Wrapping one’s head around the concept of contemporary art is undoubtedly a difficult thing to do. Yoko Ono’s Walking Piece is a work that makes the movement a little easier to understand, simply because of the sheer uniqueness of it. It is the opposite of a traditional work of art, as the only visual medium present is text. That text is however is pleasing to view; not only it is a font with seraphs, but it has appropriate capitalization and is centered accordingly. Each of these aspects of the work would have you believe that it is a page of a book, that of which it is, yet the actual subject matter is far from that.

        Walking Piece, much like many of Ono’s other works, is unique because it only becomes a complete work once a participant has followed through on the instructions. The instructions are strikingly child-like, which I find to be a good way of understanding the movement of contemporary art. It is almost as if the artist once said to herself, “wouldn’t it be fun to follow in someone’s footsteps” and then did so, but immediately became sad that there was no one near by to witness it, and so, Walking Piece was born.                              (Word count: 207)