Avantgarde yesterday and today – Yoko Ono in Berlin: The principle of hope

If you fancy an overdose of Yoko-Ono art, you get the good chance in Berlin to get it right in three places: in the Gropius building, the new National Gallery and in the new Berlin Kunstverein (NBK). In these institutions, the work of the fluxy artist who was born in Japan in 1933 and has now lived in upstate New York can be seen retrospectively until summer.

The exhibition “Music of the Mind” exhibition, organized by the Tate Modern and the NRW art collection and already shown in London and Düsseldorf in 2024, is now stopping in Gropius-Bau. A large banner with the slogan »Peace is Power« hangs over the magnificent atrium. Even if it currently does not look like the end of wars and pacification in many places in the world, Yoko Onos’s obsessive use of peace – after all, as a child, she experienced the effects of the United States’ atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – with artistic means through her entire work.

The anticipation of the not yet realized and still to be won, which only exists as hope and dream, plays a huge role in her work and is reminiscent of Ernst Bloch’s “principle hope”. In 1969, ono, together with her third husband John Lennon, propagated at the height of the Vietnam War by means of projection and posteration in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg and internationally on all-round advertisements, not only in the “New York Times”: “War is over. If you want it «. Everyone is asked to raise their voice against the war. A very sensible campaign with a message that could not be more up -to -date today.

However, the fact that art can really change the world, as the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media Claudia Roth (Greens), who has become out of office soon, claimed in their idiosyncratic mix of empathy and hysteria to be visited for invited guests. With a focal that her party is in particular relating to militarism and “manifold” and denouncing the peace movement, Roth quoted the text of “Imagine”, without realizing that it does not only seem embarrassed from a feminist perspective to appreciate ono’s work with a song by Lennon.

Yoko Ono had already made an international name in the art area before the worldwide success of the Beatles when she met Kunstaffinen John Lennon at a solo exhibition in the Indica Gallery in London in 1966. One of her works consisted of a white canvas, a hammer and a container with nails. The title was “Painting to Hammer A Nail” (painting to take a nail). Lennon came up to her and asked “if it was okay if he put on an imaginary nail,” Ono later recalled this scene. “I thought I got to know a guy who played the same game as I do”, to read in the accompanying catalog for the exhibition in Gropius-Bau.

Compared to the previous station of the exhibition in the K20 in Düsseldorf Last year, the Ephemer and delicate works are presented onos in the rooms of the Gropius building much more generously and more engaged. The first room is already irritatingly empty, and it takes a while to discover the delicate and small lines of text with the mysterious and philosophical messages at first glance.

With “Many Rooms, many dreams, many country country in the same space …” Ono refers to the expected diversity of the audience, which is made of many individuals, claims and should claim his own rooms. In general, she turns with her haiku-like sentences-many come from her legendary booklet “Grapefruit” from 1964-directly to the audience. They are mostly poetic requests and instructions to become aware of the immediate neighborhood, community and also nature and the world.

The intangible character of many of their works relies on the emergence of imaginary rooms among the audience. Perhaps this is one of the strongest characteristics of onos art. But their experimental video films are also important, especially if they capture groundbreaking performances. The “Lightning Piece” with the instructions to ignite a match and observe it until they go out is part of it. In 1966 she lit one at the invitation of George Macunias, the founder of the fluxus movement, which the photographer and cameraman Peter Moore filmed, with 2000 instead of only 24 frames per second, which generates an extremely slow film that can now be seen in the Gropius building. Likewise, the “cut piece” performance, with which Yoko Ono proved to be a feminist artist very early. After she had already asked the audience in Kyoto, Tokyo and New York to cut pieces out of her clothing while sitting stoically on a stage, she was filmed in London in 1966, at the “Destruction in Art Symposium”, organized by Gustav Metzger.

In doing so, she went into the role of the passive victim and made the mostly male audience symbolically perpetrators at the time. It is a game and at the same time a blueprint test for sexism, voyeurism and machismo. With a reenactment with the 70-year-old Ono, the audience reacted much more sensitively than in the 1960s. For the artist it is generally “a form of giving and taking”. The participatory approach has long been part of her art before this became a Vogue in the 1990s.

This is also focused on the new National Gallery at its “Dream Together” ono exhibition, while the NBK dedicates its traditional poster wall project this time Yoko Ono and her request “Touch” (touched) in black letters at the Friedrich-, corner of Torstraße intersection. From the folds of cranes from paper in the origami tradition as a metaphor for happiness and long life to gluing broken dishes to chess game with exclusively white figures, the audience is asked in the new National Gallery.

The game with the white chess figures requires the highest concentration because it refuses visual opposition. This of course also the intended message from Yoko Ono: if we all met with respect and love, a division into friends and enemy would be obsolete, and we would have the paradise situation of a world peace.

Yoko Ono: »Music of the Mind«, Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Bus 31.8., Catalog 48 €.
Yoko Ono: “Touch”, new Berlin art association, poster wall until 31.8.
Yoko Ono: “Dream Together”, New National Gallery, Berlin, until 14.9.