In Her Life: Yoko’s Art

Yoko Ono has always considered herself an artist, despite the often disparaging opinions of others. She admits, however, that art was never a professional goal for her.

“I think we’re all artists in some way,” she says, calmly sipping from a coffee mug in the enormous kitchen of her apartment in the Dakota on Central Park West in New York. “I was just inspired by things and putting out things. If you made a career decision, then you would have to follow up--going to galleries and trying to get your works exhibited. Well, first of all, you have to have art school, maybe, and create the kind of work that’s speaking the right language for the art world.”

That was not her intention in the ‘60s, when she was on the far edge of the avant-garde, selling what she called “future mornings,” in the form of glass shards, for a quarter. That is not her intention now, even though she is selling works for several thousand times that amount at the Ubu Gallery on the tony East Side and is the subject of a major retrospective, “Yes Yoko Ono,” which opens at the Japan Society in New York this week. Instead, Ono has always been a loner, rather gleefully bucking--or was it setting?--the trend.

She created pieces of performance and conceptual art well before the terms became the common currency of the art world. She put ideas, not objects, at the center of her artmaking--manipulating text, composing sound art, setting up happenings. And then, Ono as artist became overshadowed by Ono as Mrs. John Lennon. Even Lennon dubbed her the world’s “most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”

With the retrospective, which will travel to six other venues over the next three years, maybe that will change. “Let’s hope so,” says Ono, who cooperated fully with the exhibition and lent much from her own collection.

A trim and petite woman wearing oversized, tinted glasses, Ono exudes a brisk sense of self-confidence and composure. Her dark hair is cropped, a hint of blond coloring on top. The punk-chic look goes with the canary yellow, crisply pressed bowling shirt she wears over a black tank top and black stretch slacks. She talks rapidly, in a stream, barely pausing before a question ends to register her response.

“I think dilettante is the most superb position to be in,” Ono says blithely, upon being reminded that some critics have found her a mere dabbler in the arts. “I think professionalism immediately limits one to a certain form of thinking--it’s very dangerous. So I’m proud to say I’m an outsider. There are things that an outsider, a dilettante, can bring in to the world, to the center--to give awareness, so to speak.”

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Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono grew up in Japan and in the U.S., the daughter of a banking executive. Both her parents, as Ono tells it, were frustrated artists. In 1952, she moved with her family from Tokyo to Scarsdale, N.Y., and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry and composition. After three years, she dropped out and eloped with pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Ono was happy, she says, to cut herself loose from the stultifying expectations of her parents. The couple took up residence in Manhattan, where they encountered John Cage and his experiments in using chance operations to create art, and where Ono, working part-time jobs to support herself, began devising art pieces to express herself.

In the winter of 1960-61, she and composer La Monte Young coordinated a series of concerts and happenings in her Chambers Street loft. One visitor was George Maciunas, an uptown gallery owner who would shelter and give shape to the loose art movement known as Fluxus--a “fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp,” according to a 1965 manifesto. Maciunas would give Ono her first gallery show--in which she showed her “instructions” and other works on paper--and he included Ono in the Fluxus fold.

However, she was aware of not having full membership in the club.

“One, most of them were guys,” Ono recalls. “There were some token female artists--and especially [as] an Asian female artist--they would love to have an ornament around, you know. But then when it came to the point that suddenly she’s speaking, she has her own mind! That was kind of annoying to them, I suppose.” She gives a small laugh.

During this period she was creating word-based pieces. The early “instructions,” written as terse poetry, were later published in a volume called “Grapefruit” (1964). One example: “Light canvas or any finished painting/with a cigarette at any time for any/length of time./ See the smoke movement./ The painting ends when the whole/canvas or painting is gone.”

Later word-based works were sometimes just one line written on a floorboard--”This is the ceiling”--or on the wall--”This room slowly evaporates everyday.” The idea was to provide, as Ono says, “a somersault of the mind.”

It would be art that introduced her to Lennon in 1966. The story, retold by Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner in the catalog for “Yes Yoko Ono,” has Lennon climbing a stepladder at a London installation of her “Ceiling Painting” to read the word she had inscribed on a dropped panel: “YES.”

“I felt relieved,” Lennon told Wenner in a Rolling Stone interview published in 1971. “It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ . . . it says ‘YES.’ ”

The internationally famous Beatle and the unfamous artist met that night at the gallery, and the rest is history. He left his wife Cynthia and his son Julian for her; she left her second husband, Anthony Cox, for him. There were bed-ins, billboards for peace, film and music collaborations, and eventually the breakup of the Beatles. Ono took much of the blame from fans who were unhappy with the new Lennon.

Wenner saw it differently: “Yoko had liberated John,” he would write in a catalog of Lennon’s art works, “had freed him to become the person he always wanted to be.”

These days, Ono laughs about her “dragon lady” reputation.

“You know who’s the first dragon lady?” she asks with relish. The Chinese empress dowager Cixi, she says, who was much vilified by the British for challenging their attempts to carve up bits of China for themselves.

“I’m kind of honored to be a dragon lady,” she says with a light chuckle. “The dragon is a very powerful mythic animal--well, probably they think I’m powerful, thank you very much!”

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“There’s a great element of humor and parodox in her work,” notes Alexandra Munroe, the director of the Japan Society Gallery and the curator of “Yes Yoko Ono.” “You see that also in the films--you cannot take her films too seriously, it’s not about that. She’s using humor to kind of trip you into another consciousness. She wants you to think differently, she wants you to have a flash.”

Munroe offers her take on Ono’s reductive sensibilities.

“I feel very strongly,” she says, “that much of Yoko’s aesthetic is a transformation of certain artistic practices that we can find in high aristocratic forms of Japanese literary traditions, especially haiku, and [in] performing arts traditions, especially noh. She was trained in haiku, and in the ‘60s the first art form that she chose to practice was indeed . . . haiku-like poetry.”

The exhibition attempts to encompass all the major phases of Ono’s far-flung art career.

“[We want] to emphasize how many media Yoko worked in,” says Munroe. “One of the reasons she’s had a hard time in the art world is that they don’t know what to make of her. She is by nature a multidisciplinary, inter-media artist.”

The lobby at the Japan Society will greet visitors with one classic piece, “White Chess Set” (1966), and a newer one, “Wish Tree” (1996). The former, also referred to as “Play It by Trust,” is a white table and game board set with all white chess pieces and was canonized by its inclusion in the movie version of “Imagine,” which starred Lennon and Ono.

“It’s like life itself,” the artist explains now. “The game of life is not black and white--the opposition and you are in the same boat. Basically, you have to start playing by trust, that’s the only way you can do it.”

The main galleries will display the instruction paintings, installation and sculptural pieces (including the fateful “Ceiling Painting”), and a telephone that will ring every now and then--with Ono on the other end to speak to the lucky visitor who happens to pick up the receiver. Several of Ono’s films--some that document performances and some film-as-art--will be shown in individual screening rooms.

“Cut Piece” (1964) documents one of her best-known performances, in which she sits impassively on stage while audience members come up, one by one, to cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. Ono explains that this work reflected how she felt after being stung by the brutal criticism of a Tokyo exhibition.

“There were many things that were done to me at the time, and I kept fighting,” she recalls. “To the point that one of the male artists said, ‘You’re such a drag’. . . . In other words, ‘Why don’t you just shut up and sit pretty?’ ”

In the notorious “Bottoms” (1966), she edited together tight shots of the bare buttocks of 365 subjects walking on a treadmill. In “Fly” (1970), flies are tracked with a close-up lens as they walk around the body of a naked woman, with high-buzz vocals provided by Ono herself. (A funny account in the book “Loving John” by May Pang, a production assistant who became Lennon’s girlfriend during a low point in his marriage to Ono, reveals how the flies had to be gassed with carbon dioxide in order for them to crawl docilely on the model’s body.)

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Ono still lives on the seventh floor of the Dakota, the famous building she moved into with Lennon in 1973--the driveway was the site of Lennon’s murder in 1980.

She also has an office on the ground floor, and both spaces are liberally sprinkled with John Lennon memorabilia--music awards, photographs, an Andy Warhol painting of Lennon, and in the corner of the living room, the white piano that John played in the film version of “Imagine.”

Lennon would have been 60 this year, and Ono, as loyal keeper of the flame, has cooperated with and contributed to a number of commemorations. This month sees the opening of the John Lennon Museum just outside Tokyo and a major exhibition on Lennon at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Also this fall, three Lennon albums, including “Imagine,” will be re-released, and Lennon’s book “In His Own Write” and Ono’s “Grapefruit” will be reprinted by Simon & Schuster.

Her own art gets done between all the managing and administration of the Lennon estate. “I have a very mercurial character as an artist,” Ono admits, “and I can’t keep on repeating one pattern. I’ll be doing something, and then I get a totally different idea and jump to that.”

But art is what she keeps returning to, whether in the drawings and conceptual photography she’s taken up lately--there will be a wall of her recent biomorphic dot drawings in the exhibition--or in the music she continues to produce.

Perhaps Ono’s 1966 statement “To the Wesleyan People”( written in response to a discussion after a performance at Wesleyan University in Connecticut), comes as close to her creative manifesto as anything. In it, she wrote, “The natural state of the life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer . . . is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind.”

Ono agrees that this idea remains central to her. “Relaxation of the body, relaxation of the mind is not considered that important in this society,” she notes. “Western society is more into being a workaholic--the more work you do the better.”

In terms of her art, she says, “it’s nicer to give a kind of simple message that would give you inspiration, energy rather than give you a complex message that you have to delve into and exhaust yourself!” She laughs.

Also unchanged is Ono’s belief in the better world that could be, the world Lennon sang about in “Imagine.” When reminded that others shaped by the ‘60s have become disillusioned, Ono replies, “I’m not disillusioned at all. I really think that the most beautiful future is right there. Most people don’t see it, but it’s right there.”

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“Yes Yoko Ono,” Wednesday through Jan. 14, Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St., New York; (212) 832-1155.