WAR IS OVER (PAINTING TO BE DESTROYED)
Park Avenue Armory, Veterans Room, February 16th, 2025
“PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT’S COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED:
Let People copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the originals. Spring 1964.”
WAR IS OVER (PAINTING TO BE DESTROYED) is a painting-performance engaging the aforementioned prompt from Yoko Ono’s collection of drawings and instructions in Grapefruit. The performance is a collaboration between long-time friends: Palestinian-American artist, Waseem Nafisi, and Trinidadian artist, Taya Serrao. With the piece’s impending destruction in mind, the artist-duo reference Ono’s global anti-war media campaign and its iconic phrasing: “WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It).”
“WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT”. This was the slogan of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1969 campaign for peace against the Vietnam War. It was presented like an advertisement - plain text on billboards and printed in newspapers. But it didn’t ask us to buy anything, it asked us to make what we wanted to see - the words articulated that peace exists to the extent that we want it. Reality can be produced by us. Our desire for a peaceful world can manufacture peace in the world.
We found a photograph of one of these billboards titled “Ono and Lennon, War is Over!, Billboard Installed in Times Square, New York”, from Lenono Photo Archive, December 1969. This is the image we used. There is a single cab in the foreground, a single passer-by, and a single façade welcomes tourists to NYC. You look up from the sidewalk, feeling around for your keys in your coat pockets, folding paper handouts that you might read later. The 7th avenue lights change color with the evening, coloring the whites of the billboard blue and yellow. The old men pull out their newspapers. You don’t live here, you live miles away, where there are no billboards around, only residences and shop windows. The pink splatter on the sidewalk isn’t paint, it’s melted ice-cream. A man empties the contents of his water bottle from a kneeling position. The system of metal poles and wooden platforms of scaffolding that they’re using to repair a nightclub. You imagine these abstractions peeling away from their sources like an animal’s skin - a long, transparent tube that is curved and twisted: an inch-perfect index of the path it took through the bushes. And now, even though there is nothing for it to mark its future path, its skin is shinier than ever. You go to a post office, you send a package to your friend who is living in a more-difficult part of the world. The post officer takes it, and puts it in the outgoing pile. But your mind stays with it as you leave. Now you are walking home and your mind is peeling away from your body, travelling in two different directions - to your home - and to a far-away place.
In Yoko Ono’s “footnote” to her 1966 lecture at Wesleyan University, she writes in detail about her instruction paintings. Make a painting in your mind, she writes, a painting to construct in your head. She lived through the 1945 fire-bombings of Tokyo in her childhood - scarcity and starvation - which introduced such constructions to her as possibilities. If the world is inhospitable to you, you must re-create the world within your mind. Events can begin and end over-and-over again. Food that didn’t exist in concrete reality can be cooked and eaten many times. In this reiteration, the in-hospitability of her concrete reality can be stripped away, creating a kind of theatre of annunciated being - a being by way of the desire to live.
And so we return to the peace message - peace exists to the extent that we want it. (We can also understand this as a kind of ‘duet’-with, or possible antidote-to the equivalences imposed by a totalizing system. Capitalism tries to distill the mass of human experience in terms of units of exchange value. In this case, what Yoko describes is an erosion - a reclamation of equivalence, or equivalence without distillation.)
When planning the performance, Waseem and I imagined that the original image would be abstracted many times before being stretched onto the frame, and abstracted many times after. We took cutting as a basic unit of abstraction - cutting as the means by which meaning is created (and destroyed) and therefore a kind of nested-doll theatre of cutting and mediation. So we imagined that the fragments of the peace-message that were left were not fragments of a peace message, but multiplications and divisions; and in the event of a reconstruction, the exact sum-total of the remainder.
- Taya Serrao, in collaboration with Waseem Nafisi