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Yoko Ono - Part 2
179 Plays6 months ago
Here we are! Part 2 of our episode dedicated to Yoko Ono's retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern, Music of the Mind. We cannot believe we managed to talk about the exhibition but... we used our imagination, and so will you. Follow us virtually in this exploration of Ono's life and work, and, more importantly, her exhibition. We focus on the highlights (for us) as it would be near impossible to talk about everything. There are so many delightful details and pieces that will speak to everyone differently.
To find out more about it, go to: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono
@yokoono
Music: Sarturn.
@exhibitionistas_podcast
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Transcript
Yoko Ono's Retrospective Exhibition
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the second part of our two-part episode dedicated to Yoko Ono's retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern, Music of the Mind. The exhibition was curated by Juliet Bingham and Patricia Dander. It is a co-production of two institutions, Tate Modern and Kunstamlung Nordrein Westfallen. It is open until the 1st of September, so run, go there, go there often if you can.
00:00:39
Speaker
Just a heads up, content warning. We do briefly mention suicide, so if this is something you'd rather skip, just do it. There are other episodes out there for you. We are recording a brand new one in a few days. So I will not keep you waiting any longer. This is a packed episode with seemingly impossible chess games and butts. Lots and lots of butts. Enjoy the episode.
Introduction to 'Exhibitionistas' Podcast
00:01:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Exhibitionistas, the podcast where we explore the work of an artist through their solo exhibition. This week is part two of the Music of the Mind exhibition at the Tate Modern with work by the incomparable Yoko Ono.
Yoko Ono's Early Artistic Life
00:01:32
Speaker
When we left you last time, it was 1962 and Ona was hosting avant-garde event gatherings in the loft on Chamber Street, New York. She was chucking jello at the wall. She was almost burning the place down after she lit the paper on fire.
00:01:49
Speaker
She was there with the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor, Terry Riley, and Lamont Young. I mean, it was just a who's who of the art world in the 60s that we're all kind of coming to her loft and experimenting with avant-garde art.
00:02:07
Speaker
I have to say, I just read in the catalogue that Marcel Duchamp was there as well. Yes, I saw that too. It's quite a thing. Huge, absolutely huge. So she had also rebelled against her parents and married a Japanese composer, Toshi Ichinagi,
00:02:28
Speaker
with whom she had a creative partnership as well as a romantic partnership.
Artworks Challenging the Mind
00:02:33
Speaker
But that was kind of coming to the end at the end of our last episode. They were drifting apart. We had also just stepped into our exhibition at the Tate where we saw her wishing trees and discussed how they might speak to one's higher mind as they entered the exhibition. We watched her burn a match on film to a soundtrack of inaudible music ever challenging right from the start.
00:02:57
Speaker
So this week will take you through her artistic inspiration in the 60s and 70s and through some of the highlights of the exhibition. It's way too massive to talk about in full, but fear not. Those of you in London, you'll have a chance to see it at the Tate until it closes on the 1st of September. I know that I will be going back for sure.
00:03:17
Speaker
And those of you who are new to the podcast, welcome.
Hosts Introduction and Corrections
00:03:21
Speaker
It's such a thrill to see more and more of you listening in. I cannot tell you the joy it brings us to see more of you coming along. And thank you for all of those who have been spending your time with us thus far. As you might know, I'm Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer and a co-host of this podcast.
00:03:41
Speaker
And I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, your co-host. I am an independent curator and writer. And I'm delighted to continue with part two of this outstanding artist who is finally getting her due with this retrospective exhibition. Her life is so tumultuous, so rich that, of course, I was bound to get something wrong. Mark, mark, mark. I mentioned in the last episode that a former assistant of hers and John Lennon
00:04:10
Speaker
had just released a documentary. Indeed, it is called The Lost Weekend, A Love Story, and I misnamed her as Amy Pank. Her correct name is Mae Pank. So the documentary, if you're interested, is available on Prime, YouTube, and Apple TV, by the way.
Documentaries as Background Noise
00:04:27
Speaker
And the other documentary I mentioned, and that you can watch at your own risk of extreme boredom, is called
00:04:36
Speaker
murder without a trial on Apple TV about John Lennon's assassination. Resounding endorsement there too, Anna. I'm sure that everyone's going to rush off to Apple TV and watch this last one. Do you ever just like to have TV on in the background when you sort of fall asleep maybe for a Saturday nap on the sofa? This could be good. This could be choice viewing for that.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, this is good for insomnia. Yeah, indeed. So shall we start? Because we have a lot of stuff to cover.
Yoko Ono and the Fluxus Movement
00:05:12
Speaker
So going back a little before 1962 to mention very briefly the Fluxus movement. When George Messounas was setting his own art space and someone told her about it, saying that he was copying her,
00:05:26
Speaker
He invited her to do a show in his gallery where she installed her instruction paintings. One of them, Painting to Be Stepped On, which is also in the Tate exhibition, was one of the features. So the instruction paintings are really interesting because they kind of celebrate in some ways a very traditional form of art making. And at the same time, it completely breaks down this tradition, particularly Painting to Be Stepped On.
00:05:52
Speaker
She remembers Noguchi, who's this really important Japanese artist, stepping on them in these very traditional nice slippers, she calls them. And lots of people stepped on that painting. And I wonder that in the exhibition, so the painting, there's a lot of those paintings, these instruction paintings in the second room. And I wondered, is this the original one? Where all these people she worked with,
00:06:21
Speaker
stepped on them because I mean it looks like I mean it's definitely seen better days but even still I could not bring myself to step on it which is silly because that's actually the instruction of course and you didn't I know I didn't it's just one of the reasons why I did it was and I saw it yes you should but I read something interesting about this piece in the New Yorker article by Lewis Minand in it was written in 2022 and he writes
00:06:50
Speaker
Painting to be stepped on resonates in two traditions. It alludes to the widely known photographs published in the late 1940s in life and elsewhere of Jackson Pollock making his drip paintings by moving around the canvas spread on the floor. These photographs representing painting as performance inspired artists for decades. And the second context identified by the art historian Alexandra Monroe is Japanese.
00:07:19
Speaker
in 17th century Japan, Christians were persecuted. And one way that they used to identify them was to ask them to step on images of Jesus and Mary. And the procedure was called stepping on. So people who refused would be tortured and sometimes executed. So in this way, because it has references to both Eastern and Western culture, painting to be stepped on is a grapefruit, which is a
00:07:48
Speaker
which is her recurring theme that we'll talk about later. That's very interesting because she's 91 years old, by the way. I don't think we said that. She was born in 1933, and she's an iconoclast because she is too Eastern in the Western world, too Western in the Eastern world. She's never where she should be, and she's really very naturally rebellious. So that's a really interesting
00:08:15
Speaker
reference actually. Also, Alexandra Monroe has a really good interview, great women artists podcast, about Yoko
Yoko Ono's Artistic Philosophy and Influences
00:08:24
Speaker
Ono. If some of you, some of our listeners want to dig into Yoko Ono a little bit more, it's a really interesting episode. So just to finish off with, finish off, just cancel out the Fluxus movement. But I think it's an interesting reference because she did dabble. So Ms. Eunice discussed the need
00:08:45
Speaker
to have a name for the movement. So the movement had no name by that time. The movement was inspired by the anti-establishment of Dadaism, amongst other things. She, rebellious as ever, as I said, was against the idea of a movement.
00:08:59
Speaker
But he still talked about this with her, and he showed her the words fluxes. So it has many meanings in the dictionary, and he pointed out flushing. And actually, in one of her concert pieces, there's a flushing toilet, so she probably also liked the sound. She uses the flushing toilet sound quite a bit.
00:09:19
Speaker
movements that were so outside of the books and outside of convention and didn't want to belong to the conventions of the art world that always existed, even though you know you have the avant-gardes, they would still show in galleries. But here, Massiones was creating his own gallery. Yoko Ono was creating her own space. You made the point that she is an event organizer, and that's exactly what it was. So
00:09:44
Speaker
Fluxus would become an international movement where authorship was irrelevant and the art object was considered a commodity. This was not, again, I highlight this, it was not the first time that this was an important point for a movement. But I think in the heights of capitalism, after the 50s, it is important to go back to that notion that
00:10:12
Speaker
artistic practices are not always object-oriented and object-driven. And even if they are objects, that's not the point. It's the toing and throwing between the spectator and the object, or the art object that is the important thing. So the artwork had to be ephemeral, non-traditional, non-commercial, etc.
00:10:31
Speaker
It was a radical and collective endeavor, which is really important, certainly the most extreme of the 60s as a movement, as a collective movement. John Cage was, as ever, a great inspiration. And I think we have mentioned John Cage in every episode of the podcast.
00:10:52
Speaker
I think we're renaming this to the John Cage podcast. Who did he inspire and what major solo exhibitions are they having essentially? But I mean, war has also been a huge feature. I mean, we could reposition this as the Cage art war podcasts. If you think of Dido, Moriyama, you think of Rister, you think of, you know, Philip Gustin, even, I mean, Marina Abramovich, different war, but very, very,
00:11:22
Speaker
A lot of artists have this connection to this moment that kind of broke the 20th century. I have a quote by Yoko Ono about John Cage that is really interesting. So she says, I don't really feel close to John Cage's music. He's interested in this loud sound, you know, in a concert. I don't understand why, because that distracts me from hearing the mind sound.
00:11:49
Speaker
So I think that really clarifies her relationship to music and her relationship to music as kind of the drawing of imagination, drawing in the sense of kind of like to pull and push and to move things around and rhythms and patterns, but also of the artwork as an incredibly individual experience. We talked about her work being about togetherness, but this togetherness she builds is very much
00:12:19
Speaker
built on a work on the ego. I think that's the only way I can try to explain it. So anyway.
00:12:28
Speaker
Her relationship with Toshi Ichinagi was turning sour. I mean, this is a pattern all throughout. She had several liaisons, including with Lamonta Young because Chamber Street was actually organized with Lamonta Young. And so that's why her parents were so concerned that they kind of sent a person to escort her
00:12:49
Speaker
to Tokyo in 1962. So it was kind of her parents doing that she went back to Tokyo. But she was very glad she did, because she did say that had she'd say it in New York, she would have been this kind of like conned madame of avant-garde and would have just repeated herself. And she's not interested in that.
00:13:08
Speaker
So after the very ambivalent criticism of her big concert, she did another work, which is called Cut Peace, which is also in the exhibition.
Iconic Performance: 'Cut Piece'
00:13:21
Speaker
And that's a really, really important work. I don't know if you want to introduce the work, Cut Peace.
00:13:28
Speaker
For sure, yes. So Cut Piece is a performance where she sat on stage while she allowed attendees to come up on stage and cut pieces of her clothing off with scissors. So Marina Abramovich surely must have seen this and been inspired because it's, you know, it is that kind of performance that is, you know,
00:13:49
Speaker
a little bit dangerous. I mean, certainly very vulnerable for Yoko Ono as the performer. So she would wear her best clothes for the show as an offering to participants. And this comes from a Buddhist teaching as well that encourages doing the most embarrassing thing in order to break down your ego. And I mean, the way that you see it at the exhibition, it's obviously a video of her having done this previously.
00:14:19
Speaker
And you see people kind of going up and clipping, you know, very modest portions of her look like some kind of Chanel suit or something like that and taking it away. And then there's kind of a man who comes up towards the end and just starts hacking off so that then she is much, much more exposed. And there's a lot of audience participation. And she has to cover her breasts.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. This is all about audience participation. They are creating the art, as it were, but there's a lot of disagreement in the audience about, no, don't do that.
00:15:04
Speaker
you know, toing and froing, but it's that, you know, it, it, it enters into that, you know, discussion about complicity, you know, stripping a woman naked on a stage, which she's inviting you to do. But 1964, mind you, this was not in 2024. This, by the way, took place at the contemporary American avant-garde music concert in sound and in structure.
00:15:31
Speaker
Yamayachi Hall Kyoto on the 20th of July and of 1964. And what is interesting as well in regards to all of her
00:15:40
Speaker
major works is that the way she explains it changes across time. And also the way it starts is not how it is perceived nowadays. So now it's considered to be a precursor of the piece Rhythm Zero of Marina Abramovich that we talked about in the first episode whereby she had a table with lots of objects, some of them dangerous, some of them nice, some of them
00:16:08
Speaker
nourishing and people would use those objects on her and she ended up being threatened by a man with a revolver that was there because she had placed a revolver and a bullet on the table. And this was much later, this was in 1972 if I'm not mistaken.
00:16:25
Speaker
And so this piece was about 10 years before, and it is perceived as a very feminist, humanist piece where the audience is made responsible of whatever happens to the performer. But for her, you know, I have a quote about this piece, and she says, it was a form of giving.
00:16:51
Speaker
giving and taking. It was a kind of criticism against artists who are always giving what they want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted to so it was very important to say you can cut wherever you want to.
00:17:09
Speaker
So that takes us to a whole other direction. It takes us, again, obviously to the sense of responsibility, but it also takes us to the notion of the artwork. So as you said in part one, and I think very rightly so,
00:17:25
Speaker
For her, it's all about abandoning her own wants and needs in a very Buddhist sense. It's all about putting the artwork in the hands of people. And I think that's why she talks about her pieces in very different ways, because she's at different times in her life, and she sees them differently. And they are complex. They are nuanced. They're not just one thing and one message.
00:17:50
Speaker
And so it makes for a really interesting take on whatever she was doing. It's a very generous piece. Take whatever it is you'd like. I mean, if you'd like to sit here and watch.
00:18:03
Speaker
if you'd like to participate, if you'd like to heckle people who are doing something that you think is not right. I mean, she's creating a lot of space for people to have their own agency in relation to the artwork. And it's kind of destructive. It's interesting because we will talk about this a bit later on.
Symposium on Destruction in Art
00:18:22
Speaker
When she comes to the UK, she comes for
00:18:26
Speaker
a sort of a symposium, a conference organized by Gustav Metzger about destruction in the art world. And you can also see her kind of chipping away at the conventions of the art world and the exhibition space, because, you know, exhibition, you know, to exhibit yourself, she's actually exposing herself or letting others expose herself in her nakedness and her rawness, you know, as an embodied being.
00:18:55
Speaker
So it's quite complex, actually, and there's no single way to look at this piece. And that's why it's so, so interesting. So by this point, she still considered herself as an outsider. Her gender was isolating. There weren't many women out there in the Japanese avant-garde. She didn't want a conventional role of mother or wife. Her marriage came to an end. But what happened here is very surprising in the way we talked about.
00:19:25
Speaker
Yoko Ono, which is that she was really, really in a bad way, and she tried to commit suicide, and she was institutionalized. So by that time, she was very, very, very alone. And there's a whole myth around this period in her life, because someone comes up when she is
00:19:49
Speaker
in an asylum in a psychiatric ward. A strange man, Anthony Cox, sort of maverick musician and notorious drug taker, apparently, he was one of the first people to take LSD, just comes and saves her.
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. What a man, what a guy like Hannah Gatsby says. So he came and just kind of took care of her. He heard about her. So he came to Japan, stayed with her in Japan for quite some time.
Yoko Ono's 'Grapefruit' and Cultural Hybridity
00:20:23
Speaker
And in his honor, we can say that he was very supportive of her and helped her publish her major opus, Grapefruit.
00:20:32
Speaker
which is a book of instruction-based art, a really important book, that included the instruction paintings and included lots of instructions that were near impossible, if not completely impossible to make or to realize.
00:20:50
Speaker
And the name, and I wondered this for so many years, why is this book called Grapefruit? But you never forget the title, do you? I mean, it's impossible not to remember that such a book is called Grapefruit. Such poetic license is quite, I find, admirable.
00:21:11
Speaker
and actually she identified with grapefruit because it's a fruit that is midway between an orange and a lemon and she's also a hybrid of two cultures. So that's how she saw herself and that's why she called the book.
00:21:26
Speaker
Grapefruit. The critic David Burden wrote in the Times, Grapefruit is one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 60s. So this is nice to know, at least. She has some recognition. Ono has a lyrical poetic dimension that sets her apart from the other conceptual artists.
00:21:47
Speaker
Her approach to art was only made acceptable when white men like Joseph Kasut and Lawrence Wiener came in and virtually did the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collective. Going back to what you said a little bit ago about how she was happy that she went back to Tokyo,
00:22:06
Speaker
because the avant-garde scene there really opened things up for her in a way that she didn't think that she would have opened up if she was in
Artistic Growth Amidst Personal Challenges
00:22:14
Speaker
New York. I think that's a remarkable thing to say when you really look at what happened. I mean, essentially, your parents kidnapped her back to Tokyo, put her in an institution. She was kind of
00:22:26
Speaker
Released by this guy through the help of this guy who ended up becoming her husband and who ended up doing some pretty Despicable things later on. I mean this optimism. I mean, maybe there is a whole You know library of articles where she just laments all of that but I haven't come across any of that and not that I know of I
00:22:49
Speaker
She looks back on that period as, wow, I really developed a lot as an artist. I mean, you know, and doesn't, you know, sort of dwell on the trauma of it. I forgot to mention that before her breakdown, actually,
00:23:05
Speaker
She was very good friends with Namjoon Paik, who's a really, really important artist in the American and Japanese art scene because he developed conceptual work through technology. So through the use of televisions and lots of radios and transmission, broadcasting, all of it. And so she participated as well in experimental activities with the group Ongaku and Namjoon Paik.
00:23:33
Speaker
keeping a link with Fluxus. She also made this artwork called, I think, Pieces of the Future, where she would break milk bottles, because by the time people were delivered milk bottles every day in the morning, and there's shards of milk bottles with the dates, in future dates, and she would sell them. She sold them somewhere in a
00:24:00
Speaker
festival or something in Japan and the only person who bought a piece for 500 yen was Namjoon Paik. So she was always in... I think she had the recognition and I think she was an artist artist basically by this point because she was a woman. There's no other explanation because Namjoon Paik went on to have a brilliant career, super uber recognized.
Heartbreak and 'Bag Piece' Performance
00:24:24
Speaker
So yes, as you said, going back to this mysterious Anthony Cox, a horrible thing that happened was that she had a child eventually with him, Kyoko. So after things go sour, which of course they would eventually do because Cox had a very kind of erratic kind of life and habits, drug habits. You know, they moved to New York with Kyoko. So Kyoko was born in Japan. They moved to New York with her.
00:24:54
Speaker
And eventually, when they separate, Anthony Cox takes Kyoko, he joins a cult, and he forbids Yoko Ono to have access to her for many, many, many decades. I actually hadn't realized that she had had a kid before the one she had with John Lennon, Sean, you know, and seeing some of the art that she made in Kyoko's honor.
00:25:19
Speaker
I mean, it's just really heartbreaking. And it looks like after she got together with John Lennon, they tried to see the daughter and tried to, but then, you know, she just kind of went off into this cult. And I think they were there for like 10 years and then Anthony Cox and Kyoko left that cult, but they were still in some kind of really fundamentalist Christian sect.
00:25:48
Speaker
So she didn't see her again until the 90s. I mean, I just can't imagine how painful that must have been. And isolating because who can understand and who could not blame the mother in that period for something like that. She could not confine it anyone because she would always be seen as a bad mother even now.
00:26:12
Speaker
Can you imagine then? An artist, an independent woman who was still making her art and who was still successful and traveling, who had a child somewhere and wasn't crying her eyes out and frantically trying to kidnap her from the father.
00:26:31
Speaker
And at the time, you didn't have the resources you have now. And she also had the child in Japan. She was a foreigner. So she had no rights in the United States. Everything was against her to get her daughter back. But who would have wanted to understand that? I don't think.
00:26:47
Speaker
a lot of people would have been very understanding. Anyway, so she reenacted a lot of her works in New York, so cut piece, morning piece, so the bottle shards. She also sold them in, I think, New York and at the top of some building. And she did also do back piece as well, where two performers take off their shoes, climb into a burlap bag where they take off their clothes and move around.
00:27:15
Speaker
which is also a work that is in the exhibition. It is, yeah. And did you do bagpace while you were there? Well, it was so cute. It was cute alert. When I got there, so I was with my parents, so it was my birthday,
00:27:37
Speaker
And I had asked that my parents would come with us. That was my birthday request because my mom has mobility issues. She had a knee operation. And so we booked taxis to go to come back, but I really wanted them to be there with me. And my three boys, unfortunately, my daughter couldn't come because she was working. So the whole family was there except for Konstantin, which was, you know, such a pity. But anyway,
00:28:02
Speaker
She had grapefruit. I gave her grapefruit when she was a teenager, and she's held on to it since, even when I was preparing this. She held on to it. So that was really cute, but I was really worried about my mum. And so I carried this foldable chair in the exhibition space. I'm really worried.
00:28:25
Speaker
And so I followed them. I didn't read any text. I just followed them and spend time where they would spend time. And they were just really interested looking at the stuff and looking at the paintings that you have that noise of the nailed painting where there's always someone banging on a nail. And so it's really noisy. It's really chaotic. And we go into the third room where you have back piece number 31.
00:28:54
Speaker
And I see two kids performing it and lots of people around it just with the biggest smile on their faces.
Experiencing the Emotional Impact of Art
00:29:04
Speaker
They look like caterpillars. It was such a cute thing. So my parents look at that and then there's cut piece right next to it. And then I got completely distracted by the kids, obviously. I stayed for quite a while. Then my children came over. We were all like looking at each other going like,
00:29:21
Speaker
Oh, this is so nice and so beautiful in terms of sculpture and performance and dance. It was just such a mesmerizing thing to look at. And also ideal for Yoko Ono. There's no, it was just spontaneity. There was no know-how or attempt to be beautiful or to do some kind of dance moves. It was just an experiment. It was just an experience.
00:29:49
Speaker
And then I thought, my parents, my mom, she probably needs to sit down. And I see them and they were just mesmerized by cut piece. They were looking at it and they just looked at me and they were like, oh my gosh, I mean, this is so incredible.
00:30:05
Speaker
When did she do this? So we started talking about it. So it was a really beautiful experience of the exhibition to go with your whole family. My parents don't really read English that well, so I decided not to read the text and just
00:30:21
Speaker
be there for them, but I would completely lose track of them because I got distracted by the works and I just had this experience of being, letting myself be attracted to whatever was calling me and then suddenly thinking, my mom, I'm just running off and giving her the chair. She never used the chair, not even once. She had the biggest smile on her face. My parents were delighted. They were so happy. I hadn't seen a smile on her face
00:30:50
Speaker
like that for a very long time outside of the family and our own stuff here at home. She was so happy. My dad was so happy. They were just having the time of their lives. It was so fantastic. That's so nice. What a great birthday gift. I mean, is there a better one? Yeah. Especially when you get to the end of the exhibition. We'll talk about that later. Oh, gosh. Yeah, boy. That's a good... Yeah, definitely. Good one to go with your mom, for sure.
00:31:17
Speaker
You know, so when I went to the exhibition, it was late. So it was after work. I didn't have a ton of time and it's huge. So I was kind of a little bit worried about seeing as much as I could see. And when I got to Bagpiece, it was just the bags on the floor. And then there were signs around and I was like, what, what is this about? And then this woman just kind of got there, hopped in and was doing very Yoko Ono, like kind of, you know, just sort of
00:31:47
Speaker
you know, just throw in shapes, you know, and then she did a little bit of rolling around and it was so cool. I mean, it's how could you not watch that? You know, I mean, how could that not be anything other than captivating? And it was really cool. But I mean, what I loved about it, though, was, you know, she wanted people to experience a world without race or gender or ethnicity and allow people to feel what that would be like to
00:32:15
Speaker
not have that be the first thing that you perceive about you. And there's some great YouTube videos where she's performing bag piece while the plastic ono band is playing. So you see like John Lennon and the band there on stage. And then she, you watch her just like, you know, kind of take your shoes off.
00:32:40
Speaker
and then go to the front, kind of somewhere in front of the amps and just get in the bag and just start doing her thing, you know? And I just think like,
00:32:52
Speaker
What must that have been like for the audience? For a lot of people, they're there because John Lennon is there playing the guitar and singing. Is there? For sure. And then she's just going off on this bag piece kind of tangent. Yeah, just Google Yoko Ono on YouTube and you find the most incredible things. And I have to say,
00:33:14
Speaker
I'm in awe of her because being in that space where you know that people are coming to see your husband, to see the celebrity, the Justin Bieber of the moment, and you're bringing in
00:33:31
Speaker
the most awkward, bizarre actions and happenings into it. And you know that people are criticising you. By then, people would probably also have been there for her, but not with good sentiment. And also lots of fans, I think, as she has an interview on YouTube with the singer of the B-52s,
00:33:53
Speaker
who imitates the little screams that Yoko Ono does in such a perfect way that Yoko was like, oh my god, you're good. That's exactly it. And the B-52s, they loved Yoko Ono's music. Of course, she had fans. But again, artists, performers. And I admire, maybe because I identify with that a little bit, this idea
00:34:16
Speaker
of not wanting to belong, of not wanting to fit in, of wanting to carve your own space in the name of something that you really believe in, in the name of a form of language and a form of existence,
00:34:31
Speaker
that in her mind would end all the differences while celebrating uniqueness. The uniqueness she never denied her own Japanese culture or even Western culture. She embraced old forms of language that were given to her and that were familiar to her. And carving that space for yourself in the place where you're not wanted,
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah. My oh my. Isn't that incredible? Yeah, that is super impressive. I mean, the grid brings me to tears. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so impressive. Whatever you think of her work.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, whatever you think of her visual art, whatever you think of her music. And she did a lot of concessions. She met John Lennon halfway. She did lots of pop music, which was not her thing. And she is just in order to bring her art to the people. There's an interview on YouTube. I don't know who the interviewer was, an American interviewer.
00:35:34
Speaker
where she brought back piece, a bag for herself, a bag for him. And I had a feeling that they had agreed that he would put himself in the bag and she would climb into the bag as well and do the interview like that. And she tells him, so are you not going to use your bag? And he says, no, no, I would rather not. No, thank you very much. I'm very comfortable as I am. I'm really aggressive.
00:35:59
Speaker
passive-aggressive, you know? She's trying. She keeps trying to bring her work to a sort of celebrity platform, which is kind of incredible. So shall we talk about London? Because that's a big part of her life. Yeah, definitely. Let's go there.
Yoko and John Lennon: The Beginning
00:36:17
Speaker
So in 1966, she traveled to London to participate in that art symposium I mentioned, organized by the great artist Gustav Metzger.
00:36:27
Speaker
So she was invited to do an exhibition as well at New Indica Gallery, which was set up by John Dunbar, who was married to Marion Faithful. So it was kind of a big deal. The New Indica Gallery was a sort of makeshift space that connected to music as well. She does seem to gravitate to popular culture and music anyway. So she was right at the center of swinging London, and I haven't said this expression in so many ways.
00:36:55
Speaker
So many years. I mean, it's swinging London was a thing. Like, can you believe it now? I know. And Austin Powers, baby. Yes. So finally we get to John Lennon. This is where she met him. So of course there's a lot of urban myths around this, lots of stories, lots of
00:37:15
Speaker
Anecdotes told about this, so apparently I read in the biography that John Lennon said, and I quote, Dunbar told me about this Japanese girl from New York who was going to be in the bag during this event or happening, and I thought, hmm, sex, end of quote.
00:37:38
Speaker
Who wouldn't think of the girl in the bag and think sex? Listen, it was there. It was there for the taking. So he goes to the gallery before it happens. So the gallerist was doing his job well. He was inviting the celebrities. He could potentially buy the work and bring other people. And so Ona was super busy preparing the exhibition. She did not want to talk to anyone.
00:38:03
Speaker
So the pieces she showed at New Endica Gallery are in the big, big room where you have the white chess and you have the apple on the sort of transparent plexiglass. Plin so apparently he bit into the apple and she found him arrogant. Their meeting was like in, I believe,
00:38:30
Speaker
15 minutes. They went to ups and downs and controversy and finally finding a common ground. He's like, I want sex. And she's like, you're arrogant. And then it snowballs from there somehow. It snowballs from there. So there was this other work in the exhibition, Painting to Hammer, which is in the exhibition at the Tate as well, very audibly so. No, Painting to Hammer and Nail, sorry.
00:38:59
Speaker
And so he wanted to do it, which made her reluctant as she wanted the works to be pristine for the opening. So she answered, OK, you can do it for five shillings. And he replied, I will give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer and an imaginary nail. And for her, that is when they actually really met. Then he went up the ladder, which is another work that I really, really love. I think it's one of my favorites.
00:39:26
Speaker
So there's a ladder, you go up the ladder and then there's from the ceiling hangs a magnifying glass that you use to read a word that is in the smallest print possible hanging from a painting, on a painting hanging from the ceiling that just says the word yes.
00:39:49
Speaker
And I heard, I read or heard of another story that when he saw that he got it and he thought, wow, this is incredible. Cause he was a bit afraid of like going up the ladder and just having some sort of, you know, aggressive thing, you know, shouted at him through the magnifying glass. And he just found it really beautiful and he really loved it. So apparently that's how they met. And she claims that she had no idea who he was.
00:40:18
Speaker
See, I don't buy that for a moment. And I've seen a lot of interviews where she's like, no, honestly, no, I had no idea I met Paul before, but I had no idea who John Lennon was. But I just don't believe you could have been in a Beatles saturated 60s culture and not known who he was. I mean, I love her to pieces. I'm not buying this bit. But the the yes piece,
00:40:44
Speaker
And her pieces in general, again, very optimistic in a very pessimistic time.
Optimism in Art During Turbulent Times
00:40:50
Speaker
I mean, there's racial strife going on. There's a war going on. And a lot of the art happening at the moment was making an explicit mark on one of those themes and is grappling with it. And I mean, so I watched the Steve Martin documentary on Apple. Oh, yeah.
00:41:11
Speaker
It's really good i really enjoyed it and and it's interesting because they talk about that that's what he was doing with his comedy at the time i mean so much you think of like george carlin. Richard prior i mean these guys right yeah.
00:41:26
Speaker
making political statements with their art very explicitly, very funnily, I mean, really, really humorously. Just as an aside, was it Richard Pryor, because I watched it as well, who had that joke saying like, you know, I don't want to be white at the moment, because I mean, all white people are going to the moon, and I just want them to go all of them to the moon. Just leave us.
00:41:51
Speaker
Yeah, that was him. That was him. Yeah. I enjoy what Steve Martin was doing, but some political jokes were funny. No, I mean, yeah, and all of that political stuff. And this was really funny as well. I mean, Richard Pryor, you know, side splitting, but
00:42:10
Speaker
But I liked that the way he talked about his art and what he wanted to do was not joke punchline. So you have this tension where the joke is happening and that tension gets released with the punchline and then everybody laughs.
00:42:28
Speaker
He wanted tension the whole way out. He wanted people being like- He wanted to take out the punchline. That's what he said. He wanted to just abolish the punchline and contain the awkwardness. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And he was doing really silly stuff. He wanted it to feel like you're hanging out with your mates and you're just
00:42:50
Speaker
laughing for no particular reason, you're just being silly and laughing. And if you've seen any of his stuff, wild and crazy, you know, I mean, that is exactly, I mean, Ono's work was political, you know, but she set out to be more joyful and optimistic. And I think that yes piece is a perfect demonstration of that because it could have been
00:43:11
Speaker
very easily something about racial tension or and it could have been like that's not that that's invalid that's a very valid thing to be producing art around but yeah you're saying basically that it's not directly political
00:43:30
Speaker
in the message, but I think it is political. I was thinking about Steve Martin as well that you mentioned so rightfully because he was being political as well in his actions, in the way he was deconstructing that very
00:43:49
Speaker
dusty structure of laughter through TV because he was the first stand-up comedian.
Art as Conceptual Self-Help
00:43:56
Speaker
He was doing it live. No one was doing that. And he was really kind of deconstructing the space for laughter when laughter would come up and kind of building into
00:44:07
Speaker
the mind of the viewer who had to decide whether that was funny or not because he was presented as a comedian and then giving the power to the audience as well. That's such a good comparison because Yoko is saying yes. I heard someone say that I think it was Sarah Marshall describing Yoko Ono's work as conceptual self-help, which I find really funny.
00:44:34
Speaker
And she said it in a nice way, not like a criticism. And the yes thing is kind of preempts this whole self-help movement of like, say yes to everything in your life. Be affirmative. But actually, it resonates in an
00:44:52
Speaker
in the lean in and it resonates in a different way because yes yes to what yes to going into war yes to you know being in the military yes to going out there and destroy the structure and showing it to the man yes to what what are you saying yes to and that is incredibly political you know without it explicitly delivering a message you think of how different that would be if you climbed up there and it was no
00:45:22
Speaker
I mean, which could also be no to war. It could be a positive no, no to war, no to the going and killing people, no to racial injustice, all that kind of stuff. But she chose yes, which is a... I think there's a lot of artists at the time that probably would have been like, no, we have to be no. We have to lay down the law here.
00:45:45
Speaker
But yeah, I agree. I think it is just such a simple thing, but really complex and deep in its simplicity. Anyway, so John Lennon and Yoko Ono become an item.
Controversial Relationship with John Lennon
00:45:59
Speaker
She pursued him quite aggressively, apparently. But at the same time, he took her to a studio, opened a sofa bed, and she said, no, I'm not having sex with you this way. I'm not a groupie.
00:46:11
Speaker
So she established the terms of the relationship as she was pursuing him in a very Yoko Ono style. And it was brutal, I have to say this, to Cynthia Lennon. It was brutal because he was married to Cynthia Lennon. He had lived a super secluded life. He was this kind of like,
00:46:32
Speaker
grown child, adored by everyone in the whole world. And he just decided that, you know, he would spend time with Yoko Ono in his own home until Cynthia Lennon got back home because he had offered her, I think, a trip to Greece, her and her son Julian. And when she arrived, they were there in their night counts.
00:46:55
Speaker
sitting on the floor just talking about art. And it was just a fait accompli. There was nothing to say. And he'd really behave like a big baby. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's awful. I can imagine how miserable that must have been for her. And just cruel. I mean, that's a really cruel way to end a marriage that's deeply disrespectful. But I mean, I don't know if he was a secluded
00:47:19
Speaker
child. I mean, I know that he was a famous person by that point and had legions of fans that would have done anything for him and he could get anything he wanted. But I mean, he was born during the war and grew up with rationing. His parents split. His dad tried to kidnap him before he abandoned him altogether.
00:47:39
Speaker
Then he was raised by his aunt because his mom was mentally ill, even though she continued to be a big influence in his life. She bought him his first guitar. It's worse than that. His aunt actually thought that he should have been her child and lied to his mom, who lived not very far away from them, lied to him, saying that his mom did not want to see him.
00:48:01
Speaker
and manipulated things into keeping him with her while being really arrogant to him and being really, really abusive. So, I mean, he had a horrible childhood. Yeah, I mean, that is really dark. And then, you know, he had this connection with his mom.
00:48:19
Speaker
And then she was hit by a car and died when he was 17. I mean, so he, I mean, he had, you know, this very famous lifestyle of, you know, the whole world of yes, as it were. But I mean, he certainly spent some time in the school of hard knocks. And I think, you know, there's certainly a loneliness that you can imagine from Yoko Ono in the coldness of her family.
00:48:44
Speaker
the loneliness he must have felt by both parents not being available and growing up in this really weird condition with his with his aunt. Yeah I mean what I mean by being secluded is that he was in the rarefied air of celebrity so he could do whatever he wanted. He was you know surrounded by yes people
00:49:08
Speaker
And as typically in the men who were grownups in the 60s and the 70s, he didn't address his personal trauma. And he ended up doing the same thing that was done to him to Julian with apparently
00:49:24
Speaker
a big support from Yoko Ono, which Mei Peng talks about, don't know if that's true or not, doesn't really matter. But so what I mean to say is that he had agency and I'm not against, not only I'm not against, I'm absolutely full giving John Lennon full agency because he was a powerful man.
00:49:43
Speaker
but I think he also was in a situation where everything was available to him. He could do anything he wanted. I don't know what you think about this, but I think that this celebrity thing that she embarked on was very dangerous. She did her best with it. Dangerous in what sense? I'm going to give you an example. So, Arthur, my
00:50:07
Speaker
23-year-old son went back to the exhibition with a friend. I asked him, so how did you experience the exhibition again? And he said, well, you know, yeah, I mean, my friend didn't really love it, but we kept thinking about this bed thing they did with Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
00:50:23
Speaker
And we were like, who do they think they are? I don't care that they're in bed together. Why are we looking at them naked? I mean, it makes absolutely no sense. And so for him, this made no sense. It was even a bit distasteful. It didn't mean anything and it didn't change anything.
00:50:42
Speaker
He was like, these celebrities who think they can change the world just because they say something or they have a message of some kind. And notoriously, you can think of Gal Gadot with Imagine the song during the pandemic, which was such a disaster.
00:51:01
Speaker
So I can see how you would look at it. I mean, when I was a kid and I saw those, you know, Imagine piece and kind of the posters they put up, I loved it. I felt really, really moved by it. I mean, at the time as a teenager, yeah.
00:51:21
Speaker
you know, kind of starting to feel some seeds of social justice start to bloom. And it felt like a very simple idea that I felt was a very powerful one. The fact that someone so famous was saying it and someone that, you know, I admired so much, you know, in him, I wasn't as close to her work then.
00:51:45
Speaker
felt important and felt really inspiring as a kid. I mean, I do see that it is a very simple message, but that's intentionally so, you know?
Power of Imagination in Art
00:51:57
Speaker
I mean, it's like they're, you know, if you go back to what she's about, which is the power of the imagination to create art and create reality in your own mind,
00:52:10
Speaker
That's the most powerful thing that you can get people to do is imagine peace. Granted, I don't know, the celebrity part of it, I can see why Artur would feel that way. I have a complicated relationship with celebrities who become activists and start to say things about international relations or the way things should be.
00:52:34
Speaker
Because sometimes they get it really wrong and they don't know really what they're talking about. But at the same time, you want them to leverage that extraordinary power that they have for something good. They're human beings and they can have opinions about the world as they so choose. But it is a complicated thing when it is mixed with celebrity and when it's mixed with kind of branding as it would be now.
00:53:00
Speaker
Yes, which was not the case for them. I mean, if you watch the Mei Peng documentary, Yoko Ono was the person managing everything. And the footage you see is really them, but mostly her, dealing with requests, press requests, public appearances, exhibitions, pieces, concerts, and John Lennon
00:53:28
Speaker
we have to say this, was a heroin addict by the time. So was she. Of course, obviously, at the time when after he was killed, everyone claimed that she was the heroin addict, but he had a big addiction at the time. So they were living a very reckless life. And you can see, and if you turn the Amy Pegg documentary on its head,
00:53:55
Speaker
What happens is that Yoko Ono was completely, as usual, committed to art, completely stifled by the relationship because she had to take care of him
Balancing Art and Personal Life
00:54:06
Speaker
as well. And so at a certain point, she tells Mei Peng, listen, can you please have an affair with him? I can see he's unstable.
00:54:13
Speaker
You're nice. She was 19. I mean, there's so many things wrong with all of this. But anyway, spend some time, I can see he likes you, as if she was asking someone to do something in order to fix him because he was not doing well. And she had stuff to do. She wanted to do her art. For her,
00:54:31
Speaker
It's always about her art. And of course, I think us commoners probably do not understand that kind of state of mind. And of course, if you talk to Mei Peng, this was completely...
00:54:44
Speaker
irrational, nonsensical. Why would a wife ask for someone to take care of her husband? But she was not a wife. She didn't see herself as a wife. She saw an artistic partnership that wasn't working. And I think that's basically what was happening then. And she really wanted to use that platform
00:55:04
Speaker
And she used it to the best of her ability. And to be honest, you can see in the exhibition, so that big space of the exhibition, which is really, really nice, so chaotic. So you have the pieces she did when she was in London, the whole New Indica exhibition with a magnificent room with half furniture.
00:55:25
Speaker
you know, well, everything cut in half. And she was talking about dispossession, you know, because she was getting a divorce. She also did not have a child with her. I think it's a lot about that. And she asked John Lennon to actually finance the piece and he said no. So they were having that kind of toing and froing, that interesting relationship. And lots of the works of the exhibition are there. They're super interesting. And then you have a whole space with just tables with the chess piece, which is basically
00:55:55
Speaker
a chessboard and all the pieces are white.
Interactive Artworks and Symbolism
00:55:58
Speaker
And you can only play until you remember all the moves of the game. And if you forget and if you can't retrace all your steps, then you've lost the game. Brings it back to your point about Steve Martin and kind of taking away the punchline.
00:56:13
Speaker
So the chess board was also white. So the pieces are white and the chess board is also completely white on a white table and white chairs. And I think in addition, she was talking about taking away opposition. Because unless you really remember all of your moves and pieces, which is impossible, I don't know who could do that. I don't play chess. I think you can.
00:56:40
Speaker
But the thing is, and that takes us back to her upbringing, the high achieving Yoko Ono is like, you need to be high achieving as well. I think there's a bit of that in the piece, which I love. Yeah, yeah. But it also takes away the opposition. I mean, there's less opposition. Yes, the competition.
00:56:59
Speaker
Nothing is there, or very little is there, to facilitate you actually strategizing against someone. It's incredibly difficult to do when the black and white is taken away, which is quite simple and powerful. And it's a Buddhist thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a Buddhist thing. Do your best. Be wholeheartedly there. In mind and body, be in the moment, be present, and do it to the best of your abilities.
00:57:27
Speaker
Yergo and Arta love chess. I mean Arta loves chess. I love chess as well. But I didn't play because I was running around my mom with a folding chair. But so they were playing and then my parents were like looking at them. And it was such a nice experience, that exhibition. It was really, really nice.
00:57:46
Speaker
And then my mum loved the piece, the final one. So the two final pieces after the 60s works in the Newindica Gallery. You have this big room, which was completely white as well, with a boat.
00:58:02
Speaker
And I think only 15 people can be in there. Did you experience it? My mum went straight in there. Yeah, and the boat is white as well, and it's kind of like a rowboat. It's a very simple rowboat kind of boat, and everything's white.
00:58:18
Speaker
And you can have, there's blue markers for people just to write whatever they'd like to. So there's writing all over the boat so that it's almost completely blue or it was almost completely blue when I was there. And then kind of up to the room on the floor and on the walls up to handwriting height is words, images, lots of them overlapping to create
00:58:46
Speaker
you know, different words and images. Really cool. I mean, you know, it's like a giant coloring book for anybody and everybody to come in and color in what they wish, but also with a very clear point about the refugee crisis. You're basically drowning in a sea of words.
Yoko Ono's Films and Humor
00:59:05
Speaker
But before that, you have the video Fly, which she made with the help of Mei Peng.
00:59:13
Speaker
John Lennon and a whole team. And I decided to go into that room with my 14-year-old son. The technical caption says, flies provided by New York City. What really happened is that Mei Peng had to actually get flies in the middle of winter. So that's one of the things she was asked to do. I mean, they were in a sort of another stratosphere, I think.
00:59:41
Speaker
and so apparently I think your co-owner wanted to be the person to do that but they ended up hiring a porn star so to lie down completely naked while the camera follows a fly just being a fly on your body and at a certain point the fly decides to go very slowly but surely
01:00:06
Speaker
onto the pubic hair of the woman and then straight into like on the lips, you know, nearing the vulva.
01:00:18
Speaker
So I was there with my son and I just kind of thought, I'm going to hold this moment as much as I can. And we're going to watch this together and we watch this together. I mean, he's seen other stuff. I mean, obviously my kids have been through a lot, but he was just like, they're, you know, watching this thing.
01:00:38
Speaker
and just kind of calmly taking it in. We didn't talk about it because of course I was running after my mum each time I experienced any of the works and my mum would say, no, I don't need a chair. Why would you ask me that? And I'd say, okay then. I didn't see this one. I think this is one I'll make time for when I go back. How did you find it? What did you walk away with?
01:01:00
Speaker
I find it the most intriguing one because you don't know exactly. I'm sure there's a very specific purpose for the work, but I'm not too curious. It's not one of those where I want to know what it's about. It's just so strange to suddenly fixate on a fly, on a human body, and turn things around and see things from the perspective of the fly. The film
01:01:28
Speaker
I saw was the Bottoms film, which is one that I think she did with Anthony Cox when she was with Anthony Cox. And so it's comprised of close-up views of people's bottoms as they're walking. So, you know, she kind of, when you're looking at it, you can't even- A very famous Bottoms, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
01:01:49
Speaker
You can't even necessarily tell if they're male or female all the time. I mean, most of the time you can. Yes, I like that. And yeah, and her whole point was like, yeah, everybody has a bum, you know, famous people, not famous people.
01:02:06
Speaker
And I kind of like that about, you know, that irreverence, because I don't think she gets enough credit for her irreverence. You know, she... No, and her humour. Exactly. And she... Gosh, where was I reading? It might have been in the New Yorker article I read where she advertised a fake exhibition at MoMA.
01:02:29
Speaker
And she was like, Yoko Ono is going to be at MoMA. And she had these advertisements made. And instead of Museum of Contemporary Art, it said Museum of Contemporary Farts. And so all these people were showing up at MoMA. And MoMA apparently had the advertisement there saying, you know what? She's putting you on. She's not here.
01:02:52
Speaker
I mean, I just like, well done, you know, I mean, you know, that is that's really pushing, you know, you talked about that earlier about how she really pushed back on the structures of the art world itself. It's like you couldn't get more any blatant kind of thumb in the eye of the art world than that. It's really good.
01:03:15
Speaker
Yeah. And the bottoms is really funny because usually you say, we all have the same blood running in our veins. We're all the same. And she goes like, we'll have bottoms guys. Yeah. We all have your hearts in our chest and souls and our bodies. Now she's like, we all have a butt.
01:03:34
Speaker
And also, I like the fact that it's that place in your body that is sexual that you can use at your own will in your sexual relationships, be it heterosexual or homosexual. And it is genderless, to her genderless point. I think we can address also the fact that nowadays it's very hard to say, look beyond race, look beyond gender.
Identity and Traditional Labels
01:04:02
Speaker
We are in a moment where we're reckoning with gender, with race, with cultural differences, with appropriation. I would love to know what younger generations who are fighting a lot for their bodies to be recognized as they see themselves and identify themselves as or as they are seen by culture, society, history, etc.
01:04:27
Speaker
how they would feel about this idea of being in a bag and trying to exist in a sort of world where none of that exists. Because is the end point of talking about identity going beyond identity? And is that what she was thinking? Or is the point not really addressing identity in her work? And I think that's a fair question. And it's a question that
01:04:52
Speaker
probably a lot of, you know, trans activists, you know, black activists, you know, could ask. Because I mean, that whole colorblind thing, we were there for a while and we thought that was the way to think about it. And it's not. It is not. I don't see color. Yeah. Just problematic. And not true. So tell me about your experience of the rest of the exhibition. There's two very strong pieces at the end of the exhibition. My mommy is beautiful.
01:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a bit like the Wishtrees.
Emotional and Communal Art Experiences
01:05:22
Speaker
So people can write notes to their mother about their mother and put them on the wall. And there were just tons of notes. I mean, I don't know what they're going to do. Are they going to take them down so that they'll have to take them down at some point because
01:05:37
Speaker
If this goes on until September, this whole room will be full of messages. Thinking about her mom and how her mom was like, you're so lucky to have a beautiful mother. I think that that kind of adds an interesting dimension to it. I think how most people took it and most of the messages that I read
01:06:00
Speaker
were, you know, kind of, my mom is the best and I love her and this is how she makes me feel. And I did see one that was like, my mom is an enemy and you need to keep your enemies close. So there's this famous clip of Fred Rogers when he's getting, I think it's an Emmy award and he's on stage. He had this really famous kids TV program for years and years and years, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
01:06:26
Speaker
He got up on stage and he was like, actually what I want everyone to do right now is to take a moment to think of someone who's made a real difference in their lives and help them get to where they are right now in this seat, in this auditorium. You can feel it when you watch that clip. The room, it changes and the feeling in the room changes because people are all focusing their minds
01:06:54
Speaker
on something that they are grateful for and towards someone to whom they are grateful. And I think that there's a bit of that in this room. Yeah, I think Bartholomew, my 18-year-old son, said that he heard someone say, well, this is stupid because not everyone has a mother. And he said, well, that's stupid because even if you don't have a mum, you kind of have
01:07:19
Speaker
a relationship with someone who's akin to a mother or who's akin to a carer. And you can think about carers and you can think about the fact that you don't have a mom. You might have two dads and they're mothering you. What is mothering?
01:07:35
Speaker
And my father's mum passed away when he was 23 years old, and he loved her to pieces. He had a great relationship with her. And so my kids told me, because I got there later than everyone else, my dad wrote something and pinned it to the wall in Portuguese. And then I wrote something about my own mum. So I had to think,
01:07:55
Speaker
about my relationship with my mother. He was there, so happy. And I found something that made me really, really comfortable. So I felt really at peace. So yeah, we got to the end of the exhibition, believe it or not. We thought we never would. Yeah, it's a biggie. It's a biggie. But you're right. In terms of my mommy is beautiful, you're right. Not everybody does have a mother. That is true.
01:08:21
Speaker
And I mean, that isn't a common denominator necessarily. Everybody is born through uterus, but not necessarily is a mother. Does that make her of her own time or is she trying to say something about de-gendering mothering as well?
01:08:41
Speaker
Again, it's up to you to decide. I have to say, I'm coming away with a very different understanding of Yoko Ono than I had going in. Me too. When I went in, as I said last time, I didn't really get her art.
Admiration for Yoko Ono's Influence
01:09:00
Speaker
There was the whole hangover of the Beatles, all that kind of stuff. I didn't really
01:09:06
Speaker
I didn't really appreciate what she was trying to do or the really revolutionary way she was trying to do it, being the person that she is and the time that she's lived. But I'm coming away with, yeah, just a lot of admiration and respect for what she has done as an artist.
01:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, me too. Me too. And she's still going. She's 91 and she's still going. I mean, God love her. I want to be just like that. My goodness. I mean, she's still wearing her funky sunglasses and her life before you kind of think that what a resilient human being she is. In perfect being, she's not a perfect human. Neither are we far from it. Yeah, indeed.
01:09:54
Speaker
speak for yourself. Come on. Let's wrap it up. Yeah. I mean, I'll just say there's a huge portion of her life, obviously, that we have not covered in as much detail as we have kind of the beginning of her life until
01:10:06
Speaker
She got together with Lenin, but there's loads of available resources online.
Preview of Next Episode
01:10:12
Speaker
So do go check it out and do check out this exhibition if you can. It's really, really worth it. Our next episode is going to focus on Aria Deen's exhibition at the ICA. So if you have time, go and see it because that's going to be our next episode.
01:10:29
Speaker
But yeah, so thanks so much everybody for listening. Take care and have a great week. And don't forget, we visit exhibitions so that you have to. So go out there and visit some shows. Take care. Bye, Joanna. Bye, Emily.