The story goes that after leaving a recording session on November 8, 1966, John Lennon of the Beatles strolled into an installation in progress at the Indica Gallery in the Mayfair section of London. He was familiar with the place through his bandmate Paul McCartney and other acquaintances that included musician-producer Peter Asher, who co-owned the gallery with John Dunbar (husband of pop chanteuse Marianne Faithfull) and a third partner. Making his way around the space, Lennon perused such works as a ladder leading up to a painting fixed to the ceiling, where one could find a magnifying glass dangling on a chain. Viewers were encouraged to climb up and peer through the lens to find the word YES written on the canvas in tiny letters. (Speaking years later, Lennon said he was relieved to find that it didn’t say NO after the effort of seeing it.)
Dunbar introduced the artist to Lennon, who then examined another piece instructing gallerygoers to hammer a nail into it. When Lennon asked if he could give it a try, the artist initially demurred, preferring that the object remain untouched until the opening the next day, but then relented, saying that Lennon could proceed for a fee of five shillings. Lennon replied “Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” Thus, one of the most famous romances in rock-and-roll history was born.
The artist in question was Yoko Ono, and it is no surprise that her story’s intertwining with Lennon’s made her one of a handful of artists whose pop cultural reputations were commensurate with their oeuvres. But unlike her peers in this respect—Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, for example—Ono’s notoriety overshadowed her practice to the point of displacing it, thanks to her misogynistically conferred reputation as the woman who broke up the Beatles. Seen as little more than a character in a real-life soap opera, Ono was transformed from an artist into an artifact in the public imagination.
But Ono had already been a well-established figure in the postwar avant-garde by the time she met Lennon, due to her association with the Fluxus movement. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, Fluxus focused on process over product, becoming foundational to the development of the performance, conceptual, and video art that followed. Whatever else he might have thought of them, the works that Lennon encountered comported with the Fluxus ideology of merging art and life.
In the decades since Lennon’s 1980 murder at the hands of a delusional fan, Ono (as author, filmmaker, and musician as well as visual artist) has enjoyed a renewed admiration within the art world and beyond. The first significant Ono revival, for instance, occurred in 2000 with “YES,” a show at the Japan Society in New York that subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. In 2015 MoMA presented a survey of Ono’s work between 1960 and her “unofficial” MoMA debut in 1971: an unsanctioned one-woman show in which she released hundreds of perfume-soaked flies inside the museum, inviting visitors to follow them. This year London’s Tate Modern has mounted a major monograph spanning her practice from the mid 1950s to the present.
Welcome as these encomiums were, however, they often created the impression that her time with Lennon represented an interruption of her career, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As her 1971 intervention at MoMA makes clear, Ono pursued projects well after meeting Lennon. Moreover, he became her partner for various collaborations in which she took the lead (though some regard these efforts as celebrity hijinks). For these reasons, it’s worth taking another look at Ono’s life and art.