Yoko Ono: Play it by Trust

I just think this so cool that I have to share it, despite the fact that I still consider myself “on break.” I have pretty low tolerance for art world speak and analysis and there are many, many times when I just look at something and go … “wow…. I could do that myself…… that’s… dumb.” You know, the white sheet of paper on the wall or the scribble that an art critic could write an analytical paper on.

Cara at The Curvature did a feminist analysis of Yoko Ono that was pretty good. I had never known much about her other than she’s blamed for The Beatles having broken up and that I didn’t really like her music, but it prompted me to read all I could about her.

One of the things she’s known for is her conceptual art. I was not aware there was such a thing until I read about her, to be honest. I guess part of it is that a lot of her art is very much about engaging the audience and the way they contribute to a piece. An example of this is Cut Piece, in which she sits on the stage in her best clothing and invites the audience to come up and cut off a piece for themselves. She says one of the purposes of the piece is in part to promote peace and to challenge racism and sexism. I haven’t really been able to find much analysis on it, but it was fascinating to me to hear that audiences reacted differently around the world.

But I created this post to showcase the white chess set. It is called “Play it by Trust” and people viewing the exhibition can actually play chess with it. I’ll admit that with my cynical attitude towards certain types of art the implications of a white chess set took a bit of time to sink in. I am putting Yoko’s explanation of it under the cut as I think it’s better to think about it on your own first.

Play it by Trust

by Yoko Ono

Indica Gallery 1966

PLAY IT BY TRUST aka WHITE CHESS SET (1966)

Play it for as long as you can remember
who is your opponent and
who is your own self.

Yoko Ono

Play It By Trust presents an all-white chessboard with all-white pieces, and alludes to the ideal of chess championed by Marcel Duchamp as “the landscape of the soul.” Ono’s game demands the ultimate abstraction by leaving all but the first few moves to be played entirely in the mind. With minimal and conceptual means so typical of her art, she reduces the game to its fundamental structure-an opposition defined by black versus white-to provoke a sage contemplation: How to proceed when the opponent is indistinguishable from oneself?

YO: When I created Play It By Trust I wasn’t thinking about Duchamp at all. Many artists have worked with chess, but they usually worked with the decorative aspect of the chess pieces. I wanted to create a new chess game, making a fundamental rather than decorative change. The white chess set is a sort of life situation. Life is not all black and white, you don’t know what is yours and what is theirs. You have to convince people what is yours. In the chess situation it is simple if you are black then black is yours. But this is like a life situation, where you have to play it by convincing each other.

People think that I’m doing something shocking and ask me if I’m trying to shock people. The most shocking thing to me is that people have war, fight with each other and moreover take it for granted. The kind of thing I’m doing is almost too simple. I’m not interested in being unique or different. Everyone is different. No two persons have the same mouth shape for example, and so without making any effort we’re all different. The problem is not how to become different or unique, but how to share an experience, how to be the same almost, how to communicate.

The concept is my work. In the art world, work is shown in a museum and a lot of people or a few people will see it, then if it’s bought by someone, that’s the end of it, or it comes back every once in a while. So I like the idea that Play It By Trust is repeated in different places, because the environment makes a big difference to the piece. Again, it’s the concept that is the work.

Read more about Yoko Ono’s show YES YOKO ONO here

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Tags: art, chess, Cut Piece, human rights, Play it by Trust, something cool to think about, Yoko Ono