Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for an hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tuna fish sandwich and eat.
Yoko Ono’s recipe for tuna fish sandwiches. 1964
Start with a lie:
Yoko Ono met John Lennon in 1966, when Lennon went to one of her art shows. At first, things were awkward. Lennon took a bite of an apple, which sadly was actually an art piece by Ono, called ‘apple’. Things got better when he looked at her Painting to Hammer a Nail Into (No. 9) and offered to give her imaginary money, if she’d let him hammer in an imaginary nail, which is what ‘meet-cute’ looked like in 1966. When Lennon left, Ono asked someone who that man was. ‘That’s John Lennon,’ she was told. “Oh” she said, “I didn’t know.”
That, of course, was the lie. Had Mickey Mouse walked into her gallery wearing his tuxedo and white gloves, he would not have been half as recognizable as John Lennon in London in 1966.
Tape the sound of the moon fading at dawn. Give it to your mother to listen to when she’s in sorrow.
Yoko Ono
For years, she was scapegoated for breaking up The Beatles, but by 1969 Lennon was addicted to heroin, a junkie not always able to keep up. Before the group split, Paul McCartney laughed at the idea that people would think The Beatles broke up “because Yoko was sitting on an amp.” Which is exactly what people did think. Another lie.
Make all the clocks in the world fast by two seconds, without telling anyone about it.
Yoko Ono
The idea that Yoko was nothing without her famous husband is a lie too. She wasn’t as big as The Beatles, but nobody was. Still, Ono’s Cut Piece 1964, in which she sat mutely on a chair as audience members cut off pieces of her dress was a powerful feminist work made when The Beatles were singing about how much they wanted to hold your hand. Ono was ambitious. Lennon’s then wife Cynthia said that Ono showered Lennon, the guy she claimed not to recognize, with hundreds of letters and drawings. Cynthia found out about her husband’s affair when she came home one day and found he and Ono sitting in her kitchen wearing matching bathrobes.
So much around Ono’s life exists in the border between truth and fiction. Lennon’s, Imagine, is one of the most beautiful tunes ever recorded. Ono should have been credited with helping to write it. After seeing Ono and Lennon’s home, Elton John, never known for monastic restraint, made fun of them, singing: “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do/One is full of fur coats, the other is full of shoes”. Lennon’s son from his first marriage had to sue her to get any money from his estate.
Art is my life. My life is art.
That, I suspect, is what is really true. Ono’s life is her art and sometimes what’s merely true gets in the way of Truth.
In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art restaged one of Ono’s shows. I happened to be near the museum one day, and wandered in. One piece consisted of a bag on the ground, with instructions for visitors to climb in and make ‘bag art’. There was a family in front of me, and one of the kids climbed into the bag and began making silly noises. We all laughed. Then, still in the bag, he began dancing and I found myself thinking about how free kids were, and what it was like when my kids were young.
And then, that little bastard just kept going.
His parents tried to get him out of the bag, but he wouldn’t stop. I got angry and annoyed and wondered why his parents never taught him how to behave in public.
You know, bag etiquette.
I’d just felt joy, nostalgia, and anger, all because Yoko Ono had tossed a bag on a floor. I don’t suppose I’ve ever had so many reactions in so short a time to any other artwork.
Yoko Ono is my favorite Beatle.
That’s not true, of course, but when it comes to art, it doesn’t need to be.
loving the photography