Yasunao Tone Dead: Experimental Composer and Fluxus Artist Was 90
A Japanese-born multimedia artist whose associates included John Cage and Yoko Ono, he pushed digital music past its breaking point.Yasunao Tone, an experimental composer and multimedia artist associated with the Fluxus movement who used manipulations of digital technology to turn digital technology against itself, including a 48-minute exercise in aural endurance made up of squawks and bleeps from a mangled compact disc, died on May 12 in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Artists Space, a New York contemporary art nonprofit that presented a retrospective of his career in 2023.Before moving to New York City in the early 1970s, Mr. Tone, a native of Tokyo, was a founding member of Group Ongaku, a groundbreaking free-improvisation ensemble, and of Team Random, an early computer art collective.He became an influential figure in the Japanese wing of Fluxus, the loose-knit avant-garde movement that began in the early 1960s, whose members included John Cage, the experimental composer; Nam June Paik, the video art pioneer; and Yoko Ono, the conceptual artist. All of those artists influenced his work.Mr. Tone, left, performing in 1976 with Suzanne Fletcher.via the Estate of Yasunao ToneWhatever the medium, the guiding principle of Fluxus was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art,” as its founder, the artist George Maciunas, once put it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
