"If a Piece of Work Only Exists in your Head, Can it Still be Called Art?"

The next block in my blog will be devoted to two conceptual works of art: Yoko Ono's Play it by Trust and Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp. The two pieces were both created in 1966 and they touch upon serious issues in a playful and experimental way.

Yoko Ono: Play it by Trust

The observation of chess sets is a well-known phenomenon in artistic grounds. Duchamp even stated that they can be interpreted as the "landscape of the soul." However, most of these works which centered chess sets exploited the opportunities of different kind of decorations that can be applied in their case.

Contrarily to these trends, instead of coming up with a new decorative idea, Yoko ono made a fundamental and interior change regarding the function of a chess game. She extinguished all the black figures by painting them white. This way, she called attention to the fact that the world is not black and white. That is clear. But why didn't she give different colors to all the figures in order to symbolize diversity? It's because her concept was deeper and more abstract than the overused metaphor of a rainbow for highlighting distinctive features in people and the world.

In an interview, she claimed that everyone is different. We all know that by know. Everyone is unique and idiosyncratic in a way that is positive (individuality), and everyone can be different in a sense that is unusual or does not quite tie with the norm (equality movements, celebration of diversity, etc.) This differentness is something that is given and unchangeable. Ono said that it is the sameness that should be searched for because that is something that requires effort from people's part. Finding a similar platform, communicating and co-operating with each other is much harder than just tolerating or enduring each other. One of them is passive, the other one is active and constructive. That is why the competition element is taken out of the piece and is replaced by sameness and assimilation. Inspired by Zen philosophy, Ono emphasizes the necessity of self-discovery, and she extends this imperative to a collective level.

Although Yoko Ono works in the field of conceptual art, which means that the powerfulness of the idea itself is much more forceful and impressive than the manifestation of it, Play it by Trust cannot be judged as a completely alien and abstract piece of art which is only understood by its creator. The viewer can sit down, they are allowed to touch the figures, and they can try themselves out in the hard task Ono assigns to them.


Zbigniew Libera: LEGO Concentration Camp

Libera's work is undoubtedly a controversial piece of art since it deals with the sanctified topos of Holocaust in an appallingly colloquial manner. Holocaust is still a hot-button issue, and its depiction is still debatable, given that survivors always mention that no-one (not even the victims) can really disclose the excruciating horrors they lived through.

Libera used seven boxes of the popular game, LEGO to manifest his idea which was to build miniature concentration camps in their harshest reality (gas chambers, shooting soldiers, overworked and humiliated captives, and the like.) He was immediately threatened with a lawsuit by LEGO which was not familiar with the artist's purpose when they gave him the bricks for free. The general reception of the work was similarly scandalous. People - even artists - were outraged by the piece, claiming that it was not a work of art and it was the utter trivialization of one of the darkest events of human history. Still, a massive press campaign finally persuaded LEGO to drop the charges, and during the time that elapsed, the adjudication of the work grew more tolerant and lenient. Even the Jewish Museum in New York bought one of the replicas of the camp.

The LEGO Concentration Camp can be interpreted in many ways. First, it obviously calls attention to the practical presence of Foucault's biopower theory, which suggests that there is a technology of power which is a way of managing people as a group, reducing them to mere bodies which can be controlled. Thus, populations can be manipulated and regulated this way. In this specific case, Libera extends the concept of biopower to genocide, which is an organized form of the oppression and eradication of certain groups of people.

Another interpretation of the piece can be one in which we presume that Libera's camp is a fillip which criticizes the overprocessing of Holocaust in the media and in artistic spheres and thus trivializing and oversentimentalizing it. The LEGO figures can thus be symbols of the distorted and glamorized images that these other works convey regarding the Holocaust.
Viewed from another angle, Libera's piece can be regarded as a banalized and oversimplified game with the purpose of enabling people to cope with the tragedy easier.
From yet another viewpoint, which is a quite obvious one, LEGO Concentration Camp is just a symbol which stands for the brutality by which the Nazis treated other people just like figures in a child's game. Also, the fact that Libera made several replicas of the camp carries the dark message: history can repeat itself anytime.

It is certain that Libera's work of art carries a great shock value. Still, if the viewer is willing to overcome the general indignation, the piece will raise new questions regarding this clichéd topic which is still unutterably terrible, and which should not lose it's capability of provoking thoughts or emotions in people. Furthermore, a work like this is likely to provide new ways of finally overcoming and coping with the wounds.