Yoko Ono's 'Wish Tree' is branching out
EACH spring at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, white note cards bearing wishes dangle from the branches of Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree for Washington DC”. Some years, they swallow up the dogwood, thick as heavy snow. Other years they decorate it, bright like a second bloom.
This year, for the first time since it was installed in 2007, the Hirshhorn's Wish Tree will be partially virtual. Through the end of this month, the museum, with Ono’s permission, is taking wishes posted to Instagram with the hashtag #Wishtreedc and transferring them to the tree.
Then, later this year, the museum will mail them to Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower outside Reykjavik, where the wishes will join more than a million others, compiled since Ono started making wish trees in the 1990s.
The Hirshhorn has invited artists. Their wishes are idealistic visions and impossible dreams. Byron Kim wishes people would be more concerned with unity than diversity. Huma Bhabha wishes to talk to animals.
Through the shift to social media, an experiential piece in person is becoming more of a collective performance online. The private act of wishing becomes public self-expression. And on Instagram, the reality that wishes are equal parts helpless and hopeful is central.
Los Angeles artist Liz Larner wishes the burden of recycling didn’t always fall on the consumer. But her wish.
“A wish is the first impetus toward action,” Larner said. “People keep wishes to themselves a lot of the time, but when a wish gets out, there’s more possibility for it to come true.”
In a way, the evolution of the “Wish Tree” into the digital realm is quintessential Yoko Ono.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Ono took part in an international avant-garde art movement titled Fluxus, which was particularly active in New York. They sought to upend what art could be, making works that were impermanent, unfinished, participatory and event based. Ono’s work has played with the line between private and public. In her 1969 protest artwork bed-in-forpeace, she invited the media into her and John Lennon's honeymoon bed. In a seminal 1964 work, Cut Piece, she asked audiences to cut off bits of her clothing.
With much of Ono’s art, the more people who participate in it, the more complete it becomes. She has written a book filled with instruction-based works known as “scores”. Famously, upon meeting Lennon at her solo show at London’s Indica Gallery, she handed him a card that instructed him to “breathe”.
“(Artists) usually want to just perfect something and never let people touch it,” Ono told Interview Magazine. “I thought that's why this could be good, because it’s very different. It even goes against my feelings – I don’t want to give up the control.”
Giving control to the audience also means opening the work to different tastes – for better or for worse. And many of the wishes that have appeared on Washington’s wish tree over the years – “for new Legos”, to 'smoke weed every day” – are probably not what Ono envisioned when she began making them, inspired by the wish trees she had visited growing up in Japan.
For artist Ken Lum, who wished that he had met my wife sooner, not all wishes are created equal. There are the instant gratification wishes. Then there are the kind of wishes he encountered with his Chinese American family: long-term wishes.
Lum sees differences in what he calls Western and Eastern wish systems. The former, focusing on personal “wish fulfilment” and the latter “embedded in the cosmological view of the world that all things are interconnected”.
In wish trees, which are popular in temples around East Asia, there is a picture of such interconnectedness. Traditionally, attaching a wish to a tree is a private act, but “it's only one contribution of possibly thousands”, Lum notes.
“Even though no one knows each other,” Lum says, “what you have is an image of a community.” |