I spent the lunch hour on Thursday trying to put a teacup back together. More accurately, I was trying to build a new teacup out of fragments of broken cups and saucers – as per Yoko Ono's instructions.
Ono's work Mend Piece has been installed at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver: a white table and chairs for 10 with the ceramic shards in the middle. At each setting, there are tools: white scissors, white glue, elastics, string and tape – the brown twine being the only break in the white.
"Instead of buying a new cup, if you just mend the cup that you have, that is very significant because you put your soul into it," Ono told me in an interview conducted over e-mail.
The exhibit consists of a white table and chairs for 10 with fragments of ceramic in the middle. At each setting, there are tools: white scissors, white glue, elastics, string and tape – the brown twine being the only break in the white.
On shelves installed across one wall, the mended objects are displayed. One resembled a swan, another a heart. Someone at my table created a lotus leaf. I tried to make a cup. On the wall, Ono's words from 2015: "Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the Earth at the same time."
The work is a reminder to those of us feeling despondent at the state of the world that it was ever thus. In 1966, when Ono conceived and first installed the piece, the Vietnam War was raging – and so were protesters. I could take up my entire word count, and then some, summarizing the deeply troubling events of the day that make Mend Piece still so utterly relevant today. The ugly and deadly ruptures over gun control in the United States, the heartbreak of Tina Fontaine in Canada, horrific events in Syria, Myanmar, Nigeria.
"There is always something going around in the world that we don't like, and each time by mending we are thinking about mending the world as well, and I know that is being done," Ono told me when I asked about contemporary relevance.
On the piece’s relevance today (it was first conceptualized in the sixties) Ono says: ‘There is always something going around in the world that we don’t like, and each time by mending we are thinking about mending the world as well, and I know that is being done.’
Bob Rennie, the Vancouver real-estate marketer who built the museum where he installs works from his collection, met Ono at the Venice Biennale in 2009, touring through Mona Hatoum's show, an artist Rennie collects. "Listening to how peaceful Yoko was talking about Mona's works, I thought we want to get her in the collection," he says.
He admits to being infatuated with the history of Mend Piece, which was first installed at Ono's Unfinished Paintings and Objects show at London's Indica Gallery in 1966, where Ono and John Lennon met. But more important than his devotion to the Beatles (even if he has seen the Cirque du Soleil show LOVE in Las Vegas eight times), Ono's work fits with the themes around which he has built his collection: social commentary, race, prejudice, injustice.
Ono, who famously staged a "Bed-In for Peace" with Lennon in Montreal in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, says she has "a special warm feeling" about Canada. "I know that Canadian people will understand this work." (Ono's The Riverbed is also installed in Canada right now, at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.)
In the Japanese tradition, museum proprietor Bob Rennie explains, when a fine piece of porcelain breaks, it would be mended with liquid gold. ‘It exaggerates the solution,’ he says. ‘So the solution shows through. The mend shows through.’
There was something Rennie told me that helped me understand Mend Piece. In the Japanese tradition, he explained, when a fine piece of porcelain breaks, it would be mended with liquid gold. "It exaggerates the solution," he says. "So the solution shows through. The mend shows through."
As I sat there trying to get the glue to stick (tape was more effective, I quickly learned), I remembered what Rennie had told me ahead of time: "There's no wrong way to put a cup together; you just start mending."
I expected the exercise to be meditative, contemplative. My experience was more playful; participants were joking around; "Will you be my Yoko Ono?" was overheard. When I asked if people felt like they had been mended by the experience, there was silence.
‘There’s no wrong way to put a cup together,’ Rennie explains. ‘You just start mending.’
So, my teacup: It didn't work out. It became a sort of house, but when the glue gave out on me, I realized it resembled a smiling face. I added some twine hair. When I expressed disappointment at not having been able to recreate the teacup, museum director Wendy Chang offered some wisdom: After something has been broken, even when you mend it, it's not the same thing. It has transformed into something else – maybe something better, stronger.
I'm a sucker for a good metaphor, particularly when it is partnered with a profound (and fun) experience. We are all broken. We have all been mended. Sometimes the cracks show.
Yoko Ono's Mend Piece is at the Rennie Museum through March 31. Contact the museum to arrange a visit (renniecollection.org).