Saturday, June 6, 2009

A good choice?

Keeping the words of Yoko Ono's curator, Nora Halpern, in mind that this is the first time that Ono is looking back at her life (for she is always looking forward), it is interesting to consider the performance she did for a packed house in the Teatro Piccolo was very much related to her concurrent exhibition in Venice at the Palazzetto Tito, "Anton's Memory." There she underlined the idea of the first moment in which our memory starts to generate itself and when we realize the presence of the other.

Yet couldn't this encounter at Teatro Piccolo be a place for a slightly different approach? For the memories on view in the film she projected, filled with images from her childhood and after, hardly seemed related to her art practice. As people began to leave during this extended home movie, it was obvious that they came to see and hear something related to Yoko Ono's art, which has supposedly been influential since her first performances in the 1960s and for which she came to Venice this year to receive the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

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