Yoko Ono is ninety years old. Many people only know her as John Lennon's widow or as the lady who killed the Beatles. Fans referred to her as "the bad witch from the Beatles fairy tale." But many people are unaware that Yoko Ono was a well-known avant-garde artist, feminist, and musician long before she married John Lennon.
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| Yoko Ono |
Yoko Ono is widely regarded as a conceptual art pioneer in the art world. She exhibited at the world's most prestigious institutions. She was last spotted in Germany in 2019 at the "Peace is Power" exhibition in Leipzig. Several of her works are challenging and uncomfortable.
Despite this, the most of us only know Yoko as John Lennon's wife and peace campaigner. Her "Bed-In for Peace" protest act is particularly well-known.
For their honeymoon in 1969, she and John Lennon hired hotel rooms for one week each in Amsterdam and Montreal. And remained in bed.
She experiments with provocation in her most well-known feminist performance, Cut Piece. Yoko Ono sat on the platform of New York's Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, holding a pair of scissors. The audience should approach her on stage and cut bits of her clothing off. Several others did as well.
A swarm of guys snipped the artist's outfit. She ends up appearing shamed and terrified at the camera while holding her hands in front of the ripped bra.
The performance is remembered as a "cut piece" since it was captured on film. Yoko Ono exposes herself to harm and commits crimes in order to bring them to light. This concept would go on to inspire well-known performance artists like Marina Abramovic.
The tabloids frequently mocked and tore her as a musician. Only her Christmas feel-good song "Merry XMas (War is Done)" and her duet with John Lennon, "Give Peace a Chance," are well-known. Yoko Ono was already musical as a youngster, having learned to play the piano at a young age. She studied composition at Sarah Lawrence University in New York as a young lady.
Yoko Ono likewise relies on loudness as a musician: Beatles fans labeled her the "wicked witch in the Beatles fairy tale". A kind of sexism and anti-Asian prejudice. And Yoko Ono transforms this anger into art.
Yoko Ono sings at the age of 70 "I am, indeed, a witch. I'm a jerk. Whatever you say, I don't care. My voice is genuine, my voice is the truth. I don't belong in your world ".
For 50 years, she has screamed and sang against violence and misogyny with the "Plastic Ono Band," and screaming has become her own form of expression. As a result, she influenced numerous artists.
Yet Yoko Ono's work extends beyond music, performance art, and video art; she also writes poems. "Grapefruit" is a book in which she compiles ideas for performances, drawings, and poetry.
Without our knowledge, certain sentences from the book are quite widely known in a changed version. For John Lennon's well-known song "Imagine", the artist was influenced by sections from "Grapefruit".
Yoko Ono's son, musician Sean Ono Lennon, 47, is producing a virtual replica of her installation "Wish Tree" on her 90th birthday.
Since the construction of her first wishing tree in 1996, Ono has collected almost two million wishes from over 200 trees in 35 countries. Individuals should put their own peace wishes on a sheet of paper and tie it to a tree.
But what about the birthday child's future hopes and plans? In an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk, she stated that she had no future intentions.