Sometime in 1964 or early 1965, having recently returned to New York after a two-year stint in her home country of Japan, Yoko Ono sent out some postcards. The cards bore the instruction to draw a circle inside a rectangular box, alongside a questionnaire gathering data about the “circle experience” of the recipient. The return address was the Empire State Building. Respondents included George Maciunas, Ay-O, and Carolee Schneemann—all fellow members of the avant-garde artistic circle in which Ono was embedded at the time.
A handful of these cards are on view in “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” a major survey that opened at Tate Modern in London last week. Schneemann’s is a delightfully smudgy mess of scrawled rings in black, green, and yellow that far surpass the limits of the rectangular box. Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, took a contrasting approach: a neatly annotated diagram showing the difference between circles drawn by hand and with a compass.
Draw Circle Event, as the postcard project was titled, is an entertaining episode from the early history of mail art. It is also a clear example of what Ono has done, again and again, across her career: setting up situations that invite us—the viewer, the reader, the listener—into the creative act. As Ono herself once put it, in reference to the series of silent concerts from which the title of the Tate show is drawn, “My works are only to induce music in the mind in people.”
This project of stimulating the imaginative potential of others—whether these are people she knows or complete strangers—spans Ono’s conceptual artworks, her chart-topping music, and her peace activism. Just think of the lyrics of “Imagine,” the 1971 anti-war anthem which John Lennon would eventually admit was all Ono’s idea. “It was right out of Grapefruit,” Lennon told a BBC interviewer shortly before he died, referring to the experimental book of instructions and drawings that Ono had self-published in 1964. “There’s a whole pile of pieces [in the book] about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine that.’”
The Tate show has a display of the typescript for Grapefruit, with its instructions—or what Ono calls “scores”—ranging from the whimsical but do-able to the entirely impossible. “Walk all over the city with an empty baby-carriage,” suggests one addressed to the artist and choreographer Simone Forti. “Send the smell of the moon,” suggests another.
There are also more straightforwardly interactive exhibits. At the press view for the show, I watched as one of the photographers stepped into a large black bag made of Japanese cotton and began to flail his limbs, reenacting the Bag Piece which Ono first performed in 1964. Elsewhere, there were blank canvases where visitors could trace the outline of their or another person’s shadow—or, if feeling a little more destructive, hammer a nail.
At various points Ono has offered symbolic explications of her works. On Bag Piece, she has offered that “By being in a bag, you show the other side of you, which is nothing to do with race, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with…age, actually.” Her all-white chess sets, first presented in “Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono” at Indica Gallery in London in 1966, are supposed to represent her commitment to pacifism. Clearly, for Ono, the most important job for our imaginations is to help us conceive of a better world—one without violence or suffering.
But not everything we dream about has to have such weighty ramifications. It’s easy to be charmed by the story of Ono and Lennon’s first meeting at the Indica show in 1966, where he offered her five imaginary shillings to hammer an imaginary nail into a canvas before the exhibition’s official opening. “Oh, here’s a guy who’s playing the same game I’m playing,” Ono later recalled thinking in response to his gesture.
That’s the thing about Ono’s participatory work: It is really as much about the viewer and what they bring to the experience as it is about the artist. A work entitled Add Color (Refugee Boat), conceived in 1960 but first realized in 2016, consists of a white-painted wooden boat, which the visitor can scribble on with a blue marker. The work was originally produced in the context of the global refugee crisis, but the latest iteration at Tate has been dominated by messages—by turns angry, sad, and hopeful—relating to the current crises in Ukraine and Gaza.
Some of the most personal and moving contributions in the exhibition were in response to My Mummy Was Beautiful, first created for the Liverpool Biennial in 2004. The reinstallation for Tate features images of a woman’s breasts and vagina—among the first things a child sees when it is born—on the ceiling of the gallery. Visitors are then prompted to write memories on notepaper, or share photos of their own mothers.
“It has not always been easy,” reads one memory. “You used to pull my hair. You’d hate it if I said that now. You love me. You try so hard. I love you. Thanks for everything.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/iSFZoK4
No comments:
Post a Comment