In 1945, Yoko Ono's parents sent her and her younger sibling to the Japanese countryside to escape the attacks on major cities in Japan during World War Two. The United States had firebombed Tokyo, Ono's hometown at the time, killing up to 100,000 people. The now 90-year-old artist was then 12 and from an affluent family, but food shortages during the war meant that Ono, her brother, Keisuke and sister, Setsuko, often went hungry.
According to Ono's son, 48-year-old American-British musician and producer Sean Ono Lennon, his mother, who now lives in New York, would play "imaginary meal games" with her siblings where they would pretend they were eating food. "You could say that the conceptual origins of her work started there in World War Two – being hungry and realising the power of imagination," says Ono Lennon, who runs her day-to-day affairs now that the artist has retired."You could even say it led directly to the song Imagine, which became this world-famous anthem," he tells BBC Culture. The 1971 song Imagine was co-written by Ono and her husband, John Lennon, though at the time of the song’s release, only Lennon was credited.
While many identify Ono simply as the wife of John Lennon, before the couple met in 1966, Ono, who moved to New York with her family in the early 1950s, had been an influential multimedia artist and musician in her own right. In New York, she had worked with artists such as the US composer John Cage and the musician and performance artist La Monte Young.
She had also been invited to be a part of Fluxus, an international avant-garde art collective popular in the 1960s and 1970s for their experimental performances, though Ono turned them down. "In my mother's case, she never necessarily felt that Fluxus represented her," says Ono Lennon, explaining that she preferred to work alone. "Even when my father, John Lennon, was looking for a new writing partner [after The Beatles broke up in 1970] because he'd always had Paul McCartney to write songs with, my mom said she didn't want to at first."
Earlier in her career, Ono was particularly known for her "scores" or "instruction pieces", which initially began as an invitation for viewers to interact with her paintings but became artworks in themselves, instructing viewers to engage in or envision engaging in various activities. Ono would ask people to perform actions such as "bondage any part of your body" or "light a match and watch til it goes out", both of which can be found in her 1964 book Grapefruit, where she famously collated a collection of these short instructions.
This creativity has seen her work shown at some of the top museums in the world, including a 2015 retrospective at the MoMA, titled Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, and now a major exhibition at London's Tate Modern, Yoko Ono: Music Of The Mind.
The Tate show follows Ono's art from the mid-1950s to the present day. As curator Juliet Bingham puts it in the exhibition catalogue: "We are invited to step on a painting, water a canvas, perform inside a bag, greet visitors by shaking hands anonymously, put our shadows together, hammer a nail or play a game of chess, celebrate our mothers, share our hopes, our dreams and our wishes, and most importantly to imagine."
Finding comfort
As Ono Lennon says, his mother's artwork can be seen as a way of processing her experiences of suffering, and as a means of probing how we can achieve world peace. In projects like Grapefruit, viewers are invited to view the world through Ono's eyes. "There are people who sit and go through Grapefruit, and they try to do each instruction," Sean says. "So if it's to 'make a painting to see the sky through', which is essentially a hole in the canvas that you look at the sky, they'll make that because the idea is breaking the barrier between the artist and audience." Bingham also notes that "as a child fleeing the bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War, Ono found comfort in the constant presence of the sky".
But for Ono, art has never been about a singular mode of expression, which is why her work can be found in multiple forms. "What's unique about my mother's work is that she didn't think about art as a specific medium," Sean says. "She felt that art and creativity were conceptual, and so it almost didn't matter which medium they were manifested in." In 1955, she performed Lighting Piece for her friends and family before publicly performing it in 1961, then incorporated it as part of a musical performance in Japan in 1962. She eventually included the instructions in Grapefruit, and then recorded a silent film of the action in 1966, titled No.1 (Match).
Some of Ono’s most notable artworks are also performances. In 1964, at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, she performed Cut Piece, where she placed scissors in front of her and invited viewers to cut off a piece of her clothes. "Cut Piece has increasingly been understood as a pivotal early work of feminist art history, although it is open to multiple readings, including those posed by Ono herself," writes Bingham. "During her early performances in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1964 and at DIAS in London in 1966, Ono's performance of the work was accompanied by a large handwritten sign that read, 'My body is the Scar of My Mind', and Ono's own quote that, "It was a form of giving, giving and taking".
Ono later performed Cut Piece in Paris in 2003 at the age of 70, 39 years after the initial performance, which her son attended. "Watching it is like watching one of the most terrifying and engaging performances I've ever seen," he says. "There's the danger of the scissors and the vulnerability of the woman sitting there."
Sean also notes the various different ways cutters chose to approach Ono. "One person cut a very small piece of the bottom of her dress shyly and ran away, and then another person confidently and arrogantly cut a circle around her breast " he explains. "It's amazing how much you see of the inner world of the audience members just from this single act of cutting one piece of clothing off."
Many might assume that, as a musician, Sean must have been influenced by his world-famous father, but he mentions that Ono is actually the one to have inspired his music from a young age, as his father died when he was five. Lennon was murdered outside of his family home in New York City in 1980. "I learned how to record from my mother, I saw her record and then I wound up making a record with her when I was 19 called Rising," he says. "She was my musical mentor, whereas my dad, I had to learn his music from records, which was instructive in its own way, but it certainly wasn't as influential as my mother being there and making music with her." In honour of his mother’s birthday on 18 February, and in a homage to her art, he has created a virtual "wish tree" where users can hang their hopes and dreams and plant a real-life tree with the reforestation charity One Tree Planted.
Ono also eventually collaborated with Lennon both musically (as we know) and artistically. The pair often used both of their platforms to advocate for world peace, much in the way Ono approached her art prior to this. In 1969, the pair sent acorns to world leaders, and asked them to plant them in support of world peace for a performance titled Acorn Peace. The pair also held two widely publicised Bed-Ins where they stayed in bed in a hotel suite for a week (the first time in Amsterdam in March 1969 and then in May 1969 in Montreal) as a form of peaceful protest againstthe Vietnam War, which garnered worldwide attention. A film titled Bed Peace (1969) documented the second of the Bed-In events, where they spoke with the press.
Ono Lennon notes that, while people like to consider how his father might have influenced Ono, "it's almost more clear the influence that she had on my dad".He believes Imagine would never have been written without their relationship. "My point is that it can only have been made by those two people at that point in their lives," he says. He says that the song's history begins with his mother "starving in World War Two, and having to imagine meals for her crying little brother, causing her to become a conceptual artist," which in turn influenced Lennon "to start writing a song that came from this idea of imagine this and imagine that," he says. "But like any great piece of art, it goes beyond the people that made it when it becomes part of the world."
Source: BBC