Review of Yoko Ono: To The Light at the Serpentine Gallery
Yoko Ono has added her very own trees, heavy with wishes, to the promenade the viewer takes through Kensington Gardens towards the Serpentine Gallery. The first work we encounter in her To The Light literally asks the viewer to voice their hopes and dreams publicly – an emotional truthfulness usually preserved for the likes of dream-granting, reality television, denigrated by high culture. But outside the Serpentine the wishes of the everybody and the anybody rustle like fragile flowers in the wind of our wild British summer. Ono has a way of making beautiful dreams a reality.
Participation is a recurrent wish of Ono’s: inside the main body of the exhibition two tables are placed by the windows, wistfully overlooking the gardens, entitled Where Will You Go From Here? (2012) – pen, paper and little glass jars (steadily filling up with the future) provided. In the centre of the space Ono shows a glass maze, Amaze (1971) – making the entering participant, not disappear into the void, but become its very object. One becomes hyper-aware of the situation of loss one is placed in in this cube of refracted light, rather than dissolving in the void that the, now ubiquitous, black-cube installation space provides. Amaze invites the viewer on a ritualistic journey of memory of self and others: treading the path they trod towards the centre and retracing this path to leave the space.
One of the more political sections of the show features upturned military helmets suspended from the ceiling, offering (heavenwards) jigsaw pieces of the sky; viewers are invited to take a piece and implicitly asked to come together to assemble it one day. Arranged next to this work is Three Mounds (1999/2012), three heaps of earth on the floor, individually titled, Country A, B, and C. This work postulates an innocent understanding of nation, imagining how the world might have been. With the hindsight of history, however, these mounds become graves in the eyes of the viewer, speaking of the number of people (soldiers and civilians A, B, C, and the rest of the alphabet many times over) that nations have committed to the earth. We might understand Ono’s film Fly (1971), also shown here, as consciously adopting a “naïve” perspective of the world, too. A fly explores Ono’s naked body, indiscriminate over where it lands: her nipple becomes a drummond of earth to it; her labia, a gorge down a steep hillside.
After opening hours, Ono’s work shows into the night: she has installed a work which beams, not an S.O.S. signal, but ‘I love you’ across the park. By supplanting these signals as such, what may seem naïve comes to figure as an extremely knowing question of whether these signals’ meanings differ much at all.
Of course we all know who this call is for most of all. The viewer can hardly avoid entering this retrospective with preconceived notions of Ono, the famous “other half” of John Lennon. What we find inside, however, is very much an artist in her own right, no matter how many times Lennon is referred to in her work. The work is about love – she speaks as the half of a whole we know her to be, using the position of heartbreak she was tragically placed in to make from. Her voice is still so tied to another’s that, of course, sometimes ‘parts of him pour out of her from time to time’. Her show is not ridden with nostalgia but, rather, fidelity to the event of love. She places Afterwords (2012)a print of the footsteps Lennon and she made together, not on the floor, but on the wall, as an indexical trace of love ‘walking to the sky’ (a poignant motif throughout the show). Her Imagine Peace Tower (2007) too, reworks the concept of the search-light to project a path of light hundreds of feet into the air, lighting up the clouds as if it could reach the stars; it is present and visible from miles away, though intangible– like love itself. ‘Where Ono goes from here’ might be said both to be to the stars, and back to John. This tautological pull of forever and never – ‘eternity’ and a ‘pin-point’ – is at the heart of her show. Ono has found a way of travelling backwards and forwards simultaneously in working from her position of heartbreak: perhaps that is what ‘skywards’ means.
Outside, a peaceful work, Play It By Trust (1966) – an entirely white chessboard – sits quietly in the gardens. It is impossible to play against someone on this board – one’s own pieces are also one’s opponent’s. Standing in front of this work, unable to compete, one might become aware of something unfamiliar: if you listen very hard from here you can hear the wishes of others’ on the breeze.
Play it by Trust, Yoko Ono, 1966
