Yoko

So much more than that bitch that broke up the Beatles

Yoko Ono was born in 1933 in Japan, and when people read that birth date, their first question is often where was she when the bombs fell? The answer is that she was stashed away on a rural farm, a possibility for her because of her family’s major privilege. Her mother descended from generational wealth—her family had founded one of the four largest financial institutions in Japan. Her father, a busy and high up bank executive, did not even meet her until she was three. His job moved the family to New York in the early 1950s, and Yoko, who was the first female student admitted to the prestigious Gakushuin University as a philosophy student, dropped out of college to join them. 

She transferred her studies to Sarah Lawrence, met a fellow Japanese student who attended Julliard, Toshi Ichiyanagi, married him, dropped out of college, and moved to New York City in 1956. Ichiyanagi enrolled himself in a New School class with John Cage, the experimental composer who was an important member of New York’s avant-garde artistic circle and the lover of the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Yoko was thus introduced to Cage, to his work and his friends. This included Allan Kapprow, the artist who invented the term happenings, which are planned performative events that invite audience participation. Happenings prioritized the conceptual ideas behind works of art instead of physical objects like painting or sculpture, and Ono was inspired by both this emphasis on concept and the use of the body that happenings often involved. 

In typical rich-girl fashion, Ono’s impulse was to immediately rent a massive loft downtown and start having parties. Only her loft had no heat or electricity and her parties were populated by artists and musicians of her new-found circle, whom she invited to perform (sometimes she performed, too). She organized these events with the composer La Monte Young, and soon the two of them found out that a gallery uptown was going to copy their party happenings, and that the owner was a man named George Maciunas. Perhaps you remember Maciunas, who would go on to found the Fluxus Art Movement, from the article about his protege Shigeko Kobuta, who he named the Vice President of Fluxus. In other words, if you read the history a certain way, Ono herself birthed one of the great avant garde art movements of the century.

Ono’s marriage fell apart and she returned to Japan in 1962, where she discovered that the Japanese avant garde, particularly a group called Gutai, was even more radical than New York’s. She performed in Tokyo, plastering a concert hall with “instructions” for making paintings (this was an idea she’d actually borrowed from Cage and other conceptual artists) and in 1964 published Grapefruit, a book of such directives. Listen to the sound of the earth turning, read one page, and Use your blood to paint, keep painting until you faint, keep painting until you die, read another. 

Also in 1964, Ono performed a work called Cut Piece, where, one by one, viewers were invited to snip pieces of her clothing off and keep the scraps. She sat, silently, calmly; scissors in front of her; later describing that she’d been in a trance-like state as the first trepidatious participants approached her, followed by emboldened participants who removed larger and more provocative pieces of her outfit; exposing a breast or her stomach. She classified this work as a score– art made up of written instructions, that, when followed result in an experience or activity. She’d read the score out loud before she started, and then waited, kneeling at the front of her stage, for the audience to do their part.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964, Sogetsu Art Center, Toky

Afterwards, when the work was performed in Tokyo, London and Paris, and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she explained that it was about subverting the meaning of being an artist, giving pieces away instead of using them in private creation. It was about war, a protest against the violence and destruction–the torn clothing and tattered country left over after the bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Though she wasn’t saying it in the ’60s, by 2003, at its most recent performance, Yoko described it as anti-sexist and anti-ageist, hinting at a feminist underpinning, an idea that drew me in for its relevance in my lived experience, in the ways I have often felt so taken from by men, by systems that were designed by them, and benefit them.

Patriarchy grabs so much from us, cuts into us in small paper cuts and gashes, over and over for entire lifetimes, snipping and snipping, keeping the pieces and never apologizing. Yoko never screamed, flinched, spoke up or fought when a participant approached her with the scissors. To me, that’s the most startling and meaningful part of the piece. 

Two years after Cut Piece was first performed, Ono met John Lennon. He called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist,” alluding to a brilliant and important career that was usurped by his own persona. You’ve probably read a lot about the rest of their lives together, and know a lot about her legacy as it intertwined with the Beatles. Ono now lives in the Catskills, on the farm she bought with Lennon, splitting her time between Tokyo and London as well. Her contributions were not included in Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s landmark essay, 1968’s “The Dematerialization of Art,” the defining text of conceptual art. She is often derided as being merely the girl who broke up the Beatles, and is left out of many important narratives about the conceptual art and performance art movements to which she is so incredibly essential.