A Circular Play: Open-ended Narratives
Translated by: Renna Okubo
By courtesy of WAKO WORKS OF ART
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Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the existing concept of time and space. And then sometimes later, the instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.
-Y.O. [*1]
In the early 1960s, Yoko Ono worked on a number of instruction-based "paintings." Works such as <Painting to Hammer a Nail In>, which instructed one to "hammer a nail in," or <Painting to be Stepped On> which was to "leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street," as well as <Painting for the Wind> or <Painting to See the Skies> that involved cutting holes in a canvas, are completed by the participation of the audience, in the same way as her performance works, in which <Cut Piece> is most probably the best known. The participation, however, often takes place only within the confines of its imagination. In other words, they are "paintings" depicting viewers' invisible thoughts and imagination as their motives. Nina Beier (born in 1975) and Marie Lund (born in 1976), originally from Denmark, are currently based in London. They made their debut in the art world some 30 years after Yoko Ono's instruction paintings, yet the manner in which their work intervenes in the invisible realms of viewers and employs them as medium, as well as its high affinity with performance, are reminiscent of Ono's instruction paintings. Coming from a generation that has been inspired by 1970s conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Vito Acconci, Beier and Lund say that they are interested in "extending possibilities by applying instructions and new elements to existing situations," and they have been working with incorporeal situations and materials as their artistic language. In addition, their frequent involvement in the participants' collective psychology during the production process and in the exhibition itself can find its relation to so-called participatory art, which is another aspect their work has in common with the art of Yoko Ono. Their work encourages the audience to actively engage with the situation unraveling before it and, as if projecting the invisible psyche of those involved, rewrites the situation into a new, unpredictable narrative.
