Bag Piece

Yoko Ono, 1965 · Gallery 417 · Floor 4

We got three photographs. Same night. Same bag on a stage. And every one of them taken from the wrong side. Inside the bag is Yoko Ono. New York, 1965. She calls it Bag Piece. George Maciunas takes the photographs. He's also the guy running Fluxus. Basically, a loose international gang of artists making performances out of things that barely looked like art. A sound. An instruction. Somebody climbing into a bag. George is out front with the camera. Of course he is. That's where the camera goes. And all he gets is a pale lump of cloth against black. The curve along the bottom is the edge of the stage. In two photographs, the bag just sits there. In the third, it shifts. And that's the whole event, as far as the camera knows. Except the bag isn't blind from the inside. "We see the world through it," Ono said. Out front, laundry. In there, a window. So he is photographing a lump. And the lump is looking back at him. He's the one who can't see. That mattered to Ono. Inside the bag, she said, race drops away. Sex. Age. You become "just a spirit or soul." You can talk "soul to soul." Four years later, she takes the bag somewhere with a lot more cameras. March 1969. A press conference at a hotel in Vienna. Ono is inside a bag again. This time John Lennon is in there with her. Her husband of eleven days. The reporters keep asking them to come out. They won't. Somebody asks if there are holes in the bag. "There's a hole to get in and out," Lennon says. That's all they get. Everybody in the room can hear them. Nobody can see them. A room full of reporters. A room full of cameras. Every one of them on the wrong side. They call it "total communication."

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