Lennon's Birthday (1971)

 Lennon's Birthday

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Democrat and Chronicle

October 11, 1971

    It was John Lennon's birthday Saturday, and the songwriter and former Beatles celebrated number 31 in Syracuse amidst a box of salt on a four-foot-high plexiglass pillar, a bed, a bathtub, and a rusting automobile in an art museum. 

    The backdrops for the birthday party come from the British musician's wife's first solo art exhibit. This is Not Here, which was open to the public Sunday at the Everson Museum of Art. Visitors to the exhibition are fitted with rubber gas masks, the eyepieces of which are made of distortion-producing glass, and enter the display room through a telephone booth that has two sides removed. 

    Yoko Ono Lennon, husband John, and Everson director James Hartitus took the press on a preview tour. John Lennon said, "Everyone who is desperate enough can communicate. We're all artists, and when you walk through this show, you'll find you're involved in it. Anyone who has gone through the museums today would have communicated with us."

     In the basement of the museum, direct communication is encouraged through blank canvases provided for visitors who want to leave messages or paint designs of their own. For tenderness, viewers are invited to wrap with gauze a cylinder labeled "Yoko's tears."

     "I think Jim Hartitus is very, very courageous in taking a chance on me." The Japanese-born Yoko said. "People elsewhere probably didn't want to take any risks," she added.

     Once through the telephone booth entrance to the display, the viewer finds himself in a large room with a bed, a kitchen table with canned goods on top of a refrigerator, a steel I-beam, and a soccer ball. In the next room are the rusting automobile, a bathtub, a box of salt, and on an identical plexiglass pillar, a hypodermic syringe. 

    Attending the Sunday birthday party and opening dedication to Lennon were Ringo Starr, drummer of the former Beatles, his wife Maureen, bassist Klaus Voormann, drummer Jim Keltner and pianist Mickey Hopkins.[sic]