Interview: Yoko Ono on her Newcastle visit
Dec 15 2008 By David Whetstone, The Journal
Yoko Ono explains to David Whetstone why she was so intrigued to visit Gateshead and Newcastle.
Later, perched on the edge of a red sofa in a Baltic office, she explains: “I was married to a musician so I’m always concerned about buskers.”
I have to smile. In the 20th Century’s conceptual hall of fame, the late John Lennon is probably acknowledged as more than just “a musician”.
But where does this leave the woman who became his second wife on March 20, 1969, in Gibraltar? On every Lennon/Beatles website, Yoko is at least a footnote.
Some have blamed her for the break-up of the group they called the Fab Four, driving a wedge between John and the rest. More generous pundits have pointed to the meeting of John and Yoko as a positive thing and the break-up of The Beatles as inevitable.
Yoko, who smiles a lot and speaks softly, is framed within the arc of the Tyne Bridge, visible through the picture window behind her head.
“I’m so thrilled I came because seeing is believing,” she says. “It is so important, the message of Newcastle and Gateshead. It is very interesting what has happened here.”
By its nature, the Yoko Ono exhibition which opened at Baltic yesterday – and which she confirms is her biggest in the UK – will evolve. So much is required of the public that what you see on March 15, when it closes, will be bigger and busier than what you see this week.
I wonder if she’d be curious enough to come back and see how people have responded to her artistic challenges.
“I’d like to come back because Newcastle and Gateshead, both of them, I know from reports in the newspapers. But when you actually come here, you really feel something about it. There’s an incredible power, so I am very interested in that.”
But back to the question of identity. If you thought of Yoko Ono principally as the widow of a rock superstar, you will find evidence in this huge and entertaining exhibition that she has always merited public attention in her own right.
She thinks maybe she came to Newcastle in the 1960s. “I have been to many different cities but I believe Newcastle asked me to give a lecture.” John was in the city in the 1960s, I say. I’ve seen the pictures of screaming girls at the City Hall. Quickly she says: “This was before John.”
When they met in 1966 in London, he was famous and she had already made waves in avant garde art circles.
I wonder if her marriage to Lennon, which ended violently with his murder in 1980, overshadowed her progress as an artist.
“In a way, yes,” she says. “But I think the most important thing for an artist is to not dry up. You have to keep the creativity and inspiration. I was with John and we were so much in love and we exchanged so much between us. He was from Liverpool, I come from Tokyo – very different environments. But that exchange was very important to me.”
Much of the work we see at Baltic, she says, would probably be much as it was even if her fateful meeting with Lennon in a London art gallery had never taken place. But she acknowledges the power of fame.
“Many of the pieces would be the same because I was already a conceptual artist. But I don’t know how much the message would have communicated in terms of distance and volume.” The word “participatory” figures in many of the captions to the Baltic exhibits.
She says: “I think this was very important for me because I observed most artists had an incredible ego. They just wanted everything to be just so for eternity. As a rebel, which I was, I didn’t like that. That’s one of the reasons John and I met, because we were both rebels.”
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko’s mother was a painter and her father was “a very good pianist”.
“I had two uncles and one was a painter and one was a sculptor and there was this atmosphere of art in my life. But I wanted not to become one of the clones of them so I had to find my own way. I became avant garde whereas they were classical. I wouldn’t say they approved but they were very intelligent and kind.”
She recalls, though, that her mother was also “rather domineering” when it came to art. Young Yoko would start to draw and her mother would want to show her how it should be done.
So Yoko asks everyone to take part. In one famous early piece of performance art, she invited people to cut pieces of her clothes away until she was left naked. I ask Yoko to explain the title of the exhibition,
This sounds a bit religious, I suggest. Yoko says: “I’d say I’m what you’d call an agnostic. I feel I believe in my kind of power but I feel God is within us – if there is such a thing.”
Love and peace are the messages John and Yoko promulgated and they remain dominant themes in Yoko’s work.
Onochord, the public work she orchestrated last night in Baltic Square, has been done many times since the 9/11 atrocity. “After that,” she recalls, “I went around the world like crazy, probably about 20 cities a year, and just did that. I keep doing it to spread the word.”
She and John campaigned against the war in Vietnam and now we have Iraq, Afghanistan and war zones aplenty. Yet she seems sweetly nonplussed when I ask if it makes her pessimistic that there are still so many warmongers in the world.
“We are not trying to twist their arms to make them do something,” she says.
“I really think we have to be patient. I really think that now 99% of the world is really wanting peace and only the 1% is trying to make a big mess out of the place.
“I believe the world where we can all live in love and peace is just around the corner.”
For Yoko, the glass is always much more than half full.
Page 2: Between the sky and my head, at Baltic until March 15
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