Yoko Ono: kindred spirit

wonder | wander | women love birthdays, especially our own. Crossing the threshold of every year gives new cause for celebration, reflection, and inspiration. And as we toast ourselves and prepare for the year ahead, we look back on our collective experiences, absorbing them and creating our new, future selves.

Entrance and Wish Trees

It was in art school when we learned about Yoko Ono - the truth beyond her victimhood, her proximity to John Lennon, her reputation in the media. Yoko Ono was a powerful art figure before she ever met the famous Beatles, a frequent collaborator with the Fluxus movement but insistent on her independent spirit. 

We attended an early exhibition of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind on its last day...which happened to be my birthday! Her art sings with playfulness and whimsy, as much a thing of action as imagination. She wrote instructions for people to create her "paintings" in a ritualistic way, but also much like a child playing: "Cut holes for eyes into a canvas and look at the sky." "Construct three paintings in your head."

Her Waterdrop Painting was made of an old bottle of Waterman black ink, cleaned and filled with water, wrapped intricately with rope and hung from the ceiling over a piece of canvas. Every fifteen minutes, a member of Tate staff would tip the bottle up and let a drop fall onto the canvas below, in a ritual that reminded me of the Japanese shishi-odoshi, but stripped of its noise and function.

Bag Piece and Cut Piece were some of her more confrontational works, part of her Strip Tease show in Kyoto. In Bag Piece two people would enter a bag, remove all their clothes, put them back on, and emerge from the bag.  In Cut Piece, Yoko sat in front of an audience in her best suit and audience members would come and cut off a piece of her clothing.

For another art event, Yoko set out a little market stand on the roof of her building on Christopher Street, NYC, labelled "Mornings for Sale". Broken bits of milk bottles were "past mornings", while smooth pieces of sea glass were "future mornings". 

Morning Piece, 1964-65

In the exhibition we happily participated in actions like stepping on "paintings", tracing our shadows in pencil, and hammering nails into a canvas. Sometimes people got carried away with the audience participation, drawing on surfaces they were not supposed to.

Shadow Piece 

Her time with John Lennon was a large part of the exhibition, with their collaborations influencing a lot of her future work after he died. Many of their private moments played out in front of paparazzi, since they had opened their own home as part of their anti-war protest art.

Paparazzi video from Bed-In, 1969

Yoko's current work still revolves around peace, love and activism in many ways. Her Add Colour (Refugee Boat) installation invited visitors to inscribe messages of peace and support to the constant waves of war refugees around the world.

Helmets (Pieces of Sky) is made of WWII soldiers' helmets, each containing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle depicting a blue sky. The accompanying instruction reads "Take a piece of sky. Know that we are all a part of each other."

My Mommy Is Beautiful is a room of notes from hundreds, maybe thousands of visitors, all with memories of their mother. Children's drawings, photos, reminiscences...a forest of powerful stories.

This is the work that sees us out of the exhibition, alongside a video of Yoko prowling the stage with her signature piercing vocal stylings. The power of Yoko Ono is in the hands of her audience, their participation in telling her story. And yet she remains just as powerfully herself: bold, unabashed, imaginative and playful. 

It was the perfect trumpet call to boldness and creativity in our own lives: to dance through a paper playground, looking, loving, learning...and taking joy in every year.