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Contemporary Exhibit Honours 1969 Bed-in

In 1969, Richard Nixon became president of the U.S., the war in Vietnam entered its tenth year, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s Omnibus Bill decriminalized homosexuality and abortion, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrived in Montreal to take up residence at Suite 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for their now legendary Bed-in for Peace.

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For seven days, Montreal was the epicentre of the worldwide anti-war movement.  John and Yoko turned an ordinarily calm and conservative hotel into an impromptu press conference of frenetic activity, entertaining reporters and famous guests (including LSD guru, Timothy Leary ), as well as recording “Give Peace a Chance.” Forty years later, the upheavals of 1969 are alive again on the walls of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Imagine, a multimedia exhibition honouring John and Yoko, welcomes, free of charge, thousands of gallery goers from around the world.

Parisian Curator, Emma Lavigne, with extensive assistance from Yoko Ono herself, has built a bright, spacious place that invites people to play and participate. You can laze around on a giant bed, have a game of chess in which all the pieces are painted white, play the piano or write a message for peace and hang it on a “Wish Tree.” One lucky visitor per day even gets to talk direct to Yoko Ono on the telephone.

The museum’s curatorial spokesperson, Thierry Loriot, describes Imagine as “a monster exhibition” that turned out much larger than anyone initially expected. Guests “from seven to ninety-seven” have enjoyed the tour, liberated to interact with the art and to photograph anything they please. This is not your stuffy, elitist art show where no one dares emit any sound louder than a whisper.

John and Yoko were enthused with the same spirit of playfulness and boisterousness from the very beginning of their relationship. They met in 1966, an event that John described dramatically:

“Imagine two cars of the same make heading towards each other and they’re gonna crash, head-on. We’ll, it’s like one of those scenes from a film – they’re going 100 miles an hour, they both slam their brakes on and there’s smoke everywhere and they stop just in the nick of time with their bumpers almost touching but not quite.”

John and Yoko became more than simply a couple – you could say they became a force of nature, moving across the world like a weather system, driving the peace movement everywhere they went. Whereas their self-appointed successor, Bono, styles himself as a friend and counsellor to world leaders, John and Yoko were typically adversarial in their relationship with the powers that were, often taking to the streets to protest the ongoing atrocities perpetrated in the name of America in the jungles of Vietnam. When they mailed acorns, symbolizing peace, to world leaders, South Africa’s president and Jordan’s King Hussein vociferously objected.

John described the Bed-in as “one big advertising campaign”; but from the outset, it was clear this would not be like a Coke or Pepsi commercial. The Bed-in did not ask people to consume; it asked people to imagine and enact a radically different world.

The Imagine exhibit does a nice job of contextualizing the Bed-in among the events of the 1960s, and in the chronology of John and Yoko’s respective endeavours. When you enter, there are beautiful photos of John and Yoko as children, their families, and the obligatory photographic homage to John’s famous friends and music partners – The Beatles.

Particularly instructive is the guide to Yoko Ono’s importance as one of America’s leading contemporary artists. A massive screen projects her famous work, Cut Piece, in which Yoko sat on a stage and had members of the audience come and cut off pieces of her clothing. As you progress through the exhibit, you can see the escalating intensity and artistic collaboration of John and Yoko in numerous fields: film, music and art. A body of work emerges that beggars any contemporary output of today’s so-called stars. What meaningful political contributions can you expect from Nickelback, 50-cent, or Nelly Furtado? Imagine makes you long for a time when art mattered.

In the final analysis, profiting from a sense of nostalgia is perhaps the only aspect of the exhibition that a detractor might justifiably decry.  Whether or not you feel the pantheon of 1960s icons have become clichés, it’s hard to argue that they did not – in their day – matter. And so, to fast-forward to our own day, in which Dick Cheney continues to proudly support America’s torturing of its “enemies” in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Imagine provokes the loaded question, “Can the peace movement still make a difference?” It’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s certainly courageous of the museum to invest so much effort and money in keeping it alive. {w}

symbols: volume i, issue iv

 

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