Perplexity and Anti–Vietnam War Protest in Yoko Ono's Film No. 4.
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...
| Publicado en: | Afterimage Vol. 52; no. 1; pp. 47 - 67 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of California Press
Mar2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=184342215&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 184342215 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 03007472 ATF jtl: Afterimage issn: 03007472 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Mar2025 vid: 52 iid: 1 pid: 414 pub: University of California Press artinfo: ui: 184342215 10.1525/aft.2025.52.1.47 ppf: 47 ppct: 20 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 523KB tig: atl: Perplexity and Anti–Vietnam War Protest in Yoko Ono's Film No. 4. aug: au: Peterson, Nina su: Ono, Yoko, 1933- Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Filmmaking White supremacy Interactive art Intervention (Federal government) sug: subj: Ono, Yoko, 1933- Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Filmmaking White supremacy Interactive art Intervention (Federal government) keyword: aesthetics anti–Vietnam War art perplexity protest art Yoko Ono ab: 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Afterimage is the property of University of California Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Afterimage holder: University of California Press dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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