Ono was one of the first women to be admitted into the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. After she moved to New York with her family in 1956, she turned her Manhattan loft into a series of performance events where she presented conceptual art that often required interactive participation from the viewers. Her piece Painting to be Stepped On (1960) was a canvas on which the audience was allowed to walk on. Her other well-known performance piece is Cut Piece (1964), where she sat passively while the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her dress. This work was attributed to feminist art with its themes of sexual violence.
She continued to make art and films before she met John Lennon in 1966 at an exhibit showing her work in London. By 1968, the two began collaborating on experimental films and recordings, thus resulting in their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. In 1969, Ono and Lennon married. During their honeymoon, they had a week-long "bed-in" in which they made their hotel room open to the press in an effort to promote world peace, especially the war in Vietnam. Once The Beatles disbanded (1970), Ono was vilified and blamed as the reason for their split. Ono didn't let this kill her creative thunder; she continued to create and made the Plastic Ono Band and many popular songs.
On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was killed in front of his and Yoko Ono's apartment building. Ono was devastated and feared for her and her son's safety, but she refused to let this violence stop her voice. She released "Walking on Thin Ice" and the album Season of Glass, whose artwork is a pair of Lennon's glasses splattered with blood and a half-full glass. She has also worked on different memorials for John Lennon and oversaw the release of some of his unpublished works.
Ono used art as a way for not just her but for the world to process the death of her husband. She took her grief and made it communal to help peace prevail. This is a common experience for many artists who grieve. Musician Nick Cave lost his son, but he created an album called Skeleton Tree after the event. Cave used his album as a place for his son's spirit to live, which he describes in his book with Sean O'Hagan. Both artist refuse to sentimentalize loss; they show how hard the grieving process is through their art. Ono turned her mourning into action by participating in peace activism, public installations, and art.
It was so interesting to hear about Yoko Ono's life as an artist, since so many people only focus on her relationship to John Lennon and the theory that she "broke up The Beatles." Im happy to have learned about her education and some of the work she has done as a performance artist!
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how terrible things can spark creativity. I knew very little about Yoko Ono, and it was amazing learning about all that she did. Her and Lennon opening up their hotel room to the press was a very creative and progressive way to advocate for world peace!
ReplyDeleteI'm going to preface that everything I have read/heard about Yoko Ono indicates that she is not a very good person. So, I am mostly writing about her as an artist not a person in this comment. That being said, I saw Ono's "Music of the Mind" exhibit at the Tate Modern (and I think it's coming to Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), and it was a really interesting exhibit. I wouldn't really call myself a fan of contemporary art for the most part, so a lot of the the pieces didn't necessarily do much for me personally. There was one piece that was a video of her performing at a concert and she was just screaming into the microphone the whole time, so that got irritating after awhile. However, there were two pieces that especially resonated with me and those were "Cut Piece" (as you mentioned in your post) and a piece where people were invited to write a note to their mother on a sticky note then stick it to the wall. "Cut Piece" made me really emotional and sick, but I couldn't look away; I thought it was very powerful. The mother piece also made me emotional, writing to my own mother across the sea and reading all the other notes to mothers, ranging from love to hate to disappointment to elegies to things they could never say but always wanted to. Regardless of how I feel about her or her art, I find it unfortunate that she gets reduced to "John Lennon's wife/the woman who broke up the Beatles."
ReplyDeleteExperiencing pain, loss, and fear is a powerful motivator for art. Yoko Ono is a good comparison with Nick Cave, as both tragically lost someone close and dear to them. The ability to be creative and create something beautiful from it is not easy task and something both people were able to do. The way she fights for world peace and the tragedy of Jon Lennon being assassinated would only fuel her fire to keep spreading the message of world piece, as it is no easy feat.
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