What is art making?
by Ayumi Goto
I have been thinking about this for some time, maybe since the first covid lockdown in Tkaronto. In this space, will contemplate this question through reflections on past performances, random order of thoughts, further queries, most likely to reach no solid conclusions.
In January 2021 was invited via my sis, Hiromi, to participate on a panel discussion on Yoko Ono’s seminal 1964 publication, Grapefruit. This one-hour online discussion was a space shared with other invited guests, Suzette Mayr and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Sponsored by Contemporary Calgary, the panel was to be moderated by Dave Dyment, someone whom I could easily describe as a Yoko Ono otaku.
By the time the panel invitation came around, I had been teaching online and was fucking sick and tired of platforms that hyper-individuated virtual presence into bobbing heads or vacuous, square-shaped yet named black holes. It’s funny that for all the talk around diversifying and decolonizing the institution, when the proverbial microbial shit hits the fan, how quickly technology enables immediate returns to the white cube of pedagogy and art presentation. Yet the cube is downgraded into two-dimensional form. Those who could speak with the loudest voice and widest vocabulary would not hesitate to showcase their supposed intellectual and political prowess, while others were disappeared, muted and contained. In online spaces such as these, it is nearly impossible to express or witness embodied and unspoken relational care, save for the ever-streaming emojis in the chat that serve as a poor substitute for the elongation of eye contact, the edging closer in to listen to someone’s thoughts, the support that hangs in the air like a salve when emotions become raw from disagreements or puzzlement.
For the Grapefruit panel, my self-challenge was to disrupt the rules of online conduct, to make an intervention into the conventions of talking floating heads. As a performance artist with no formal art training, this would mean to rely upon creating from the inbetweenness of my lack of technological knowledge and critical commentary on the late-capitalistic art world that artists are pulled in to inhabit. Let’s face it, Grapefruit is a globally celebrated piece from a pop icon.
But is that the purpose of Grapefruit?
Using my free-downloaded version of Zoom, I clicked ‘yes’ to a green screen capability, when I didn’t know what that meant yet was pretty sure that the free app didn’t have that function. Then I mapped a background onto this ‘non-green screen’, which led to the phenomenon of digitally crumbling the image. I wished for this to be the purpose of Grapefruit, thus the title of the intervention, “If you sing the grapefruit, eat the grapefruit”. This title is inspired by the famous Zen Buddhist koan, “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”. Instead of hero-worshipping Yoko Ono as an untouchable creative, would it not be more fruitful to take the publication at its original value, that is, to embark on a series of self-inscribed art experiments that open up our worlds?
The video provided here is a recorded back-up, which was prepared just in case technology failed during the actual panel. 32 grapefruits were consumed in the preparation and making of the final live performance. I drew upon one of the sound pieces, “Pieces for Orchestra”, in Grapefruit and added a few of my own movements…please enjoy this grapefruit! I hope it inspires you to explore your own fruit choices to remake the world with your senses of juiciness, flavour, and squishy transformative art.