Also on that list was a “wind house”,
in which all of the rooms would make a different noise. Back then Ono
had so many ideas that she didn’t know what to do with them — the
technology hadn’t been invented — other than show them to friends. In
1967, for her show at the Lisson Gallery in London, she rewrote the Light House concept. That was the year she met John Lennon, and the Beatle invited her to sterling silver jewelry lunch at his home in Weybridge, Surrey. He asked if she would build him a Light House
for his garden. She replied: “Oh, that was conceptual. I’m convinced
that one day it could be built, but I don’t know how to do it.”
“They were ideas you couldn’t create in one day,” Ono, now 76, reflects. “So it was better to just write it down.” Hence Grapefruit, “the pearl jewelry
book of instructions”, she says of her famous Sixties manual-cum-event.
“In other words, I’m saying, ‘I can’t do it, I have this idea, please
do it’.”
Another famous mid-Sixties work was No 4, aka Bottoms, a film that showed exactly what it said on the tin. Whose bums were they?
“Well, so many people,” Ono replies, laughing. “I don’t know if
they’d want me to mention them! That was really the London Sixties
bottoms.”
Famous Swinging Sixties bottoms?
“Yes! It was really like an incredible expression of energy.”
Is John Lennon’s bottom there?
“I don’t know,” she replies, giving a smile one feels obliged to describe as enigmatic.
Several years later, Ono would deploy nude body parts again, in an
installation piece called My Mummy was Beautiful. It featured images of
a breast and a vulva, and was made for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. Did
she expect the upset it caused?
“I was totally surprised! I said, ‘This is Liverpool, the freshwater pearl bracelet
birth of the Beatles and everything.’ Just a hip city, I thought. And I
was dedicating it to John because John was so much into his mother, you
know? And I thought people would love it. And I wanted to cover
Liverpool with beauty. And they didn’t think it was beauty!”
Even when she tries to do right by the Beatles and their legacy, it
seems that Ono will always be cast as the villain in some quarters. But
it’s hard to square the antipathy of some cultural observers with the
small, giggly, friendly woman sitting so close that our knees are
almost touching. It is Friday, October 9, 2009 and we are in a
Reykjavik hotel suite. This would have been John Lennon’s 69th
birthday. It is also the birthday of Ono and Lennon’s son Sean, who
turns 34.
Today — 42 years after Lennon first voiced his enthusiasm for Ono’s
light tower — on the small island of Videy, just offshore from the
Icelandic capital, the artwork will become reality. At 8pm, six mirrors
and nine searchlights will be turned on, shooting a beam high into the
sky. This is the Imagine Peace Tower. Inaugurated by Ono, Ringo Starr
and Olivia Harrison (widow of George) in 2007, it will stay lit until
December 8, the day of Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
Ono is dressed all in black; not widow’s weeds — the horizontal and
vertical prominence of her frankly remarkable décolletage further belie
that image — but the funky, utilitarian threads of the artist who still
feels compelled to work, despite her years and the countless millions
in the bank. Art work, peace work, memorial work: it’s what Ono does,
and she can’t imagine life without it. Little wonder, perhaps, that in
June she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for
Lifetime Achievement.
Musically, too, she’s super-busy: shortly after our trip she was
coming to the UK to film a contribution to this week’s episode of Later
… with Jools Holland, she’s a guest vocalist on Basement Jaxx’s new
album, and has just made an album produced by Sean Lennon and released
on his label. She’s also had a hand in a key soundtrack component of
Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood’s forthcoming biopic of the pearl jewelry wholesale
teenage John Lennon. In the field of music, too, Ono has earned another
lifetime achievement award this year, from Mojo magazine. All this
while approving the myriad details involved in the release in September
of The Beatles: Rock Band.
So many questions … First, though: why are we in Iceland? “I wasn’t
intending to, it just happened,” she says, her girlish and airy-fairy
response at odds with a woman (in)famous for her steely business mind.
“In the beginning I was incredulous, when they invited me to do a
museum show here, why would I go to Iceland?” she continues in an
English that is still heavily accented and still circuitous 60 years
after leaving Japan. “And this curator was very intelligent — he said,
‘Well, two thirds of the Icelandic people have the experience of
publishing their own writings.’ Two thirds!” she exclaims. “I come from
a land with so many illiterate people you have to put them in a bag and
drag them around . . .” I think she means, in her singular style, that
this is — or was in the Fifties — how one makes the Japanese read books.
“And I came here,” she says, gesturing out of her window at Viday
island and the mountains beyond, “and it was beautiful. The land was
clean, the water was clean, the air was clean.”
Also, ’s a] totally different type of people here — sort of like a
land of gnomes or a land of wizards!” Ono adds, with more affection and
less patronising intent than it might seem from her words. “So I
thought it was very interesting. And I fell in love with this place.
And of course it’s the northernmost land on the map. And north is
wisdom and power. You want to give that power and wisdom to the whole
world from the north, you know.” She stretches out her arms and draws
them down. “So that’s why I thought it was very good place to have the
tower.”
Somebody up above must agree with her: just before our interview,
there was a brief lull in the violent storm outside and a rainbow
filled the horizon. It seemed to touch earth right on Viday. Ono was
delighted by this, not least because she seems to have an affection for
the sky. Her album is called Between My Head and the Sky. Her last UK
exhibition, held at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead earlier this year
after its debut in Germany, was entitled Between the Sky and my Head.
Why, I ask her, does she like the sky so much?
“My theories are so far-fetched that you are not gonna think it’s
serious. But I think that we all came from another planet. Some of us
were probably here. And the sky is the passageway. And so I feel like
the sky is the passage to my home planet.”
This is similar to the theory of exogenesis, an idea that the
cosmically inclined British rock band Muse also explore on their new
album. Has she always believed this?
“Yes.”
Why does she believe in it?
“I don’t know. There was some proof — the things I was thinking,
even when I was very young, about 4 or 5. I got inspired by all these
ideas, which was not of this planet.” She clarifies, a bit. “I didn’t
think they were coming from another planet, but coming from me who
probably had different roots.”
So she’s an example of a kind of interstellar reincarnation? She nods.
A few hours later, just before the lighting of the Imagine Peace
Tower, a small crowd, including the mayor of Reykjavik, gathers in the
hotel’s eighth-floor function suite. Ono, unstinting activist that she
is, is bolstering the Imagine Peace Tower message with the spreading of
the “ONOCHORD” message. That is, “I LOVE YOU” blinked out, Morse-code
style, using little torches that she is distributing.
Kyoko, Ono’s daughter by her second husband, the American film
producer Anthony Cox, is also here, with her two children. After Ono
and Cox split before her 1969 marriage to Lennon, Cox kidnapped Kyoko
and raised her in a religious cult. Mother and daughter were estranged
for years, reuniting in 1994, but “we have a very good relationship
now”.
Of the ups and downs of her life, she says: “I thought it was
strange that so many challenges were given to me.” Her losses, it seems
— of her family, her daughter, of John Lennon — were channelled into
her art. “I know. I’m so thankful that I have that, otherwise I would
have gone crazy. That was the shell pearl jewelry only thing I could do, if I wanted to survive. My back was up against the wall.”
Sean Lennon is here too, with a small group of hipster New York
friends. Ono said she encouraged her children to accompany her as a
show of solidarity with an Iceland bankrupted by the financial crisis.