BIRCH MONOLOGUE – YOKO ONO
“All my works are a kind of wishing. You too should wish all the time as you participate,” Yoko Ono says about her art. This statement encapsulates the foundation of Ono’s work, which seeks authenticity and simplicity. It plays with our perception and aims to expand awareness. While proposing equal participation between artist and audience, it ultimately strives to dissolve the boundaries between art and life.
Yoko Ono is one of the pioneers of the international FLUXUS movement, which emerged in the early 1960s around the ideas of George Maciunas, blending various art forms. Ono played a significant role in the development of New York’s avant-garde scene during the 1960s, particularly in the realms of performance art, happenings, visual arts, experimental film, music, and literature.
The era of Fluxus was characterized by a goal of “cleansing” art—a neo-Dadaist mindset that, perhaps subconsciously, expressed a distaste for the aesthetic and didactic ideals of “high art.” By championing ephemerality and immateriality, Fluxus challenged and satirized traditional artistic conventions. It represented rebellion and a deliberate refusal of the values imposed by society, such as productivity. The movement aimed for an anti-heroic, anti-monumental, and “styleless” art rooted in simplicity, even triviality. This “mind music,” as it has been described, existed outside precise definitions but was closest, in various phases, to minimalism, conceptual art, and proto-hippie Zen-dualism.
The term Fluxus emerged around 1961–1962, although performances and works with Fluxus-like qualities were already being created by several artists who later became central to the movement (Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Bob Watts, George Brecht, Henry Flint, and others). By 1962, La Monte Young had organized a series of events and performances, some of which took place in Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street studio and others at Maciunas’ AG Gallery. Following the death of George Maciunas, the movement’s central figure, in 1978, Fluxus activities dwindled, but recent years have seen an active effort to document and evaluate its history. The 1990 Venice Biennale featured a major Fluxus exhibition, Ubi Fluxus ibi motus. The Pori Art Museum is involved in international efforts to archive and research the history of Fluxus and the works of its artists. The museum aims to expand its Fluxus collection, focusing particularly on works on paper.
Yoko Ono (b. 1933) has often been overshadowed as an artist by the public role she is still most associated with: as the wife of John Lennon, who passed away over a decade ago. While her collaboration with Lennon is strongly perceived as a defense of peace and sexual liberation, this is just one aspect of the holistic life perspective that Yoko Ono has advocated throughout her artistic career.
The retrospective exhibition of Yoko Ono’s work now on view in Finland highlights the artist’s multifaceted output over approximately 30 years, ranging from her conceptual poem-paintings of the 1960s to her recent bronze works. The exhibition also includes experimental films presented in video format as well as sound pieces.
One of the works, EN-TRANCE (“Entrance”), will be realized in Finland based on Ono’s drawings. This piece concretely requires viewer participation and exemplifies her interest in architectural experiments. A similar call for participation is echoed in her postcard work from the late 1960s, WAR IS OVER! If you want it. Love and Peace from John & Yoko, which remains as relevant today as ever. A new edition of this postcard has been produced for the Finnish exhibition.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Henie-Onstad Art Center in Oslo and the Reykjavik Art Museum. An accompanying catalog, part of Henie-Onstad’s publication series, includes texts by Yoko Ono herself.
Translated with ChatGPT