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Remember
Love Sweden: May 29th - August 8th 2004
"Yoko
Ono's exhibition in Kulturhuset in Stockholm has five entrances: one narrowing,
one funnel-shaped, two that lead nowhere, one blocked by over-sized stairs, one
with skyblue drapes. Like many of the artworks on view, the different entrances
to the exhibition appeal to the visitor's sense of sympathy and generates active
audience participation. Imagine Peace/Map Room which is a room with maps, has
a table with stamps. The exhibition visitors are urged to stamp the word "Imagine
peace" on the maps, wherever they feel the need to. It's like a performance
variant of a Christian intercession. Signal Event has
two flashlights hanging from a string, urging people to signal "I love you"
to each other in morse code. Not so much conceptual, but
more lyric and complex is the piece called Crickets, with small cages hanging
from the ceiling with remnants from crickets imprisoned where terrible events
have taken place. "17 July 1942, Stalingrad, USSR, YO 98", reads on
one of the cages, "Hiroshima" on another. You can write about your own
crickets to grief for them. The piece is beautiful and universal. Blue
Room is created by the artist at the exhibition venue. A rental room in New York
is the background to this piece by Yoko Ono: the room was so depressing that she
decided to change the nature of the room to a more warm and humane one by writing
on its walls. Right now there are over 20 exhibitions and
projects by Yoko Ono going on in the world, and to us it feels like a circus or
an industrial activity. How does she find the time to do it all? Are we tricked?
In any case the exhibition is good enough, and there are enough ideas behind the
pieces - there's Stockholm sky live on a TV screen, stones for happiness and sadness,
rays of the morning sun falling down - so that you can leave the exhibition with
joy and new sensations, and with fingers stained purple from the stamps."
"Yoko
Ono covered herself with a black cloth bag, tied people in a crowd together with
blue string and asked them to "Remember Love", as she opened her exhibition
of the same name in Stockholm yesterday. "We should all remember love ..
They said that in the beginning, there was one word, and the word was God. I don't
believe that. I believe the word was love," she told a crowd at a one hour
chat about love, life, memory and art in the Stockholm Kulturhuset, where her
vast exhibition of interactive installations, portraits, films and sounds was
on display. "I am 71. When I became 70, I suddenly realised that I had so
much love for the world, because I realised that the world is like my lover which
has stayed with me for 70 years. "I love it ... I love you," she told
the 300-odd onlookers who had been entangled together in blue yarn. "We're
all part of it. We can all be together in this blueness." Functioning as
an extension of her exhibit two floors up, Yoko's "chat" was more like
a one-woman, multi-media performance-art show. Using slides, music, bird song
and a few chairs, Ono constantly changed positions, lay on the floor, groaned,
moaned and grunted, and made statements like "I like this position ... It's
all about positioning." When art critic Haakon Nilsson tried to involve her
in a dialogue, she moved around, sat on the floor, measured his head and shoulders,
and invited him to join her inside a black cloth bag, where they both removed
their shoes and "changed the world". "You know, I think that you
think and talk too much in a linear language," she said in answer to his
questions about her work, urging him to change positions and to learn not from
her, but from himself. Making art and living life is not
about pleasing the critics, but about doing what feels right, she insisted. "When
John and I did the ‘bed-in', we were so excited,"
she said, referring to the couple's "Bed-in for Peace" in 1969, when
they sparked a media frenzy by staying in bed for a week in protest of the Vietnam
war and to send a message of universal love. "We didn't know we would be
persecuted so bad ... that we would make our bed for life, or what would happen
to John ... We just thought ‘what a great idea!' " she said. Lennon
was assassinated in 1980 outside the New York building where he lived with Ono.
Ono's exhibit, which consists of both her more recent worksandher earlier pieces,
including several of the conceptual films she worked on with Lennon, will run
through Aug 8 in Stockholm. Texts with messages such as "Imagine Peace"
and "Remember love" have been posted across the city centre, and Ono's
"Toilet Thoughts" poster, on which people are invited to write their
thoughts, can be found in the lavatories of many Stockholm bars and restaurants."
More information
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©
Olof Elfverson 2004
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