I recently went to see, in its last week, Yoko Ono’s exhibition Growing Freedom at the centre Phi. The exhibition takes aspects of different art exhibitions throughout the artist’s fifty year career. The exhibition is divided into two parts. One focuses on Yoko Ono’s fifty year career as an artist. The second part celebrates “action and participation” by paying tribute to Yoko and John Lennon’s bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth hotel 50 years to date.
Throughout her career, Ono has questioned the concept of art and the art object. We see this idea in the first section of the exhibit where viewers are not to be nearly onlookers, but are meant to interact with the art and make it there own. Yoko’s goal was often to break the boundary or traditional art and curation. I think that as ambassadors and troops of the creative field, we need to constantly think about the role of the end user. I love the idea of breaking the boundaries of traditional procedure and making lowbrow valuable again. As designers of brand identities, furniture, urbanism, we should include the end users in the whole process.
In the first section, we were invited to paint on a collective canvas, play chess, hit some nails on a wooden board. The main themes in the exhibit were about inclusiveness and I believe, also collaboration. It was so instinctual when we got to the second section of the exhibit and saw a white room with broken dish-ware to start mending it. There was something about the whole exhibition that felt very childish and innocent to me. Playing at recess with your classmates, making art projects out of scraps with tape and string. The idea of being empathetic towards one and another, to have a childlike curiosity again. To challenge the ideals put in place. To dare to participate, no matter what we were told or taught.
One of the pieces in her exhibition was Cut Piece, which dates back to her earlier work. It is a video of her on a stage, where random individuals are given a pair of scissors and told to take a piece. This performance piece starts off quite innocent but gets gloomy very fast. By the end of the video, men are cutting up her skirt, cutting though her shirt and cutting her bra strap off. I think here, Ono once again brings up the idea of breaking boundaries. As much as breaking the boundaries of modern art institution is a highly positive ideal, what happens when the boundary is so far from what we were told. These men took their freedom to the limits. At the time, women were quite conservative, and having the power to do something so scandalous, even for the sake of art seemed amazing to these men. I fear that boundaries must be broken, but sometimes slowly, and with dignity. Our childlike innocence gets overcome by pure animalistic desire. In any revolt, there is a fine line between peaceful protest and complete chaos and destruction. As artists and designers, we should strive to also design how those boundaries might be broken, how might we design a path to getting there.
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