From 09 March to 17 July 2016, the three floors of the macLYON are devoted to the work of Yoko Ono, conceptual from the very beginning and which encompassed performance, instructions, film, music and writing.
This first French retrospective, entitled YOKO ONO Lumière de L’aube gather more than hundred works, from the illustrated poems of 1952 to the big installations of 2016, but also film, performances, etc.
Faithful to the spirit of the work of Yoko Ono, the exhibition has of course to be seen, but also to be heard and above all to be experienced.
The artist
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Nom de l'artisteYoko Ono
Yoko Ono was born in 1933, in Tokyo, and visited the United States when she was 3 or 4, but was forced to return with her family to Japan when the war broke out. In 1953, Yoko Ono moved to New York to continue her studies, and there wrote "A Grapefruit in the World of Park", which became the basis for some of her earliest performance works.
Yoko Ono creates works in many different forms – sound works, film works, participation works, instructions, architecture, installations, and environments. All of these will be reflected and included in the macLYON exhibition with works spanning the period from 1952 to 2016.
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It was during the “soirées” at 112 Chambers Street that Yoko presented her first “Instruction Paintings”: Smoke Paintings, Painting To Be Stepped On, Shadow Piece, and Pea Piece, Add Color Painting. She wrote about these in 1966: “Instruction Painting separates painting into two different functions : the instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the artist himself cannot foresee, and brings the concept of ‘time’ into painting”. It is clear from this that Yoko Ono considers that her œuvre is expressly designed to be definitively uncompleted, to be capable of being performed by anyone and of being reworked over time, and re-performed on any occasion. And it follows that, since they can be performed anywhere and at any time.
So over the course of 6 years and 8 months, almost by sleight of hand, Yoko Ono brought about a veritable Copernican revolution. Her ideas of text and text-score, instructions, sound, stage, collectives and multiple versions opened incredible vistas for her, which she would go on to broaden and develop in her subsequent works.
We have every reason to wonder why Yoko Ono was thought of (particularly in Europe) as playing a minor role, when she so clearly exerted a major influence on the creation of the Fluxus “spirit” (which she refused to identify with, however). Yes and Imagine suited her well enough.
These days, her work is essential viewing ; it is utterly relevant.
We expect to present an exhibition that would be totally faithful to the work and in harmony with the principle of the instructions, and that would respect its “spirit”.
For Lyon’s show, Yoko Ono has chosen the title Lumière de L’aube. It is generic, in so far as Lumière (Light) is one of the keywords of her œuvre. At the same time, it is rooted in the city’s history because it inevitably recalls that strange invention, which its creators, the Lumière Brothers, predicted would never catch on, namely, the cinema. And for such a young work, Yoko Ono’s, this title is a beautiful beginning, a very nice opening.
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Titre
Cut Piece
“Cut Piece” was first performed by Yoko Ono on 20 July 1964, in Kyoto, Japan. Yoko Ono, wearing a suit, knelt in the middle of the stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothes and take them away. At some of her performances, Yoko Ono made the statement, ‘My body is the scar of my mind.’
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Titre
Mend Piece
Originally presented at the Indica Gallery, London in 1966, Mend Piece is an emblematic piece and Yoko Ono’s response to the traumas of the world : Mend Piece for John (1968), Mend Piece for the World (2001). The visitors are invited to ‘mend’ pieces of broken china, as a metaphor for individual participation in collective memory.
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Titre
Ex It
Initially designed for the Museu de L’Almodí, Valencia in 1997, the work consists of a hundred coffins, for men, women, and children. Yoko Ono’s instruction makes it clear that they are rudimentary coffins, such as those used on battlefields or during natural catastrophes. A hundred trees grow out of them, while the space is filled with birdsong, a metaphor for life and resurrection.
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Titre
Amaze
This maze of Perspex, the centre of which is made up of three panels of mirrors, partially concealing a toilet, invites visitors to look in all directions without being seen themselves. However, there is no privacy; one section is open. The work combines the complexity of a maze and its capacity for disorientation, and the lack of privacy in life.
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Titre
Balance Piece
In an ‘instruction’ from 1958, Yoko Ono suggested placing a magnet on the left-hand wall of a room so that the objects would gradually move. The idea was to rebalance our mind, which was too far to the right. In the installation Balance Piece, created in 1997, a very large magnet seemed to attract all the objects in the room. Yoko Ono was formally developing the idea that there must be balance in all things, an idea she had already put into practice in Weight Objects in 1990.
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Titre
Freight Train
The work Freight Train by Yoko Ono was recently installed at the Cité internationale in Lyon, close to the museum. This wagon, covered in bullet holes from which rays of light shine out, was originally inspired by a dramatic incident : the death in 1987 of several Mexicans who had been trying to cross over the United States border in a freight train. The locked wagon was abandoned in the middle of the desert. Yoko Ono sees this work as ‘a memorial to all the injustices of the 20th century’ and ‘a manifesto of resistance, cure and hope for the future’.
