DR - Danish broadcasting Station (Danish version of BBC) // March 13, 2015
A Cheese Grater and An Art Book, Please: Yoko Ono releases book with Tiger Multi-artist Yoko Ono will release her next art book in collaboration with Danish retail chain Tiger. The book will be sold across 25 countries.
was keen for the book to be sold as cheaply as possible, without compromising quality, to allow greater access to her art, Mai Due Brinch tells Denmark’s Radio. “Why Should An Art Book Be So Expensive?” In that regard, Yoko Ono’s aims are very much in line with Tiger’s – namely that it’s not about money, but about availability. And the sales proceeds are divided evenly between Ono and Tiger. - Why should an art book or a catalogue be so expensive? The best shouldn’t be the reserve of the few. At Tiger, we certainly don’t understand why the best art shouldn’t be available for everyone, says Mai Due Brinch. Tiger has previously collaborated with artists on art books and related events – including the poster project “Postapestry” by artist Flemming Quist Møller at the Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, as well as the book “An Artist with 6 Legs” by art collective Superflex.
Yoko Ono. Photo: Kate Garner. Courtesy: © Yoko Ono. By Marie Ravn Nielsen
She was married to Beatle John Lennon, established her own peace prize, performed her music on stages across the planet and, not least of all, exhibited her art works in museums all over the world. And now 82 year-old multi-artist Yoko Ono is about to publish an art book together with Danish retail chain Tiger. Her bound art book “Conceptual Photography” comes out on April 1st and will be sold in Tiger stores across 25 countries for 100 Danish kroner. Major Museum Sells Tiger Book And the timing is hardly accidental. This May, a Yoko Ono solo exhibition opens
at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. And the intention, certainly, is for MoMA to sell the book in its own museum shop as well, according to Mai Due Brinch, Head of Concept Development at Tiger, whose focus is on the retail chain’s creative partnerships. New Yorkers will also be able to find the book on Tiger’s own shelves, once their first Manhattan store opens this May. Mai Due Brinch is excited about the collaboration, which slowly began about a year-and-a-half ago, via a mutual acquaintance of Tiger founder Lennart Lajboschitz and Yoko Ono herself. - One of the reasons Yoko Ono wants to work with Tiger is our far-reaching vision of affecting a wide variety of people. She
More Than A Retailer tWith Yoko Ono, Tiger seeks not only to explore an international market, but a new brand as well. That, at least, is the verdict of Fabian Holt, lecturer in Music, Arts and Event Communication at Roskilde University. - Tiger aspires to be more than just a retailer, selling everyday household products. They want to have an impact on people’s lives, to make their mark on art, as well as music, which Tiger releases through their label Tiger Music, says Fabian Holt. He is far from surprised that Yoko Ono, of all artists, is partnering with the Danish retail chain: - Art books are typically released as limited editions, so both Tiger and Yoko Ono can use this book to position themselves as boundary pushing. Yoko Ono already enjoys a large following, despite being avant-garde and part of the art world elite. According to Tiger, Yoko Ono’s “Conceptual Photography” will be released with a first printing of 10,000 copies.
Kunsten.nu - Denmarks only art magazine // March 12, 2015
Yoko Ono Releases Photography Book in Collaboration with Tiger Over the past two years, Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono has collaborated on the project Conceptual Photography. The book goes on sale April 1st and can be bought for just 100 Danish kroner in Tiger Stores across the world. By Stine Nørgaard Lykkebo
For more than 50 years, Yoko Ono has manifested herself as an important, groundbreaking artist. Ono has operated within the fields of performance,
photography, music and peace activism. Now she will be releasing a photography book in collaboration with the Danish worldwide retail chain Tiger, ahead of a major solo exhibition at MoMa in New York.
The book is titled Conceptual Photography, and is a photography book, featuring poetic fragments. It is bound and 159 pages long. Over the past few years, Tiger – perhaps best known for its colourful and practical products, often sold for as little as 10 Danish kroner – have strived to promote the accessibility of contemporary art. They have entered into several partnerships with various art institutions, most recently with
the National Gallery of Denmark, in conjunction with the Elmgreen & Dragsets exhibition Biography.
Yoko Ono. Photo: Kate Garner. Courtesy: © Yoko Ono.
Politiken - Denmarks biggest newspaper // March 15, 2015
Tiger Stores Release Yoko Ono Tiger stores have been given publishing rights to Ono’s book “Conceptual Photography”. »Reading glasses, a pack of pastel-coloured Easter chicks – and the new Yoko Ono book, please «. That exact purchase will be available for Tiger stores customers come April 1st. Because the Tiger stores have entered into an agreement to publish Ono’s book “Conceptual Photography”, which will be sold in 425 Tiger stores across 25 countries, leading up the artist’s solo exhibition at MoMA in New York this May. Over the past few years, Tiger has entered into partnerships with several art institutions such as the National Gallery of Denmark, Charlottenborg and CPH:DOX. The 159-page bound book will sell for 100 Danish kroner.
Kopenhagen Magasin - National Culture Guide // March 16, 2015
Yoko Ono – Conceptual Photography After two years of collaboration between Tiger and Yoko Ono, the book Conceptual Photography is now issued for sale in Tiger stores across the world. The book will be available from April 1st and consists of a number of a photographical works by Yoko Ono poetically combined with notes and small poems by the artist. Together, the b/w photos and the sparse text, the book appears as a piece of minimalist aesthetics in line with Yoko Ono’s artistic production as we have come to know it. By Kathrine Børlit Nielsen
Tiger’s project originates in the idea of giving customers access to art in everyday life. The book is the first instance of a whole concept of promoting contemporary art. With former collaborators including The National Gallery of Denmark, Charlottenborg and CPH:DOX, Tiger is firmly established in the Danish art field. Now, they seriously move on to international contemporary art. The concept developer behind the book, Mai Due Brinch, describes the project as an attempt to make art and culture more accessible all over the world. Yoko Ono has been active in art for decades. The book pre-
Yoko Ono. Photo: Kate Garner. Courtesy: © Yoko Ono.
sents a number of older conceptual photographical works mixed with various poetical, biographical and descriptive text fragments by the artist herself. According to Tiger, “Conceptual Photography is an untraditional, poetical universe of texts and images. With a quiet sense of humour the book involves and challenges us to look at life from different and unexpected angles, realizing that words can be photos projected before our inner eyes.” Lars Schwander’s introduction being the only sizeable text in the book, the reader is challenged to experience Yoko Ono’s textual fragments with an untraditional, visual approach.
gaffa - Denmarks biggest music publication // March 12, 2015
Yoko Ono Releases Book In Collaboration With Tiger Danish retail chain Tiger has entered into a partnership with Yoko Ono and will be releasing “Conceptual Photography” on April 1st. The 159-page bound book will sell for 100 Danish kroner. By Rosa Louise Stilgren
82 year-old Yoko Ono combines photography with poetry to create inner images for the reader. One of the pages shows a blurry close-up of a man, followed by the header “Doctor III” and the words: “He’s missing a tooth and smells of alcohol. He removed my appendix.” Tiger has entered into partnerships with several art institutions, including the National Gallery of Denmark, Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall and CPH:DOX. The release of Yoko Ono’s book is the first of several international initiatives to promote contemporary art. Tiger’s vision is for the artists to retain their artistic freedom by not surrendering the rights to their works. The proceeds from the sales are therefore divided evenly between the artist and Tiger. “It’s been an exciting process and we’re thrilled about the result and the work with Yoko Ono. Conceptual Photography shatters genres in a fascinating universe of text and images that I hope will affect a lot of
Photo: Morten Rygaard
people. The release springs from our vision of making art and culture more accessible. We think the work deserves to be read and seen by people all over the world, and we are proud to do our part in that endeav-
our,” states Tiger’s Head of Concept Development Mai Due Brinch about the project. The book will go on sale on April 1st in 425 Tiger stores, across 25 countries.
SEMI FEMI - One of the biggest fashion bloggers in Denmark by model Emma Leth // March 13, 2015
Yoko Ono for 100 kroner at Tiger For the past two years, Tiger has been working with Yoko Ono to release her art book “Conceptual Photography”. The book will go on sale in Tiger stores across the world on April 1st. By Anika Lori
Over the past few years, Tiger has entered into partnerships with several art institutions such as the National Gallery of Denmark, Charlottenborg and CPH:DOX. The publication of Yoko Ono’s book is the first of several international initiatives to promote contemporary art. Tiger’s vision is for the artists to retain their artistic freedom by not surrendering the rights to their works. The proceeds from the sales are always divided 50/50 between the artist and Tiger. Mai Due Brinch, Head of
Concept Development at Tiger, says of the Yoko Ono project: “It’s been an exciting process and we’re thrilled about the result and the work with Yoko Ono. Conceptual Photography shatters genres in a fascinating universe of text and images that I hope will affect a lot of people. The release springs from our vision of making art and culture more accessible. We think the work deserves to be read and seen by people all over the world, and we are proud to do our part in that endeavor.”
Yoko Ono. Photo: Kate Garner. Courtesy: © Yoko Ono.
Politiken - frontpage of Arts & Culture section - Denmarks biggest newspaper // april 3, 2015
She Sent Bare Bottoms to the Fight for Peace Yoko Ono’s conceptual art can be poetically precise. A conceptual photography book featuring early works, as well as notes for the film ‘Bottoms’, is now on sale in Tiger Stores.
BOOKS Yoko Ono: Conceptual Photography. Foreword: Lars Schwander. Tiger Stories, 159 pages, 100 DKK. Released April 1.
By Carsten r.s.F. Ifversen
As a rule, celebrity culture leaves me cold. People aren’t interesting because of who they are, but because of what they do. Still, I understand what’s at stake when others obsess over and invest themselves in celebrities. I know the feeling of being a bit starstruck when meeting someone whose achievements I truly admire. Fame, after all, is something you attribute to people of certain significance, when you mirror yourself in them through engaging with their work. And I can’t help think of the phenomenon when reading Yoko Ono’s book ‘Conceptual Photography’. In 1967, she presented an extended version of ’Film No. 4’, commonly known as ‘Bottoms’, in England. Over the course 80 minutes, it shows close-ups of 365
SKINTIGHT. Poetry and humor go hand-in-hand in Yoko Ono’s conceptual art, which often takes its point of departure in bodies – such as in 1970’s ’Fly’ (top left), where she and husband John Lennon filmed a fly on a woman’s body. In ’Toilet Thoughts’ (below), she hung 365 posters of bare bottoms in public toilet stalls, and in 1997’s ’Vertical Memory’ (top right), she composited her own face onto those of Lennon, their son Sean and her father – a meditation on being a woman in a male-dominated world. Photos from the book.
naked, walking male bottoms. It was immediately a scan-
dalous hit. The presses joked about he film on a daily basis
and her avant-garde friends no longer wanted anything to do with her; they felt she had sold out. You were either mainstream or avant-garde. And if you were famous, you were mainstream. When she was recognized by young people shouting her name on King’s Road, she hoped profoundly to never become more famous than she now was. She would come to lose all her friends, as well as her marriage to the American jazz musician and film producer Anthony Cox – a marriage that was already in dire straits. She writes about all this in ‘Conceptual Photography’ as a kind of annotation to ‘Film No. 4’, the full script of which is far shorter than its annotations: »String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition for peace.« Yoko Ono never found peace, certainly not from her fame. She is one of the most famous people alive. Not so much for her art, though, as for her later relationship with John Lennon. But as Trine Ross wrote in her review of Ono’s large solo exhibit at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2013, it’s time for her work to step out of
Politiken - frontpage of Arts & Culture section - Denmarks biggest newspaper // april 3, 2015
the blinding glow of celebrity and be recognized in its own right, because »Yoko Ono was and is in fact a very good artist – indeed, something as heartbreakingly rare as a conceptual artist with plenty of humor and a penchant for poetry.« However, one shouldn’t dismiss her fame entirely. Because it is presumably the reason that a low-priced retailer like Tiger Stores – who does have considerable cultural ambitions, but whose cornerstone is primarily offering large quantities and low prices – can even put out a book titled ‘Conceptual Photography’ in the first place. And the title should certainly be read with particularly emphasis on the first part. It contains very little in the way of traditional photography. Rather, the book abounds with instructions to works one can create oneself, and which, through reading it, are developed and enlarged within ones inner darkroom. THE BOOK collects some of her earliest conceptual pieces from the 1960s: ‘Instructions for Photography’ and ‘Instructions for Films’. And they are exactly what their titles promise; that is to say, not photographs that you can see, but rather photographs that you can go out and take for yourself, meaning that the work only comes into being through the act of conceiving it in one’s own mind. The boundlessness of imagination is very much the type of magic with which this branch of conceptual art operates. For example, it can take the short form of a haiku poem, such as in ‘Shadow Piece’, from the fall of 1963, which reads: »Put
your shadows together/Until they become one/ Take a picture of the shadow «. There’s something very simple and concrete about Yoko Ono’s art. Occasionally, it’s very of its time in its naïve banality, as when it postulates that something or the other spreads love or peace. Other times, that simplicity is the precise prick that strikes a mood so purely it unfolds the world. For example, ‘Film No. 11 Passing’: »See the sky from below/ from a very deep well. / A cloud passes slowly/ from left to right and disappears.«
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Yoko Ono’s art is the precise prick that strikes a mood so purely it unfolds the world
ONE IS NEVER a passive viewer of a Yoko Ono work. The work typically demands one’s own participation or performance. Her perhaps best-known work, ‘Ceiling Painting’, thus consists of a single stepladder in a gallery space. Not until you reach the topmost step, do you read, in small letters on the ceiling, the word “Yes”. The piece from 1966 is infamous, as it supposedly sparked John Lennon’s interest in the artist behind it. ‘Ceiling Painting’ is not a photographic work, and
therefore not included in the book, unlike 1997’s ‘Vertical Memory’, which certainly impressed this reviewer. Here, the same blurred image is presented 21 times, accompanied by different short sentences, each altering the reading of the image ever so slightly. The texts relate how a woman can feel subjected to the male gaze. It mentions 21 men by their professions, and their significance to her through various points of her life; everything from obstetricians, surgeons and artists, all of whom look at her in some judgmental way. Six artists are referred to with numbers, but aside from that, the pages are blank – a silence that speaks volumes, as Lars Schwander (another man throwing his knowledgeable gaze on her work) notes in his excellent foreword. The blurry figure in the repeated image of ‘Vertical Memory’ is a digital composite of her father, John Lennon and their son Sean Ono Lennon. Here, she elegantly communicates experiences of being a woman in a male-dominated world. When her corpse is finally carried in underneath a dark arch, akin to the one through which she entered the world, she asks the mortician to where it will lead her. He doesn’t answer, and as she’s lying there, it all feels very recognizable. How much of her life has she spent lying down, she asks. One of the scripts is for the film ’Woman’. It’s meant to depict a pregnancy. From morning sickness through child labor. But it’s not intended as a medical film. It’s intended as a poetical film about an intelligent and sensitive woman’s thoughts and feelings dur-
BIO: YOKO ONO By Joachim Adrian Born in Tokyo, 1933. Following World War II, Ono’s family moved to New York, where she has lived for most of her life. She studied at various institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, and was a part of the Fluxus art collective in New York. A Yoko Ono solo exhibit opens at MoMA in May.
ing pregnancy, with a mixed soundtrack of location sound and fictional philosophical interviews. It must not embellish pregnancy, as Yoko Ono writes in the script. Because of preconceptions of pregnancy as the most rewarding experience imaginable, some mothers come to loath their offspring when living through its unglamorous realities, she writes. »It should be a film I would want all girls to see before they become pregnant.« This is not a book I would recommend to everyone. But if you have even a passing interest in 1960s avant-garde art, it’s an interesting and especially touching, cheap release. Its timing coincides with the opening of Tiger’s first Manhattan store in May, as well as a Yoko Ono solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).