Yoko Ono

Every spring a slew of “blockbuster” exhibitions begins to open across the globe, as nervous institutions leverage their bottom line and cast their nets as broadly as their mandates will allow. Angling for “buzz,” a recognizable name or two will be picked to have their work surveyed by this or that museum, inciting otherwise busy city dwellers and tourists to queue up for hours. Sometimes these shows are great and sometimes not, but as lines produce attention, attention produces lines, and the community feels engaged. This spring two of Toronto’s most visible institutions mounted their own respective versions of the celebrity-scaled exhibition— remarkably both with living artists!—Yayoi Kusama at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Yoko Ono’s “The Riverbed” at the Gardiner Museum. While most viewers have seen images of Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” on Instagram or Facebook, usually with the face of a friend, family member, co-worker or acquaintance grinning in front, Ono’s exhibition prohibits photos, so its dissemination is left to word-of-mouth reportage. This also means that viewers are unable to hide behind the usual technological mediation we’ve all become accustomed to when looking at art. Apart from whatever conceptual reasons might be used to explain the camera-free zone of “The Riverbed,” Ono’s exhibition also couldn’t exist without this limitation. Being camera-free means that your hands are free, and the central work in the exhibition requires some handholding.

A collection of rocks dredged from local riverbeds meanders through the central gallery of the Gardiner’s third-floor space, each stone polished and shaped by time to be just large enough that they can be grasped by most hands. Ono has titled the work Stone Piece, and has left instructions for each visitor: “Choose a stone and hold it until all your anger and sadness have been let go.” A selection of stones are also inscribed in felt marker by the artist with words such as “Dream,” “Wish” and “Remember,” a final prompt toward the type of inward turn that Ono has in mind with this project. Offered as a cure for contemporary anxieties that have pushed many people to their ideological extremes, it is hoped that with these stones in hand, visitors come to some new resolution about their personal well-being and position in the world.

Two other interactive works comprise the remainder of the show. Line Piece is a series of small desks with notebooks and pencils in which visitors are encouraged to draw a line, which will “take [Ono] to the farthest place in our planet.” This sketching is then physically materialized as visitors may extend a string across the gallery space and secure it in place with a nail. Over the course of the exhibition, this has grown to become a web, a line of connection between disparate points of view. The other, Mend Piece, is intended to elicit the impulse to heal. Fragments of broken cups and saucers are littered across a series of tables for visitors to reassemble using glue, string and tape, before positioning them on shelves around the room.

The slightest cynicism can easily derail the sincerity of Ono’s work. The last 50 years have seen Ono’s brand of love and care co-opted by capitalism, and the industry of entrepreneurial self-love and self-actualization has ravenously consumed her language, so that aphorisms like “Dream,” “Wish” and “Remember” are now more likely to conjure embroidered throw pillows and engraved key chains than anything radical. To look at Ono’s work only through this lens is unfair, though, and misses the potential radicality of these gestures in such antagonistic times. But it is also dangerous to only replace a phone with a stone and call it a day. It is a luxury and privilege to be able to sit and meditate on such things, when so many people are still oppressed and unspoken for. Contemporary politics calls for more attention, anxiety inducing or not, and the grasping of a fist around a stone might, too, recall the simplest of weapons, and the famous slogan of Paris protests of the late ’60s, Sous les pavés, la plage! (Beneath the paving stones—the beach!), a reference to the sand beneath the cobblestones students would lift from the Paris streets to hurl at police. At the very least, with phones away, the question of how to cope and overcome can be asked in the time and space created by such a gesture—whether through a sort of gnostic withdrawal to an interior world or via a student-led occupation of city streets—and from there we can begin to mend broken political and economic systems, as well as relationships, at both the local and global levels. ❚

“The Riverbed” was exhibited at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, from February 22 to June 3, 2018.

Aryen Hoekstra is an artist based in Toronto. He is a contributing editor at Towards.info and currently serves as the director of G Gallery.