ARTS

ARTS Yoko Ono and John Lennon were “unstoppable”

by Steve Newton

In 2002, when Cheryl Sim was an artcrazed young woman in her twenties, she travelled from Montreal to Toronto to see an exhibition by her hero, Yoko Ono, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The experience had a profound effect on her.

“I’m of Asian heritage as well,” Sim says on the line from Montreal. “I grew up in Canada in the ’70s, and I didn’t really see many people who looked like me in any kind of mainstream anything, so when I discovered this person named Yoko Ono through her music, I was like, ‘This is one kick-ass dame!’ I fell in love with her power, her strength, her being ‘out there’ and doing really avant-garde sort of work in the music world.

“And then as I also got into things like video art, I discovered her multidisciplinary practice, and I really was in love with the audacity and the free spirit that informed her work, and then later on just finding her message of peace and hope a real touchstone, you know. She’s been through so much, but she would always unwaveringly insist that we never let go of hope. And there was her own pursuit, artistically and otherwise, for freedom— that’s what we all really want. We all want to be happy and free.”

Now the curator and managing director of Montreal’s Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sim is also cocurator, with Gunnar B. Kvaran, of GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono/The art of John and Yoko, a touring exhibition that opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 9. The exhibition is divided into two parts, the first of which delves into Ono’s artistic process, reflecting her radical and unconventional approach, and the second highlighting Ono and her deceased husband John Lennon’s collaborative art projects aimed at promoting peace. (Two other works connected to the exhibition, ARISING (2013) and WATER EVENT (1971), will feature the participation of women and local Indigenous artists.)

In her role as cocurator of GROWING FREEDOM, Sim finally got to meet and exchange ideas with her visionary idol.

“She was really ahead of her time in terms of the way that she addressed art-making,” Sim explains. “First of all, what’s really cool is that all of her works are reproducible. She really thwarted the whole art-market issue, because anyone can reproduce her instructions. They’re words, right, so they’re not these discrete objects that travel around in crates and need to have special temperature and humidity and that kind of thing. And then the other thing that she did, which was extremely radical for the times, was including us as part of the work. And by us reading or experiencing the instructions and then using our imaginations to engage with them, the work is concluded through us. Without us, the work is not a work.

“So no one was doing that, and that was extremely unheard-of at the time. And then she was interdisciplinary at a time when no one was interdisciplinary. You know, you were a painter or you were a sculptor—you didn’t mix the two. She was doing everything, and she was an early conceptual artist in that way. Also, she was early in addressing issues of women, violence against women, and women’s bodies.

“One of her ‘Cut Pieces’, which is probably the most well-known—and is going to have a nice place in the show at the Vancouver Art Gallery—is really intense. She was sitting on the stage, fully clothed, with a pair of scissors by her side, and the instructions people received when they arrived into the performance hall were: ‘Come and cut a piece of the artist’s clothing.’ And you can imagine that in the 1960s, seeing an Asian woman in that type of very public, very vulnerable form was something you weren’t seeing every day. It was challenging to so many sensibilities on many levels.”

Cut Piece will be displayed at the VAG through a short film of a performance that Ono did in Carnegie Hall in the mid-’60s. It is part of “The instructions of Yoko Ono”, along with such works as Mend Piece, 1966 and Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1966.

“The instruction work is really a major series that’s still ongoing for her,” Sim says, “and what those are are essentially words put together as instructions to us to follow. They manifest themselves in different ways. Sometimes they are really just text on the wall; sometimes they have a physical action that goes along with them. So Painting to Hammer a Nail, for example, that’s the instruction, but there is a canvasshaped wood panel that’s been painted white, and nails, and a hammer, and so you participate by kind of making this work of art by hammering in your nail.

“And there’s another piece called Mend Piece where there’s all these broken pieces of dishes that are on a table and you’re invited to take pieces and then create little works, little sculptures, through using tape and glue and string and making these pieces into something. Sort of making something positive out of destruction. So there’s action, participation, and imagination, all coming out, and it’s all us—we get to do everything. We complete every one of these works in the first part of the show.”

Sim believes that the second part of GROWING FREEDOM, “The art of John and Yoko”, may be the only exhibition so far to successfully drive home the fact that Lennon and Ono were making art together as collaborators.

“It wasn’t more John than Yoko,” she says. “It’s more the opposite. It’s what she had been working on for years leading up to the start of the collaborative work that informed the work that they made together…[like] War Is Over, the advertising campaign for peace, where she had been working with language and word and display and postering for a long time already. I mean, the power of John Lennon at that time was really becoming engaged politically with the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement—all these things that were happening in the late ’60s—and when they met and started exchanging ideas, the two of them together were unstoppable.

“So in the second part we explore that. We explore the Montreal bed-in, but we looked at it rather than just being this media event; we looked at it as an artwork. It was a performance work. They did the same thing in Amsterdam a few months before, after they got married. And they had done this thing called Acorn Piece where they each planted acorns on the grounds of Christ Church Cathedral, one in the east and one in the west, to show that if a woman from Japan and a man from Liverpool could get together and make it work and join forces for good, then we can do anything.” g

The Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono/The art of John and Yoko, features works such as Bed-In for Peace (1969). Photo by Ivor Sharp.

GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono/ The art of John and Yoko runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 9, 2021, to May 1, 2022.

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no SEEKS WOMEN’S STORIES

GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono/The art of John and Yoko, shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 9, 2021, until May 1, 2022. Photo by Blaine Campbell.

A MAJOR EXHIBITION, GROWING

FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono/ The art of John and Yoko, will open at the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 9.

As part of the exhibition, two other Yoko Ono “instructional” works—ARISING (2013) and WATER EVENT (1971)—will feature the participation of women and local invited Indigenous artists.

“Visionary artist Yoko Ono invites women of all ages from all over the world to send a testament of harm inflicted on them, for simply being what they are, a woman,” reads the ARISING event info

on the VAG website. “The artist asks that you write your testament in your own language, in your own words and however openly you wish. You may sign your first name if you wish, but do not give your full name. Send a photograph only of your eyes.

“All statements of harm and photographs will be exhibited in Ono’s ARISING, an ongoing installation that has been shown internationally.”

Testaments and photographs can be sent by email to yoko@vanartgallery. bc.ca, or by regular mail to ARISING, c/o Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, B.C., V6Z 2H7.

During the entire run of GROWING FREEDOM, which continues until May 1, 2022, the VAG will be showing an iteration of Ono’s WATER EVENT (1971/2021).

“For this project,” reads the event info, “Ono invites a number of artists to create, or select, a container that can hold water. She then adds water to the sculpture for its presentation in the exhibition, which completes the sculpture and the collaboration. The work was initially presented in Ono’s first museum exhibition at the Emerson Museum in Syracuse, New York, in 1971, when she invited 120 artists and musicians to participate.

“For the iteration at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ono has requested to work with local Indigenous artists to reflect the significance of water to these local communities, past and present, and to create specificity in the work that acknowledges and amplifies the Indigenous communities on whose land the Gallery resides.”

Invited artists for WATER EVENT include Orene Askew, Zac George, Leigh Joseph and Floyd Joseph, Diamond Point, Chrystal Sparrow and Chris Sparrow, Debra Sparrow, Manuel Axel Strain, and Sesemiya/Tracy Williams.

Yoko Ono, Mend Piece, 1966/2020. Photo by Blaine Campbell. by Steve Newton

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964/1965. Photo by Minoru Niizuma.

Fri/Sat Oct 15/16

A New World

Orpheum | 8pm

Maestro Tausk brings us back to an exciting “New World” with two great masterpieces and indigenous cellist/ composer Cris Derksen’s powerful braiding of the traditional and contemporary.

Cris Derksen

Hear it. Feel it.

Robert Silverman

Sat/Sun Oct 23/24 Robert Silverman plays Bach

Chan Centre, UBC | 8pm Bell Centre, Surrey | 7pm

A master of the international stage, Vancouver’s own Robert Silverman brings an intimate performance of Bach to the Chan Centre at UBC and Bell Performing Arts Centre in Surrey.

Fri/Sat Oct 29/30 Sal Ferreras “Latin Nights”

Orpheum | 8pm

Vancouver Percussionist Sal Ferreras joins his Latin Jazz sextet and the fabulous Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to open the London Drugs Pops series with a celebration of Latin American rhythm, dance and joy.

Sal Ferreras

Sun Oct 31 The Composer is Dead!

By Nathaniel Stookey with Text by Lemony Snicket Orpheum | 2pm

There’s dreadful news from the symphony hall — the composer is dead! Where exactly were the violins on the night in question? Did anyone see the harp? There’s a mystery to be solved in the orchestra, and the suspect is still at large! Plus a suite of Halloween-themed favourites.

Get Tickets Today! VancouverSymphony.ca 604.876.3434

OCT 15 & 16 MASTERWORKS GOLD SERIES SPONSOR OCT 23 CONCERT SUPPORT PROVIDED BY OCT 29 & 30 VSO POPS SERIES SPONSOR OCT 31 KIDS CONCERTS SERIES SPONSOR MEDIA SPONSOR