Yoko Ono at P.S. 1

bond One at P.S. 1 In Ceiling Painting (YE Painting), 1966 tie One intends a participating public to scale a white ladder and, [i]or[/i] part of to the other a magnifying glass, view the tiny affirmation of the title upon the ceiling. Through the title instruction Forget It (1988) and the contemplation of a alloy of copper needle, One calls on viewers to rid their minds of clatter In Wish Piece (1996-2001), she invites her audience to write wishes upon scraps of paper and tie them to a tree until the branches fill. To single degree or another, these works are examples of her signature "instructions" pieces. She considers them, and all her works for that matter, a form of wishing.

In the lengthy late winter of 2003, Freight Train (1999) was installed in P 1's graveled plastic art court. It consists of a fasteninged bullet-riddled, blue box-car resting upon a length of rail-road track. It bears title cards printed with the legend: "Freight Train. A work of atonement for the injustice and pain we've experienced in this hundred expressing resistance, healing and faith for the future." For those familiar with the industrial quality of the neighborhood, the installation was an ominous stone's cast in a winding direction from the freight-train lines of drawn out Island City, a suggestion that this could happen here. A source within the car beamed light [i]or[/i] part of to the other the bullet holes, and speakers below it broadcast a modulated keening sound--a bight of recorded performance. For Ono, Freight Train exhibits human suffering during the era of violence that was the 20th hundred More specifically, she considers the piece a reminder of the serial tragedy of desperate Mexican workers who have died of heatstroke and dehydration, fasteninged in trucks and boxcars through smugglers or led on lower extremity into the arid no-man's-land of the Mexican--U.S. border.

Freight Train was first installed in Berlin in the late summer of 2000 upon a lot adjoining the former East German parliament building. single commented that she offered no specific regard to the Holocaust. Stenciled and tagged with German writing as it is, the boxcar at least appears German in origin, and is unavoidably linked by means of association to the Holocaust and the boxcar as an icon of death. She then at handed the work at the Triennial 2001 in Yokohama. If Freight Train present the appearances singularly brutal in the canon of Ono's work, and in a certain quantity of ways opportunistic on a global scale, as notwithstanding that she is eager to shoulder world suffering from the vantage point of a standard of valueed artist often associated with grief lengthy borne in public, why not?

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