As we all celebrate the holiday season, there are bundles of must see attractions to keep families busy around the country. One such destination is the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Yoko Ono: War is Over (If You Want It). It’s as much as look back at her life in work as it is a custom made installation for Sydney – Yoko’s first ever in Australia. It’s definitely a must-see. To talk about how it all came together, I sat down with the gallery’s curator Rachel Kent to talk all things Ono…
How did the relationship between you and Yoko begin?
I’ve been working on this project for probably about four years now. I’ve been interested in her work for a long time, following her career and like yourself I’d seen pieces here and there. Mainly in Europe and in the US, and also in some smaller exhibitions – but in terms of Sydney and Australia, other than a work Yoko had in the Sydney Biennale twelve years ago, she’s never shown in this part of the world. And I just thought if I want to learn more, surely there must be other people who want to learn more as well.
She’s just got the most wonderful career, she’s 80, going on 81, she has over 60 years of art making behind her. I thought it would be a really great opportunity to show people who she is as an artist. There’s that quote by John Lennon, her late husband, where he said that she’s the world’s most famous unknown artist – everyone knows her name but no one knows what she does. And I thought that this would be a good opportunity, at least in this part of the world, to address that and show people THIS is what she does. It’s extraordinary! And I mean she was an artist waaaay before any entanglement with fame or any of that kind of stuff came about.
There’s some fascinating early videos of her works floating around…
Yeah definitely, and you’ll see a lot of that in the show. One of the first things you’ll see when you walk into the exhibition are two big wall projections at a right angle, which are two performances of “Cut Piece” – it’s the piece where people cut the garments from her body – one when she’s a young, unknown artist at 32… she’s kneeling and she’s quite vulnerable, and the second is when she’s aged 70, and because she’s an older woman she’s sitting. But there’s also the context that she now has a name, and people are kneeling down to cut her… she’s less vulnerable.
Why did you choose to embody the exhibition with such an iconic phrase?
Well, that was the name of an activist work she did with John Lennon in 1969. And I felt like we’ve almost come full circle, because that was obviously a statement and a work and a political gesture that was made at a time of huge turbulence – you had American troops in Vietnam, you had student uprisings across Europe – particularly in Paris. I feel like we’ve almost come full circle and today, similarly we’re in interesting and fraught times, and I was thinking a lot about the Arab Spring and what we’ve witnessed in terms of the fight for democracy and peace. And then there’s what’s happening in Syria and Egypt and even look at what’s happening a lot closer to our own shores. I mean I think these messages apply in terms of the way we treat people seeking refuge from war and oppression who try to come to our own country.
Did Yoko have any input in terms of the Australian connections to her works? Is there anything that directly relates to our region?
When we started talking about the exhibition, she was really curious and interested… she’d only been down here once and that was literally for two days for the Biennale, so she really didn’t have a clear idea of Australia. But she was very interested in our history and that idea of the “new world” and being a part of the Asian region and so on. So we invited her down for a site visit while we were rebuilding (the MCA), and she came in December 2011. We reopened in March 2012 so it was pretty close to the completion of the new building. The galleries were pretty well done. So she came through a bit quietly… it’s hard to hide her! She’s tiny but unhideable *laughs*… to look at the configuration of the new space and what the scale and the potential would be of the galleries.
And from there we were able to work with the floor plans and start mapping things out in a concrete way, but also she wanted to know how we could make this specific to Australia, and relevant and meaningful to our audiences. So you’ll see that there are quite a few pieces in the work that are new iterations for Sydney. For example there’s the wish tree for Sydney on the sculpture terrace, which incorporates native Eucalyptus saplings. There’s also a really iconic work of hers, which is the Chess installation (pictured at the top of this article), Play it by Trust, and we’ve made a new version of that. It’s inspired by the architecture of the Opera House – from its curvature to the checkerboard tiles of the sails, which relate to the chess board itself. So I had a local construction team and an architect create that work here.
Tell is a little about the premise that runs at the heart of this exhibition? Apart from Yoko, of course, what sets it apart?
The whole idea for this show is that people are getting involved, they’re not just looking at objects on the wall, they’re making and doing and creating. There’s also a lot about gender and the feminine and the maternal, particularly in one of the participatory works called “My Mummy is Beautiful”, which is a message wall for mothers, and I’ve seen people get very emotional around it.
It’s not an exhibition to just stand and look at, it’s one to do and write and play… everything from writing to your mother to wishing for world peace to playing chess and mending broken crockery! Yoko says that when you mend something, you mend a piece of your soul. It’s a lovely metaphor for mending a fractured or broken world and it’s been such a popular part of the exhibition! It’s been hilarious to see what people have come up with too…
What surprised you about working with Yoko?
Her generosity and her warmth, but also her intellectual curiosity. She has one of those restless inquiring minds. She loved the idea of showing in this part of the world; she sees it very much as the new world and the future. She’s constantly up for a new challenge, which is remarkable for someone about to turn 81! She travels all around the world… I couldn’t keep up with her! You know she released a new album in September, which went totally viral with the clip for “Bad Dancer” and knocked all the Lady Gaga’s off their perch! *laughs* Go Yoko!
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Yoko Ono‘s War is Over (If You Want It) appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney until the 23rd of February. Tickets and more details are available at http://www.mca.com.au/
