Yoko's exhibit at Barcelona
Diana
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 24 2001
Exhibition
Ono she can't
BY STEPHEN BURGEN
Yoko Ono's show in Spain aims to beguile viewers with its interactive exhibits.
Our critic has his doubts
There’s an old saying, one does the work and the other does the grunting, and
while it may be futile to argue over what makes a work of art, it seems fair to
expect that it’s something into which the artist has put some work.
Impressions, which has just opened in Barcelona, is a retrospective of Yoko
Ono’s works, mostly from the 1960s, plus some new work prepared for this
show. It is, to put it nicely, effortless. You enter via a floor strewn with
sheets of A3 on which are printed messages such as: “Painting to be stepped
on. Leave a piece of canvas or unfinished painting on the floor or in the
street” (1960).
This is the first of many exhortations. You then pass into a room containing a
pile of white stones. This is Cleaning Piece (1996). You are asked to pile up
the stones according to the number of your sorrows and then do the same with
your joys and see which pile is bigger. The room is strewn with un-equal piles
of stones.
Then comes Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961). Rectangles of various materials
are fixed to the wall and hammers hang on pegs. Visitors are to hammer in a
nail and ideally wrap a hair from their head round it. When there’s no room
for any more nails, we are told, the picture is complete. There is also
Painting to be Watered (1962), a white wall with a stainless steel trough of
water at its base and some paint rollers and brushes. Water every day, we are
instructed.
No one was watering the wall but they obviously enjoyed hammering in nails, as
most of the pictures were already “complete” — which may be of concern as
the show runs for another two months.
And so it goes on. There are posters — rather grandly referred to as
“canvases” — which you are to cut up and stick on to other posters, and
photographs which you are to put on the wall and allow others to cut up. Then
there’s the bare room with a chair in the middle and around the wall a text
that begins: “This room moves at the same speed as the clouds. Find other
rooms which exist in this space.” This is rather like coming across a journal
you kept when you were 16 — you’re not sure whether to cringe, titter or
blush. Of course we all have our juvenilia, but most of us prefer to keep it
out of the public domain.
It is tempting to say when viewing this work, ‘Oh well, it was the
Sixties’, but the recent offerings contain the same mix of fey flower-child
and faux wisdom, and it is debatable whether this should be taken as firmness
of principle or simple lack of development.
Take Telephone Peace (For Barcelona) 1997-2001, which consists of a telephone
mounted on a wall. You pick it up and get a dialling tone. Wow! This work took
four years to execute? And surely the wordplay on piece/peace, which dates back
at least to 1969 and Ono’s “bed-ins” with John Lennon, is a little tired
by now.
Another work made especially for the show is Mend Piece for the World
(Barcelona 2001), a long table covered in broken crockery, presumably waiting
for Gaudí to come back from the dead to do something interesting with it.
So it’s a great relief to enter a room and discover some large bright
canvases. Aha! Something she’s done herself, you think. But no, the paintings
are the work of visitors to the exhibition who have been asked to colour the
blank canvases. Even the movie Fly (1970), which shows a young naked woman
motionless on her back as a fly crawls over her, is accompanied by a blurb
which says: “Let the fly crawl over her body,” as though there was anything
we could do to stop it.
The Barcelona show coincides with the opening at the Japan Society in Manhattan
of YES Yoko Ono, her first retrospective in America, which was five years in
the making. Many of the pieces in New York are from the 1960s and 1970s. The
show brings out John Lennon’s role as a collaborating artist in many of her
works, and features a new film by Ono, Blueprint for a Sunrise. YES Yoko Ono
runs until January 14.
As for Impressions, while there’s nothing wrong with a bit of interaction,
the traffic is mostly one way, the work being more ours than hers, which is no
doubt the show’s conceit, that by hammering in a nail the visitor learns
something about themselves and their place in the world. However, as so much of
the work is executed by the public, it is almost impossible to depict. Overall
one is left with the impression of an artist who either has nothing whatever to
say or suffers from a pathological fear of revealing herself. And yet if
another measure of an artist is whether they have a distinctive voice, the
answer would have to be yes. The show is exactly what you’d expect; it is
very Yoko Ono. Which must say something, though perhaps not very much.
Impressions is at Palau de la Virreina, La Rambla, 99, Barcelona, until January
6
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