UPDATED: Oct. 31, 2011, 11:44 a.m.

David Ross will always wax nostalgic about his first assignment at his first job out of Syracuse University. The harmony game was all too real. While his boss chatted with Yoko Ono, he met the Beatle of Beatles at the foot of his bed, grabbed a guitar off the wall and became Paul McCartney for a few golden minutes.

Jim Harithas, director of the Everson Museum of Art, gave the 20-year-old Ross the task of keeping John Lennon occupied when the two traveled to Manhattan in 1971 to execute Harithas’ master plan — convince Yoko Ono to bring her first American Fluxus art exhibit, ‘This Is Not Here,’ to Syracuse.

‘Jim is the most radical man to ever run an American museum,’ Ross said.

As a new director in a stunning 3-year-old art museum, Harithas was only interested in energizing the stagnant Everson Museum, and in turn, shaking the mundane city of Syracuse. His visions for this new building would change the Everson forever. And Harithas knew that to do so, Syracuse needed Ono.

‘It was very sweet of him to take a chance on me,’ Ono said in an email. ‘This was my first one-woman museum show.’

The moments surrounding the avant-garde exhibition, which closed 40 years ago today, would let him claim an artistic and social stake in Syracuse. It was an event that produced a day unlike any Syracuse has ever bore, ideas unlike any the Everson had ever showcased and an approach to art that still greatly shapes the Everson and Syracuse today.

‘Harithas is an activist who believes in revolution,’ Ono said. ‘My show was a revolution!’

 

Act 1: Preparing Syracuse for the pair

Reeling in Ono and Lennon wasn’t hard — the couple agreed to venture to Syracuse several times to plan the exhibition.

‘We just believed in our work, and went where our work was welcomed,’ Ono said.

Harithas had big ideas. He wanted to make Syracuse’s art scene symbiotic with New York City’s — not just in October 1971, but afterward.

‘New York was the port city, and the Everson was the center of the universe. That’s how I saw it,’ Harithas said.

But Harithas’ biggest hurdle would prove to be getting people to appreciate the Fluxus art amid the hysteria of Syracuse’s very own Beatlemania. Harithas wanted to contain the inevitable frenzy the couple’s presence would cause. Leading up to the exhibition, 23 other musicians and conceptual Fluxus artists slept on floors with Lennon and Ono at Harithas’ house.

He and Apple Record executives chartered a 747 plane to bring fellow Beatle Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and others to town to surprise Lennon on his 31st birthday with a midnight concert in the Everson’s Garden Court. Though George Harrison was invited, he didn’t come, but Harithas and Apple planned for a concert anyway.

Word spread and the secret got out. With about 5,000 crazed fans descending on the Everson, a handful breached a metal door near the museum’s garage and infiltrated the museum. Plans changed. There wouldn’t be a concert to distract from the main event: the art.

‘The place was dangerous,’ Ross said. ‘Literally, every square inch was filled with people who were excited.’

 

Act 2: The art couple’s collective crowning moment

Oct. 9, 1971, may have been the day that trumped all others in artistic achievement for Ono and Lennon. With her exhibition and the release of ‘Imagine’ two days later, the weekend was a celebration, and Harithas brought that to Syracuse.

But as the couple celebrated smack dab in the middle of the Garden Court, they exuded an aura of isolation. As the crowd enveloped the couple to wish Lennon a happy birthday, then-Everson Curator of Exhibitions Sandra Tropp saw the Garden Court transform from possible birthday jam to incubator of artistic lab rats.

‘It was like two rats trapped in a cage,’ Tropp said. ‘If they walked out of that area, everybody got hysterical and were grabbing at them.’

Fans filtered in to see the artwork consisting of such avant-garde pieces as hanging condoms, a gas mask telephone booth and a shattered Waterford crystal. Lennon even exhibited his 6-foot ‘Big Guitar’ and about 50 Fluxus artists, including Bob Dylan, provided pieces for Ono’s show.

Later, Lennon and crew tore up the Hotel Syracuse for his 31st birthday. The concert moved from the Garden Court to a hotel suite. Harithas displayed Ono’s art for another 18 days.

‘For all the people who cared, it was all about the art,’ Ross said. ‘For everyone else, it was about a circus.’

 

Act 3: 40 years of influence

Before Harithas left the Everson in 1974, he tried to keep up the momentum set by Ono’s exhibit. During Syracuse’s glory days of conceptual art, Harithas installed 80 exhibitions and 200 programs in the museum. His social activism art continued, and he hired three Auburn prison inmates, Mando, Melvin and John, as curators. Once Harithas left, the Everson scarcely exhibited the Fluxus-like art that Ono and Lennon once brought to Syracuse.

‘After that, everything died,’ Tropp said. ‘It became Syracuse again.’

The city art scene reverted back to traditional art within the frame, with the museum occasionally exhibiting new computer art, sound art and conceptual art. But the video art that Harithas kick-started in Syracuse is still a mainstay at the Everson. After Harithas left, Ross became the Everson’s first video curator. Now, the Everson prides itself on video.

‘The video exhibitions continued into the mid-80s,’ Deb Ryan, current Everson senior curator, said. ‘Those exhibitions were highly conceptual and big installations.’

Times changed, but people like Ross still feel the Everson chooses to shy away from risky art. At times, Ryan showcases conceptual art like Syracuse University professor Yvonne Buchanan’s recent piece, a gospel song that uses inaudible noises and a black screen to let listeners conceptualize an image. It is eerily similar to the 1968 Beatles song ‘Revolution 9,’ comprised of abstract inaudible noises and known as Lennon’s first music art piece influenced by Ono’s Fluxus.

The Everson is no longer conceptual. Harithas accepts that. But if he can encourage anything, it is to have an imagination like the one he had in 1971, when he introduced his take on art by giving the city of Syracuse Ono and Lennon. Two days after Lennon’s birthday, Lennon released ‘Imagine’ on Oct. 11. And looking back on that fact and October 1971, it is perfectly reasonable for Harithas to wax nostalgic. He may have pulled off the greatest harmony game of all.

‘Part of ‘Imagine’ may have been written in Syracuse,’ Harithas said. ‘I’m not sure of that, but it seems like it was part of it. And imagine — of course that is what artists have: imagination. It really fit right in.’

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Published on October 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm