Tag: letting go

Yoko Ono, Stone Piece, from The Riverbed, 2015

Since the early 1960s, audience participation has been a crucial aspect of Ono’s work. To make a village is a political gesture, as well as a formal one. Audience participation is key to completing the THE RIVERBED through everyday action coupled with contemplation; they are collaborators with the artist, similar to the collaboration between the artist and the two galleries. Additionally, it is significant to Ono that all three “principals”— the artist and two gallery leaders—are female; the support and participation of women in power is one of Ono’s longstanding concerns.

Conceived as two room-sized installations shown in two spaces—a whole in two parts— visitors are encouraged, via instructions, to visit both spaces in order to experience and fully understand THE RIVERBED. Both galleries will have a pile of large river stones that Ono has selected and gathered. She will inscribe the words like remember, dream, and wish on the stones, which have been honed and shaped by water over time. Visitors may pick up a stone and hold it in their lap, concentrating on the word and letting go of their anger or fear, transforming the stone into an emotional object to be placed upon the pile of stones in the center of the room.

Marina Abramovic invented conscious uncoupling way before that dude from Coldplay.

Marina Abramovic, The Lovers (Two Vases), 1966, C-print

“In 1988, Ulay and Abramovic decided to end their relationship and to mark this with a performance, which became the legendary endpoint of their collaboration. After years of negotiations with the Chinese authorities, the artists got the permission to carry out ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’, in which they started to walk from different ends of the Chinese Wall in order to meet in the middle and say good-bye to each other. Abramovic started walking at the eastern end of the Wall, at Shan Hai Guan, on the shores of the Yellow Sea, Gulf of Bohai, walking westward. Ulay started at the western end of the Wall, at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert, walking eastward. After they both continuously walked for 90 says, they met at Er Lang Shn, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. Here, they embraced each other to go on with their life and work separately from then on.”

I was obsessed with loss; not surprisingly, I was also acquisitive, possessive. The two tendencies fed each other; every impulse to extend my holdings increased the fundamental anxiety. Actual loss, loss of mere property, was a release, an abrupt transition from anticipation to expertise. In passing, I learned something about fire, about its appetite. I watched the destruction of all that had been, all that would not be again, and all that remained took on a radiance. These are, in the deepest sense, ordinary experiences. On the subject of change, of loss, we all attain to authority. In my case, the timing was efficient. I was in my late thirties; perhaps I’d learned all I could about preparation, about gathering. The next lesson is abandon, letting go.

Louise Gluck, Proofs & Theories, 106