Instruction Pieces

The use of words as primary tool on Art practices, pushes the limits of more traditional creative orders and often involves the active engagement of viewers. This engagement, as a practice of art, is ephemeral, as every other life act. 
The huge difference :  "doing" and "done". 

Three art movements that aim to evoke fun, ephemeral, lack-of-worth ( monetary speaking ),and  "anti-art" discourses, and involved with the use of words, were Fluxus,Happenings and conceptual art .

For over fifty years , Yoko Ono has played a decisive role in these three art movements. 

Ono´s interdisciplinary approach to her artistic practice, which uses words as primary tool, has reached contemporary art, and consumed many of the definitions conceptual art assumed.Her famous and assertive approach to Art as words in included in her book Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono (Simon & Schuster 2000).

 When presented the book in New York (circa 1961) , it was called "concerts" . These concerts comprised three pieces: A Grapefruit in the World of Park, A Piece for Strawberries and Violins and AOS.In this later work, Ono wrapped two performers in gauze, back to back, and dangled an assortment of empty bottles and cans from their ankles and waists. Their instructions were to walk from one end of the stage to the other, without making any noise. This injunction against sound, coupled with the difficulty of one performer moving backwards while the other moved forward, and caused them to move extremely slowly, an effect which resembled a slow-motion film.

 Now the viewer / the reader / the "instructions follower", is the artist and the artistic element, the center piece.The result, an ephemeral event  that can be understood as art. / Eva Guerra Luján

My personal Selection
( based on the last Ono´s Exhibition in 2009 /
Arsenale Section 93 - Venece Art Biennale)

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Instruction Pieces (Yoko Ono )
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PAINTING TO ENLARGE AND SEE (1961)

Write five hundred telephone numbers on a canvas in a space as large as your palm. The numbers can be overlapped with one another. Also, the numbers can all be the same. Observe the drawing by enlarging it with a microscope. Also, you may take a picture of the drawing and enlarge it to the size you prefer.

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SNOW PIECE (1963)

Think that snow is falling. Think that snow is falling everywhere all the time. When you talk with a person, think that snow is falling between you and on the person. Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.

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FLY PIECE (SUMMER 1963)

Fly.

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COUGH PIECE (WINTER 1961)

Keep coughing during a year

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BOX PIECE (SPRING 196Y)

Buy as many boxes.

Ask your wife to select one.

Dream Together.

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Note: You can print this page, cut each instruction

and give it to someone you´d like to watch performing this

for you.( That Piece could be called : Dictator Piece)

Instruction Pieces

“One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish” by Dr. Seuss

Random House: Beginner Books (1960)

Part of the 220 rhymes and verbal doodles 

written in 1956 by Dr. Seuss. 

This compilation was called the Cat in the Hat, read in every Anglophone kinder corner since forever but familiar to the world since it hit the big screen in 2003. The wonderful thing about this book is for instance the cover in a palette of primary colors and the lines torn concave and convex in order to give birth to amazing creatures.  

Drawings dance to the rhythm of absurd scenarios and fantastic animals with peaceful faces and childish behaviours , living common situations with whacky details. As we all know, Dr. Seuss mastered the sewing of vowels and and consonants to create his inmense kooky paraphernalia for stories such as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Horton Hears a Who! And this one itself.  

Theodor  Seuss Geisel  also known as Dr. Seuss was really a doctor of the nonsense cartoons  from Oxford University, changing the concept of all pastel colors and didactic toned storied for kids. He changed those moral clichés to whimsical experiences which still show us never stop imagining , say he was the real Peter Pan of the 20^th century. Geisel ´s unpredictable way of story telling  was a combo of lines, few colors such as red, yellow and yellow all so shiny and eye catching.  The  sketching and coloring of the époque beats in the escence of the characters, with combination of bright colors reminding us postmodernism in watercolours, pen, acrylic.  His aesthetic creatures belong to somewhat called maximalist because every corner is bright and extremely detailed, but his work is also defined as cute formalism with ironic manners, childlike riddles and playful spirited art. 

 

This Pulitzer champ (1984) has been considered as an American popart – sometimes kitsch,   yet his art is better defined as transgressive, aiming to be rebel to the ordinary and shocking the typical contents, including bizarre and almost “mental illness”ed works. Dr. Seuss , illustrator of his mental odysseys ,  was the voice of rebel kindergartens, he made learning to read a hip thing in the 60´s and not only had he written quirky books for kids, but he also achieved and Acadamy Award  (1945) for a short documentary called Your Job in Germany.  / Maja Luján

 

“One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish” by Dr. Seuss