Along with viewing four of Ono’s films, the attendees will perform Wish Trees by writing their wishes for peace on a small piece of paper and tying it to a tree. I walk inside the building from the enclosed courtyard, where young trees wait to be adorned with wishes written on paper. I want what the opening event can give me: a chance to look at a different scale, a way of engaging her poetry and art as objects, as experiences. Ono herself is not here, but her words, the objects she has created, the event we will create tonight, draw us here. Why am I trying to absorb it unfolded across a long gallery wall? Something has drawn this bustling crowd to the Poetry Foundation tonight. Why am I watching them here, projected on a screen? I can hold Grapefruit in my hand. If Yoko Ono, performance artist and singer, stages experiences where audiences are also creators, then why don’t we think about how she stages phenomenological encounters when she is not in the room with us? In other words, how does this evening produce something like the performance art experience? In turn, what can we learn by paying attention to the objects that exist separately from the ephemeral performance-the printed page, the digital film? I can watch each of the films at home on my laptop. Here I’m most interested in a phenomenological engagement with words on a page, light on a screen. I start with my own feelings-about myself, about clothes-because I want to end up with an understanding of what Ono’s creative works do. ![]() We must view the scores that are hung on the wall like artwork and, in turn, acknowledge the textual and poetic arts as components of Ono’s cross-medial artistic practice. Tonight, all of us at the Poetry Foundation must engage her work cross-medially. Likewise, the choice to screen videos she created alongside video recordings of her performance works emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of her work. The Poetry Foundation thereby shows how Ono’s work is bound up with textual making while also highlighting the role of reading in her performances. Indeed, a review of the exhibit in Chicago Magazine asks, “Is Yoko Ono overlooked as a poet?” 1 In choosing to exhibit each page of Grapefruit, the co-curators of the exhibit, Fred Sasaki and Katherine Litwin, answer yes and propose that we read her performance scores as poems. The exhibit marks a shift in how we understand Ono’s oeuvre-she is just as much poet as performer, a creator of objects and events. Their Yoko Ono exhibition argues that we should see her career as equally invested in language, image, sound, and experience. They should be, and the curators at the Poetry Foundation get that. Scholars of performance art and music have long been interested in Ono’s body of work, but her writings are rarely approached through the lens of literary criticism. ![]() Ono is primarily known as a performance artist, but she is also a musician, filmmaker, and writer. This exhibit insists on the importance of Ono’s poetry. It will culminate in a screening of four of Ono’s films, created throughout the 1960s when Ono was working with the Fluxus art collective and, later, her partner John Lennon: Eyeblink, Match Piece, Fly, and Cut Piece. The opening reception highlights each page of Grapefruit, an early collection of Ono’s drawings, poems, and instructions for performance events. I am surrounded by earrings like Calder and bracelets like Bourgeois I carry my Moleskine notebook like a graduate student walking into their first seminar. I have driven into the city from a day of meetings, underdressed for both the weather and the occasion in day-worn shift dress, cardigan, tights, and boots. In the peaceful modernist building, with each page of Ono’s 1964 artist’s book Grapefruit hanging in tidy columns across the wall of the main gallery space, gold winks, linen billows, and leather slumps artfully on the chic patrons who fill the nearly-monochrome building. ![]() I am the biggest square at the opening reception for Yoko Ono: Poetry, Painting, Music, Objects, Events, and Wish Trees, held at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in spring 2019. ![]() Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit in an installation at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.
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