The question of Yoko Ono’s marriage to John Lennon sits like a water buffalo at the center of any conversation about her eight decades of work as an artist. It is oversized, hairy, imposing, impossible to ignore, tricky to get around. Do you tiptoe past it, slink away from it, or approach it head-on?
As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?
Ono and John Lennon hold their marriage certificate.Bettmann/Getty Images.
You try to wish such conjecture away, but then comes a swarm of pesky subconcerns, such as: Had Ono not become the world’s foremost widow in 1980, after Lennon’s murder (she has been known to compare herself to Coretta Scott King and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), would the general public care about her work? Does Ono deserve to be considered, as she often is, a footnote in postwar art, a minor figure cited in catalog essays about Fluxus or conceptualism or performance art? Or a brief mention in the context of avant-garde music, a secondary player in the exalted milieu of John Cage and La Monte Young? Or a passing reference in conversations about 1960s art films, which inevitably focus on Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner?
If we can imagine an alternative art history in which Ono did not become the iconic, reclusive queen in her Dakota tower, perhaps we can imagine her as a semi-obscure artist surfacing in oral testimonies about the New York art scene in the early 1960s—a reliably great, insightful interview. And maybe, in time, this boundary-pushing woman artist from an unabashedly patriarchal era—the creator of such performance works as Cut Piece and Bag Piece, and the conceptual films Fly, Bottoms, and Rape—would finally be getting her due, in the manner of the formerly undersung Judy Chicago and Niki de Saint Phalle.
If Ono’s marriage to Lennon is the water buffalo, then these other nagging questions are a swarm of gnats that is awfully hard to wave away. To walk through the new career-spanning retrospective Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, at London’s Tate Modern (on view until September 1), is to feel them nipping at you until they are practically an element of the art itself. As inconvenient as they are, they are an inescapable reality of Ono’s complicated, rich, many-chaptered life and career, and her enduring influence. (She has inspired generations of artists and musicians, from Pipilotti Rist to Sonic Youth to Lady Gaga to, well, John Lennon.) You may begin to feel that they make the experience of Ono’s work that much more complex—vexed, layered, frustrating, surprising. Until some distant, Ozymandian future, this is simply the fate of the woman Lennon himself described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist.”
Louis Menand once observed that “Ono may have leveraged her celebrity—but so what? She never compromised her art.” The Tate Modern retrospective shows a singular artist following a singular inner voice. As for her outer voice, there are opportunities to sample that as well: A room is outfitted with listening stations for visitors to get a taste of Ono’s long, parallel career as a classically trained musical explorer whose work has spanned genres, from experimental (before and with Lennon) to rock (with Lennon) to dance club (after Lennon). Ono, in fact, has gone on to score an astounding 18 Top 10 dance-club hits in the 21st century, the most recent being “Hell in Paradise 2016,” which reached number one. (Her son, Sean Lennon, may not have achieved that level of commercial success, but he is a similarly inventive and sui generis musician-songwriter, having recently collaborated with Paul McCartney’s son, James, on a song called “Primrose Hill.”) The ever-acerbic rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that Ono “couldn’t carry a tune in a briefcase.” But hearing—and watching—her wail, squeal, and yelp in, say, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, or during the Plastic Ono Band’s 1969 concert in Toronto, or on the 1981 downtown club staple “Walking on Thin Ice” (released two months after Lennon’s death), you can’t help but think that, compared to the posturing male rock stars surrounding her, Ono was just…beyond.
In the era of “woke,” the position feels naive, easy, privileged—cringey. (You can’t help but remember Elton John’s friendly parody of Lennon and Ono’s 1971 utopian anthem, “Imagine”: “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do / One is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes.”) Then again, plenty of demonstrations, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, and campus protests during the ensuing five decades have fallen well short of their goals. So perhaps Ono and Lennon were onto something, even at the modest level of offering an overly obvious choice—peace!—to the global public. As Ono put it, “We’re using our money to advertise our ideas so that peace has equal power with the meanies who spend their money to promote war.”
