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Weird Stuff/Unexplained Title: Yoko Ono gives peace a voice Clint Burnham, Special to the Sun Published: Saturday, July 01, 2006 Article tools Printer friendly E-mail Font: * * * * Mending Peace Works by Yoko Ono Centre A, 2 West Hastings, until July 2 - - - Best known to rock-and-roll fans as John Lennon's wife and the woman who supposedly broke up the Beatles, Yoko Ono was a respected experimental artist before hooking up with Lennon, and a key player in the international art movement known as Fluxus. Mending Peace, an exhibition of three key Ono works up until Sunday at Centre A, gives us a glimpse of Yoko Ono's whimsical but also dead-serious art. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh has described the Fluxus movement (or non-movement) as one of the most complex and misunderstood of the 1960s, both for how it incorporated Pop and Minimalist art and sought to bring everyday activities into the art world. The term "Fluxus" harkens back to Greek philosopher Heraclitus's observation that you never step into the same river twice: all is in flux. And certainly this heady mixture of high concept and low materials is evident in Ono's Mending Peace. The centre of the exhibition is Ono's Wishing Tree, a display of six saplings provided by the Vancouver park board and including young maples, chestnuts, and katsuras. Gallerygoers are welcome to write their wishes onto a piece of paper and then tie it to the trees. At the close of the exhibition, the wishes will be sent to Ono in New York for her own future art works, and the trees will be planted here in the city. Wishing Tree is an Ono work from the 1990s (the other two works in the show are from the '60s) and works by involving the viewer in a tangible, if ephemeral, way. By doing more than simply looking at a work -- although no doubt some do -- the work of art is both open-ended, and interactive. It also becomes a living bulletin board for the hopes and desires of the city's residents. Reading the messages already on the tree a couple weeks ago, I was impressed at the range of responses. Some messages were personal, as in "I wish Travis D. Black of Canada all kinds of happiness in his life" and some were political (and, in this case, a wish that was already granted): "I wish for a speedy head-tax refund real soon." Some wishes were jokey: "I want to be planted" and some were enigmatic: "I wish." Some were long-winded: "What is a wish? What makes a wish precious? Where is a wish, between a hope and a desire ... etc." and some were poignant: "For the women on our streets, for our children and our students. Dedicated to all our missing and murdered women of the D.T.E.S." The gallery's location in the Downtown Eastside presumably has meant that many of its patrons have a lot to wish for, and it is to Ono's credit that she has created a work that demands the viewers become creators as well. A similar process is at work in Ono's Mending Piece, which, like the title of the show itself, plays with peace, the piece of art, and a piece or fragment. Mending Piece is a work in which broken pottery is offered for the visitor to mend as best she or he can: fragments are provided on a table, along with glue, string, and tape. Like Wishing Tree, this is a participatory work, eminently democratic both for how it turns the making of the work over to the audience and makes the reconstruction of art into an artistic activity.
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