Shout it out

I sat on a bench in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, looking at the lone black microphone, strips of tape, and two speakers. I watched as a parent pushed his toddler up to the microphone in a stroller, gesturing and offering it to him. The toddler looked up at him with an expression that clearly read “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” and shook his head violently from side to side. “I feel you, little man,” I thought from my spot on the bench.

This setup is an installation of Yoko Ono’s “Voice Piece for Soprano,” colloquially known as “Scream Piece,” now on view at MoMA through Nov. 28. Following the tradition of mid-twentieth century Fluxus pieces that explore uncertainty and interaction, Ono’s works often consist of instructions and a few props to go along with them, leaving the result of the piece up to the participant. In this instance, the props are the microphone and speakers, and the instructions are inscribed on the wall: “Scream. 1. against the wind, 2. against the wall, 3. against the sky.”

As soon as I entered MoMA, I could hear people obeying Ono’s instructions. The entire museum sounded like a haunted house, due largely to a gaggle of Italian school kids, each of whom would shriek into the microphone and then retreat, giggling, back to the group.

However, it wasn’t just teenagers who padded their screams with the buffer of friends and laughter. As I observed, not one person walked up and screamed with real intention. There was a weird dynamic in the air that reminded me of reading plays aloud in high school English classes: the kid who actually commits to the character and reads his lines with feeling is immediately cast as a weirdo and probably also wears medieval costumes to school. People were afraid and uncomfortable. It made me wonder if nearly all performance art has to involve a certain degree of public humiliation and spectacle.

Last spring, in the same atrium where Ono’s piece currently resides, Marina Abramović invited New Yorkers and visitors to sit across from her at a table one at a time and stare at her, observed by everyone waiting in line for their turn to do the same. Also during this time last year, I squeezed my own uncomfortable, mildly horrified body between two naked people who framed a gallery doorway as part of a reenactment of her piece “Imponderabilia” from the 1970s. Now as I avoided yet another uncomfortable artistic sentence while watching others participate in Ono’s piece, the idea of socially-imposed comfort zones ate at me.

It’s not hard to imagine why I was afraid of having an exposed penis brush the sides of my trench coat, but it’s a little more complex to understand why I was avoiding standing up and screaming like I meant it. It seems like students are taught, day in and day out, to be quiet in almost every context, not only in museums but in lectures, during quiet hours in the dorms, and in the library. Anyone who sneezes in Butler during midterms might as well be a leper. Unless she’s Lady Gaga, people generally operate under an unwritten rule of avoiding standing out. I’d as soon as scream in a museum as I would rip off my pants in the dining hall.

Ono seems to call attention to the self-imposed boundaries that people obey all the time and to attempt to investigate what happens when these boundaries are stripped away. Genuine screams are what “Scream Piece” is intended to elicit. In this way, Ono’s raw experience is as disarming as Abramović’s nude performers—the participant is left vulnerable and exposed in both.

Moved by my own little call to action, I stood up. The Italian kids stopped their conversation and turned to stare at me. I came very close to pretending to be on the phone and sitting back down, but I didn’t. Instead, I thought of the red flush that heats up my face when I accidently drop a notebook in Butler, of the nerdy kid reading “Hamlet” in my high school English class, and of all the times I’ve been shushed, and I walked over to the microphone and screamed.

It sounded like something between a bird call and a scratched record and hurt even my own ears. The silence that followed seemed almost louder than the scream itself, and I thought I heard a single clap from somewhere on the upper levels of the museum. I felt both oddly light and distinctly empty, like I had just taken off my backpack and was left with a singular floating feeling.

Don’t get me wrong, this story doesn’t end beautifully—I haven’t even mentioned the sweaty glaze that took over my whole body or the fact that I kept my eyes on the floor and immediately exited the museum after my little performance—but during the scream, with my eyes closed and this odd noise exiting my body, I was thrilled.

Ono’s piece has the special ability to force people to be alone with themselves and make them acutely aware of what they’re feeling. Whether it’s throat-burning adrenaline or complete physical discomfort, people wake up for a minute from their usual sleep-walking. Yes, I nearly peed my pants, and yes, the Italians laughed at me, but I felt something when I performed “Scream Piece,” which, at the end of the day, is really all I ask of art.

That, and maybe some sound-proof walls next time—just a thought.