Longing for Nothing: On Kawara and Yoko Ono

On Kawara and Yoko Ono, two Japanese-born artists, came to terms with their traumatic memories of the Second World War and its aftershock through alternative artistic means, which are explored in this dissertation from a two-fold perspective. The first has to do with the war and postwar Japanese society as the troubled reality the two artists strove to overcome in their work and life. The second context deals with the reception of their work within the canonized narrative of Conceptual art, which ignored the extent to which these artists were caught up with the postwar history of their homeland. Concomitant to this are the philosophical and ethical concerns raised in the discourse on the Holocaust, an increasingly universal symbol of historical trauma. Chapter I focuses on Kawara's Bathroom series in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis of the uncanny. In Chapter II, Kawara's decades-long projects of Date Paintings are explored within the context of traumatic realism. Chapter III turns to Yoko Ono, and accounts for Ono's multiple manifestations of her poetic texts in terms of the fundamental loss of communal unity and the structural impossibility of representation. In Chapter IV, her sound and vocal experiments are theorized in relation to the abject and poetic language as conceived by Julia Kristeva. Despite the drastic disparity in aesthetics as well as in the public persona of these two artists, traces of horror and anxiety surrounding the political atrocities of the late twentieth century persistently emerged from their practices in distinct but inherently connected forms of fragmented text, inconsistent narrative, and perceptive disruption. The analyses of the artworks in this dissertation are thus concerned not so much with iconic representation or referential subject as with the formal structure of the work. The core connection of the apparently unrelated projects of Kawara and Ono lies in the ultimate shattering of ontological belonging, and the ways in which the trauma of the lost community is reenacted to assume psychophysical effects against the very social circumstances that produced them. The objective of this dissertation is to reinstate the political potential of conceptual aesthetics in its current predicament.