Riff: How I Learned to Love Yoko Ono

Illustration by Tom Gauld

Yoko Ono is not pretty, she is not easy, her paintings aren't recognizable, her voice is not melodious, her films are without plot and her Happenings make no sense. One of her paintings you are told to sleep on. One of her paintings you are told to burn. One of her paintings isn't a painting at all — it's you going outside and looking at the sky. Most of her stuff is not even there. This is why I love her. This is why we need her. We have too much stuff already. It clutters our view, inward and outward.

We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, she commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete. We already have a billion lovely things and a million amazing artists who have honed their talent and have lorded it above us. People who have achieved the highest of the possible. People wearing their roles as artist or writer or filmmaker or spokesman as a suit of armor or as an invisibility cloak or as an intimidatingly, unacquirably tasteful outfit.

Even other artists can't figure out Ono or accept her as legit, nor can she obey the club rules. Her stuff is all wrong. She tells you to spend a whole year coughing. Listen to a two-minute song of recorded silence, music lovers. As for you, the most imperialist and arms-profiteering superpower in the history of the world, give peace a chance.

There are two schools of art. One is what is made beautiful by the artist; the other is to make way for the viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful.

The first is to make something ornate and unreachably special with skills. The viewer or listener is awed, their belief regarding the order of things is confirmed and they are reminded by this unachievable beauty of their own powerlessness. And I do love that kind of art, the beautiful kind.

The other way to make art is to tear down what's between us and nature, us and eternity, us and the realization that everything is already perfect. In this experience of art, the viewer or listener loses respect for the current order or arrangement of civilization and thus becomes powerful, like King Kong, and outside civilization, like God — or simply like the shuffling janitor who is pleased with his own work and sleeps well.

I always admired the Japanese use of negative space in decorating and the unspoken in conversations (or so I gather from old films). Ono uses the negative positively. She is a classically trained operatic student who uses silence or screeches in her singing; a recipient of coveted gallery showings who hangs unpainted canvases with requests for you to pound holes in them or to walk on them. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, and could travel the world discoursing multisyllabically, yet instead she tries lying in bed and not lifting a finger to cure a war.

It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcomed sounds at the drop of a hat. She could sing; she knows how. And being a Beatles wife could have been a magic charm — but she wasn't interested. It takes willpower to overpower the will to power. To be accepted, to be thought nice, is traditionally woman's power. That is something Ono doesn't need.

She uses nonexistence in art, and she uses absence in her private life. Her first husband was the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. They grew apart then flew apart. Her second husband, the film producer and promoter Tony Cox, same thing. Only he took their daughter, Kyoko, and hid with her, joining a religious cult.

At first Ono allowed her third husband, John Lennon, to do what came naturally to him: to hunt for the lost daughter through private detectives and the courts. Only after John's death, when Ono wrote an open letter to her grown daughter, saying how deeply she loved her but that "you should not feel guilty if you choose not to reach me" and that she would no longer try to locate Kyoko, did her daughter slowly come back into her life.

This essay was adapted from "Reaching Out With No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono," published this month by Backbeat Books.

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