Since emerging onto the international art scene in the early 1960s, Yoko Ono has made profound contributions to visual art, performance, filmmaking, and experimental music. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she moved with her family to New York in the mid-1950s and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. Over the next decade she lived in New York, Tokyo, and London, greatly influencing the international development of Fluxus and Conceptual art.
Ono’s earliest works were often based on instructions that she communicated to the public in verbal or written form. Painting to Be Stepped On(1960–61), for example, invited people to tread upon a piece of canvas placed directly on the floor, either physically or in their minds. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday.
Painting to Hammer a Nail In (Bronze Age) is one iteration of a work that Ono has executed in various media and iterations across decades of her career. The concept is drawn directly from Grapefruit, the artist’s book of instructions published in 1964, which itself has become a monument of conceptual art of the early 60s. The instructions for Painting to Hammer a Nail were first ideated by Ono in the winter of 1961, and read as follows:
Hammer a nail in the center of a piece of glass. Send each fragment to an arbitrary address.
Ono first executed the work physically in 1966 for her show with Indica Gallery in London, where she mounted an exhibition grounding her practice in conceptual themes she would explore for decades.
Painting to Hammer a Nail was one of a few participation works, and with its title being quite literal, viewers were invited to hammer nails directly into the work themselves. This particular version came out of a time in the 80s when Ono chose to remake many of her early conceptual pieces in bronze, noting that this was an age of commodity and solidity. Rooted in influences of New York’s Avant Garde scene and the Fluxus movement, the work serves to expand the notion of what a painting is and can be , blurring delineations between the maker, object, and viewer, as well as those of art and everyday life.
