The ballad of John and Yoko
ou don’t have to trudge through all 468 minutes of Peter Jackson’s documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, to find it. The clip is part of the official trailer. There’s Yoko Ono, avant garde artist, musician, activist and then John Lennon’s girlfriend, later wife, hanging around the studio in 1969, dancing with him, laying out a blanket to sit in front of Paul Mccartney’s amplifier. And, tellingly, there’s Mccartney, at the tail end of their journey as a band. “It’s going to be such a comical thing, like in 50 years’ time,” he says, if people think “‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp’.”
Fifty-two years on, the throwaway comment seems oddly prescient. Ono didn’t break the Beatles up, but she’s long been cast as the villain in the fairytale, the conniving witch who stole Lennon away.
That connection has preceded every examination of Ono’s life and work, even this one. But over the last few years, her story has been getting a rewrite. Fans are finally seeing her in a fairer light, and as an artist and musician in her own right.
Ono has done little to hasten the reconsideration process. She does more screaming than singing. Her films meander without plot or plan. She rarely, if ever, talks about the Beatles. Fellow artists are stumped by her art. One painting instructs the viewer to burn it; another canvas invites you to walk all over it. Her instructional works call on you to participate — go out and look at the sky; carry a bag of peas and leave a pea wherever you go.
It’s the kind of work we’re only now identifying as crowdsourced, participatory, or performance art, says art critic Girish Shahane. Consider the Bed-ins for Peace in 1969, in which Ono and Lennon protested the Vietnam War by staying in bed and inviting the press in. “That was her idea more than Lennon’s,” says Shahane. “She was older than him — 35 to his 27 — an established artist and much more assured. It was symbiotic. He needed her creativity; she saw his fame as a way to spread a message.”
Half a century on, it was Ono’s “values of courage, peace and faith”, and “the power of collective will in bringing about change” that prompted Parul Vadehra of the Vadehra Art Gallery to invite her to their Delhi space.
The gallery marked its 25th year by hosting two of Ono’s shows, Our Beautiful Daughters and The Seeds, in 2011-2012. Viewers were invited to sew back a slashed canvas covered in Indian embroidery. Local artisans decorated casts of women’s bodies. “It was a learning experience for all of us, viewers included, to see how expansive Yoko Ono’s work has been,” Vadehra says.
Ono was 78 then. Vadehra recalls her being “present in the moment, courageous and driven by a steady commitment to her practice”. She recalls how, in a candid moment, Ono described the wave of hate towards her after Lennon was fatally shot in 1980, and how “she in turn channelled it into love and sent it back into the world”.
Now, even among Beatlemaniacs, things are different. Young fans care more about the music and less about why the band split up. Ono’s involvement or lack thereof is irrelevant. DJS remix her music at dance clubs. In a 1980 interview, Lennon admitted that Ono’s 1964 manual Grapefruit, which instructs readers to imagine a series of hypothetical scenes, inspired his ballad Imagine. She was finally listed in the writing credits in 2017.
Ono herself is being re-imagined, Shahane says. “Imagine if Lennon had survived. Yoko’s legacy would have been so different.”