One Thousand Days of Yoko Ono

Uh, why is everybody so weird and sexist about Yoko Ono?

As any person in the public long for as long as her, Yoko Ono has lived through many seasons of media circus, decades of open speculation and discussion about the minutia of her life, family and relationships, and a bespoke industry dedicated to slandering her for the sake of scorned Beatlemaniacs. In the public imagination, much of her legacy is intwined with that of her late husband, John Lennon, co-frontman and founder of The Beatles. Ono is variably imagined as the cause for the band’s breakup, a dominating wife who pushed Lennon away from his friends, and a strange, speechless interlocutor who insisted on involving her incomprehensible art with that of the band’s.

In this discourse Ono’s work is almost unilaterally discredited. At 91, Ono has been artistically and politically active since the early 1960s; she is considered most tied to, and thusly most prolific in the Fluxus movement and broader conceptual art space. Her most known performance work, 1964’s Cut Piece, is considered essential canon for contemporary art writ large; dressed in fine clothing, she would sit, silently, and permit attendees to take a set of scissors to her clothing. Her work deals extensively with feminist themes, otherness, serendipity, optimism and peace.

…For the public, though, there are few worser things that the spouse of a famous male artist can do than be independently skilled. Fluxus and the conceptual art space, particularly in the performance art medium, had a much fairer proportion of women than most contemporary art movements. 60’s Rock music was a boys club with fangirls in the seats and the tour busses.

Ono was one of a group of feminists, as well as one of the foundationally important Japanese women in the space, drawing on her childhood during the second world war to motivate her pacifism and feminist values. To this point, in life John Lennon extensively cited Ono’s work as influential of his own later corpus, most clearly seen in the albums, creative countercultural protests and artwork they produced in their married life.

Often, critics of Ono draw on racism and xenophobia to exoticize Ono and the avant-garde nature of her work, a parasitic product of Lennon’s well-documented 60s orientalist tendencies. Tabloids regularly produced expressly racist discussion of her strangeness, alternately painting her as silent and emotionally dependent on Lennon, or as a stereotypical Dragon Lady. These two volleys were partly inspired by pro-nativist trends in an increasingly conservative postwar England and the United States, though anti-Asian racism in the United States was particularly potent during and after the war.

This tenant of her identity is particularly important in contrast to other Beatles spouses and girlfriends; though often the source of sexist vitriol from fans, Ono’s identity, artistically and personally, was directly in the crosshairs of pardoned populist bigotry.

Of course, Ono’s false legacy as the agent of the Beatles’s dissolution which has kept this image of her in the public consciousness for decades to come, further entwined with Lennon’s murder in 1980 grimly sending hopes of a Beatles reunion into rock legend.

Perhaps best seen in the 1970 Let It Be documentary, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and featuring the recording sessions of The Beatles’ final studio album of the same name, are the true causes of the band’s dissolution. Despite its limited focus on the subject, the film provides a representative sample of the tremendous tension between John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the co-leads of the project, as well as George Harrison’s turn to solo songwriting. At time of recording, the band had produced each Beatle as a starkly creatively distinct musician in his own right. Along with this, tensions in the running of the band brought the motion to dissolve the band.

In this, Ono is hardly a factor. Conversely, John Lennon is partly responsible for absorbing credit for her work and ideas, largely unintentionally, by virtue of Ono’s status as his muse. Lennon, as he continually affirmed throughout his life, has Ono to credit for much of the later creative success of his work.

Lennon’s figurehead status in the counterculture movement was in part led by Ono’s conceptual arts influence, leading to their famous series of anti-Vietnam War “bed-ins”, elaborating on sit-in and die-in protest techniques. Many of their public appearances and performances explicitly followed the tenants of Fluxus “happenings”, the operative public-facing performance mode in the movement. Ono is also not only in duet with Lennon in his preeminent 1971 song, Imagine, but credited by Lennon as the inspiration for both the lyrical content and its meaning, drawing from her poetry and childhood experiences.

Ono is neither the first, nor last, to suffer this particular form of public scapegoating. Fourteen years after the murder of John Lennon, the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would draw a similar flood of ire, suspicion and abuse towards his widow, Hole singer and guitarist Courtney Love. Both women had been pigeonholed into the position of muse for troubled genius spouses. In turn, as women with confrontational, challenging art and countercultural sensibilities, public scorn had long since developed for their perceived inability to meet sexist standards of wifely duty and supportiveness. It is little more than Victorian-esque sexism that posits that the widow’s job is in the mourning of her husband, deferring in all things to the men in her life.

Even under these pretexts, Ono has spent decades celebrating both Lennon’s corpus alone, as well as their shared works. Though Lennon is critiqued for the minutia of his quite-public private life and effusiveness, he is ultimately permitted to be a famous musician, genius and countercultural hero. In this image, his flaws are only in service of humanizing him just enough to spur the love of his fans, to mediate his genius to the masses in the guise of men.

Yoko Ono is not, as it were, a perfect wife, mother or person. As an artist and public figure, many of her mistakes have been made in full view of the public. Public discourse about her life and legacy sees her only as a barrier to her late husband’s genius, rather than as an artist both independent and in companion to his work. Despite this, where she is celebrated, the full breadth of her work comes to life; ultimately, her messages of peace and optimism require her confrontational spirit, which continues to burn towards greater, more hopeful ends.

Take me back home!

Oh, oops, nothing here.