early works and writings from the late 1950s to the early 1970s in order to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings that inform their philosophical meaning and to make Ono's politics of instruction legible. Each of the four chapters examines a different moment in the socially alternative mediating process of 'instructionalization.' Chapter 1 grounds Ono's basic principle of 'instruction' within the medium-specific context of post-WWII New York and Tokyo. It reconstructs the art-historical logic of Ono's counter-paintings and instruction pieces through the instruction/painting dialectic to shed a new light upon the ontological status of the instruction form and its contribution to a rethinking of the history of conceptual art. Chapter 2 critically reconstructs Ono's singular concept of 'instructure,' a tertium quid in the instruction/structure dialectic. It explicates the ways in which her counter-structures, in their realizations, are radically open to the historical process, demonstrating that 'instructionalization' is a process of counter-actualization. Chapter 3 situates the instruction pieces in the context of everyday life and the crisis of historical experience. It theorizes Ono's distinct anti-ontological concept of the 'event' from within the concept of 'destruction' as a radical cut in being that destructures the fabric of ordinary experience, punctuating the horizon with a new dimension of time and moving the historical narrative forward. Chapter 4 problematizes the instruction/institution dialectic and investigates how alternative paths to realizing the autonomous social development of a society might be possible through an art form that both instructs and institutes. More specifically, by demonstrating that self-instructionalization is a process of self-institutionalization, this chapter illuminates the anarchic moment of the instruction project on the path to autonomy. In sum, the thesis offers an original interpretation of Yoko Ono's art and writings that makes a scholarly and critical contribution to a historical art theory and a philosophical art history.