Harper's Bazaar : The people vs Yoko Ono: Why has the ground-breaking artist been disliked for so long? (by Ella Alexander)

As a blockbuster Tate Modern exhibition on her opens, we celebrate Yoko Ono and explore why she's never been given a fair trial

You could argue that John Lennon was somewhat detrimental to Yoko Ono’s career. Ever since the two got together in November 1966 at one of her exhibitions, her innovative and radical artwork has been overshadowed by the man she married. While her contemporaries dismissed her as a sell-out for marrying a pop star, the rest of the world blamed her for breaking up The Beatles – a myth still believed by a surprisingly large amount of people.

It’s a narrative that stood the test of time; calling someone a ‘Yoko’ is still shorthand for a controlling woman who stifles her partner’s achievements and corrodes his friendships. If you only know two things about Ono, it’s likely to be either that she was blamed for the demise of the beloved band, or that she and Lennon famously protested for peace from their hotel bed. A blockbuster exhibition at Tate Modern, which opened this month, hopes to celebrate Ono as an experimental, enduring and visionary artist in her own right.

"She encouraged people to use their imagination from the very beginning"

“Yoko Ono is such a versatile artist and has worked in so many different ways to convey her message,” says Juliet Bingham, co-curator of Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. “One of the things the show tries to do is honour all the different strands of her métier – participatory work, her conceptual pieces and art designed to stimulate the imagination of the viewer. Yoko upended the relationship between the artist and the audience.”

In 1964, Ono debuted one of her most acclaimed works, Cut Piece – first in Japan (she would later perform it in New York, London and Paris) – in which she quietly sat on stage and invited the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing. It was seen as a feminist statement and a bold manifesto against male violence towards women. “She’s revolutionary and innovative. Ono saw participatory performances as a form of giving and taking,” explains Bingham.

MINORU Ono performing Cut Piece in 1964 in New York

“The invitation was not just directed towards to the audience member who joined her on stage, but also towards the audience who watched and became a part of the work themselves. Even earlier than Cut Piece, she came up with conceptual works for viewers to create in their imagination – paintings to be constructed in your mind, so that people can physically realise themselves. She encouraged people to use their imagination from the very beginning.”

It didn’t matter that by the time Ono met Lennon she was already a much-respected, established name among New York’s avant-garde art scene. The masses didn’t care that she was among the first to invite her audiences to partake in her performance art, nor that she had created compelling conceptual work that would become highly influential in the years to come. Yoko was famous in the art world when she met John, but was still branded a groupie with no discernible talent.

“She has been treated unfairly because people have a hard time looking at themselves,” says the musician Peaches, who has been hugely influenced by Ono, even performing Cut Piece in 2013 at London's Southbank Centre. “They project anger on her. Others were so focused on The Beatles as a pop group; fans didn't want John to change, so it was easier to blame Yoko.”

GETTY IMAGES Ono and Lennon at their Bed-In peace protest at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam in 1969

In the years following the start of Ono’s relationship with Lennon, she was subjected to a powerful mix of misogyny and racism. Depictions of East Asians were rare during the 1960s, and the negative perception of the Japanese from World War II was still relatively recent, making Ono an easy target for vitriol. Her art – which spanned film, performance, music and the written word – was viewed as vacuous and shallow. Her character was slandered and she was branded conniving and manipulative.

When in 1981, a year after Lennon was shot dead, Ono released her song, Walking on Thin Ice, one critic wrote that Lennon’s killer “could have saved us all a lot of grief by aiming just one foot to the right”. The hatred towards her was visceral. “She had an incredibly difficult and unjust time, particularly at that moment in the '60s,” says Bingham. “The abuse was both racism and misogyny in equal measure. Hopefully younger generations can now come to her work untainted by the discourse that surrounded her back then. They can see her work with a fresh eye.”

KOH HASEBE/SHINKO MUSIC//GETTY IMAGES Ono in New York, 1973

"Yoko has this quiet way in her art, of making a very loud impact"

As revolutionary as her activism was her appearance. Ono subverted beauty standards, challenging traditional notions of femininity: her hair was loose and wiry, her clothes low-key, and she didn’t wear make-up. “She had a freshness and natural quality to her,” says Bingham. “When we look back now, we can appreciate it better.” Over the years, Ono has worked with several fashion brands including Opening Ceremony on a menswear line and Chanel, having been photographed by Karl Lagerfeld for a 2013 exhibition focused on the brand's famed little black jacket.

To her credit, Ono never let the open hostility stop her and, aged nearly 91, she continues to work. When critics called her a ‘witch’, she responded with characteristic wit, releasing a song entitled Yes, I’m A Witch, with the lyrics: “I’m gonna stick around for quite a while”. Her Tate Modern exhibition shows that her upbeat message has never deviated: collective action drives change and we can make the world a brighter place if we work together. Ono's idealistic ethos has long been derided by her critics, but if her biggest fault is earnestness and positivity, we could all do a lot worse.

Her son, Sean Lennon, says that his mother has always channelled the toxic rhetoric directed at her into her art, which – like it or not – has never lost its idealism and hopefulness. “When people have asked her how she has dealt with all this hate that’s been focused on her since she met my dad, and the bad press and the misunderstandings and the blaming of her for things that were outside of her control, I have heard her say, ‘Well, it’s all just energy.’ I do think in a way that she does thrive off energy – whether it’s good or bad – and she manages to somehow refocus that impulse into something positive,” he said in a 2017 interview with Harper’s Bazaar.

YOKO ONO A still from Ono’s Freedom film, 1970

That same year, Ono was finally given a writing credit for Imagine, after the National Music Publishers Association admitted that “a lot of it – the lyrics and the concept – came from Yoko”. Her influence has been far-reaching, from musicians including Patti Smith and Kim Gordon to fashion designers such as Cecilie Bahnsen, whose spring/summer 2023 collection was inspired by one of her exhibitions. “Yoko has this quiet way in her art, of making a very loud impact,” says Peaches. “Just being in bed for peace. Sitting on a stage fully dressed with scissors – she invited her audience to take action while she did not move. She has taught me the importance of patience.” That’s Ono all over – a distinctive voice in among a lot of noise.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is open from 15 February - 2 November at Tate Modern.

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