Yoko Ono's Mind Games—And Her Lasting Legacy - Vanity Fair

A show at London’s Tate Modern reveals the astonishing breadth of a career often shadowed by questions about fame, celebrity, and a certain collaborator-husband.

By Mark Rozzo

May 22, 2024

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The question of Yoko Ono’s marriage to John Lennon sits like a water buffalo at the center of any conversation about her eight decades of work as an artist. It is oversized, hairy, imposing, impossible to ignore, tricky to get around. Do you tiptoe past it, slink away from it, or approach it head-on?

As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?

Ono and John Lennon hold their marriage certificate.Bettmann/Getty Images.

You try to wish such conjecture away, but then comes a swarm of pesky subconcerns, such as: Had Ono not become the world’s foremost widow in 1980, after Lennon’s murder (she has been known to compare herself to Coretta Scott King and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), would the general public care about her work? Does Ono deserve to be considered, as she often is, a footnote in postwar art, a minor figure cited in catalog essays about Fluxus or conceptualism or performance art? Or a brief mention in the context of avant-garde music, a secondary player in the exalted milieu of John Cage and La Monte Young? Or a passing reference in conversations about 1960s art films, which inevitably focus on Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner?

If we can imagine an alternative art history in which Ono did not become the iconic, reclusive queen in her Dakota tower, perhaps we can imagine her as a semi-obscure artist surfacing in oral testimonies about the New York art scene in the early 1960s—a reliably great, insightful interview. And maybe, in time, this boundary-pushing woman artist from an unabashedly patriarchal era—the creator of such performance works as Cut Piece and Bag Piece, and the conceptual films Fly, Bottoms, and Rape—would finally be getting her due, in the manner of the formerly undersung Judy Chicago and Niki de Saint Phalle.

If Ono’s marriage to Lennon is the water buffalo, then these other nagging questions are a swarm of gnats that is awfully hard to wave away. To walk through the new career-spanning retrospective Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, at London’s Tate Modern (on view until September 1), is to feel them nipping at you until they are practically an element of the art itself. As inconvenient as they are, they are an inescapable reality of Ono’s complicated, rich, many-chaptered life and career, and her enduring influence. (She has inspired generations of artists and musicians, from Pipilotti Rist to Sonic Youth to Lady Gaga to, well, John Lennon.) You may begin to feel that they make the experience of Ono’s work that much more complex—vexed, layered, frustrating, surprising. Until some distant, Ozymandian future, this is simply the fate of the woman Lennon himself described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist.”

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the Tate Modern in London.DANIEL LEAL/Getty Images.

Louis Menand once observed that “Ono may have leveraged her celebrity—but so what? She never compromised her art.” The Tate Modern retrospective shows a singular artist following a singular inner voice. As for her outer voice, there are opportunities to sample that as well: A room is outfitted with listening stations for visitors to get a taste of Ono’s long, parallel career as a classically trained musical explorer whose work has spanned genres, from experimental (before and with Lennon) to rock (with Lennon) to dance club (after Lennon). Ono, in fact, has gone on to score an astounding 18 Top 10 dance-club hits in the 21st century, the most recent being “Hell in Paradise 2016,” which reached number one. (Her son, Sean Lennon, may not have achieved that level of commercial success, but he is a similarly inventive and sui generis musician-songwriter, having recently collaborated with Paul McCartney’s son, James, on a song called “Primrose Hill.”) The ever-acerbic rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that Ono “couldn’t carry a tune in a briefcase.” But hearing—and watching—her wail, squeal, and yelp in, say, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, or during the Plastic Ono Band’s 1969 concert in Toronto, or on the 1981 downtown club staple “Walking on Thin Ice” (released two months after Lennon’s death), you can’t help but think that, compared to the posturing male rock stars surrounding her, Ono was just…beyond.

Taking in the more than 200 works marshaled here (a far broader scope than the 2015 Ono show at the Museum of Modern Art) gives a similar impression of Ono’s breadth as a fine artist. She is beyond categorization—a participant in the above-mentioned art-world developments of the ’60s (conceptual, minimalism, Happenings, sound art, experimental film) who roamed from installation work to filmmaking to photography to so-called instruction pieces, as in her foundational Grapefruit, a self-published book from 1964 that is at once a collection of micro-poems and a user’s manual for conceptual works. (The original typescripts are on display.) Some of these quiet, diffident entries could be attempted at home, DIY-style, such as Lighting Piece, which consists of a simple directive: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” (Ono turned this piece into a hypnotic film: a match in extreme slow-mo immolation.)

Lennon and Ono during the so-called Bed-In, during which they spent a week in bed, advocating for world peace, first at the Amsterdam Hilton, then at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel.Cummings Archives/Getty Images.

Many such Grapefruit pieces turn everyday acts, such as lighting a match, into art. A number of them, conversely, could never be everyday—or any day—acts, such as Sun Piece: “Watch the sun until it becomes square.” You could say that Ono, as a conceptualist, was determined to stage Happenings inside the human brain, a sly and ingenious innovation. (The exhibition’s subtitle, “Music of the Mind,” comes from a canny description of such “events” that her second husband, the filmmaker Anthony Cox, coined.)

At the Tate Modern, the piece that most riveted viewers, judging by the crowd clustered around it, was Cut Piece. It is arguably Ono’s best-known work, and it may be her best. In this performance piece, Ono kneels onstage with a pair of shears on the floor next to her. Audience members are invited to come up and snip off bits of her clothing in a slow-moving, collaborative, and subtly violent striptease. In black-and-white footage of the 1964 performance of Cut Piece at Tokyo’s Sogetsu Art Center, Ono appears to be somehow both meekly submissive and impassively defiant as a series of volunteers bound onto the stage to get into the act of disrobing her, cut by cut. (Another performance of Cut Piece was documented by the Grey Gardens documentarians Albert and David Maysles.) The work is a precursor to later performance pieces, most notably those of Marina Abramović. It must surely be a landmark in feminist art, even if Ono has spoken of its aims in terms that are more broadly zen-like and art-historical: “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” she once wrote, “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.”

Either way, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Milgram experiment, the notorious psychological study from the early ’60s in which volunteers, participating in a study examining how physical pain affected learning, were asked to deliver electric shocks to the test’s subjects. The volunteers were, in fact, the actual subjects of the experiment, which sought to show how readily people will follow directives from authority, even if the end result is human victimization and suffering. In Cut Piece, the occasion (art!) exercised its mute authority over willing participants who might have otherwise never dreamed of using scissors to render a defenseless stranger naked. Sixty years after Ono debuted Cut Piece, the work has the power to leave viewers discomfited—complicit, fascinated, aghast.

It has also been suggested that the work is a shrewd metaphor for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, and, by extension, the violence of total warfare and the vulnerability of its civilian victims. Ono, who was born in Japan, was 12 years old that summer and living in Tokyo (her father was a banker); she later said that “those experiences of the early days cast a long shadow in my life.” When Ono performed the work in 2003, it was in a post-9/11, post-second-intifada context. At that time, she mused about going to Palestine as a human shield, saying, “Cut Piece is my hope for world peace.” In the year 2024, it’s hard to know just what Ono is thinking about Gaza or other matters; she turned 91 in February, reportedly left New York City last year, and has mostly receded from public view, despite her active social media accounts.

Lennon and Ono in London promoting the publication her book Grapefruit.Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images.

Other pieces at the Tate Modern that have captured eyeballs are inevitably ones associated with Ono’s marriage to Lennon, beginning with works the artist featured in her famous November 1966 “Unfinished Paintings & Objects” show at the Indica Gallery in Mason’s Yard, London. It was there, during a preview, that the two first met, when Lennon—then working on “Strawberry Fields Forever”—gamely offered Ono an imaginary five shillings to drive an imaginary nail into her Painting to Hammer a Nail, thus keeping it pristine for the opening. Ono later said of their avant-garde meet-cute, “I met a guy who plays the same game I played.” The piece is replicated at the exhibition, with visitors lining up to hammer non-imaginary nails into a mounted board.

It would not be until 1968 that Ono and Lennon’s acquaintance ramped up into an affair that had Lennon leaving his first wife, Cynthia, and their son, Julian (and had Ono and Lennon offering their naked selves to the record-buying public on the cover of their experimental Two Virgins LP). That year also marked a moment when Ono’s work took a turn, with sonic explorations and big public events and art pieces devoted to the cause of world peace, the big theme that has dominated her work ever since. The most famous of these is Bed Peace (1969), equal parts publicity stunt, protest, and Happening, filmed in a Montreal hotel room and commonly known as the “bed-in,” in which Ono and Lennon stayed in bed for a week surrounded by a retinue of supporters (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory) and representatives of an oft-combative press corps. Watching the footage of Bed Peace, it’s illuminating to hear Ono and her husband arguing against direct political action on the grounds that, because everything is corrupt, you’ll only end up replacing the current corrupt system with another one. You know: You can’t change the world until you change your head, and all that.

In the era of “woke,” the position feels naive, easy, privileged—cringey. (You can’t help but remember Elton John’s friendly parody of Lennon and Ono’s 1971 utopian anthem, “Imagine”: “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do / One is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes.”) Then again, plenty of demonstrations, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, and campus protests during the ensuing five decades have fallen well short of their goals. So perhaps Ono and Lennon were onto something, even at the modest level of offering an overly obvious choice—peace!—to the global public. As Ono put it, “We’re using our money to advertise our ideas so that peace has equal power with the meanies who spend their money to promote war.”

Ono with her son Sean Ono Lennon at the Third Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1988.Gary Gershoff/Getty Images.

From room to room, there are other greatest hits to take in, including Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67), the artist’s 16-millimeter film documenting approximately 200 pairs of buttocks, which Lennon declared to be “as important as Sgt. Pepper,” and Fly (1970–71), a film directed by Ono and Lennon showing a fly traversing the body of a naked woman. (Liquid carbon dioxide was allegedly used on the insect to make it slow and dopey enough to remain in focus.) Not included in the show is the duo’s 1969 film Self-Portrait, a 42-minute close-up of Lennon’s penis. “The critics wouldn’t touch it,” Ono said, although whether this Lennon-esque turn of phrase was intentional has been an open question for more than 50 years. With their deadpan languor and blithe transgressiveness, Ono’s films may be indebted to Warhol. But, as with much of her work, they suggest a more pronounced willingness to be goofy, disarming the viewer with childlike humor and fixations. (Speaking of: Her “Toilet Piece” is an audio recording of a flushing commode that plays in an endless loop.)

A lot of Ono’s pieces play like one-liners. Which is to say that you might find them facile yet you can’t help but crack up. They are invitations to laugh or smile or just share a feeling. There’s a generosity to them. And yet there’s a rigorous specificity, a reduction of things to essences and simple gestures. (There’s also perhaps a tendency to oversimplify, which is why some critics have viewed Ono as a kind of Rod McKuen of conceptual art.) Even one of the later pieces, Add Color (Refugee Boat), first realized in 2016 and inspired by a dreadful global refugee crisis, emanates humor and optimism as it invites visitors to grab blue markers and scrawl on a white rowboat and surrounding white walls. Inevitably, many of the inscriptions are—people being people—irreverent and irrelevant: The non sequitur “EGG + CRESS SANDWICH,” for instance, was perhaps the most conspicuous contribution. Ono had to have known this outcome going in.

That lonely white boat and that white room slowly turning blue—it also feels like a metaphor for our collective public voyage with Ono, one that began almost 60 years ago. In terms of legacy, where that voyage leads next is a mystery. The questions return: Will Ono be remembered as an important, or at least fascinating, figure in postwar art? Or as the Japanese artist who married a Beatle? Can it be both? Could Ono’s legacy eventually outshine her spouse/partner’s? Historical memory is, after all, unpredictable. Time bends. Fame distorts. Notoriety, collaboration, personal history—when you consider Ono’s work, these elements become as tactile as paper, celluloid, and paint.

Ono performs on stage with the Plastic Ono Super Band at Kenny’s Castaways in New York, 1973.Images Press/Getty Images.

Ono and Lennon will likely remain inseparable in memory, collaborators who impacted each other’s creations and mirrored each other’s creativity. Ono and Lennon, after all, were both unabashed avant-gardists—and yet Lennon loved pointing out that “avant-garde is French for bullshit.” For him, it was an article of faith that the lower calling of rock and roll could transcend the high culture of art. He adored “Be-Bop-a-Lula” until the end of his days (in fact, he had his hair done like a Gene Vincent–style ’50s rocker on the very last day of his life)—and yet, contradictorily, he was the author of “Revolution 9,” probably the most outré recording in pop.

Coming from opposite directions, he and Ono met at the same place, as her work suggests a high artist searching for ways of liberating the avant-garde from arid intellectualism and going for the gut, the heart. Throughout “Yoko Ono: Music for the Mind,” pleasure comes into the equation, with works conceived to make you smile, giggle, or, perhaps oddest of all in the context of the art world, just feel warm. (Cut Piece is a notable exception.) With Ono, there’s always an impulse to embrace the unseriousness of the serious. In this way she’s not unlike the very best pop musicians. She was, after all, married to one, and perhaps it was he who said it best: “Her work is far out.”