Dr. Kevin Concannon of Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Arts will deliver the keynote address, “War is Over If You Want It: John & Yoko’s Year of Peace,” tomorrow night at the University of Central Arkansas for its 22nd Arkansas College Art History Symposium. He’ll talk at 7:30 p.m. in the Art Lecture Hall of McCastlain, on the UCA campus.
Concannon, whose scholarship focuses particularly on the work of Yoko Ono, will give another lecture, at 4:30 p.m. Friday, “Yoko Ono’s Touch Piece: A Work in Multiple Media, 1960-2008.” His talk will come after the presentation of student papers that begins at 8:30 a.m. Friday.
Here is how fellow performance artist Daniel Rothbart describes Touch Piece:
Touch Piece is generally performed in the following way: lights are turned off and members of the audience feel one another from anywhere between ten minutes and two hours. At the Tanzen Temple in Kyoto Japan, the piece lasted from dusk until dawn. For New Yorkers, Touch Piece may have particular significance. Each day city-dwellers clad themselves in psychological armor which strongly inhibits their ability to empathize with strangers. Touch Piece forces participants to eliminate barriers to communication and understand the body of another through the sensual language of touch, awakening myriad sensations and emotions that lie dorment in their daily lives.