ART CITIES:Lyon-Yoko Ono

For her first Retrospective in France, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Yoko Ono has chosen the title “Lumière de L’aube”. It is generic, in so far as Lumière (Light) is one of the keywords of her œuvre. At the same time, it is rooted in the city’s history because it inevitably recalls that strange invention, which its creators, the Lumière Brothers, predicted would never catch on, namely, the cinema.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon Archive

Yoko Ono is a rare individual, who emerged as a fully formed artist. Right from the start, she was working with new concepts and ideas, new ways of listening, new ways of making sound. Her education was philosophy, and the extraordinarily difficult times of war and displacement. She was born in 1933, in Tokyo, and visited the United States when she was around 3 years old, but was forced to return with her family to Japan when the war broke out. During the bombing of Tokyo, she moved to the countryside with her brother. It was there that she discovered sky and imagination, seeing the sky as a peaceful oasis from the hardship that surrounded her. By 1952, she had written her first “Instruction Pieces”. During the winter of 1960, Ono developed the idea of her Conceptual “Instruction Pieces”, displaying some at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery, which went on to become some of the fundamental bases of Maciunas’ Fluxus. Her instructions given are a kind of written score, which allows a work to take on multiple forms, there is the text, written by the artist, and then there is its realisation, which can be influenced by any one of us with many resulting interpretations. For Yoko Ono “the instruction brings the concept of time into painting … and breaks with the excessive solemnity of an original”. Text and text-scores, instructions, sound, stage, collectives, and multiple versions opened incredible vistas for her, which she broadened and developed in her subsequent works. As Yoko’s work contains time within itself, this retrospective does not operate in chronological order, even though the dialogue opens with Instruction Paintings. And, because the visual art contains sound, or vice versa, Yoko’s music has not been in any way “isolated” in the exhibition space in order for it to be heard. On the contrary, it radiates from the walls. Because the original, in its generally accepted sense, is no longer an original for Yoko but rather a beginning,

Info: Curators: Jon Hendricks & Thierry Raspail, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, 81 quai Charles de Gaulle, Cité Internationale, Lyon, Duration: 9/3-10/7/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.mac-lyon.com