Yoko Ono In The Financial Times
At Ikebukuro station, they sell newspapers and one of them is the FT at 600 yen, thus I rarely buy it, but it is there, and I sneak a look, getting a peak at the headlines. This weekend I was going to Tokyo so I bought it, and hey, the Simon Schama interview was a bonus. For 600 yen, there is a lot to read, indeed. I like how the lady that sells the pink rag by the tracks agrees with me, "Yes, it is expensive..." But, as we head out to the 'woods, we like a good read, nes pa?
Ft.com: Yoko Ono talks to... But had she not been Mrs John Lennon, would the world have heard of Yoko Ono? The answer, says Simon Schama, is YES
Ft.com: Yoko Ono talks to... But had she not been Mrs John Lennon, would the world have heard of Yoko Ono? The answer, says Simon Schama, is YES
In
a cold-water apartment on Chambers Street, New York, she gave a series
of performances and concerts in which minimalist “instructions” and
transient experiences replaced the static, monumental pretensions of
framed pictures. The prompted eye and the receptive brain made the
pictures instead. The technique was lovely, liberating and genuinely
innovative. “I thought art should be like science, always discovering
things afresh, and I wanted to be Madame Curie.”
So
when she and Lennon had their momentous encounter at Indica in 1966,
Ono was already established as an avant-garde conceptual artist. She
insists she really had no idea who he was or what he did. “I just saw
this rather attractive guy who seemed to be taking my work very
seriously”. Of pop music she knew nothing, “not even of Elvis Presley;
just maybe some jazz.” Of what was about to hit them both out there in
Beatlemania land she had no clue. “I was naïve. We both were ... we
thought that it was going to be really great.” It wasn’t. “My work
totally disappeared and John, with all that power he had, was going to
go down too.” She falls quiet for a moment; a flicker of sadness
clouding the wide, expressively sunny face. “I feel very badly if maybe I
was the cause of it.”
But then she remembers good things: the long night through which she
and Lennon produced the first Plastic Ono Band album “full of things not
done before”. Dawn light was coming through the window. “We did feel
like Monsieur and Madame Curie, trying to change the world. I know this
pride can be considered arrogance but isn’t that the reason to live?”
She also remembers making the film in which – eventually – the impish,
sometimes enigmatic Lennon face resolves itself into a wicked grin. And
then you realise that Yoko Ono is really still, for all the world and
for all her past, not so much a near-octogenarian as an ageless child
for whom a smile is actually a work of art that no one, not even among
the loaded readers of the FT, is rich enough to buy at auction.
‘Yoko Ono: TO THE LIGHT’ is at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2, from June 19 to September 9, www.serpentinegallery.org
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