::: PROJECTS :::

By Richard Layne

Went to Yoko's talk at the ICA in London on Tuesday. The talk was in the ICA theatre: seats about 200 people, with a small stage at the front.

The talk was a sell out. Audience was a fairly even mix of sexes and ages, quite a few Japanese people.

On the stage was a table with several white teapots, some broken. As the audience came in, you could hear pottery being smashed backstage: preparations for Promise Piece.

Philip Dodd, ICA Director, introduced the event. He mentioned Yoko had been associated with the ICA since DIAS in the late 60s.

Yoko arrived on time: wearing black combat pants, Rubettes hat, T-shirt, jacket (which was discarded). Hat was thrown on the table with the teapots. (she had to be reminded by Dodd to pick it up at the end)

She opened the event by finding her comfort zone with a chair. Seen her do this before but still very impressed that aged 71 she can lie on her back and fold herself in half.

Then Yoko was(sort of) interviewed by the excellent Michael Bracewell (who currently looks like a Geography teacher in a 1950s boys school). He wandered on stage and slumped in a chair reading "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", Yoko had to yell at him to start interviewing her.

First question was a long one about the interconnectedness of all her art: she didn't understand this so Bracewell read it back with the words in reverse order. Other questions were about Chrissie Iles (curator of the Oxford MOMA show) comments about the Zen quality of her work, and discussions of the recent dance hits (Neil Tennant was in the audience).

Yoko didn't really give straight answers to any of this.

Bracewell asked Yoko about a piece she and John did where they put a small ad in a paper and asked people to phone them. Yoko couldn't remember the response, but talked about Telephone Piece (ie the phones she puts in galleries that she then calls).

Apparently 90% of the time when she phones up the person she calls won't believe its her. And when people write to her asking for autographs, she sends them autographs, then they write back saying "how do we know its really you?". As she said, "How are they ever going to know??"

He asked her about "Cut Piece", specifically didn't she feel in danger doing this in Paris last year.

First point she made was that doing it last year wasn't "remaking it", its all part of the same piece: ie the first part was 40 years ago, the second part was last year. Or maybe they were both at the same time - she has a different perception of time and space than most people.

She felt most threatened when she did Cut Piece in Japan in the 60s: a guy came up and lunged at her theatrically with the scissors, but he was just doing dance moves.

Eventually she told him he was being "too linear" so he wandered off. and she took questions from the audience.

They were too linear as well. Except the guy who asked her what she thinks about when she goes to sleep at night - that got a longer answer than all the complicated questions from everyone else.

A: At night, she blesses people. Particularly her enemies. This I think takes a long time. The benefits of this approach to life were explained at length. Can't remember the details, but she says you should just try it and see.

B: In the morning when she wakes up, she generally thinks "I've got to write down the great idea I just had"! She gave no examples of this - as usual she never talks about future projects.

An eastern European woman in her 70s from the audience told her she was "the living embodiment of quantum mechanics" because time is irrelevant, and the less you know the more you understand and vice versa. Yoko liked this.

One question I remember is a nervous woman who asked complex questions about Haiku. And are Japanese children taught to write Haiku.

Many more questions like this.

Yoko's answers were predictably gnomic.

She was looking great, and was wearing the Rubettes hat that she wears a lot currently. Only occurred to me afterwards I should have asked her about this: is it one hat, or several similar ones?

The photo Richard Joly just posted shows the hat in question.

Seemed to go down really well with the audience, although I think many of them were expecting something more serious.

She did a few pieces. At one point she got up and screamed to "clear the air". The audience was tied up with wool. She did "Promise Piece": she'd bought two identical vases and smashed one. She said they were going to bring vases from NY until someone pointed out London is "quite a civilised place" these days so you can get pottery!

No jigsaw pieces, posters etc, but "Imagine Peace" badges were handed out.

The whole event lasted about an hour.

Went to the private view the next day. Really disorganised door policy - I got there about 6:45, they weren't really checking invites properly. So by about 7:30 they had to shut the doors leaving loads of people (inc. probably celebs) outside! I left about 8, they were queuing around the block.

ODYSSEY OF A COCKROACH IN NYC - FALL 2003
Web Gallery Made Available By Yoko Ono
all photographs by Robert Young
© Robert Young and Lennon Ono Archives
warning - heavy load - photos and movie - nearly 120 files

The film and photos on show the New York installation: the major difference in the UK version is that the UK display is split over three floors. There's an "Imagine Peace" map table in the same position on each floor (so maybe they're all the same floor: see under quantum mechanics).

ODYSSEY OF A COCKROACH IN LONDON - 2004
Web Gallery Made Available By Yoko Ono
photographic team: Andrew LaVallee, Karla Merrifield, and Robert Young
© Lennon Ono Archives
warning - heavy load - photos and 360D movies - nearly 120 files

At the opening, there were about 490 people on the ground floor (where the bar was) and 10 on the other two floors. People (on the top two floors anyway) seemed to be enthusiastic about the art.

Top celeb sightings - Neil Tennant
Janet Street Porter (TV presenter / journalist)
Nina Myskow (did that great interview with Yoko in the Daily
Mail last year, also interviewed her on "This Morning")
Gustav Metzger (he wasn't there last night, I wondered if he
was OK!)
Grayson Perry (this years Turner Prize winner)
Johnny Greenwood (from Radiohead)
Graham Coxon (ex-Blur)
Yoko (obviously) in the Rubettes hat.

Went back the following week for a proper look at the installation. Its on three floors, each has huge photos round the walls, with large sculptures of objects from the photos in front of the photos.

Seemed to me to be organised thematically:

Ground floor:

Couple of piles of clothes in pools of blood: look like suicide bombers. Next to this is a crate full of body parts cast in plaster. Round one walls are photos of a domestic scene with blood/ broken furniture. Large chairs/ broken pottery in front of this.

Another wall has photos of feet (reminded me of the cover of "Fly"), with large shoes, watch etc.

There's a large screen with a quote from Goerring: postcards of this were in the drawers of the "Imagine Peace" desks.

First floor:

Photos of someone who's been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Large sculpture of the baseball bat etc. Two large cages: one full of shoes, one full of books. The books are not about WW2 as has been stated - just looked like a random selection of old books. All the photos here look like contemporary New York, with a couple of black and white shots, maybe Berlin.

Second Floor:

Photos are mainly Berlin immediately post-WW2 (signs about entering the zones etc). Clothes lines and barbed wire with ragged clothes on etc. General impression was related to WW2/ the holocaust.

Also on this floor is a wall for people to put their memories of oppression or injustice. Most people had just stamped patterns with the "Imagine Peace" stamps.

Also here was a dark narrow corridor - only one person can get through at once - with at the end an illuminated postcard of a rainbow.

The Imagine Peace tables have a fairly random selection of maps - I'd assumed each would be a map of the world, but instead its a set of maps of different areas. They are replaced during the exhibition - spotted this since my home town was on the first floor at the private view, and wasn't the following week!

There were about 20-30 people in the gallery while I was there. Not bad considering the location: its very out of the way, only thing nearby is a drive-through Macdonalds.

By Freed Schmitter

Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 02:43:07 +0100
From: planetwork@tip.nl
Organization: http://www.planetwork.org

Last weekend, i was in London. I misinterpreted a scheduled meeting on Sunday (15 February' 04) in the British Museum. This left me time instead to take a bus that passed near the ICA East at 14 Wharf Road where the Yoko Ono exhibition 'Odyssey of a Cockroach' was situated. Especially the basement part was impressive, with four gigantic props (an overturned chair, a blood-stained baseball club, a wrist watch, a master-crafted shoe), plus a pile of naked puppet body-parts overflowing a garbage bin, together with three blood-stained cloth pieces near an empty oval mirror.

Upstairs, two capacious rat-cages with a heap of shoes in the one and a mass of (remarkably interesting) books, decorated among others with a photograph of John's famous round spectacles with blood spatters when he was killed, and the as well well-known 1969 Lennon-Ono poster 'War is Over - If you Want It' catched my attention. A load of clothes and barbed wire where a few more clothes were hanged lined up the left side of the room in front of bleak photographs of a lone New York suburban area.

The third floor had a composition with a mirror. A long dark tunnel with a small bright light at the end was on the righthand side. Black and white photographs of European World War II places covered the walls. On an initially empty wall, messages could be placed. Many used the rubber stamps with 'Imagine Peace' for that. Someone had composed the word YES in this way, which inspired me to add (Y)OKO vertically. To finish, i pinned two of my postcards in the O's.

On all three floors were tables with world maps where the meanwhile famous 2003 Yoko Ono statement 'Imagine Peace' could be stamped.

For documentation, I made a video of the exhibition with a DV camera. The guards in charge were very kind, encouraging participation. Children enjoyed to stamp, and to run around. This and the looped Japanese children chant gave the otherwise somber atmosphere some extra life.

Freed Schmitter