Article by Ellen Papazian, Illustrated by Shen Plum, appeared in issue
Art/See; published in 2009; filed under Art.
20 Ways of Looking at an Art-World Icon
Art/See
Who is Yoko Ono? She is one of the most famous figures in the world, yet also one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and, at times, vilified. Quite often, what we think about Ono says more about us than about the artist herself. Do we want to know her, or are we content with myth and stereotype?
For most of her career, Ono has been carelessly marked by the culture at large–as the harpy who broke up our beloved Beatles, the shrieking voice behind those unlistenable records. But what do our images of Ono say about our understanding of otherness? What do they say about art? Or icons? Truth? Transformation?
To coincide with the September release of Ono's new album Between My Head and the Sky, Bitch asked 20 well-known musicians, writers, visual artists, and scholars–some who have met or worked with Ono, some who know her only through their admiration or critique of her work–for their thoughts on how one woman has come to stand for so much.
Who is Yoko Ono? This is exactly who we think she is...
1. Hated
What happened to Yoko, the degree of hatred that was directed at her, the blame that fell on her for breaking up the Beatles—which struck me as an absurd accusation even as a very young girl—frightened me terribly. I very much felt she was hated because she was a woman artist. She had John's ear; if anything, he wanted to earn her respect as an artist. This came through very clearly in all his statements and in their body language.
She was the type of person I most wanted to be—yet she was hated. I found this very discouraging. I too wanted to be a conceptual artist, but I didn't want to be hated. I too wanted a partner with whom I could work, but didn't want to be seen as the evil controlling woman, as she was (and Linda McCartney, too, for that matter). Her fate seemed intimately connected to my own, and I wanted her to be accepted.
--alice elliott dark, novelist
____________________
2. Courageous
The most surprising thing about Yoko Ono is her courage to be positive. [She] turns negative power into positive power, and it's very akin to martial arts…. You take the oppositional, negative death energy, and you transform that into a life force. She doesn't attack back; she just changes the ground of the criticism.
To her, it's simply an art of coping. She had to cope with negativity. She had to cope with the murder of her husband. She had to cope with being virtually disowned by her family. She had to cope with being considered a breaker-up of the Beatles. She had to cope with being considered an unserious artist because she was working in art forms that didn't have any commercial value. And she coped, and [not] by retreating. She coped by persisting in creative vision.
--alexandra munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and author of Y E S Yoko Ono
__________________
3. Radical
I first encountered Yoko Ono when I was a teenager. I thought she looked cool. I saw pictures of her all in white with the black hair, and I thought she was really chic and intriguing.
I did a talk on Yoko in Minneapolis during her "Y E S Yoko Ono" exhibition in 2001, and I was listening to the boxed set that she put out, just going through and listening to it CD by CD. I forget what song it is, but it's John just [playing] feedback guitar with Yoko's voice, and it's one of the most radical things ever. It would be amazing if people could really hear John Lennon playing this. And her lyrics were so pro-choice; they were very ahead of her time.
When I saw "Cut Piece," she just looked so vulnerable, and it was almost like a foretelling of what would happen when she became involved with John. People obviously wanted to remove her mask.
—kim gordon, artist and musician
____________________
4. Offered Sacrifice
Back in the '60s, I was peripherally involved in a Fluxus concert evening at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York where Yoko did several pieces, [including] "Cut Piece." People began lining up to cut little pieces of her skirt or sleeves or strands of hair as souvenirs, or artworks, if you prefer. Everybody was very respectful, [and] Yoko remained impassive, without any change of expression.
The atmosphere changed to dark and unpleasant when several young men who were obviously not members of the art community started taking off large parts of her skirt and sweater, disclosing her bra, and getting back on line after each of their cuts. They couldn't stop laughing. I recall Carolee Schneemann going up to one of them and slapping him in the face, which didn't faze him one bit. He was after Yoko—the offered sacrifice.
At the point where one of the grinning guys went towards her bra strap with the scissors, Yoko made a slight gesture towards the wings, and the curtain immediately closed on her before her breast could be revealed. The piece was over. Obviously, when you let the audience into the artwork, you can't always predict the result.
—eleanor antin, performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist
____________________
5. Visionary
"Cut Piece" was astonishing. It was an extremely dangerous piece, especially in the moment when it was done, because there was no sense of feminist presence or barriers. She could have been stabbed. Vile things were in the air then, so she was challenging those very dark impulses in this vulnerable position—and that was the indelible power of it.
Yoko is a determined visionary, and now she has a huge fortune to work with, and every possible international art connection would want to be associated with her. It's a strange, anomalous personal history. She was ignored. She was marginalized. She was vilified. And she's become golden.
—carolee schneemann, multidisciplinary artist
___________________
6. Groundbreaking
As a female artist who has dated guys in bands and often been accused of being "a bad influence" on them, I have clung to the knowledge that amidst the sexism and unfairness of her mainstream portrayal, Ono has still managed to radiate joy and hope.
Ono's installation art, especially the work she's made that deals with death and mourning, has profoundly affected me. Like many people my age, I have lost many friends, some to AIDS, some to drugs, and far too many to suicide. Having no public space to confront these losses has been a source of pain in my life, and Ono's work gives voice to this pain by recognizing these losses in the context of communal life.
I do not know any other contemporary artist who has remained as relevant in so many different eras. She clearly doesn't give a shit about maintaining status in the art world, receiving awards, or being recognized. She simply wants to make smart, inclusive work that makes the world a better place. Waking up in New York every morning makes me happy, knowing she is waking up here, too.
—kathleen hanna, musician
____________________
7. Self-Aware
Yoko often mentioned in interviews that she felt that an Asian woman was seen as a dragon lady or an obedient slave—nothing in between the extremes. There were countless racist remarks in the press, especially after the breakup of the Beatles, but she has overcome it over many years. She has made a great contribution in changing the world's view of Asian women in general. She has consistently projected an image of a self-aware, confident, creative, and strong-willed woman.
—midori yoshimoto, associate professor of art history, New Jersey City University, and author of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York
____________________
8. Unshakable
I was 19 and working as an art handler at the Miami Art Museum. The first exhibition I helped install was "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s," a survey show that included Ono's "Cut Piece." I was blown away by the quiet, unshakable disposition of the artist in this vulnerable situation.
Ono's work became an emblem of everything I hoped feminism would be: unapologetic and forward thinking. Her work, along with that of theorists like Judith Butler, ignited my feminist curiosity. I began to understand the freedom that comes from the fluidity of nonidentification, and the possibility of breaking free from the societal constructs imposed on [us] from all sides.
—anat ebgi, curator and co-owner of The Company, a project space in Los Angeles's Chinatown
___________________
9. Misunderstood
I don't think most people realize that [Ono] was an important artist from a heavy, powerful family who was making her mark long before she met John Lennon.
Over the years, people have come to realize that—ongoing Yoko jokes aside—she really can't be held responsible for Lennon's actions. He was obviously seeking an escape from his identity in the Beatles, and he found it in her.
—emily haines, musician
____________________
10. Exciting
I fell in love with the Beatles when I was still a child, so I learned about Yoko before I had any conscious misogynist or feminist prejudices. I have a general visceral memory of being told that she was a strange artist who did "performance pieces" where people cut off pieces of her clothes—that this is how she and John met. I found this very sexy and exciting. Even as a preteen, I got what she meant by that piece, and it made me like John more that he loved an interesting woman. I wanted to go to parties where people did weird stuff like that. Yoko probably introduced the ideas of conceptual and performance art to small-town Midwestern girls like me.
—evelyn mcdonnell, author and editor of Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap
____________________
11. A Bridge
I first heard of Yoko when she began going out with John Lennon. That would've been the first time I heard her, too, as a backing vocalist on The White Album, on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill," where I thought her voice sounded silly, and "Revolution No. 9," where she was spooky. You didn't hear Yoko's music on the radio, and I never knew anyone who owned any of her records. In the mid-1980s, I got a copy of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, originally released in 1970. It blew my mind. Everything John Lennon had said about how innovative she was suddenly made sense. It was raw, punky stuff, with the most amazing vocals. I like to say Yoko Ono is the bridge between the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith.
—gillian g. gaar, author of She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll
____________________
12. Contested
Yoko was someone my parents [Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles] knew as younger artists, but she didn't come to Fluxus events. She and John were in their own hybridized art/pop world during the late 1960s and '70s.
There was a special sadness in the house when John died, but my sense was that [my parents] didn't feel close to her any longer. People—maybe especially Fluxus artists, who work in a relational vein—drift apart when the creative link no longer feeds a social connection. It does not follow that there is bad feeling between Fluxus artists who have drifted away from each other.
When I say Yoko is "contested," I mean that because I think Fluxus is perhaps best understood as a community of people with different ideas and practices whose connection to each other is real and sustained—a voluntary association—it matters that her social relationship to other Fluxus artists diminished substantially with time. That she is the most famous Fluxus artist seems to me deeply ironic given this social drifting. She seems to prefer to appear as a solo artist even when there are large Fluxus exhibitions.
—hannah b. higgins, academic, writer, and author of The Fluxus Experience
____________________
13. Wise
Growing up in Fargo, North Dakota, I don't think I really thought much about Yoko Ono until 1980, when Lennon was killed. I accepted the conventional wisdom that she was sort of this avant-garde nobody, and he was one of the greatest musicians and cultural figures of all time. I had no concept of how a) misguided and b) misogynist that theory was, due to my own youth and lack of consciousness.
One piece of her work has special philosophical importance to me: the "Y E S" piece. You climb up a white full-size ladder in a gallery and written on the ceiling in tiny letters is "y e s." You can't see the word from the ground—you have to climb. It's so simple and yet so powerful. As a feminist, learning to say "yes" (not just "no") has been a huge turning point for me. It indicates to me how truly creative, wise, and tapped into life and joy Yoko was and is.
—jennifer baumgardner, writer
____________________
14. Witch
She's a witch, she's a bitch, and she's done great work despite media demonization and unfair female and ethnic stereotyping.
—the guerrilla girls, art activists
____________________
15. Brilliant/Alone
Yoko has suffered more than most people understand. Her father was often absent; she was 12 when she fled to the mountains of Japan with part of her family, escaping the bombings in Tokyo but learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki; she attended college in the United States in the 1950s when the Japanese were vilified; her passionate art was ridiculed as too "expressionistic"; her daughter was kidnapped by her second husband; she was ostracized by the public as the "dragon lady" for putatively breaking up the Beatles; she struggled with Lennon on drugs; she and Lennon were threatened by the CIA with his deportation; she witnessed his murder, and so on.
The result: Yoko feels alone and sometimes trusts others to "handle" her and her art for better or worse. Nonetheless, Yoko inspires me. She is a brilliant, poetic, tough role model who is forthright with herself and brings that honesty to
her art.
—kristine stiles, professor of art and art history, Duke University
____________________
16. Freak
In December 1968, the Rolling Stones staged a concert, "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus," that was filmed for television. The Stones were the headliners, but the most famous musicians on stage performed with an impromptu supergroup called The Dirty Mac that included John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell.
Several minutes into their performance, Lennon beckons Ono onstage. She joins them, but she seems shy and apprehensive. However, when the band moves into its next number, which was later listed as "Whole Lotta Yoko," Ono delivers banshee-like wailing that made Janis Joplin's vocals sound like the blandest pop.
It's fascinating to watch the reactions of the male musicians onstage with her. Lennon behaves as though her singing is no more unusual than, say, Mick Jagger's strut, while the others try their best to maintain their composure. I don't think one could find five more uncomfortable minutes of '60s rock.
—alice echols, associate professor of English, gender studies, and history, University of Southern California, and author of Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975
____________________
17. Mother
Yoko actually had the [potential to] negate John Lennon's talent, and the preoccupation with that is fascinating. It has a lot to do with just the fear of women, the fear of the feminine. You have a group, the Beatles, that's coming out of a postwar experience, [after the] Second World War, and then you have the woman who's breaking up the structure of four. Yoko, being Japanese, would be seen as the enemy. There's a lot of anger directed to the feminine breaking up the masculine group, and that fear is not about the fear of those particular individuals…. [It] speaks to a lot of different issues, [including] wanting to have time stand still, but also the fear of being engulfed by the mother, the feminine principle.
—karen finley, performance artist
____________________
18. Elder
Yoko was not taken seriously before John's death. Afterwards, she was portrayed more sympathetically. There was prejudice against her as an Asian and a foreigner and as a woman artist, especially as an avant-garde, experimental artist. Fluxus was not respected for many years, and her reputation improved when Fluxus, as a movement, was taken more seriously. Women artists who survive to an old age sometimes have a reassessment of their artwork take place, and that has happened in her case. She is taken more seriously now in the art, performance, and music context.
—susan bee, artist and editor
____________________
19. Uniter
I saw Yoko Ono perform at the Museum of Modern Art in 2004 or 2005. This was my first direct contact with her. She gave everyone in the audience mini flashlights that said "I love you." Standing alone onstage, she began flashing a large flashlight out into the audience, spelling with light the words "I love you." She then instructed the audience to echo back, flashing "I love you." Had I heard this described and not been there, I might have assumed it was an oversimplified gesture full of sentimental goodwill. However, the performance was potent, powerful in its simplicity—a unique choreographed moment that asserted ideas of social unity and love.
—jen denike, photographer and video artist
____________________
20. Me
Yoko in hot pants, at antiwar rallies: classic proof of her bona fide iconoclast ways, mixing sex(iness) and politics—no hippie-feminist-activist Earth shoes, please!
Before I got her brilliance, I used to resent her, even though it wasn't her fault that I got called "Yoko" in the late '60s. Just when I was trying hard to pass as an all-American girl, this racial slur was outing me as an Asian before I was ready, before I became yellow and proud. It also maddened me to be mistaken for Japanese—not that racists care about these distinctions, especially when there's historical bad blood between Koreans and Japanese.
You can call me Yoko now.
—yong soon min, artist and associate professor of studio art, University of California, Irvine
Ellen Papazian is a writer whose work has appeared in About Face: Women Write About What They See in the Mirror (Seal Press) and The Long Meanwhile: Stories of Arrival and Departure (Hourglass Books). She wrote a column on books for the Bitch blog and can be found at ellenpapazian.com. To read Ellen's Q&A with Yoko Ono, pick up a copy of Art/See.
Who is Yoko Ono? She is one of the most famous figures in the world, yet also one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and, at times, vilified. Quite often, what we think about Ono says more about us than about the artist herself. Do we want to know her, or are we content with myth and stereotype?
For most of her career, Ono has been carelessly marked by the culture at large–as the harpy who broke up our beloved Beatles, the shrieking voice behind those unlistenable records. But what do our images of Ono say about our understanding of otherness? What do they say about art? Or icons? Truth? Transformation?
To coincide with the September release of Ono's new album Between My Head and the Sky, Bitch asked 20 well-known musicians, writers, visual artists, and scholars–some who have met or worked with Ono, some who know her only through their admiration or critique of her work–for their thoughts on how one woman has come to stand for so much.
Who is Yoko Ono? This is exactly who we think she is...
Art/See; published in 2009; filed under Art.
20 Ways of Looking at an Art-World Icon
Art/See
Who is Yoko Ono? She is one of the most famous figures in the world, yet also one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and, at times, vilified. Quite often, what we think about Ono says more about us than about the artist herself. Do we want to know her, or are we content with myth and stereotype?
For most of her career, Ono has been carelessly marked by the culture at large–as the harpy who broke up our beloved Beatles, the shrieking voice behind those unlistenable records. But what do our images of Ono say about our understanding of otherness? What do they say about art? Or icons? Truth? Transformation?
To coincide with the September release of Ono's new album Between My Head and the Sky, Bitch asked 20 well-known musicians, writers, visual artists, and scholars–some who have met or worked with Ono, some who know her only through their admiration or critique of her work–for their thoughts on how one woman has come to stand for so much.
Who is Yoko Ono? This is exactly who we think she is...
1. Hated
What happened to Yoko, the degree of hatred that was directed at her, the blame that fell on her for breaking up the Beatles—which struck me as an absurd accusation even as a very young girl—frightened me terribly. I very much felt she was hated because she was a woman artist. She had John's ear; if anything, he wanted to earn her respect as an artist. This came through very clearly in all his statements and in their body language.
She was the type of person I most wanted to be—yet she was hated. I found this very discouraging. I too wanted to be a conceptual artist, but I didn't want to be hated. I too wanted a partner with whom I could work, but didn't want to be seen as the evil controlling woman, as she was (and Linda McCartney, too, for that matter). Her fate seemed intimately connected to my own, and I wanted her to be accepted.
--alice elliott dark, novelist
____________________
2. Courageous
The most surprising thing about Yoko Ono is her courage to be positive. [She] turns negative power into positive power, and it's very akin to martial arts…. You take the oppositional, negative death energy, and you transform that into a life force. She doesn't attack back; she just changes the ground of the criticism.
To her, it's simply an art of coping. She had to cope with negativity. She had to cope with the murder of her husband. She had to cope with being virtually disowned by her family. She had to cope with being considered a breaker-up of the Beatles. She had to cope with being considered an unserious artist because she was working in art forms that didn't have any commercial value. And she coped, and [not] by retreating. She coped by persisting in creative vision.
--alexandra munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and author of Y E S Yoko Ono
__________________
3. Radical
I first encountered Yoko Ono when I was a teenager. I thought she looked cool. I saw pictures of her all in white with the black hair, and I thought she was really chic and intriguing.
I did a talk on Yoko in Minneapolis during her "Y E S Yoko Ono" exhibition in 2001, and I was listening to the boxed set that she put out, just going through and listening to it CD by CD. I forget what song it is, but it's John just [playing] feedback guitar with Yoko's voice, and it's one of the most radical things ever. It would be amazing if people could really hear John Lennon playing this. And her lyrics were so pro-choice; they were very ahead of her time.
When I saw "Cut Piece," she just looked so vulnerable, and it was almost like a foretelling of what would happen when she became involved with John. People obviously wanted to remove her mask.
—kim gordon, artist and musician
____________________
4. Offered Sacrifice
Back in the '60s, I was peripherally involved in a Fluxus concert evening at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York where Yoko did several pieces, [including] "Cut Piece." People began lining up to cut little pieces of her skirt or sleeves or strands of hair as souvenirs, or artworks, if you prefer. Everybody was very respectful, [and] Yoko remained impassive, without any change of expression.
The atmosphere changed to dark and unpleasant when several young men who were obviously not members of the art community started taking off large parts of her skirt and sweater, disclosing her bra, and getting back on line after each of their cuts. They couldn't stop laughing. I recall Carolee Schneemann going up to one of them and slapping him in the face, which didn't faze him one bit. He was after Yoko—the offered sacrifice.
At the point where one of the grinning guys went towards her bra strap with the scissors, Yoko made a slight gesture towards the wings, and the curtain immediately closed on her before her breast could be revealed. The piece was over. Obviously, when you let the audience into the artwork, you can't always predict the result.
—eleanor antin, performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist
____________________
5. Visionary
"Cut Piece" was astonishing. It was an extremely dangerous piece, especially in the moment when it was done, because there was no sense of feminist presence or barriers. She could have been stabbed. Vile things were in the air then, so she was challenging those very dark impulses in this vulnerable position—and that was the indelible power of it.
Yoko is a determined visionary, and now she has a huge fortune to work with, and every possible international art connection would want to be associated with her. It's a strange, anomalous personal history. She was ignored. She was marginalized. She was vilified. And she's become golden.
—carolee schneemann, multidisciplinary artist
___________________
6. Groundbreaking
As a female artist who has dated guys in bands and often been accused of being "a bad influence" on them, I have clung to the knowledge that amidst the sexism and unfairness of her mainstream portrayal, Ono has still managed to radiate joy and hope.
Ono's installation art, especially the work she's made that deals with death and mourning, has profoundly affected me. Like many people my age, I have lost many friends, some to AIDS, some to drugs, and far too many to suicide. Having no public space to confront these losses has been a source of pain in my life, and Ono's work gives voice to this pain by recognizing these losses in the context of communal life.
I do not know any other contemporary artist who has remained as relevant in so many different eras. She clearly doesn't give a shit about maintaining status in the art world, receiving awards, or being recognized. She simply wants to make smart, inclusive work that makes the world a better place. Waking up in New York every morning makes me happy, knowing she is waking up here, too.
—kathleen hanna, musician
____________________
7. Self-Aware
Yoko often mentioned in interviews that she felt that an Asian woman was seen as a dragon lady or an obedient slave—nothing in between the extremes. There were countless racist remarks in the press, especially after the breakup of the Beatles, but she has overcome it over many years. She has made a great contribution in changing the world's view of Asian women in general. She has consistently projected an image of a self-aware, confident, creative, and strong-willed woman.
—midori yoshimoto, associate professor of art history, New Jersey City University, and author of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York
____________________
8. Unshakable
I was 19 and working as an art handler at the Miami Art Museum. The first exhibition I helped install was "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s," a survey show that included Ono's "Cut Piece." I was blown away by the quiet, unshakable disposition of the artist in this vulnerable situation.
Ono's work became an emblem of everything I hoped feminism would be: unapologetic and forward thinking. Her work, along with that of theorists like Judith Butler, ignited my feminist curiosity. I began to understand the freedom that comes from the fluidity of nonidentification, and the possibility of breaking free from the societal constructs imposed on [us] from all sides.
—anat ebgi, curator and co-owner of The Company, a project space in Los Angeles's Chinatown
___________________
9. Misunderstood
I don't think most people realize that [Ono] was an important artist from a heavy, powerful family who was making her mark long before she met John Lennon.
Over the years, people have come to realize that—ongoing Yoko jokes aside—she really can't be held responsible for Lennon's actions. He was obviously seeking an escape from his identity in the Beatles, and he found it in her.
—emily haines, musician
____________________
10. Exciting
I fell in love with the Beatles when I was still a child, so I learned about Yoko before I had any conscious misogynist or feminist prejudices. I have a general visceral memory of being told that she was a strange artist who did "performance pieces" where people cut off pieces of her clothes—that this is how she and John met. I found this very sexy and exciting. Even as a preteen, I got what she meant by that piece, and it made me like John more that he loved an interesting woman. I wanted to go to parties where people did weird stuff like that. Yoko probably introduced the ideas of conceptual and performance art to small-town Midwestern girls like me.
—evelyn mcdonnell, author and editor of Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap
____________________
11. A Bridge
I first heard of Yoko when she began going out with John Lennon. That would've been the first time I heard her, too, as a backing vocalist on The White Album, on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill," where I thought her voice sounded silly, and "Revolution No. 9," where she was spooky. You didn't hear Yoko's music on the radio, and I never knew anyone who owned any of her records. In the mid-1980s, I got a copy of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, originally released in 1970. It blew my mind. Everything John Lennon had said about how innovative she was suddenly made sense. It was raw, punky stuff, with the most amazing vocals. I like to say Yoko Ono is the bridge between the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith.
—gillian g. gaar, author of She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll
____________________
12. Contested
Yoko was someone my parents [Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles] knew as younger artists, but she didn't come to Fluxus events. She and John were in their own hybridized art/pop world during the late 1960s and '70s.
There was a special sadness in the house when John died, but my sense was that [my parents] didn't feel close to her any longer. People—maybe especially Fluxus artists, who work in a relational vein—drift apart when the creative link no longer feeds a social connection. It does not follow that there is bad feeling between Fluxus artists who have drifted away from each other.
When I say Yoko is "contested," I mean that because I think Fluxus is perhaps best understood as a community of people with different ideas and practices whose connection to each other is real and sustained—a voluntary association—it matters that her social relationship to other Fluxus artists diminished substantially with time. That she is the most famous Fluxus artist seems to me deeply ironic given this social drifting. She seems to prefer to appear as a solo artist even when there are large Fluxus exhibitions.
—hannah b. higgins, academic, writer, and author of The Fluxus Experience
____________________
13. Wise
Growing up in Fargo, North Dakota, I don't think I really thought much about Yoko Ono until 1980, when Lennon was killed. I accepted the conventional wisdom that she was sort of this avant-garde nobody, and he was one of the greatest musicians and cultural figures of all time. I had no concept of how a) misguided and b) misogynist that theory was, due to my own youth and lack of consciousness.
One piece of her work has special philosophical importance to me: the "Y E S" piece. You climb up a white full-size ladder in a gallery and written on the ceiling in tiny letters is "y e s." You can't see the word from the ground—you have to climb. It's so simple and yet so powerful. As a feminist, learning to say "yes" (not just "no") has been a huge turning point for me. It indicates to me how truly creative, wise, and tapped into life and joy Yoko was and is.
—jennifer baumgardner, writer
____________________
14. Witch
She's a witch, she's a bitch, and she's done great work despite media demonization and unfair female and ethnic stereotyping.
—the guerrilla girls, art activists
____________________
15. Brilliant/Alone
Yoko has suffered more than most people understand. Her father was often absent; she was 12 when she fled to the mountains of Japan with part of her family, escaping the bombings in Tokyo but learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki; she attended college in the United States in the 1950s when the Japanese were vilified; her passionate art was ridiculed as too "expressionistic"; her daughter was kidnapped by her second husband; she was ostracized by the public as the "dragon lady" for putatively breaking up the Beatles; she struggled with Lennon on drugs; she and Lennon were threatened by the CIA with his deportation; she witnessed his murder, and so on.
The result: Yoko feels alone and sometimes trusts others to "handle" her and her art for better or worse. Nonetheless, Yoko inspires me. She is a brilliant, poetic, tough role model who is forthright with herself and brings that honesty to
her art.
—kristine stiles, professor of art and art history, Duke University
____________________
16. Freak
In December 1968, the Rolling Stones staged a concert, "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus," that was filmed for television. The Stones were the headliners, but the most famous musicians on stage performed with an impromptu supergroup called The Dirty Mac that included John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell.
Several minutes into their performance, Lennon beckons Ono onstage. She joins them, but she seems shy and apprehensive. However, when the band moves into its next number, which was later listed as "Whole Lotta Yoko," Ono delivers banshee-like wailing that made Janis Joplin's vocals sound like the blandest pop.
It's fascinating to watch the reactions of the male musicians onstage with her. Lennon behaves as though her singing is no more unusual than, say, Mick Jagger's strut, while the others try their best to maintain their composure. I don't think one could find five more uncomfortable minutes of '60s rock.
—alice echols, associate professor of English, gender studies, and history, University of Southern California, and author of Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975
____________________
17. Mother
Yoko actually had the [potential to] negate John Lennon's talent, and the preoccupation with that is fascinating. It has a lot to do with just the fear of women, the fear of the feminine. You have a group, the Beatles, that's coming out of a postwar experience, [after the] Second World War, and then you have the woman who's breaking up the structure of four. Yoko, being Japanese, would be seen as the enemy. There's a lot of anger directed to the feminine breaking up the masculine group, and that fear is not about the fear of those particular individuals…. [It] speaks to a lot of different issues, [including] wanting to have time stand still, but also the fear of being engulfed by the mother, the feminine principle.
—karen finley, performance artist
____________________
18. Elder
Yoko was not taken seriously before John's death. Afterwards, she was portrayed more sympathetically. There was prejudice against her as an Asian and a foreigner and as a woman artist, especially as an avant-garde, experimental artist. Fluxus was not respected for many years, and her reputation improved when Fluxus, as a movement, was taken more seriously. Women artists who survive to an old age sometimes have a reassessment of their artwork take place, and that has happened in her case. She is taken more seriously now in the art, performance, and music context.
—susan bee, artist and editor
____________________
19. Uniter
I saw Yoko Ono perform at the Museum of Modern Art in 2004 or 2005. This was my first direct contact with her. She gave everyone in the audience mini flashlights that said "I love you." Standing alone onstage, she began flashing a large flashlight out into the audience, spelling with light the words "I love you." She then instructed the audience to echo back, flashing "I love you." Had I heard this described and not been there, I might have assumed it was an oversimplified gesture full of sentimental goodwill. However, the performance was potent, powerful in its simplicity—a unique choreographed moment that asserted ideas of social unity and love.
—jen denike, photographer and video artist
____________________
20. Me
Yoko in hot pants, at antiwar rallies: classic proof of her bona fide iconoclast ways, mixing sex(iness) and politics—no hippie-feminist-activist Earth shoes, please!
Before I got her brilliance, I used to resent her, even though it wasn't her fault that I got called "Yoko" in the late '60s. Just when I was trying hard to pass as an all-American girl, this racial slur was outing me as an Asian before I was ready, before I became yellow and proud. It also maddened me to be mistaken for Japanese—not that racists care about these distinctions, especially when there's historical bad blood between Koreans and Japanese.
You can call me Yoko now.
—yong soon min, artist and associate professor of studio art, University of California, Irvine
Ellen Papazian is a writer whose work has appeared in About Face: Women Write About What They See in the Mirror (Seal Press) and The Long Meanwhile: Stories of Arrival and Departure (Hourglass Books). She wrote a column on books for the Bitch blog and can be found at ellenpapazian.com. To read Ellen's Q&A with Yoko Ono, pick up a copy of Art/See.
Who is Yoko Ono? She is one of the most famous figures in the world, yet also one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and, at times, vilified. Quite often, what we think about Ono says more about us than about the artist herself. Do we want to know her, or are we content with myth and stereotype?
For most of her career, Ono has been carelessly marked by the culture at large–as the harpy who broke up our beloved Beatles, the shrieking voice behind those unlistenable records. But what do our images of Ono say about our understanding of otherness? What do they say about art? Or icons? Truth? Transformation?
To coincide with the September release of Ono's new album Between My Head and the Sky, Bitch asked 20 well-known musicians, writers, visual artists, and scholars–some who have met or worked with Ono, some who know her only through their admiration or critique of her work–for their thoughts on how one woman has come to stand for so much.
Who is Yoko Ono? This is exactly who we think she is...
Bed-In, 1969
Duration: 7 days
Knowing that their wedding would cause a huge stir in the press, John Lennon and Yoko Ono decided to use their honeymoon to help champion world peace. On March 25, 1969, five days after their wedding, the duo climbed into the bed of room 902 at the Amsterdam Hilton and called the media. The idea is derived from a “sit-in”, in which a group of protesters remains seated in front of an establishment until they are evicted, arrested, or their demands are met.
'I didn't break up the Beatles. My small hand could not have broken these men up': The world according to Yoko Ono
By LOUISE GANNON
UPDATED: 18:08 GMT, 30 December 2010
Already an acclaimed avant-garde artist and musician, Yoko Ono became infamous worldwide when she began a relationship with John Lennon.
‘I had no idea when I met this man in my gallery how everything would change,’ she says. ‘Nothing was ever the same again.’
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono is used to hardship. Her family lost everything in World War II, and her father was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp.
She married twice and spent a brief period in a mental institution before meeting Lennon in 1966. The couple lived at the Dakota building in New York with their son, Sean, until Lennon was shot by a deranged fan in 1980.
‘I think we were lucky in that we did have a lot of time together as a couple,’ she says. ‘I feel very sorry for young celebrities today who don’t seem to get that time.’
I didn’t break up the Beatles.
The Beatles were a group made up of four very complex men, and my small hand could not have broken these men up. They broke up because they had reached an end, but in doing so they all also created new wonderful beginnings.
For many years I was hated by the whole world.
When I met John, I was blamed for breaking up the Beatles, I was blamed for ruining John and I was painted as a dragon. I had to deal with that. John had to deal with that. I could have turned and ran, but that was never an option. People didn’t speak to me or they were just rude to my face. It did hurt and it was tough, but I always kept my focus on the bigger picture. Every day I told myself I was a lucky person because I’d met the man I loved, I wasn’t starving, I wasn’t ill, there was no bomb in my house. I just had to get through it, and it was a great learning curve, because I had to find my own strength inside of me, inside of the two of us.
'They (the Beatles) broke up because they had reached an end, but in doing so they all also created new wonderful beginnings'
I went from great wealth to begging for food.
I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor and we were very wealthy. Then one day when I was 12, Tokyo was bombed and everything went. We had to beg for food. I was a child. I didn’t see it as a loss; I just saw it as my new reality. It made me very aware of how things can change, how the wheel of fortune can turn so quickly, without any warning. It also gave me an insight into what people, what families, go through in wars, which is why I’ve spent my life trying to inspire peace.
Paul McCartney saved my marriage.
John and I separated for a year in 1973 (he began an affair with his PA, May Pang), but Paul brought us back together. He spoke to me, he spoke to John, he got John to come back and understand the door was open. It was a very big thing Paul did for us. Paul has a very sweet side and he and I have made our peace. We are both business partners in Apple, and we speak and things are good between us. We know each other very well, and while we’ve had differences in the past, there was never a rift as people think. It was never so black and white.
If John were around today he’d love Facebook. He would love the way the world has changed. He’d love the internet and Twitter. He’d be sending out pronouncements and messages and giving his opinion all the time on everything. He would be 70 years old, but he’d want to know everything that’s going on. We share that curiosity and that energy. At 77, I can’t stop. I draw my energy from people around me; I fly round the world with my art and to keep John’s legacy alive.
My ex-husband kidnapped my daughter, Kyoko.
It was after I married John, in 1971, and I didn’t know where she was and all the private detectives in the world couldn’t find her (the two weren’t reunited until 1994). I was in torment. If a girl her age came on the television John would switch the channel, because he knew what I was going through. When Sean was born, John stayed home and looked after him. I had in my head this fear that he too would be taken away. After John was shot it was because of Sean that I got through that grief, that agony. I wanted to create a life for myself and Sean, and I wanted Sean to know that everything would be OK.
I have no regrets in my life.On December 8 it was the 30th anniversary of John’s death, and I was in Japan at the Dream Power concert to raise money for a foundation to build schools in Asia and Africa. It would have been better if he hadn’t died, but you can’t sit and cry. These are things life throws at you and you have to learn to overcome them, you have to try to make good from bad. After he died, Sean and I would just sit together on December 8 and think of him and be sad. Ten years ago we set up the foundation, and we celebrate his death and we’ve raised money to build 85 schools – that’s a lot of little children who are being directly helped by John.
The world was shocked when I put a picture of John’s bloody broken glasses on the cover of the album Season Of Glass.
To me it was the natural thing to do. John had been shot, these were the glasses he was wearing when he was shot, this was the reality. John was a musician, he was my husband, he was a Beatle, but under all that he was an artist. I am an artist. As artists, neither of us wanted reality swept under the rug. This is what John would have wanted done. Anyone who loves John needs to hear the remastered albums (out now on EMI Records). Often in his music you can’t hear his voice so well because of effects and the sound recording, but these albums are beautiful; you hear his voice pure and clear. It’s as if he’s speaking directly to you – it’s incredibly moving.
My favourite photo is still the picture of John and me as the Two Virgins.I look at it now and it makes me laugh. We were coming from such a place of innocence and spontaneity. There was no retouching, no waxing – it was just us as we were and we weren’t ashamed. I was worried about how Sean would feel about it as he got older, but Sean loves this photo too.
Life has become more beautiful as I’ve grown older.
I appreciate everything as I live each day thinking it could be my last, and so I enjoy the blue skies, the grey skies, the sun and the rain. I’m still passionate about making a difference, big and small. The world has finally stopped hating me – I hope – but I am what I am because of everything that has happened to me.
Lady Gaga has a very pretty bottom.She performed with me on stage wearing a see-through lace catsuit and people thought it was an insult because you could see her bottom. I’m the lady who did an exhibition of bottoms. How could hers offend me? She has a very lovely bottom. I think she’s wonderful. John would have loved her, because she’s an artist, she’s fearless and she pushes every limit, which we both always adored. She has played on John’s white piano and I think that’s wonderful. Life moves on and you embrace it.
Robbie Williams and his wife call themselves the new John and Yoko.Apparently they stay in bed all the time, and I believe Robbie’s father gave them the nickname, so I sent them a signed photo of myself and John in bed together. I like to connect, to reach out to people.
I am never afraid.
A lot of things have been thrown at me in life and I’ve got through it all without a rule book, taking it one day at a time. You can’t plan in life; you just have to try to do the best with what life gives you. John taught me to laugh a lot at life, and I do.
By LOUISE GANNON
UPDATED: 18:08 GMT, 30 December 2010
Already an acclaimed avant-garde artist and musician, Yoko Ono became infamous worldwide when she began a relationship with John Lennon.
‘I had no idea when I met this man in my gallery how everything would change,’ she says. ‘Nothing was ever the same again.’
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono is used to hardship. Her family lost everything in World War II, and her father was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp.
She married twice and spent a brief period in a mental institution before meeting Lennon in 1966. The couple lived at the Dakota building in New York with their son, Sean, until Lennon was shot by a deranged fan in 1980.
‘I think we were lucky in that we did have a lot of time together as a couple,’ she says. ‘I feel very sorry for young celebrities today who don’t seem to get that time.’
I didn’t break up the Beatles.
The Beatles were a group made up of four very complex men, and my small hand could not have broken these men up. They broke up because they had reached an end, but in doing so they all also created new wonderful beginnings.
For many years I was hated by the whole world.
When I met John, I was blamed for breaking up the Beatles, I was blamed for ruining John and I was painted as a dragon. I had to deal with that. John had to deal with that. I could have turned and ran, but that was never an option. People didn’t speak to me or they were just rude to my face. It did hurt and it was tough, but I always kept my focus on the bigger picture. Every day I told myself I was a lucky person because I’d met the man I loved, I wasn’t starving, I wasn’t ill, there was no bomb in my house. I just had to get through it, and it was a great learning curve, because I had to find my own strength inside of me, inside of the two of us.
'They (the Beatles) broke up because they had reached an end, but in doing so they all also created new wonderful beginnings'
I went from great wealth to begging for food.
I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor and we were very wealthy. Then one day when I was 12, Tokyo was bombed and everything went. We had to beg for food. I was a child. I didn’t see it as a loss; I just saw it as my new reality. It made me very aware of how things can change, how the wheel of fortune can turn so quickly, without any warning. It also gave me an insight into what people, what families, go through in wars, which is why I’ve spent my life trying to inspire peace.
Paul McCartney saved my marriage.
John and I separated for a year in 1973 (he began an affair with his PA, May Pang), but Paul brought us back together. He spoke to me, he spoke to John, he got John to come back and understand the door was open. It was a very big thing Paul did for us. Paul has a very sweet side and he and I have made our peace. We are both business partners in Apple, and we speak and things are good between us. We know each other very well, and while we’ve had differences in the past, there was never a rift as people think. It was never so black and white.
If John were around today he’d love Facebook. He would love the way the world has changed. He’d love the internet and Twitter. He’d be sending out pronouncements and messages and giving his opinion all the time on everything. He would be 70 years old, but he’d want to know everything that’s going on. We share that curiosity and that energy. At 77, I can’t stop. I draw my energy from people around me; I fly round the world with my art and to keep John’s legacy alive.
My ex-husband kidnapped my daughter, Kyoko.
It was after I married John, in 1971, and I didn’t know where she was and all the private detectives in the world couldn’t find her (the two weren’t reunited until 1994). I was in torment. If a girl her age came on the television John would switch the channel, because he knew what I was going through. When Sean was born, John stayed home and looked after him. I had in my head this fear that he too would be taken away. After John was shot it was because of Sean that I got through that grief, that agony. I wanted to create a life for myself and Sean, and I wanted Sean to know that everything would be OK.
I have no regrets in my life.On December 8 it was the 30th anniversary of John’s death, and I was in Japan at the Dream Power concert to raise money for a foundation to build schools in Asia and Africa. It would have been better if he hadn’t died, but you can’t sit and cry. These are things life throws at you and you have to learn to overcome them, you have to try to make good from bad. After he died, Sean and I would just sit together on December 8 and think of him and be sad. Ten years ago we set up the foundation, and we celebrate his death and we’ve raised money to build 85 schools – that’s a lot of little children who are being directly helped by John.
The world was shocked when I put a picture of John’s bloody broken glasses on the cover of the album Season Of Glass.
To me it was the natural thing to do. John had been shot, these were the glasses he was wearing when he was shot, this was the reality. John was a musician, he was my husband, he was a Beatle, but under all that he was an artist. I am an artist. As artists, neither of us wanted reality swept under the rug. This is what John would have wanted done. Anyone who loves John needs to hear the remastered albums (out now on EMI Records). Often in his music you can’t hear his voice so well because of effects and the sound recording, but these albums are beautiful; you hear his voice pure and clear. It’s as if he’s speaking directly to you – it’s incredibly moving.
My favourite photo is still the picture of John and me as the Two Virgins.I look at it now and it makes me laugh. We were coming from such a place of innocence and spontaneity. There was no retouching, no waxing – it was just us as we were and we weren’t ashamed. I was worried about how Sean would feel about it as he got older, but Sean loves this photo too.
Life has become more beautiful as I’ve grown older.
I appreciate everything as I live each day thinking it could be my last, and so I enjoy the blue skies, the grey skies, the sun and the rain. I’m still passionate about making a difference, big and small. The world has finally stopped hating me – I hope – but I am what I am because of everything that has happened to me.
Lady Gaga has a very pretty bottom.She performed with me on stage wearing a see-through lace catsuit and people thought it was an insult because you could see her bottom. I’m the lady who did an exhibition of bottoms. How could hers offend me? She has a very lovely bottom. I think she’s wonderful. John would have loved her, because she’s an artist, she’s fearless and she pushes every limit, which we both always adored. She has played on John’s white piano and I think that’s wonderful. Life moves on and you embrace it.
Robbie Williams and his wife call themselves the new John and Yoko.Apparently they stay in bed all the time, and I believe Robbie’s father gave them the nickname, so I sent them a signed photo of myself and John in bed together. I like to connect, to reach out to people.
I am never afraid.
A lot of things have been thrown at me in life and I’ve got through it all without a rule book, taking it one day at a time. You can’t plan in life; you just have to try to do the best with what life gives you. John taught me to laugh a lot at life, and I do.
6 Mason’s Yard, in the center of London, the former site of the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met on November 9, 1966.
When John Lennon visited the Indica Gallery in Central London on November 9, 1966, in order to attend a private preview of an exhibition Unfinished Paintings and Objects, it wasn't purely due to artistic interest.
More to the point, he had been enticed by the gallery's co-owner, John Dunbar (ex-husband of singer Marianne Faithfull), who had told him about a "happening" that would be taking place there, featuring a Japanese woman from New York in a black bag. As John revealed to Playboy interviewer David Sheff, this sounded to him like something to do with sex: "Artsy-fartsy orgies. Great!"
What John saw on his arrival hardly turned him on, however. The Japanese-American woman was certainly there, but instead of being inside a bag she was just walking around, arranging some of the objects that would form part of her display the following day. It was to be an avant-garde exhibition, dealing with progressive, decidedly offbeat art. John soon found himself gazing in astonishment at some of the items: A fresh apple on a stand, priced at £200 (at that time, $480), and a bag of nails, a bargain at just £100 ($240)!
"I thought this is a con; what the hell is this," he later recalled to BBC interviewer Andy Peebles. "Nothing's happening in the bags. I'm expecting an orgy, you know ... and it's all quiet."
After being introduced to "the millionaire Beatle," the woman handed him a little card that said simply, "Breathe." John, although puzzled, responded politely with a quick pant. Next, his eyes settled on a ladder leading up to a canvas suspended from the ceiling, with a spyglass hanging from it on the end of a chain. Climbing to the top of the ladder, he looked through the spyglass to read a word printed in tiny letters.
"You're on this ladder -- you feel like a fool, you could fall any minute -- and you look through it and it just says 'YES,' " he told David Sheff in 1980. "Well, all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that 'YES' made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails, instead of just walking out saying, 'I'm not gonna buy any of this crap.'"
The humor in the work, while downright strange to many people, was of a kind that appealed to John's sense of the absurd, and his interest was now taken. Nearby was an object called "Hammer and Nail," consisting of a board with a chain and a hammer hanging on the end, and a bunch of nails positioned underneath. Could he hammer one of the nails in? "No," was the initial reply. Tut, tut! The gallery owner pointed out to the artist that this was no way to treat a Beatle. Besides, with all his money, John might buy the piece!
John told Sheff in 1980, "So there was this little conference and she finally said, 'Okay, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings [60 cents].' So smart-ass here says, 'Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.' And that's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes, and she got it and I got it, and that was it."
The woman was, of course, Yoko Ono. Seven years older than John and then in the middle of her second marriage, she had turned her back on her middle-class background, and created quite a name for herself with the New York avant-garde set. Now she was attempting to cause a similar stir in London. She would set about her task by, among other things, covering one of the lion statues in Trafalgar Square in huge white sheets, and filming a feature-length movie focusing solely on 365 naked bottoms.
More to the point, he had been enticed by the gallery's co-owner, John Dunbar (ex-husband of singer Marianne Faithfull), who had told him about a "happening" that would be taking place there, featuring a Japanese woman from New York in a black bag. As John revealed to Playboy interviewer David Sheff, this sounded to him like something to do with sex: "Artsy-fartsy orgies. Great!"
What John saw on his arrival hardly turned him on, however. The Japanese-American woman was certainly there, but instead of being inside a bag she was just walking around, arranging some of the objects that would form part of her display the following day. It was to be an avant-garde exhibition, dealing with progressive, decidedly offbeat art. John soon found himself gazing in astonishment at some of the items: A fresh apple on a stand, priced at £200 (at that time, $480), and a bag of nails, a bargain at just £100 ($240)!
"I thought this is a con; what the hell is this," he later recalled to BBC interviewer Andy Peebles. "Nothing's happening in the bags. I'm expecting an orgy, you know ... and it's all quiet."
After being introduced to "the millionaire Beatle," the woman handed him a little card that said simply, "Breathe." John, although puzzled, responded politely with a quick pant. Next, his eyes settled on a ladder leading up to a canvas suspended from the ceiling, with a spyglass hanging from it on the end of a chain. Climbing to the top of the ladder, he looked through the spyglass to read a word printed in tiny letters.
"You're on this ladder -- you feel like a fool, you could fall any minute -- and you look through it and it just says 'YES,' " he told David Sheff in 1980. "Well, all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that 'YES' made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails, instead of just walking out saying, 'I'm not gonna buy any of this crap.'"
The humor in the work, while downright strange to many people, was of a kind that appealed to John's sense of the absurd, and his interest was now taken. Nearby was an object called "Hammer and Nail," consisting of a board with a chain and a hammer hanging on the end, and a bunch of nails positioned underneath. Could he hammer one of the nails in? "No," was the initial reply. Tut, tut! The gallery owner pointed out to the artist that this was no way to treat a Beatle. Besides, with all his money, John might buy the piece!
John told Sheff in 1980, "So there was this little conference and she finally said, 'Okay, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings [60 cents].' So smart-ass here says, 'Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.' And that's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes, and she got it and I got it, and that was it."
The woman was, of course, Yoko Ono. Seven years older than John and then in the middle of her second marriage, she had turned her back on her middle-class background, and created quite a name for herself with the New York avant-garde set. Now she was attempting to cause a similar stir in London. She would set about her task by, among other things, covering one of the lion statues in Trafalgar Square in huge white sheets, and filming a feature-length movie focusing solely on 365 naked bottoms.
CUTTING EDGES: LANDMARKS IN YOKO ONO’S WORK
CUT PIECE
‘My work has an inbuilt thing about participation,’ says Ono. ‘I get so much power from that kind of project.’ Cut Piece, which debuted in 1965, invited audience members to cut away Ono’s clothing, and remains her most famous piece. It was recently re-enacted by Canadian musician Peaches for Meltdown.
In Cut Piece, Yoko Ono asked audience members to snip her clothes away (Picture: supplied)PLASTIC ONO BAND
The shifting line-up of Ono and Lennon’s fruitful ‘supergroup’ included guitarist Eric Clapton, drummer Keith Moon and Phil Spector. The modern incarnation is directed by their son Sean and performs to rave reviews, including the 2009 album Between My Head And The Sky, and Ono’s current Meltdown festival.
STARPEACE
The synth-poppy statements of Ono’s 1985 album were largely slated, although it did yield a club hit, Hell In Paradise. It’s now an intriguing Reagan-era memento (it’s Ono’s protest against the US government’s ‘Star Wars’ missile programme), featuring co-production by jazz/punk/hip hop pioneer Bill Laswell.
IMAGINE PEACE TOWER
Ono’s 2007 memorial to Lennon is a dazzling light sculpture based near Reykjavik and inscribed with messages and references to his anthem Imagine. It is illuminated from Lennon’s birthday (October 9) to the anniversary of his death (December 8).
ACORN
This new book (‘You could call it poetry in action’) is a sequel to Ono’s 1964 conceptual work Grapefruit. The dreamy ‘instructions’ will also be familiar to her millions of Twitter followers. Take City Piece V: ‘Imagine painting all the buildings in the city the colour of light’.
‘My work has an inbuilt thing about participation,’ says Ono. ‘I get so much power from that kind of project.’ Cut Piece, which debuted in 1965, invited audience members to cut away Ono’s clothing, and remains her most famous piece. It was recently re-enacted by Canadian musician Peaches for Meltdown.
In Cut Piece, Yoko Ono asked audience members to snip her clothes away (Picture: supplied)PLASTIC ONO BAND
The shifting line-up of Ono and Lennon’s fruitful ‘supergroup’ included guitarist Eric Clapton, drummer Keith Moon and Phil Spector. The modern incarnation is directed by their son Sean and performs to rave reviews, including the 2009 album Between My Head And The Sky, and Ono’s current Meltdown festival.
STARPEACE
The synth-poppy statements of Ono’s 1985 album were largely slated, although it did yield a club hit, Hell In Paradise. It’s now an intriguing Reagan-era memento (it’s Ono’s protest against the US government’s ‘Star Wars’ missile programme), featuring co-production by jazz/punk/hip hop pioneer Bill Laswell.
IMAGINE PEACE TOWER
Ono’s 2007 memorial to Lennon is a dazzling light sculpture based near Reykjavik and inscribed with messages and references to his anthem Imagine. It is illuminated from Lennon’s birthday (October 9) to the anniversary of his death (December 8).
ACORN
This new book (‘You could call it poetry in action’) is a sequel to Ono’s 1964 conceptual work Grapefruit. The dreamy ‘instructions’ will also be familiar to her millions of Twitter followers. Take City Piece V: ‘Imagine painting all the buildings in the city the colour of light’.
Yoko Ono Talks About Other Beatles’ Resentment Of Becoming ‘Paul’s Band’
By Chris Willman | Stop The Presses! – Fri, Dec 28, 2012 3:40 PM EST
Was the Beatles’ breakup partly due to the fact that the semi-democratic band was on the verge of turning into “Paul McCartney and the Beatles”?
“John, in fact, was not the first one who wanted to leave the Beatles,” says Yoko Ono in a newly released interview. “Ringo one night with Maureen (Starkey, his first wife) came to John and me and said, well, he wanted to leave. And George was the next, and then John. Paul was the only one who was trying to hold the Beatles together. But then again, the other three felt that Paul was going to hold the Beatles together as his band. They were getting to be like Paul's band, which they didn't like.”
McCartney and Ono (Lester Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images)If John Lennon’s widow sounds a little less conciliatory and political about this than she has lately, that’s because this is the still slightly bristling Yoko Ono of 1987, who has come to us in a time machine to offer some thoughts less filtered by the passage of time. Her lengthy take on the breakup is a big chunk of a previously unpublished conversation with record industry mogul Joe Smith, which has just been made available as an audio file by the Library of Congress.
At one point in the chat, Smith says that he and a lot of people in the music industry had been rooting in the 1970s against the Beatles getting back together, lest they come back with substandard material and tarnish their brilliant ‘60s legacy.
Ono agrees and, after flatly declaring “I did not break up the Beatles,” adds: “You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group.”
She also maintains that the resentment Ringo Starr and especially George Harrison may have felt about being second-class citizens in the supposed democracy may have fed into the breakup.
“In the early days Paul and John wrote the songs. Rather, John and Paul,” she said, correcting the order with a chuckle. “George didn’t write much, and Ringo especially didn’t write at all. When Georgestarted to write a lot of songs in the end, it was like, who’s gonna get the space? John was really trying to protect George and not ignore him and put (in) as many songs of George’s as possible. But frankly there wasn’t much space for that on one album, and they can’t keep on making double albums. So in a way all three of them were outgrowing the Beatles. I think Ringo was getting interested in film, and George was more interested in playing with Ravi Shankar.
“That was very, very logical, because in the group George is still George and Ringo is Ringo, but when they go outside, George is the Beatle and Ringo is the Beatle and they’re treated differently,” Onocontinued. “And in fact George did mention that ‘I feel more comfortable playing with those (other) guys because they understand me and this and that, and here I’m treated like the backing group for Paul.’ And that was the complaint that was expressed may times.
“So in the beginning,” Ono went on, “when all four of them were more insecure, there was compromising and just uniting to make it. Then when they made it, of course, they blossomed and each one of them became the king. So it was very difficult to unite and do something together.”
Yoko, John, and PaulOno sounds like she considers herself Lennon’s second wife—with the Beatles, not Cynthia Lennon, as the spouse she replaced.
“For John it was like a divorce,” Ono is heard telling Smith. “I think he was feeling very good about it, as if a big weight was off him. At the same time, he was very proud of the group. He had an extremely high opinion about each one, which might be surprising. He used to say, ‘Well, they're very intelligent kids, you know. The fact that they come from Liverpool, you'd think they wouldn't understand these things; they do.’ That sort of attitude. He was always very protective of them in that sense. I don't really think he had voiced anything that he really missed about the Beatles, maybe because I was the other party that he got the divorce for. At the same time, that's a very bad thing I said, that he ‘got a divorce’ for marrying me. I fell into the trap right away about the whole ‘Does that mean you broke up the Beatles?’ Um—I didn't break up the Beatles. Each one of them were getting very independent.”
John and YokoReplacing the other three lads in Lennon’s heart and mind was a trickier task than she’d imagined.
“There was an incredible period of unpleasantness for John, so you would think that he would like it that he was out of there,” Ono told Smith. “In a funny sort of way, I felt the weight of the breakup. Because he was communicating and having an extremely intense, stimulating exchange with three very intelligent, very quick guys. And now he expected all that to be replaced by me. And so our communication was very heavy. And it went very well, but at the same time… Initially when we got together, he would go to the studio and he would be playing with the other three, and I had a little time off, in a way. But that was gone.
“It was a very heavy load, yes,” she continued. “It also was a challenge. And also, I did understand the situation. It was like the Duke of Windsor announcing to the world that ‘I am with this woman.’ Of course who is not going to feel honored and make sure that I respond to his expectations?”
Smith wondered if there had ever been a moment in the 1970s when Lennon considered a reunion.
“Maybe Paul might have felt that he wanted to get together. But on the side of John, I think he was very adamant that he did not want to repeat the past. And at one point when we were separated, in 1974—between 1973 and 75, like 18 months or something like that—I think it was a marvelous time to see if John wants to go back to the Beatles. But he had no desire for that… I think he was thinking of doing something with Harry Nilsson. But it seems like (a Beatles reunion) never crossed his mind at that point.”
Former Capitol/EMI president (and interviewer) Joe SmithSmith, the former president of Capitol/EMI, conducted interviews with hundreds of top artists for his 1988 book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. This year, he donated unedited versions of those quarter-century-old recordings to the Library of Congress. At their website, you can listen to his conversations with musicians includingMcCartney, Harrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Little Richard, Elton John,Ray Charles, Woody Herman, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Sting, David Bowie, and about 200 others.
McCartney might not appreciate Ono’s pointedness about the songwriting order in her interview with Smith. (He once unsuccessfully lobbied her to have the credits on some of his solo compositions changed from “Lennon/McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon.”) He probably wouldn’t agree with her saying that in the early days “John probably felt that he needed the commercial side ofPaul, and Paul probably felt that he needed the artistic side of John.” And he almost certainly wouldn’t agree with the charge that the Beatles were in danger of becoming “his” band.
But he would probably concur with a lot of the other things Ono told Smith in the mid-‘80s. In a recent interview with David Frost, McCartney maintained that “she certainly didn't break the group up—the group was breaking up,” and agreed that the Beatles left “a neat body of work" and their finite status "wasn't that bad a thing."
As for the contention that McCartney was ultimately the ringleader in the group’s last days, that’s not terribly in contention. The recent deluxe edition of Magical Mystery Tour on DVD and Blu-Ray makes it clear that McCartney was most headstrong about helping the suddenly rudderless group find a sense of direction after the death of manager Brian Epstein, even if “Paul McCartney & Wings” was never in danger of being directly preceded by a group that had turned into “Paul McCartney & Fabs.”
By Chris Willman | Stop The Presses! – Fri, Dec 28, 2012 3:40 PM EST
Was the Beatles’ breakup partly due to the fact that the semi-democratic band was on the verge of turning into “Paul McCartney and the Beatles”?
“John, in fact, was not the first one who wanted to leave the Beatles,” says Yoko Ono in a newly released interview. “Ringo one night with Maureen (Starkey, his first wife) came to John and me and said, well, he wanted to leave. And George was the next, and then John. Paul was the only one who was trying to hold the Beatles together. But then again, the other three felt that Paul was going to hold the Beatles together as his band. They were getting to be like Paul's band, which they didn't like.”
McCartney and Ono (Lester Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images)If John Lennon’s widow sounds a little less conciliatory and political about this than she has lately, that’s because this is the still slightly bristling Yoko Ono of 1987, who has come to us in a time machine to offer some thoughts less filtered by the passage of time. Her lengthy take on the breakup is a big chunk of a previously unpublished conversation with record industry mogul Joe Smith, which has just been made available as an audio file by the Library of Congress.
At one point in the chat, Smith says that he and a lot of people in the music industry had been rooting in the 1970s against the Beatles getting back together, lest they come back with substandard material and tarnish their brilliant ‘60s legacy.
Ono agrees and, after flatly declaring “I did not break up the Beatles,” adds: “You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group.”
She also maintains that the resentment Ringo Starr and especially George Harrison may have felt about being second-class citizens in the supposed democracy may have fed into the breakup.
“In the early days Paul and John wrote the songs. Rather, John and Paul,” she said, correcting the order with a chuckle. “George didn’t write much, and Ringo especially didn’t write at all. When Georgestarted to write a lot of songs in the end, it was like, who’s gonna get the space? John was really trying to protect George and not ignore him and put (in) as many songs of George’s as possible. But frankly there wasn’t much space for that on one album, and they can’t keep on making double albums. So in a way all three of them were outgrowing the Beatles. I think Ringo was getting interested in film, and George was more interested in playing with Ravi Shankar.
“That was very, very logical, because in the group George is still George and Ringo is Ringo, but when they go outside, George is the Beatle and Ringo is the Beatle and they’re treated differently,” Onocontinued. “And in fact George did mention that ‘I feel more comfortable playing with those (other) guys because they understand me and this and that, and here I’m treated like the backing group for Paul.’ And that was the complaint that was expressed may times.
“So in the beginning,” Ono went on, “when all four of them were more insecure, there was compromising and just uniting to make it. Then when they made it, of course, they blossomed and each one of them became the king. So it was very difficult to unite and do something together.”
Yoko, John, and PaulOno sounds like she considers herself Lennon’s second wife—with the Beatles, not Cynthia Lennon, as the spouse she replaced.
“For John it was like a divorce,” Ono is heard telling Smith. “I think he was feeling very good about it, as if a big weight was off him. At the same time, he was very proud of the group. He had an extremely high opinion about each one, which might be surprising. He used to say, ‘Well, they're very intelligent kids, you know. The fact that they come from Liverpool, you'd think they wouldn't understand these things; they do.’ That sort of attitude. He was always very protective of them in that sense. I don't really think he had voiced anything that he really missed about the Beatles, maybe because I was the other party that he got the divorce for. At the same time, that's a very bad thing I said, that he ‘got a divorce’ for marrying me. I fell into the trap right away about the whole ‘Does that mean you broke up the Beatles?’ Um—I didn't break up the Beatles. Each one of them were getting very independent.”
John and YokoReplacing the other three lads in Lennon’s heart and mind was a trickier task than she’d imagined.
“There was an incredible period of unpleasantness for John, so you would think that he would like it that he was out of there,” Ono told Smith. “In a funny sort of way, I felt the weight of the breakup. Because he was communicating and having an extremely intense, stimulating exchange with three very intelligent, very quick guys. And now he expected all that to be replaced by me. And so our communication was very heavy. And it went very well, but at the same time… Initially when we got together, he would go to the studio and he would be playing with the other three, and I had a little time off, in a way. But that was gone.
“It was a very heavy load, yes,” she continued. “It also was a challenge. And also, I did understand the situation. It was like the Duke of Windsor announcing to the world that ‘I am with this woman.’ Of course who is not going to feel honored and make sure that I respond to his expectations?”
Smith wondered if there had ever been a moment in the 1970s when Lennon considered a reunion.
“Maybe Paul might have felt that he wanted to get together. But on the side of John, I think he was very adamant that he did not want to repeat the past. And at one point when we were separated, in 1974—between 1973 and 75, like 18 months or something like that—I think it was a marvelous time to see if John wants to go back to the Beatles. But he had no desire for that… I think he was thinking of doing something with Harry Nilsson. But it seems like (a Beatles reunion) never crossed his mind at that point.”
Former Capitol/EMI president (and interviewer) Joe SmithSmith, the former president of Capitol/EMI, conducted interviews with hundreds of top artists for his 1988 book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. This year, he donated unedited versions of those quarter-century-old recordings to the Library of Congress. At their website, you can listen to his conversations with musicians includingMcCartney, Harrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Little Richard, Elton John,Ray Charles, Woody Herman, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Sting, David Bowie, and about 200 others.
McCartney might not appreciate Ono’s pointedness about the songwriting order in her interview with Smith. (He once unsuccessfully lobbied her to have the credits on some of his solo compositions changed from “Lennon/McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon.”) He probably wouldn’t agree with her saying that in the early days “John probably felt that he needed the commercial side ofPaul, and Paul probably felt that he needed the artistic side of John.” And he almost certainly wouldn’t agree with the charge that the Beatles were in danger of becoming “his” band.
But he would probably concur with a lot of the other things Ono told Smith in the mid-‘80s. In a recent interview with David Frost, McCartney maintained that “she certainly didn't break the group up—the group was breaking up,” and agreed that the Beatles left “a neat body of work" and their finite status "wasn't that bad a thing."
As for the contention that McCartney was ultimately the ringleader in the group’s last days, that’s not terribly in contention. The recent deluxe edition of Magical Mystery Tour on DVD and Blu-Ray makes it clear that McCartney was most headstrong about helping the suddenly rudderless group find a sense of direction after the death of manager Brian Epstein, even if “Paul McCartney & Wings” was never in danger of being directly preceded by a group that had turned into “Paul McCartney & Fabs.”