Starting this article, I feel the urge to use Yoko Ono’s Chewing gum machine piece (1961) instruction: ‘Place chewing gum machines with many different word cards in them next to Coca-Cola machines on every street corner. Make it so that a word card comes out when you put one cent in. Put more auxiliary words than nouns. More verbs than adjectives.’ In other words, give this essay a flux casualness, avoiding the colourful but widely known details of Yoko Ono’s biography or overly serious assessments that clog the perception of the conceptual yet laconic content. On the other hand, in the exhibition ‘The Learning Garden of Freedom’, curated by Jon Hendricks, Ono’s long-time friend and a curator of Jurgis Mačiūnas and Fluxus movement shows, the first welcoming artwork proclaims: ‘War is over if you want it. Love and peace from John and Yoko.’ This, in the context of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine today, brings the visitor back to questions of the politics of art (and Yoko Ono’s work in particular). There are many more clearly politically engaged works in the exhibition, but other objects in ‘The Learning Garden of Freedom’, such as an apple standing on a pedestal with a neat little table indicating ‘Apple’ (1966-2020), perhaps convey the idea of flux (a)politics and pacifism even better. So what will this article be about? First, about the indescribably beautiful, gruelling, scintillating, politically motivated, painful, conscious, inevitable, playful, misunderstood, imaginative, expanding and growing choice to be free in art and beyond it.
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I bought the book ‘Three Friends. Jurgis Mačiūnas, Yoko Ono, John Lennon’ (1998), edited by Jonas Mekas, in 2012. At that time, I was finishing school and was only thinking about studying art history. In the same year, together with my classmates, we prepared a themed play for the ‘100 Days’[1] [1] school celebration, in which I was given the role of … Yoko Ono. Someone made wonderful posters reproducing the aesthetics of Cold War protests (‘Make Love, not War!’, ‘End the War!’, ‘World Peace!’), the girls in the class went to all the thrift stores in town looking for the most original floral dresses, and we spent months rehearsing the rumba dance steps to ‘Imagine’. And there we were, with the head of the class, standing on the stage of the school assembly hall; behind us, a silk bedspread with cushions supported by our colleagues; in front of us, the ‘journalists’ snapping with their camera lenses. I heard myself giving a speech about the senseless atrocities of war, and then proclaiming in a hushed dreamy voice: ‘Lie in bed and grow your hair long!’ Today, the same book, a piece of the Kaunas sky from ‘The Learning Garden of Freedom’, and a card with the inscription ‘space transformer’, are lying on my desk. Somewhere in the depths of my closet lies the same white dress with puffed sleeves printed with butterflies and flowers, but I read the conversations of Ono, Mačiūnas and Lennon in a different light, enriched by the history of art and war:
YOKO: I even think that when I yell and scream and do all those things, they’re too formalized. But people think it’s just yelling and screaming. They don’t even see any rhythm, communication, anything. But I want to say that I don’t believe that people are actually so polished in their hearts and minds as to say, “Well, how are you doing, John?” And the music is squeezed into a very sophisticated form. They speak in a smooth manner, as people usually speak, and it is wrong, it is false. And actually, in our minds, instead of saying “How are you?”, “Thank you, great”, we just shout and cry and scream and always hide it. So, in my music, I, on the contrary … I want to do what seems to me to be authentic. So I can’t say “Hey, Jonas” or anything like that. I say Jo-jo-jo-on-as. Because that’s how I feel, you know?
JONAS: A-ha.
YOKO (humming a melody): Da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da, or something like that … but in a distorted way. You see, when you are still very young and raw and know nothing about life you can sing with a clear voice. But then you start to feel the pain, the tension and anxiety. Then you say “da-da-da-da”, you get it. You say “A-a-i, a-a-i, ai, o-oi, oo, o-oi” […] You see, it’s too painful for me as a human being to organize something, so I’ll just act like someone who doesn’t know anything but stuttering …
JONAS: So it’s like action painting with voice … [2] [2]
Hence, perhaps instead of saying: ‘The exhibition “The Learning Garden of Freedom” in the Kaunas Picture Gallery exhibits Yoko Ono’s text works, instructions for films, performances and theatre productions, as well as objects, installations and some of the artist’s most famous films,’ we should say Jo-h-n-n-nn L-l-l-e-ee-eee-n-nn-o-oo-n a-a-as a-a-a yo-u-u-n-nn-n-g c-l-o-u-d (1968)? Perhaps, instead of saying: ‘Yoko Ono’s works in the exhibition are completed by the active participation of the viewer,’ we should say ‘Take a piece of heaven, know that we are all a part of each other’ (Piece of Heaven, 2008)? Perhaps looking at photographs of the colony of exiles made of melting blocks of ice (2001/2004) or the Picture in three stanzas (1961), we should first of all think about the inner strength that compels us to go beyond the inexpressible and dare to create in a universe where the individual expression of poetic reality is transformed into a common feeling of an experienced (aesthetic) moment? In all these cases, we would do the right thing by allowing ourselves to be authentic. On the other hand, it is important to realise that the linguistic nature of Yoko Ono’s works, coherent or stuttering, functions in a discourse of freedom to change in acting. In other words, their politics does not lie in an abstract detachment from reality, but in the paradigm of language performativity. Thus, by being free enough to find ourselves in situations directed by Yoko Ono, we are willingly expressing our desire to reshape the socio-political environment around us into one where ‘The war is over if you want it’, i.e., we allow ourselves to establish a peculiar politically and morally grounded situation, a wedge of reality interposed between difficult or even unbearable (such as real-life war) experiences, as a will to enable the promise of the reality implied by those situations. As a result, of course, the war does not end immediately, but by accepting the artist’s instructions for these exercises of thought and imagination, we agree to be part of the reality that we seek to realise through these conceptual actions. And this allows and encourages the production of such futures and possibilities, which the daily experience of reality, as an objective reality that exists a priori for individual perceptions, cannot be grasped; i.e., such a future and opportunities that give freedom to act.
When we enter ‘The Learning Garden of Freedom’ we seem to free ourselves from Sartre’s psychology of imagination, in which perception and imagination are two acts of human consciousness that never merge, and imagination is conscious, but also the negative (imagining consciousness positions its object as nothing) momentary individual’s detachment from reality. For example, in order to imagine how the architectural structures created according to Ono’s instructions function (‘Build a house out of dotted lines. Let people imagine the missing parts, let them forget about them’), we don’t have to be physically present in such a structure, or even imagine it existing in objective reality. Here, from a certain point of view, we are also talking about virtuality as an imagined extension and possibility of physical reality. Historically, the imagination that transcended individual experience, that there is another, other than the objectively perceived physical reality per se, indicates that the significantly changed relationship of perception of ‘reality versus mediality’, as well as ‘realness versus virtuality’, which lose their conceptual polarity, also led to a need for the concept of multiple imagination, to make sense of virtuality (or any other, qualitatively new socio-epistemic level of reality) as a social, artistic, scientific, technological, etc, space of expression of imagination, the potential of which is not characterised by the opposition of perception-imagination. This exhibition seems to be an ideal field for the expression of such a multiple imagination, where the linguistic nature of Ono’s works in the discourse of the inventive surplus of imagination. Thus, when we talk about the (a)politics of these works, we first identify it as existing simultaneously on the plane of perception and imagination.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the artworks presented in ‘The Learning Garden of Freedom’.
Water talk (since 1967) is an installation of ‘water sculptures’, clear glass bottles filled with water, expressing a rather simple yet seemingly eternal idea of universal equality. Labels with the names of different historical figures on the water containers create a unique conversation between personalities distant in time and history, such as the Korean-American conceptualist and pioneer of video art Nam June Paik, the Lithuanian urban legend Tadas Blinda, the pioneer of the fluxus movement and close friend of the artist Jurgis Mačiūnas, one of the most famous theatre and film directors of the 20th century Ingmar Bergman, the Lithuanian writer and educator Žemaitė, the American poet and writer Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the painter and set designer Barbora Didžiokienė, Marie Curie, the rapper 50 Cent, and others. Yoko Ono’s poetic rendering of the idea is as transparent as the liquid filling the bottles: we are all water kept in different containers, and one day we will ‘evaporate together’. On the other hand, the catchiness of the work also lies in its adaptation to the place of the exhibition. The names of Lithuanian historical figures interspersed in the narrative of global art, science, politics and popular culture remind us that despite different socio-political circumstances, we are all equal in the context of different, smaller and larger, cultural narratives. Thus, turning to matter, Ono reduces the importance of the social status of the individual and the relations of different powers, and dissolves them in the basic discourse of ideas of freedom and equality, giving this new artistic narrative a minimalist expression. You and I could be on the same shelf, next to Vytautas the Great and Immanuel Kant. On the other hand, such conceptual ‘cleansing’ balances on the verge of a certain dogmatism: becoming transparent containers of water, we unify decades of socio-cultural experience and individuality, ‘distilling’ all the interpersonal connotations associated with them. We are equal, but do we remain free to be ourselves? What if each of these personalities had really seen the universality (and hence unification) at the core of their activities?
Another politically engaged work by Yoko Ono is the feminist manifesto Rising (2013-2022). By inviting women of different nationalities, age, race and social status to tell their individual stories about how they have been victimised on the basis of their gender, the creator proclaims an act of liberation from individual and collective trauma. The work becomes part of the global #metoo movement named by Tarana Burke in 2006 and widespread in 2017 as a sensitive and extremely wide-ranging psychological and physical oppression narrative, constantly filled with new stories. By inviting women of the world to share their stories of oppression together with a photograph of their own eyes, Ono encourages us to look into the soul of each of these women, giving these stories individuality and universality at the same time: looking into the eyes of the project participants, we see both the trauma of individual experiences and the extremely wide demographics of gender-based crime victims. Here, stories written in different languages become a performative act of expression and elevation, when personal stories are institutionalised and become a reflection of a universal fact: women all over the world still suffer because of their gender.
Finally, Add color. Refugee Boat (2016-2019), just as blue as the ocean. By inviting exhibition visitors to fill the white room where the refugee boat is displayed with different shades of blue and white paint, Ono offers an individual opportunity to rethink the migration crisis as an event of collective responsibility. Brief notes, signs and messages left in the audience room form an ocean of information where an empty refugee boat finds itself in a hypothetical exhibition situation. In other words, by creating a tabula rasa to reflect a complex crisis, Yoko Ono allows the audience to see themselves in its light: what thoughts does the escape ‘tool’ exhibited in the exhibition space evoke in us? How do we institutionalise narratives related to the global migration crisis? What circumstances led to this crisis? How did we contribute to it? What does our voice say in its context? What does it mean to be free in the context of this crisis?
Instead of an epilogue:
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Walking on thin ice
I’m paying the price
For throwing the dice in the air
Why must we learn it the hard way
And play the game of life with your heart?[3] [3]
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[1] [4] There is a tradition in Lithuania for students celebrating their last 100 days at school before their exams that usually involves putting on a theatre or music performance, followed by an after prom.
[2] [5] Trys draugai. Jurgis Mačiūnas, Yoko Ono, John Lenonn. Pokalbiai, laiškai, užrašai, eds. Jonas Mekas, Richard Foreman and Hollis Melton. Vilnius: baltos lankos, 2007, p. 24-26.
[3] [6] Yoko Ono, Walking On Thin Ice (from the 1992 album of the same name).
Photography: Visvaldas Morkevičius