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As you walk into Yoko Ono’s exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery later this month, you’ll be greeted by a big old mess. Two tables will hold a bunch of smashed pottery, as well as some twine, tape, glue and scissors. It’s your job to fix the pots. ‘Mend carefully’, Ono instructs. But she doesn’t just want you to mend the pots, because there’s a second instruction: ‘think of mending the world at the same time’. Yeah, don’t be lazy, fix the pot, and also the world while you’re at it, you ingrate.
It’s easy to be cynical about an artist telling you to think about mending the world as you mend a pot, but it’s classic Yoko Ono - conceptual, utopian, dream-like, simple. The piece was first presented over 50 years ago in 1966, right here in London. And now it’s back, at a time when the world might just be as fractured as it was back than, if not more.
Park your cynicism, whip out the glue and go mend some pots, you might just mend the world at the same time. Probably not though, eh.
'MEND PIECE for London' is at the Whitechapel Gallery. Aug 25-Jan 2 2022. Free. Details here.
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