Artnews : A Yoko Ono Retrospective at Tate Is the Latest to Argue for Her Importance (by Howard Halle)

Yoko Ono, 1967Mirrorpix via Getty Images.

The story goes that after leaving a recording session on November 8, 1966, John Lennon of the Beatles strolled into an installation in progress at the Indica Gallery in the Mayfair section of London. He was familiar with the place through his bandmate Paul McCartney and other acquaintances that included musician-producer Peter Asher, who co-owned the gallery with John Dunbar (husband of pop chanteuse Marianne Faithfull) and a third partner. Making his way around the space, Lennon perused such works as a ladder leading up to a painting fixed to the ceiling, where one could find a magnifying glass dangling on a chain. Viewers were encouraged to climb up and peer through the lens to find the word YES written on the canvas in tiny letters. (Speaking years later, Lennon said he was relieved to find that it didn’t say NO after the effort of seeing it.)

Dunbar introduced the artist to Lennon, who then examined another piece instructing gallerygoers to hammer a nail into it. When Lennon asked if he could give it a try, the artist initially demurred, preferring that the object remain untouched until the opening the next day, but then relented, saying that Lennon could proceed for a fee of five shillings. Lennon replied “Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” Thus, one of the most famous romances in rock-and-roll history was born.

The artist in question was Yoko Ono, and it is no surprise that her story’s intertwining with Lennon’s made her one of a handful of artists whose pop cultural reputations were commensurate with their oeuvres. But unlike her peers in this respect—Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, for example—Ono’s notoriety overshadowed her practice to the point of displacing it, thanks to her misogynistically conferred reputation as the woman who broke up the Beatles. Seen as little more than a character in a real-life soap opera, Ono was transformed from an artist into an artifact in the public imagination.

But Ono had already been a well-established figure in the postwar avant-garde by the time she met Lennon, due to her association with the Fluxus movement. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, Fluxus focused on process over product, becoming foundational to the development of the performance, conceptual, and video art that followed. Whatever else he might have thought of them, the works that Lennon encountered comported with the Fluxus ideology of merging art and life.

In the decades since Lennon’s 1980 murder at the hands of a delusional fan, Ono (as author, filmmaker, and musician as well as visual artist) has enjoyed a renewed admiration within the art world and beyond. The first significant Ono revival, for instance, occurred in 2000 with “YES,” a show at the Japan Society in New York that subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. In 2015 MoMA presented a survey of Ono’s work between 1960 and her “unofficial” MoMA debut in 1971: an unsanctioned one-woman show in which she released hundreds of perfume-soaked flies inside the museum, inviting visitors to follow them. This year London’s Tate Modern has mounted a major monograph spanning her practice from the mid 1950s to the present.

Welcome as these encomiums were, however, they often created the impression that her time with Lennon represented an interruption of her career, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As her 1971 intervention at MoMA makes clear, Ono pursued projects well after meeting Lennon. Moreover, he became her partner for various collaborations in which she took the lead (though some regard these efforts as celebrity hijinks). For these reasons, it’s worth taking another look at Ono’s life and art.

Tokyo after US Air Force air raids, 1945

Photo:Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

The eldest of three children, Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, into comfortable and somewhat peripatetic circumstances. Her father was a classical pianist turned banker of samurai heritage whose occupation took the family back and forth between Japan and destinations that included San Francisco, New York, and Hanoi. Her mother came from an even wealthier banking clan that owned one of the largest financial conglomerates in the country.

Ono’s family lived in Tokyo’s tony Azabu district, near the Imperial Palace. It was away from the city’s center, but close enough for Ono at age 12 to witness the notorious firebombing of the city on March 9, 1945, in which a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped incendiary ordnance on supposed military targets. Instead, entire residential neighborhoods of wooden housing went up in a firestorm that consumed at least 80,000 lives—wreaking more destruction than the RAF raid on Dresden or the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. While her mother and siblings took refuge in a bomb shelter, Ono, who had been laid up with a fever, remained in her bedroom, watching the cataclysm from her window.

Even though her children were unharmed by the devastation, Ono’s mother decided to pack them up and flee to the countryside. (Ono’s father had been interred in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp by that point, having been in Hanoi while his family was in Japan). Taking only those possessions that could fit in a wheelbarrow, Ono, her siblings, and their mother departed with no money and no place to go, winding up in a rural village in Nagano prefecture. Like most of the Japanese countryside during 1945, the town faced starvation, forcing Ono’s mother to beg and barter for food.

The trauma of war “cast a long shadow in my life,” Ono has said, but so, too, did the emotional neglect she suffered at the hands of her parents. Ono was born while her father was away on business and didn’t meet him until she was three years old. The demands of being in an aristocratic family affected her as well, leading her into the life of an artist. “The pressure . . . was so tremendous,” she once noted. “Unless I rebelled against it, I wouldn’t have survived.”

Yoko Ono, Painting to be Stepped On, installation view in “Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono,” AG Gallery, New York, July 17–30, 1961

Photo:Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image copyright © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Artwork copyright © Yoko Ono, courtesy of the artist. Photograph by George Maciunas.

Ono wasn’t formally trained as a visual artist, and instead spent time studying philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo as the first woman ever admitted to the program. Most of her arts training as such involved music, both in childhood piano lessons and later at Sarah Lawrence College, which she began attending in 1952 (by which time her family had moved to Scarsdale, New York). There, she familiarized herself with the 12-tone technique of composers like Arnold Schoenberg. Ono’s mother had also taken her to see Kabuki plays when she was young, which would later influence the performative direction of her work.

In 1956 she dropped out of college after marrying her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, a piano student at Juilliard (her marriage to Lennon, in 1969, would be her third). The couple moved to Manhattan shortly thereafter. Ichiyanagi took a course at the New School taught by John Cage, the experimental composer and music theorist who was a key figure of the downtown art scene at the time. Allan Kaprow, who had pioneered a performance genre called Happenings, attended the class alongside Ichiyanagi, and it was through these connections that Ono entered the avant-garde circles of 1950s New York.

Ono made her initial splash as an impresario of sorts: In 1960 she rented a loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan as a living/working space, and with the help of avant-garde composer La Monte Young she organized a series of concerts and performances there, including her own. (One involved throwing Jell-O at a piece of paper on the wall.) This being the 1960s, New York’s art scene was thoroughly male dominated—to the extent that Young was given credit for the program, while another artist, George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus movement, decided to appropriate Ono’s program and mount something similar at a gallery he ran uptown, much to Ono’s displeasure.

Maciunas, however, made amends by offering Ono a solo show—her first exhibition and, as it turns out, the last for the gallery. Only five people attended the opening in July 1961, including Cage and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Among the items presented was an irregularly shaped piece of army-surplus canvas on the floor with a handwritten note next to it that read, “A work to be stepped on.”

This sort of invitation to viewer participation would become a hallmark of Ono’s oeuvre, along with a puckish sense of humor that undermined the gravitas usually accorded art. In this respect she was indebted to Marcel Duchamp (who had attended the goings-on at Chambers Street), but works like Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961) or Apple (1966) gentled the waspish ironies of his readymades with Zen Buddhist meditations on the transience of life.

Yoko Ono, SNOW PIECE for La Monte Young, from Grapefruit, 1964

Photo:Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image copyright © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Artwork copyright © Yoko Ono, courtesy the artist.

In style and substance, Ono’s work retained remarkable consistency throughout her oeuvre, with instructional objects—going back to her very first piece from 1955: a typewritten card that read, “Light a match and watch till it goes out”—being reprised in later performances and films.

Not all of Ono’s output was so serene. In her visceral performance Cut Piece—a 1965 version of which was filmed at Carnegie Hall by the Maysles brothers—Ono placidly kneels before an audience, beckoning them to come and cut away her clothes with a pair of scissors. Cut Piece was embraced as a feminist indictment of how women endure the indignities of male privilege, but Ono herself stated that the performance was meant to evoke the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even so, Ono’s idea of soliciting bodily violations found its way into the work of other female performance artists such as Valie Export and Marina Abramović.

Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1971

Photo:Collection Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Digital image licensed by Art Resource, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Still, Ono’s relationship with Lennon remained the most important aspect of her career, if for no other reason than that it transformed her into an international celebrity. Unlike other wives of the Beatles, Ono didn’t confine herself to the background, instead becoming effectively joined at the hip with Lennon; meanwhile Lennon, who’d attended art school before his transformation into a rock legend, understood the creative potential of their partnership.

For Beatles fans, Ono’s presence became intrusive. It didn’t help that her default passivity (a matter of aesthetic choice as well as personality) made her a screen on which others could project their feelings about the Beatles’ dissolution. In fact, tensions within the group had already been brewing by the time Ono arrived on the scene. George Harrison increasingly chafed against the secondary role he’d been playing as a songwriter behind Lennon and McCartney, while Lennon dallied with heroin (for which Ono was also blamed). The Beatles lost the focus so evident on their albums Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. McCartney tried to keep things together, assuming the role of taskmaster for the group, which only fomented more resentment.

These issues surfaced conspicuously in a making-of documentary titled Let It Be, featuring the Beatles recording new songs for their 12th album and preparing for a live performance—their first in years—that eventually occurred as a lunchtime concert on the roof of the band’s London headquarters. Originally released in 1970, the film was recut as eight-hour, made-for-TV version in 2021 with the title The Beatles: Get Back. Throughout the footage in both versions, Ono is present in the studio, sitting as still and silent as a scholar’s rock—proof, her detractors would say, of her disruptive influence over Lennon. On the other hand, many interpret Ono’s action (or lack thereof) as kind of endurance theater, enacted for the camera.

Ono and Lennon went on to create various joint ventures, including their 1969 “Bed-In” protests of the Vietnam War as well as the album Imagine, which the pair co-produced with Phil Spector. Ono was also the co-writer (uncredited until 2017) of the hit song of the same title.

Yoko Ono, Add Colour (Refugee Boat), 2016, at MAXXI Foundation, Rome

Photo:Copyright © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini. Courtesy Tate Modern, London.

The last 20 or so years have seen Ono’s reemergence as an artist, with newer works emphasizing her lifelong pacifism. Helmets/Pieces of Sky (2001), for example, comprised an installation of soldiers’ helmets suspended from a ceiling, each containing pieces for an unassembled jigsaw puzzle of a bright blue sky. Another work was a 2016 iteration of her “Add Color” series from 1961, in which she invited viewers to write or draw on blank white objects that included globes and canvases. For the newer version, on view at Tate Modern through August, the item in question was a rowboat representing the refugee crisis fomented by the Syrian civil war.

Ono’s rediscovered relevance invites a question: Which was more important, her role as an artist or as a pop cultural fixture? Time, however, has revealed that they were always one and the same.

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