![]() She guides you to imagine dividing up a canvas to send to arbitrary addresses, and to imagine a flower made of metal that becomes soft like cotton or flesh. These “imagine” pieces show you the kind of life it’s possible to live inside your mind. These imaginings are so full, they shove out all your sad, neurotic thoughts. Then there are her instructions that ask you to imagine things. It can be a film of people’s butts (a thing she also made). It can be a strange image that makes you laugh. It doesn’t have to be formal or fashionable or sacred or rarified. But many of her instructions (which she calls instruction paintings) challenge the idea that art has to be serious. She’s joking here, as usual, and I bet she would let you get away with saying “not all men” in response (and I would let you get away with it, too). Art, painting, sculpture, like who wants a cast-iron woman, for instance.” Men have an unusual talent for making a bore out of everything they touch. “If people want to make war, they should make a colour war, and paint each others city up during the night in pinks and greens. She includes some thoughts about art as additional material towards the end of the book: For example: “Roaches are moving forms of flowers, though visually they seem unconnected.” This is funny, but honestly, I’d like to appreciate roaches more. Also, she expresses appreciation for the sacredness of things that are not considered beautiful. Maybe it is better to destroy the formality of art and sacrifice some beautiful artworks than to let art be sequestered to museums. There’s an irreverence for the sacredness of art here, as when she suggests cutting up famous paintings to make underwear out of them. When the butterflies in my stomach die, I would like to send yellow death announcements to my friends. Some of these I’d like to actually accomplish. Leave a pea wherever you go.” Yes, the sharing isn’t always something the recipient will want, as also seen in “Laundry Piece,” where you show your dirty laundry to your guests and explain to them how it became dirty. Sacrifice and sharing are major themes running throughout these poem instructions. If you did this, the recipient wouldn’t know that the ribbon is made with a recording of snow falling, and yet the giver knows she’s giving away a compound gift of both a physical object and a sacrificed experience. And they emphasize the beauty of impermanence, as in this bit from “Tape Piece III: Snow Piece:” “Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling…Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with.” Some of the instructions can’t literally be carried out (like letting someone else sleep for you while you do all the things you want to do with your life), but this one could be. ![]() The event consists of two parts: Evening till Dawn and the second part, Secret Piece, in which a few musicians improvise in the grove to the first sounds of the dawn.These instructions remind us of the importance and beauty of other people and of the earth itself. Yoko Ono’s works Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953) on the night between 4 and 5 June 2012 on Djurgården in Stockholm. ![]() Search for the Fountain Fullmoon night at Djurgården in Stockholm The text has been sent to some 20 artists who have been invited to respond to, and comment on, the text in various ways. Search for the Fountainįor the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Yoko Ono has written a new instruction, Search for the Fountain. A number of experimental films and pivotal early works show Yoko to be a pioneer of conceptual art and the international fluxus movement, and also reflect the artist’s lifelong struggle for peace and love. The Grapefruit exhibition will include a selection of Yoko Ono’s ‘instruction pieces’, which invite us into imaginative ways of looking at existence and at the making of art. Alongside colleagues including George Maciunas, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and others, Yoko Ono developed totally new modes of expression that questioned the artworld’s increasingly commercial preoccupations, and which left heroic high modernism behind. Yoko Ono moved from Japan to the USA with her family in the 1940s, and soon became a leading voice in New York’s most interesting artist circles, which worked with happenings, sound art, poetry and film.
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