VIEW FROM THE RIVERBED
Conceptual-art giant underlines idea that her Gardiner Museum creation means ‘everyone has a voice in the work’
Yoko Ono is the godmother of conceptual art, a charter member of the Fluxus movement that brought performance into the art world, a minimalist composer, an experimental filmmaker, a globetrotting peace activist and, yes, likely still the world’s most famous widow.
That last bit still chafes with her art-world following, which sees her as among the most significant female artists of the 20th century. Can there really be any doubt? An early career spent communing with the likes of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Joseph Beuys — and being aped by such luminaries as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth — seem to make that clear.
By the time she met John Lennon in 1966, it was his career, not hers, that had yet to take shape.
Through it all, certain simple tenets have held: her work is hopeful, gentle, experiential and more than a little oblique. (In Grapefruit, her 1964 book filled with mysterious instructions described as a monument of conceptualism, she suggests such things as imagining “one thousand suns in the sky at the same time” and, once they’ve melted, “Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.”) Expect little deviation (minus the tuna) when Ono’s
The Riverbed makes its debut at the Gardiner Museum on Tuesday. A set of three pieces served as a gentle invitation to contemplation, self-reflection and more than a little co-operation, which, maybe not coincidentally, are all at noticeably low ebb in these trying times. Before the opening, we engaged the artist over email to gauge her thinking.
The Riverbed, more than anything, seems to be an invitation not just to participate, but for people to interact — even with strangers. Why is it important to your work that people not only take action, but need to negotiate their relationship with others?
Because the work is for all people. And it isn’t fair if they can’t do something about it. It’s important that everyone has a voice in the work.
All over the world, but in the United States in particular, angry conflict seems to have taken over from more peaceful debate and negotiation. Are the works in The Riverbed meant to address some of the strife we see in the world today? What do you hope the works will achieve as they entreat viewers to engage in them?
Once they get engaged with the Riverbed, they will forget about the terrible conflicts. Though they may come up with a solution while engaging with the work, something hopefully all of us will be happy with.
I’m particularly interested, in this context, in “Mend Piece,” which to me is an elegant, poetic gesture towards not only co-operation, but the tremendous amount of work to be done to fix the mess we’re in. Were you thinking about the various conflicts in the world today as you conceived it, and did anything in particular strike you as broken and badly in need of mending?
Yes, and as we mend this piece many important things will be mended as well. I first made this work in 1966, but it’s even more appropriate now.
The idea of a riverbed is one that is complex. It suggests a place that was once active and free-flowing, now run dry, but it also suggests, to me, a certain amount of potential: possibly one that might be as destructive as it might be nourishing, a floodway consuming what might be in its path. I’m interested to know what this metaphor meant to you, how you arrived at it and why you chose it.
Riverbed is what we have on earth. And by mending things I want their minds to fly high, from the riverbed.
Finally, I read that you said recently that “The Riverbed is over the river in between life and death . . . Most people are not aware their anger can take them across this river to the other side. It can.” I’m interested in this idea of anger, in that my reading of these works has always been something more co-operative and peaceful — a kind of coerced communion between two sides. Anger, of course, is something that’s powerfully prevalent in the world today, as divisions seem to grow wider by the day. This seems to speak of the productive power of anger, an emotion most of us think of as destructive. Is there anything personal about the power of anger — something it has helped you achieve, a fuel to be burned constructively — that caused you to think this way? And is there a way to see the overwhelming anger we see so prevalently these days as a positive force?
You can cross the riverbed and die, or mend the works and live. Also, people can fly from the riverbed to wherever they wish to go.