I’ve been leaving peas everywhere I go. Yoko Ono told me to do it.
They’re starting to grow little tendrils. I planted one by our mailbox and hope that by the time summer arrives the little girls across the street will be able to run up to fetch the mail and pluck a juicy pea pod.
Last week I screamed against the sky. Yoko told me to do that too.
I screamed for all the injustice in the world; for the violence; for the needless killings; for the people whose voices are ignored; for the women with no autonomy over their bodies; for the stupidity and cruelty of mankind.
Yoko told me to collect sounds too. So I did and here they are in a short soundscape.
I suspect you either love or hate Yoko Ono’s exhibition at Tate Modern, London. You’re either intrigued or bored by the conceptuality of it. It took me and my lovely artist friend
(check out her ‘stack!) around three hours to walk around all the viewing rooms—Yoko has a huge portfolio of work—yet I know others who wandered through in under half an hour.And that’s maybe because Yoko’s artwork asks a lot of viewers. It requests that you stop and watch a lengthy video, sit and listen to Yoko’s music, pause and hammer a nail into a canvas; and take time to read the tiny writing in her text installations.
This is not a flashy, colourful explosion of canvases like you may find in other Tate Modern viewing rooms; this is a quiet, mostly monochromatic, documentation of many of Yoko’s most important projects.
I understand how non-contemporary this exhibition may feel in terms of what’s “on trend” right now in other London galleries that are filled with brightly coloured, figurative artworks, but the visual hush of Yoko’s work belies the powerful messaging that underpins it: that art can drive individual and societal change; that art must be democratised; that art is not about the object (or the commodification of the object) but the imaginative conceptual experience.
And above all, driving Yoko’s work is a message of peace.
And I LOVE all of that.
All of that is SO relevant in today’s world.
And so, even though I’ve seen iterations of her participatory projects a gazillion times over the last twenty years, this exhibition felt more contemporary than I expected. It inspired me in ways I never imagined. It fed my journal pages far longer than other shows I’ve visited and seeped into my art practice in alluring ways.
The works I haven’t stopped thinking or writing about are the ‘Instructions for Painting’, a series of text “instructions” typed onto pages and mounted along one long wall. These avant-garde, conceptual text pieces are sometimes poetic, and sometimes make no literal sense, but hint at experimental approaches to thinking and art-making.
What struck me immediately about these works was the parallel with the latest bandwagon in the arts: AI art prompting. In her instructional works, Yoko gives us a series of directives to follow in the same way we might feed commands into an AI art generator. Just as we have very little control over what AI might return to us, Yoko has no control over how her instructions might be carried out and the style of art they might produce.
But whereas the AI art experience is restricted to the keyboard, Yoko’s instructions are invitations to go out and explore, play, and create beyond the constraints of art norms.
Intrigued by the instructions and prompting comparison, I played…
I’ve been writing avant-garde instructional text works too, using Yoko’s examples as a springboard.
birth 1. stand naked under the stars 2. open your mouth wide and birth the moon 3. hang it in a tree for one month
I have to say it’s rare that I leave an exhibition with such a strong urge to respond to its message, and that’s a testament to Yoko’s ability to democratise her work and offer her art, not as a polished finished product to sell, but as a performance in which YOU, the viewer, can take part. It felt refreshing. It felt like what we need right now in the arts: A return to community arts and collaborative making unpinned by strong values.
There’s much more I could say about this exhibition but I highly suggest you read
’s review. We don’t agree but Victoria highlights the same works that drew my attention and offers a different perspective.One of Yoko’s timely messages is that the concept of peace often makes no sense, just like her text prompts. Giving peace a chance in today’s complex world requires avant-garde thinking and non-traditional approaches. Through her participatory art projects she tells us that if we want peace, democracy, and freedom, we must be willing to take part in the communal struggle towards those goals.
The outcomes of those projects—a breathtaking wall of love notes to mums, a room full of human mark-making, a canvas capturing the drawn silhouettes of visitors—indicate that above all, people don’t want to just witness art, they want to be part of it. And even though the projects may have been repeated a thousand times as community projects in schools and small-town art festivals, nobody cares!
They want to make art!
And the assumption Yoko makes is that if people want to make art, they want to make peace too.
Until next time.
JC
Love the soundscape!
Haven’t seen the exhibit but love her work. The book Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono really inspired me.