Journalisms -- Jay + USA -- "A Long Trip To Hell" -- 10.24.03 ------------------------------------------------------ "Journalisms:" or "Our Correspondent:" or "?" The title and mission of this collective project is a work in progress. But the general idea is that we...

Journalisms -- François -- Imagining this Piece

Every once in a while an event, an action, an image signals a problem in a way that is definite in your mind, absolutely pointed. You realize that without this image (I underline the fact that it all gels in an image, not so easily in a word) you wouldn’t be able to address with such precision, the issue that has been stalking you. This week in Paris the image was Yoko Ono. The image was the image of New York, and the image of Paris, and the image of New York that Paris holds, and the image of something that we vaguely call “the left” (or of the things that we refer to as “liberal positions”); and the image of something that we call “the Art World”. Your thought pauses, and some passion is ignited, the magma of your ideas finds the place of its combustion, a slight opinion becomes a radical position.

I am invited to go to a Yoko Ono performance in a theater near the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. That much I know, and I am aware of the fact that it is a part of her exhibition in that museum. In the back of my mind I also have the knowledge that she is revisiting a piece from 30 or 40 years ago: “Cut Piece”. I am not quite aware of how it goes, but I quickly put the pieces of information together as I advance in the line; from the comments that I hear from my friends, from fragments of conversations and from the questions of a TV crew to the people in the line about how dated this performance is, or isn’t. Two men approach me: one asks to buy a ticket from us (he seems to suggest that he will pay any price even if we didn’t buy our tickets ourselves. I see him later on the stage cutting a piece of Yoko’s dress in a posture that one couldn’t call anything but “of devotion”).