| Sumario: | During the 1960s, American artists and activists responded to the Vietnam War's violence with a variety of polemical forms including op-eds, marches, sit-ins, performative re-enactments, and takeovers of media outlets. In contrast to these conventional forms of protest and media intervention, artist and activist Yoko Ono's 1966 Film No. 4 (also known as Bottoms), which the artist called a "petition for peace," presents a sequence of human buttocks in the act of walking on a treadmill. The levity of the film's content (i.e., butts) and the gravity of the artist's intentions for it (i.e., a call for peace at the height of the Vietnam War) registers as an absurd contradiction. This article examines how Ono's unconventional form of protest signaled a shift from the autonomy of abstract painting toward dematerialized art's participatory investments and de-hierarchized modes of critique. Through its filmic self-reflexivity and its aesthetics of perplexity—achieved through the constraining film production device of the treadmill and played out in the film's voice-over and media responses to the work—Ono's Film No. 4 presents conceptualist humor as a strategy for navigating institutional power that acknowledges the limits of artistic ability to make material changes while also implicating viewers as participants in the United States' intervention in Vietnam. Social and cultural orders that discipline racialized and gendered subjects and maintain capitalist, imperialist white supremacy are confounded by Film No. 4.
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