“Your life is being conducted in front of the world, like a play,” Yoko Ono tweeted recently. “Know that it is, therefore, a play to people who watch it.” That Ono is on Twitter makes utter sense: her aphorisms were almost like tweets before the thing was invented. She has always been ahead of her time. People seem to have hated her in so many ways that I assume she must see herself as a character in a story in order just to live, just to continue being her own woman.
She is here now in front of me, a tiny woman in her shades and her hat tending to the final details of her exhibition in Liverpool, Double Fantasy. I see apples on Perspex plinths, to replicate the apple that an apparently rude John Lennon took a bite of when he met her at the Indica gallery in London. Ono, who for so long was ageless, is now 85 and needs a bit of help. I am told she is feeling emotional. She doesn’t do jetlag, apparently. The next day she will visit the house Lennon grew up in and sit in his bedroom, feeling him close.
“She took him away from us,” a man in a pub tells me. “But she has always come back to Liverpool. She has not forgotten us.” His friends agree. There is a grudging respect now for a woman who was once seen a wrecker of the Beatles, an evil foreigner who stole away and bewitched a jaded and stupefied Lennon.
She was regarded as a manipulative, clingy, talentless fake who somehow enchanted the superstar Beatle. All the loathing that was poured onto Ono is now quite difficult to read: misogyny laced with out-and-out racism. The music press and the art world policed the boundaries of femininity then and now – and Ono did not fit.
The poisonous Albert Goldman book, The Lives of John Lennon, ascribed every stereotype about oriental women to her. She was the evil dragon lady who played the mute geisha. Lennon was the weak, flawed man manipulated by this cunning, grasping creature. It was OK, in 1988, for Goldman to describe her as “simian-looking”, to speculate on intimacies he could not have possibly known about.
No wonder Ono wanted to tell her tale of their relationship in the place of Lennon’s birth, though this is not a setting-the-record-straight show exactly. The exhibition is called Double Fantasy. Maybe their coupling was a fantasy, maybe all relationships are, but here that fantasy is set in the context of world events. A simple love story perhaps, but the context was the tectonic plates that were shifting in 1966: Vietnam and the civil-rights movement are the backdrop. Their art is their response.
To see objects that belonged to the couple is strangely moving. Ono’s sunglasses positioned opposite Lennon’s wire NHS specs, the lenses mirroring each other. The loss registers. I had met Ono before at some post-gig meet and greet. I did not know what to say. Oh Yoko. She had been on stage screaming in the voice of an abused child. Sean Lennon, their son, was there so it seemed easier to chat to him. She did not seem one for small talk somehow. I wanted to tell her I had seen the Beatles as a tiny child, taken by my uncle and been terrified. It was the first gig I ever went to. I don’t think we had “health and safety” in those days and they just hit the girls off stage with brooms. It was just screaming and screaming.
When Lennon was murdered, I was working in a restaurant in Miami and made huge tips that night because I was English and kept crying while serving diners. That’s a long time ago and the Beatles don’t seem much in fashion any more. Fashion of course is something Ono knows very well. She loves clothes. She is always in black and white and she knows what she is doing.
In one film in the show, when Lennon is being interviewed by Michael Parkinson, he asks why the press are calling Ono ugly. Why is that acceptable? Lennon explains the public perception. “This Japanese witch has made him crazy and he’s gone bananas. But … all she did was take the bananas part of me out of the closet that, you know, has been inhibited by another part.”
Often in interviews Ono sits smoking and silent. That became a familiar image, but now we know differently. Ono hung on to Lennon because he was so insecure he would not let her out of his sight for a second. Indeed, Double Fantasy helps to reconfigure their relationship in ways that may finally balance. Instead of her leeching off him, maybe he was leeching off her. Maybe it was mutual. She was an artist, involved in Fluxus. She knew all the luminaries such as John Cage and had exhibited internationally. Like Lennon, she was married with a child. Like him, war was in her background: Liverpool had been bombed, Ono had had to flee Tokyo.
As a child, she said, she looked like a ghost because of food shortages. She also said she never pursued a guy, that it was never her style, and that she wanted an equal relationship. “You can’t love someone unless you are in an equal position with them,” she declared in 1971. Lennon came into the relationship a violent man who had hit his first wife and was often cruel. Ono confronted this. She talked too of bisexuality.
In the same year, Lennon told the underground newspaper Red Mole that she was into liberation before he came along. “She had to fight her way through a man’s world – the art world is completely dominated by men.” He described her revolutionary zeal: “There was never any question we had to have a 50/50 relationship or there was no relationship.”
This attempt at a personal and artistic collaboration was much mocked. Attempting equality seemed to push them further into their own bubble. That and, of course, heroin. But what else was Lennon to do with the massive celebrity that was eating at him? While Kanye West uses his power to support Trump, his partner flogs appetite-suppressing lollipops. Lennon and Ono were after a somewhat bigger prize: world peace. A deconstruction of masculine power and fake action. They would attract the press to their cause by staying in bed.
The bed-ins, indeed many of couple’s concepts, have been relentlessly pilloried as simplistic, as a bit Hallmark, a bit Zen, as somehow not real art because conceptual art was not in vogue as it is now. Ono’s Cut Piece from 1964 – invoking rituals around gender and identity, vulnerability and dissent, in which audience members could cut off her clothes – is pre-Abramović. Her film Rape, her use of nudity in performance, her interest in primal scream therapy, her insistence that everyone could be an artist, the idea that art was always to be made in process with the spectator and it is the interaction not the product that matters – Lennon imbibed all these things that now feel completely contemporary.
Not everything she did with Lennon worked, that’s for sure. The boundary between art and life was blurred by celebrity and money. Yet so much of their relationship was seen through the prism of race and patriarchy. It was not that they had an open relationship or needed to rethink. It was that she arranged for Lennon to have an affair with her assistant May Pang. She is the arch manipulator.
Some of their explorations look deeply uncomfortable now. Watching Lennon explaining what Woman is the Nigger of the World means to talk-show host Dick Cavett is interesting to say the least. Ono had used this phrase in an interview in Nova. Lennon quotes the Irish radical James Connolly in “the female worker is the slave of [the] slave”. This is in 1972. Feminism has not yet much purchase.
Alongside this, Ono is playing with the power of the male gaze and returning it, with nude pictures of her and Lennon that are not flattering but entirely human. She made a film of Lennon’s penis and called it Self-Portrait. This is the woman who we are always told has no sense of humour. In 1964, she too started thinking about the female gaze, screening a Hollywood movie with the instruction: “Do not look at Rock Hudson, look only at Doris Day.”
It seems sometimes as if Lennon’s star has waned, while hers has waxed – with many artists and musicians acknowledging her influence. So it is quite something for her to go back to Liverpool to document all the collaborations she made with Lennon. She cannot escape being defined by him, but she now gives us the holy relics of their relationship and sets them in history. The famous ladder from the Indica gallery, his shirt, the glasses, the bedclothes, the funny surreal instructions: “Imagine the cloud dripping / Dig a hole in your garden to put it in.”
She said she was saying: “Please accept me / I am mad.” But there is a steeliness in her madness, in her presence here. Lennon needed her and was desperate to come back to her and have a child. She challenged power and violence, rejecting the macho idea of fighting for peace. “I wonder why men can get serious at all,” she muses in her 1964 book Grapefruit. “They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will.” She was clearly not seeking approval.
As I was leaving the gallery, I saw too that she is still an activist. She may be old but she is indomitable. The world still needs to be changed. An exhibit had to be altered as the figures required updating. It said: “Over 1,400,000 people have been killed by guns since John Lennon was shot and killed on Dec 8, 1980.” She needed that to be put right.
Imagine.
