Yoko Ono a Kind of Meeting Point
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Yoko Ono A Kind of Meeting Point This episode focuses on Yoko Ono (b. 1933). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artists Catherine Lord and Sanford Biggers. In an interview from 1990, Ono reflects on her childhood in Japan, her years on the international avant-garde scene, and how her marriage to John Lennon affected the reception of her work. Additional Resources ◆ Barbara Rose Papers Finding Aid (http://archives2.getty.edu:8082/xtf/view ?docId=ead/930100/930100.xml) Transcript Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity. Original interview: Barbara Rose interview with Yoko Ono, 1990, box 11, C104, Barbara Rose papers, 930100, Getty Research Institute. YOKO ONO: I don’t make plans so much, so— [she chuckles] My plan now is to do this show, and then something will inspire me. HELEN MOLESWORTH: This is Recording Artists, a podcast from the Getty dedicated to exploring art and artists through the archives of the Getty Research Institute. I’m your host Helen Molesworth. In this season we focus on audio interviews with six women artists whose lives span the twentieth century. These recordings were made by the New York-based art critic Cindy Nemser and art historian Barbara Rose. Most of these interviews come from the 1960s and ’70s, in the midst of the civil rights movement and the feminist revolution. Hearing these artists in their own words talk about their work and about their experiences as women making art is a revelation. This episode focuses on Yoko Ono. Barbara Rose interviewed her in 1990. Ono was 57 years old. I’ve invited the artists Catherine Lord and Sanford Biggers to listen to these tapes with me. Catherine once performed Ono’s famous work Cut Piece, and Sanford 1 has always been interested in incorporating music and performance into his work. Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933 to an affluent banking family. The war years in Japan were difficult ones and Ono and her younger brother were sent to live in the countryside to avoid the Allied bombing of major Japanese cities. War time deprivation took its toll; food shortages affected everyone. Her recollections of this period are marked by extreme hunger. Her response was to imagine meals with her brother. Ono recalls it as follows: “Lying on our backs, looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof, we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of imagination to survive.” Ono was 12 when the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fire-bombed Tokyo. The post-war American occupation of Japan would have a transformative effect on Japanese culture. It installed a democratic system of government, as well as an American education system. It loosened cultural restrictions on women and their sexual expression. But it was also a period of intense deprivation and continued starvation. American soldiers raped thousands of Japanese women in the southern islands of the archipelago. And there was a ban on all images that showed the horrific effects of the atomic bombs on human beings— images of people with melted flesh, their clothing hanging off their bodies in tattered strips from the intensity of the explosion. This censorship was lifted only after the Americans left in 1952. In 1953, after Ono had completed two years of study in one of Tokyo’s most prestigious universities, she left Japan for New York, where she continued her studies at Sarah Lawrence College. Interested in music from a young age, she was soon introduced to the work of avant-garde composers Arnold Schonberg and Anton Webern. But the energy of New York City prompted her to leave school. As she tells Barbara Rose: ONO: I was a dropout from Sarah Lawrence. I went three years of Sarah Lawrence. So usually you don’t drop out after three years, but I just couldn’t stand the next full year. I just thought that was so crazy to stay there, because exciting things were happening. I was very influenced with twelve-tone music when I was writing songs in Sarah Lawrence. And my teacher Andre Singer was saying, “You know, your stuff is getting very far out and all that, and there’s some very experimental group of people in New York who are doing things.” And that’s when I first heard John Cage’s name. He was saying, “John Cage and those people. And maybe you’d like to be with those people, because my teaching is more classical,” kind of. MOLESWORTH: With her clear interest in twelve-tone and experimental music at Sarah Lawrence, Ono was already avant-garde as a student. Her professor Andre Singer understood that New York’s experimental composers, and John Cage in particular, would help her grow. She met Cage not long after through her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi. ONO: And then there was a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall, of Stefan Wolpe, and I think Toshi, my first husband, played his work, I think. And it was a joint concert with John Cage. That’s how I met John Cage. MOLESWORTH: John Cage had an enormous influence in the art scene of downtown New York. Barbara Rose pressed Ono about it. 2 BARBARA ROSE: What effect did he have on you? ONO: There was a Zen Buddhist, a very advanced Zen Buddhist called Dr. Suzuki. And he was doing a lecture in Columbia University, and we went to that. And of course, Cage was there, too, and we were sort of talking about things. And then I started to understand Cage’s music theory, and I was very startled. Because I was a philosophy student in a Japanese university before I went to Sarah Lawrence. So just from a logical, philosophical point of view, I thought his philosophy underneath it was very interesting. MOLESWORTH: Ono’s status as a Japanese national, combined with the popularity of Zen Buddhism among her avant-garde friends in New York—many of whom were processing the teachings of Dr. Suzuki—meant that her work was frequently understood within the framework of Buddhism. Although she tended to complicate such an easy narrative of cause and effect. ROSE: Do you feel that your perceptions or your point of view and your art is still very influenced by Japanese culture? ONO: Oh, definitely. Well, but I mean, the same thing goes for when I’m interviewed in Japan. [Rose: Mm-hm] They naturally assume that I’m influenced by Western culture. So it’s a happy medium, I think. [she chuckles] You know? ROSE: Well, it’s— Yeah. I mean, [inaudible]— ONO: The world is getting smaller and smaller. ROSE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. ONO: And I really think that we’re all influenced by each other, in that sense. MOLESWORTH: I asked artist and writer Catherine Lord about this clip. CATHERINE LORD: What was the question that Rose asks first? MOLESWORTH: Rose asks, “Do you feel that your perceptions or your point of view in your art is still very influenced by Japanese culture?” [Lord laughs] Why’d you laugh? LORD: Oh, boy. It’s as if the whole sort of weight, the burden of global conflict and structural racism just descends on the conversation. Like, why would she have to choose? MOLESWORTH: Right. And I love Ono’s, you know, “The world is getting smaller and smaller.” LORD: Yes. And I love her politeness. I mean, she doesn’t say anything that I’ve just said; she just answers deftly. MOLESWORTH: Ono’s notion that everyone was being “influenced by each other” was born of her peripatetic life. She had been moving back and forth between Japan and the United States since she was a child. When she joined up with the avant-garde music and performance scene in New York, she connected with a group of artists who were moving somewhat effortlessly around the globe. Indeed, Ono’s cosmopolitan outlook was highly regarded, because the vanguardism of these artists meant they wanted to be citizens of the world. Even though her artistic milieu was small, Ono was at the center of it. By 1960 she and the composer La Monte Young were hosting concerts and performances in Ono’s downtown loft. According to John Cage, “Yoko 3 became an important person in the New York avant-garde. People came from long distances to attend the performances. They were the most interesting things going on.” One reason Ono’s loft became such a focal point of the downtown New York scene was her early embrace of ideas that could later be identified with Fluxus. Generally speaking, Fluxus was a group of artists, musicians, and performers interested in breaking down the boundary between performer and audience. They tended to be interested in the process of making an event rather than the production of a discrete art object. Ono was one of the first artists to use an instruction-based method of making art. These works troubled the boundary between artist and viewer by offering prompts for viewers to perform various activities, essentially asking the viewer to perform some of the labor typically reserved for the artist. Her two most important forays into this realm occurred in 1964 with her book Grapefruit and her performance Cut Piece. Grapefruit was published first in Japan 1964, and then again in a radically different form, with a mainstream press in the United States and England in 1970. The 1970 edition is a small book, in the shape of a square, with a bright lemon-yellow cover.