There Is a Wind That Never Dies The life of Yoko Ono
CONNIE KUHNS
I
follow Yoko Ono on Twitter. She is my daily devotion, my addiction. She reassures me that Good things will come later and she urges me to Remember love. Her words would go nicely on a refrigerator magnet. I was not quite a woman when she arrived uninvited, a grey mist over a blonde sea. But as I aged, she became my mystery to solve, my road less travelled. Her early instructional writings tell me to imagine the clouds dripping, to send the smell of the moon (to someone), to see the sky between a woman’s thighs. She once labelled polished beach stones and shards of glass as past and future mornings, to be sold at dawn from her roof top. She took a childhood game called “Telephone” and turned it into performance art. (When she introduced “Whisper Piece” at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, in 1966, asking the audience to whisper the same word from ear to ear, many of the male artists asked that she be removed.) Yoko is a woman with machismo, who was relentless in creating her own way through the exploratory art movements of the 1960s, straight into the heart of popular culture, celebrity, politics and feminism. She is a question mark and a contradiction. At almost eighty-seven years old, she still vibrates. It has been fifty years since her marriage to the late John Lennon, a relationship that brought her into the public consciousness. It was a union that broke up two marriages, leaving two small children behind, and truthfully, helped bring about the end of the revolutionary Beatles. The couple’s public behaviour and the legal battles that followed destroyed friendships and families. It’s a saga of infidelity, drug busts and addiction; but also of transformation, collaboration and creation. Together they gave the world “Imagine,” and this year, on the anniversary of their honeymoon performances, known as the Bed-Ins for Peace, their life together is celebrated. When John and Yoko met in London in 1966, she was already an experienced entrepreneur and performance artist, and an early interpreter of what was known as Concept Art. Born in 1933, in Japan, a descendant of Samurai warriors, Yoko was an older woman. From her loft in New York City, in 1960, she had organized a series of performances with her friend, the composer La Monte Young. In this environment artists were encouraged to move outside the boundaries of historical and conventional creation. Her first husband, the classical pianist and composer Toshi
44 Geist 114 Fall 2019
