A loud bravo to Yoko Ono! The artist made a series of cups for the coffee company, illy as part of their “illy Art Collection.” On the whole, the program has been a charming amusement, more about graphics than ceramics and always with the same chubby espresso cup design. It’s fun but rarely biting.
Yoko Ono’s espresso set for illy Art Collection. Click to see a larger image.
This time Ono has hit the ball out of the park and created a true work of conceptual art for the Illy program, dealing with ceramics itself through the notion of it breaking. She ties each act of destruction to a moment of pain in history via six cups. She then “mended” these cups in the Japanese style with gold. The seventh cup is unbroken and is put in our change for safety and protection.
Ono is often not given her due as an artist because of her relationship with John Lennon (and is sometimes given too much prominence for the same reason, a double edged sword) but she is one of the top conceptualists working today and what she did with this set of cups, a small but brilliant moment, confirms her status setting the bar for the illy artists who follow her. Buy them now while they last (from MOMA gift shop, $250 for the set and $40 for a single cup).
From the New York Times:
“Yoko Ono is the latest artist whose designs will grace a set of espresso cups for illy, the Italian coffee company. Timed to the debut of “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” which opens at the Museum of Modern Art on May 17, they were inspired by Kintsugi, a Japanese method of fixing broken pottery using powdered metals (gold, silver, platinum, bronze or aluminum) mixed with water and lacquer. Ono’s designs have the look of Kintsugi, with fine gold lines used to mimic a shattering effect, and each saucer features a sentence marking a shattering event in her life, with the name of the event and the date. They include the My Lai Massacre (March 16, 1968), the bombing of Dresden during World War II (Feb. 13, 1945) and John Lennon’s death in New York (Dec. 8, 1980).”
Garth Clark is the Chief Editor of CFile
Any thoughts about this post? Share yours in the comment box below.
I just received a set for x-mas. Totally love them😍
I think these are lovely, but I don’t see the humor here. Rather, it’s sad?
No humor, irony perhaps but this are touching bringing moments of tragedy into the coffee hour so that with the warmth of coffee (and the company) so that the pain that those dates memorialize is in a very small and intimate way healed. Garth
I admire much of Ono’s work and her ability to engage her audience. But I’m struggling with this coffee set. What is the link between the dates being commemorated and the form?
Did Ono really add the graphics to each one personally? And if they aren’t really broken – why not?!
Is this art or is it commerce? (I think I might know the answer).
Compare this with Cornelia Parker’s embroidered Magna Carta work at the British Library (a different, but equally domestic medium), engaging many people in creating the work, with telling links between the graphics the making process, and the symbolism. This, for me, has much more impact even if it isn’t ceramic.
This is a design project not an art one. The link between the dates, each one dipped in horror, is to connect those moments to the idea of a cup smashing. It a small act of violence but then mending it in gold resin and drinking warm coffee from it–not actually broke but conceptually so–has tenderness that in a small way helps see the dates in a slightly different way. As a design object, most of which have no content of this kind, I think she did an exceptional job. Best Garth
In 1971, my young mind was altered by Yoko Ono’s show “This is not here” at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. I still have the catalog, in the form of a collaged newspaper broadside. I’m looking forward to the Moma show, wondering how her work resonates for me after these many years of experience. The illy cups are brilliant.
Hahahaaa, these cups are really funny, and I love the mends. Are they really mended, or are the mends just painted with gold?
Alas, just painted.