Painting to hammer a nail
Dispatch from Writing with the Seasons - February 2024
Welcome to this short dispatch from ‘Writing with the Seasons’. If you’re not already a premium subscriber, you can sign up here to enjoy our essays and audio courses as they unfold season by season.
Poetic, meditative and generous. Yoko Ono’s artwork is all of these things and more. Yesterday I visited her new exhibition at Tate Modern, which celebrates seven decades of her art, performances and campaigns for peace.
I love that it opened now, in February, a month that is filled with pale light. Her work often uses only shades of white: an all-white chessboard, a room of white objects, an artwork about clouds, a white stepladder that leads up to a framed glass panel. It’s dreamlike, calming and suggestive of her strong anti-war sentiments. Ono wants us to see beyond black and white, to understand how we all connect. We bring our own emotional state to her pieces without colour to guide.
I love her short films. Fluxfilm No.14 (1966) is a close-up shot of the striking of a match. Silent and full of shadows, the flame burns and fades in slow motion over five full minutes. We can’t help but think of how life is full of both darkness and light and about the passing of time.
And I love her instruction pieces. Some are improbable, poetic, intended to exist only in your imagination:
EARTH PIECE
Listen to the sound of the earth turning.
1963 spring
Others can be enacted in the moment and are invitations to join others to make something new together, as shown here:
PAINTING TO HAMMER A NAIL
Hammer a nail into a mirror, a canvas, a piece of glass, wood, or metal every morning. Also, pick up a hair that came off when you combed in the morning and tie it around the hammered nail. The painting ends when the surface is covered with nails.
1961 winter
Here I am, following these very instructions and contributing to the painting!
Yoko Ono offers us her ideas to bring us all closer together, and to help us imagine the world in a new way. “What I’m trying to do,” says Yoko Ono, “is make something happen by throwing a pebble into the water and creating ripples…I don’t want to control the ripples.”
‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ is at Tate Modern, London until 1 September 2024. Writing with the Seasons is brought to you by Write & Shine. Our winter programme of writing workshops is inspired by the season's gentle rhythms and slow, steady arrival of the light. Events are virtual, so you can join us wherever you’re based.
Winter artwork by Essi Kimpimäki.