The legend of Yoko Ono

Nearly fifty years after Yoko Ono faked her own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Japanese cultural icon is now having a real one at the same venue. Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 opened at MoMA last month to wide critical and public hype, as well as spite, both of which have been constant fixtures of Ono’s career since the days before she became famous as Mrs John Lennon.

Alluding to the title from her projected 1971 exhibition, which was widely advertised though never executed,the current exhibition includes a diverse range of her eclectic and eccentric output. From the notorious Painting to be Stepped On (1960-61) to excerpts from her pamphlet, Grapefruit (1964), there is enough stimulation to keep visitors amused and entertained. A reporter described the effect of Ono’s work as that of ‘mental smelling salt’; to my mind, a cup of freshly-brewed strong espresso, enough to set your brain cells racing, would be more like it.

For in spite of its Zen-like outward calm, Ono’s art provides a heady adrenaline rush. You marvel at the simplicity of it all, you may be struck with a sense of disbelief, or perhaps a rising wave of exasperation, as the case may be. How could something as banal as an apple, which greets the viewer to the MoMA show, be considered art? Of course, the Dadaists and their successors have tried our patience with much worse. Think of Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous urinal or Damien Hirst’s oversized shark in formaldehyde solution. But an apple? Really?

As it happens, in the case of the latter, the appeal is far more direct and maybe even sublime: “There is the excitement of watching the apple decay, and the decision as to whether to replace it, or just [keep] thinking of the beauty of the apple after it’s gone,” as Ono herself explained in 1966. That’s deep. And maybe unexpectedly subversive, too. (The Old Masters, who revelled in painting still life, probably had something similar in mind. It’s not a coincidence perhaps that the French equivalent of still life is nature morte — literally meaning ‘dead nature’, invoking every bit of the morbidity Ono’s crisp little spiel conjures up).

At 82, Ono is truly a one-woman show, in spite of the inevitable association with Lennon and The Beatles. It’s true, stardom did hit her after she met Lennon, and the two fell in love and did some vaguely sleazy acts for the benefit of the public, but much before her publicly exhibited love- life became the talk of the town, Ono was already creating crazy stuff in her own quiet way. As a child, she studied the piano in Japan, before taking up lieder-singing in her teen years. Eventually, she studied poetry and literature at Sarah Lawrence College in the US, before becoming a protégée of the avant-garde musical legend, John Cage.

Much before she had encountered Lennon during one of her shows in London in 1966, Ono had produced some of the most compelling work of her entire oeuvre. In 1964, for instance, she performed Cut Piece, a powerful item that continues to be in vogue even today. In it, Ono placed herself on a bare floor and offered her audience a pair of scissors, with which they were invited to come up and cut away a piece of her clothing. Every time she performed the act, the degree and the potential of violence inherent in it exceeded the previous version, until security had to be stationed close to her to prevent any mishap and keep the psychotic fantasies of the viewers in check. In spite of palpable threats— one man dangled the scissors menacingly over her head— Ono’s face remained impassive, though at the end of it all, she did confess feeling overwhelmed and deeply shaken.

Few artists had captured, so early on, the naked violence that a modern (female) subject faces from the world. Yet, in spite of its strongly feminist overtones, Cut Piece also seemed to presage the great social-media moment of our time, when forms of self-exposure have become just as voluntary, with an accompanying feeling of dread, titillating and necessary to it.

In the same year, as she performed Cut Piece for the first time, Ono put together a manifesto called Grapefruit, filled with witty, esoteric and Zen-like aphorisms for her imagined reader. Written like a droll instruction manual, Grapefruit asks its consumers to undertake certain bizarre tasks. Sample this vignette, from a section called ‘Stone Piece’: ‘Find a stone that is your size or weight. Crack it until it becomes fine powder. Dispose of it in the river. (a) Send small amounts to your friends. (b) Do not tell anybody what you did. Do not explain about the powder to the friends to whom you send.’ Published by Simon & Schuster, Grapefruit has enjoyed cult status for over 50 years and remains unique.

If Ono sounds oblique and mannered in these instructions, she must have come across as even more preposterous in 1960, when she made Painting to be Stepped On, which pretty much expects you to do what it says. With one fell stroke, she obliterated the vestiges of the so-called hallowed aura associated with art and the white cube of the gallery. You may argue that Duchamp had done it already and spectacularly, but even he did not quite expect visitors to use the urinal for the purpose it is meant to be.

Art is only one aspect of Ono’s bafflingly diverse experiments. Her foray into making music and movies has been equally ambitious, the former perhaps more successful, since much of what she recorded with John Lennon became an instant hit, thanks to the aura of The Beatles. Although Lennon had embraced the role of a pacifist before he had got together with Ono, it was her presence that seemed to bring out a twee side to his musical personality that was quite distinct from the usual twee-ness of the boy band he had been a part of. The couple’s anti-Vietnam activism, for instance, gave way to a slew of populist songs, perhaps far more mediocre than any vintage Lennon or the early Beatles, but gave Ono a lasting place in Lennon’s fandom.

She was as much praised as reviled for her influence on Lennon, blamed for the break-up of The Beatles, and much else. Yet, in spite of the constant flux in which she lived, Ono continued to work steadily and solidly, not fading into the oblivion of public amnesia after her celebrated husband’s assassination in 1980.

In the 1990s and 2000s, especially after the 9/11 attacks in the US, she emerged, once again, as an artist driven by a sharp political conscience as well as a stinging sense of humour. Her social media presence remains phenomenal—close to 5 million followers on Twitter—and her project of self-fashioning a continual work in progress. In the intervening years, she collaborated with a range of artists from across genres—jazz, pop, rock, punk, trance— and recorded dozens of songs that were sensations for about 15 minutes apiece. None of her big hits, Walking on Thin Ice for instance, has the same recall as, say, Give Peace a Chance, her joint venture with Lennon. Recorded in 1969 as a pledge against the Vietnam War, the latter has outlived its moment of conception unlike most singles or albums by Ono.

It is perhaps reasonable to wonder whether Yoko Ono would have attained the same iconic status she has today had there been no John Lennon in her life. As speculations go, the purpose behind this one is neither to belittle Ono’s work nor to claim that her reputation is an offshoot of her association with her more illustrious husband. Instead, it is an attempt to understand whether the history of modern art, and the moment of contemporary art, would have let her have her place in so ceremonious a way had she just been another conceptual artist.

Would Ono have been remembered as an artist in the league of Andy Warhol had she never been associated with Lennon, had she only produced her non-Lennon work and not been glorified or castigated as the legendary singer’s widow? The answer, though tricky, would probably have been in the affirmative.

Sample this. In 1966, the year she met Lennon, Ono made what must have been a classic statement on the evanescent nature and destiny of conceptual art: “The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer… is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again; it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem.” Someone who understood and articulated the essence of—and relationship between— contemporary life and art so profoundly would have merited a certain distinction and high regard—with or without Lennon and The Beatles.

(Somak Ghoshal is an editor and writer based in New Delhi)

art retrospectiveGrapefruitMuseum of Modern ArtNew YorkPainting to be Stepped OnYoko Ono