Instructing, constructing, deconstructing: the embodied and disembodied performances of Yoko Ono

Modernism has been described as 'either a time-bound or a genre-bound art form'. In generic terms, modernist art has been described as 'experimental,formally complex, elliptical, contain[ing] elements of decreation as well as creation, and tend[ing] to associate notions of the artist's freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form.... . Modernist art forms have further been described as those which are '.... aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or "fugal" as opposed to chronological form, ten towards ironic modes, and involve a certain "dehumanization" of art'. Modernist art deploys the techniques of montage, collage, mixed-media assemblages, genre-crossing, generic indeterminacy, formalism, anti-realism and fragmentation. One could also, however, ask whether modernism is rather a matter of reading strategies. The same work might, at different times, be read as modernist or postmodernist. New works are constantly being claimed for the 'modernist' canon.