Yoko Ono: ARISING
Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at 01:13PM Yoko Ono invited women from countries around the world to write testaments of harm done to them for simply being a woman. The setting for these testaments are part of her installation Arising, shown in conjunction with the 55th Venice Biennale along Venice’s Grand Canal, just a few steps away from the Rialto Bridge. In an interior room of a Renaissance mansion of the Palazzo Bembo, one finds the source of Ono’s unmistakable voice on the soundtrack to a video playing on a continuous loop. Her haunting aria wails, sings, moans, screams:
“Listen to your heart
Respect your intuition...
Have courage
Have rage
We’re all together...
We’re rising.”
Arising is a multi-media installation—a single piece comprised of video, sculpture, sound, photos of eyes, and the written testaments from hundreds of anonymous women. On a flat screen mounted between two windows a video plays of a dozen or more human shapes burning like a pyre of corpses in a funerary ceremony. In the center of the gallery space, in front of the video, a mound of life-size female figures—perhaps the remains from the pyre—are piled up on a parquet wood floor. Far more realistic than mannequins, these lifeless bodies are covered with an ashen dust and encrusted with scales of a coppery green patina in an open mass grave. Testaments line two long walls from floor to ceiling and a polite Queen Anne table and chair sit at one end—a place for women to add their own narratives, if they are so inclined.
At eighty years old, Ono has been creating performance art and installations since the mid-1950s when she moved to Manhattan and married her first husband, pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ono was on the cusp of change happening in the art world at that time as Asian philosophy met American artists through the lectures of D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University. Ono met John Cage during this critical juncture at one of Suzuki’s lectures on Zen. They became friends and she later helped to bring Cage to Japan, performing with him in a collaborative piece called Music Walk.
Ono was a founding member of the conceptual artist group Fluxus, in New York City, and created a body of work that is poetic, somewhat ephemeral, and often profound. By comparison to her recent installation in Venice, her 1966 piece Forget It—a steel sewing needle pointed upward and mounted on a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the title and her initials—is minimal, a found object with Duchampian connections. One thinks about the proverbial needle in a haystack or joining up one thing with another. Ono’s art has consistently been idea oriented and at the same time elegant in material form. Another early conceptual piece, Glass Keys to Open the Skies—four clear glass skeleton keys hanging in a thin Plexiglas case, keys that are too fragile to be used—speaks of the desire to unlock that which is beyond our reach. Arising differs considerably from these pieces, independent of cerebral games. Arising is not about intellectual calculation, but rather an offering up of a collective emotional wound for healing. It is as though in this chapter of Ono’s creative output, she wants to score a piece that is without the sparcity of her previous work and leaves nothing to the imagination.
The components that make up Arising are literal in subject and content, leaving no space to query what the point is. This is not a needle on a pedestal, or glass keys. Ono’s performance Cut Piece, first presented in Kyoto, in 1964, and later in London and New York City, at Carnegie Recital Hall, does resemble Arising in the expression of content. Ono invited the audience to snip away at her clothing until she was left seated onstage with little but shreds covering her body. In an essay for her 2001-2002 traveling retrospective, Alexandra Munroe wrote, “Cut Piece expresses an anguished interiority while offering a social commentary on the quiet violence that binds individuals and society, the self and gender.” Arising has a similar social commentary with the audible voices of more than two hundred fifty individual testaments. Some women wrote that they had never shared their story with anyone before out of fear or shame. Their words contain the pain of secrets long hidden:
“My silent mantra was, ‘stay small,
stay quiet, become invisible.’ My name is ‘Anonymous,’
because that is how my father made me feel. He touched
and held me as tight as he could, though not in
the way a father should.”
These are stories of physical abuse, sexual transgressions, and rape. These are stories of destruction. These are the types of stories flattened by television police dramas. They are not spellchecked or edited for grammar, they are raw. Curator and museum director, Nanjo Fumio, wrote of Ono’s oeuvre, “Some of her messages call for love and peace; others encourage us to see our life from different perspectives. But always at the heart of her messages is a call to us all to be human; and all are informed by Eastern wisdom and poetics transcending national boundaries.” Ono’s installation Arising will continue to travel to various venues during 2014, and all women are invited to continue to add their testaments. Perhaps these stories are a part of that search and the truths of an arising global heart.
—Deborah Gavel
