participating in art (lyn)

Penny calls and invites me on a tour at MoMA. 

It’s hot but not suffocatingly so.  High-eighties.  I dress for summer in a long white handkerchief skirt (with a stretch waist) and a white top.  I bought the skirt last summer at Maxwell’s, and then looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy wearing it.  Today I don’t.  In fact, Penny tells me I look thin, and adds, “You have a lovely walk.  Breezy and confident.”  No one has ever mentioned my walk in a positive context before.  Usually, it’s my mother telling me to “stand up straight.”

It’s been too hot to walk lately (well, actually, I don’t like walking in NY in the summer).  But I do like destination-walking, so that’s what we do.  Two miles through the Park.

At the exhibit, there are two installations by Yoko Ono that I find of particular interest.  The first is an example of her conceptual art, which is a set of instructions enlarged on a big blank wall.  It reads:

VOICE PIECE FOR A SOPARANO

Scream.

1.    Against the wind

2.    Against the wall

3.    Against the sky

1961 autumn

I can’t remember ever just screaming uncontrollably but I can remember wanting to.  It is odd to stand in front of a mike and interrupt the tranquility of the museum, but I do.   

We continue through the exhibit and come to a big Plexiglas box filled with tags.  On the tags people have written their wishes.  We are told that if we’d like, before leaving the museum, we can make our own wish.

At an outside fountain within MoMA I find Yoko Ono’s 1996 project entitled Wish Tree.  We were told by out tour guide that everyday, all the wishes are collected from the tree and placed in the Plexiglas box that is part of the exhibition. I want to be part of this participatory art.

Yoko’s instructions read:

Make a wish


Write it down on a piece of paper


Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree


Ask your friends to do the same


Keep wishing


Until the branches are covered with wishes

I believe in this stuff.  So I fill out three cards.  On one I write, “I wish that my glorious 17 year old son gets into the college of his choice and that he goes there and loves it.”  I follow the instructions and hang it on the tree, It quickly gets lost among the thousands that are hanging.  I start to read them.  Many reflect global wishes.  The kind about world peace and living harmoniously.  But some are personal.  “I wish my boyfriend would move to Brooklyn.”  “I wish my dad would get all better.”  "I wish the Netherlands would win the world cup.”  While I’m reading, I hear a young boy around 10 say to his friend, “This one sounds like something my mom would write.”  So I ask him what it says, and he reads me back my wish for Alexander.