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John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980, aged 40, and the world lost one of its brightest lights. Calgary is fortunate to have an exhibit here of the work of Yoko Ono, his widow, as well as material that she and John did together.
From the very first moment John and I saw each other, we knew something was about to happen — something big. We just didn’t know how big. John said about our meeting: “It was bigger than both of us.” That was the feeling we had. When John and I sang Give Peace a Chance, we had no idea the song would become an anthem not only for our time but for generations to come.
It went around the world, and made other songwriters realise that you can convey political messages with songs. Millions of people got together and sung the song in different parts of the world at different times. The song connected us and made us realise that we were a power strong enough to GIVE PEACE A CHANCE — change the world. Little did we know that that’s when we, John and I, really made our beds for life.
I still remember the beautiful full moon that John and I kept looking at from the bed, after everybody went home. Did anybody think that a man and a woman, a man from Liverpool, and a woman from Tokyo, would do something crazy like that together to change the world? Maybe it was written already on a stone on the moon or something. At the time, we were laughed at and put down, in a major way, by the whole world. Now all of us are standing at the threshold of a beautiful new age that we worked hard for. It’s not in our hands yet, but we know we will make it happen.
Let’s make the best of it and have fun.
I think John would have been very pleased too.
IMAGINE PEACE
WAR IS OVER! (if you want it)
I love you!
yoko
Yoko Ono, 2009
From Nuit Blanche 2008, Toronto.
Imagine Peace, 2001
Yoko Ono - New York, USA
Installation, Visual Art
Yoko Ono has often remarked that all of her work is a form of wishing. For "Wish Tree", participants are invited to write a wish on a piece of paper and tie it to the branch of a tree, as a form of collective secular prayer. The resulting mass of wishes resembles white flowers blossoming from afar.
The "Imagine Peace" billboard continues the advertising strategy of the “War is Over!” campaign that Ono and Lennon waged in the late sixties and early seventies. The language is both softened and more direct, but the implication of our complicity remains – peace will continue to elude us if we are unable to even fathom its existence.
Forty-thousand buttons adorned with the phrase will also be distributed to visitors over the course of the evening.
Listen to Imagine
IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is an outdoor work of art conceived by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon.
It is situated on Viðey Island in Reykjavík, Iceland, where it is known as Friðarsúlan.
Regarding publication requests or prints. Contact me at:oliragnars@internet.is
All rights reserved - Copyright © Ólafur Ragnarsson
Junge Frau beschäftigt sich in der Ausstellung "Yoko Ono: Dream Together" in der Neuen Nationalgalerie Berlin mit dem Werk "Cleaning Piece". Berlin 2025.
A woman in the exhibition "Yoko Ono: Dream Together" in the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) is engaged with the artwork "Cleaning Piece". Berlin 2025
IMAGINE--lo
Ya sé que no soy el primero, ya sé que no soy el único, ya sé que es una utopía, pero...¿ y si lo intentáramos ?. Sería entonces una realidad, el que amando y respetando al prójimo, la PAZ se instalaría entre nosotros?. Ánimo, hagamos un esfuerzo.
I know I'm not the first, I know I'm not the only one, I know it's a utopia, but ... what if we tried? It would then be a reality, that loving and respecting our neighbor, PEACE would settle among us ?. Let's make an effort.
Je sais que je ne suis pas le premier, je sais que je ne suis pas seul, je sais que c'est une utopie, mais ... si on a essayé ?. Il serait alors une réalité, que l'amour et le respect des autres, la paix se contenterait d'entre nous?. Humeur, faire un effort.
After a week-long Bed-In for Peace in Montreal and a Peace conference at The University of Ottowa, John and Yoko visited Niagara Falls in Canada at 4pm on Wednesday 4 June 1969.
They were on their way to Toronto and then home to London.
On the same day (4 June 1969), the Beatles single “The Ballad Of John and Yoko” was released.
This work was done in collaboration with my friend Leo Mayrinck, a wonderful portrait photographer. You can find the link to his studio and beautiful works below:
www.leomayrinck.com/index/G0000RkD7rJpM.WM
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.
Yoko Ono
Share your smile with the world. It's a symbol of friendship and peace.
Christie Brinkley
Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
Mother Teresa
Smile, it is the key that fits the lock of everybody's heart. Anthony J. D'Angelo
Thank you for your kind visit. Have a wonderful and beautiful day! ❤️❤️❤️
MY MOMMY IS BEAUTIFUL
Mommy, I'm sorry.
You have suffered silently.
Your life, your tears
and your laughter
have now become a memory.
This is a tribute to you and
all mothers of the world
from each of your children.
We love you!
y.o. '10
MY MOMMY IS BEAUTIFUL
Write your mother's name
upload her photo,
a note about her,
to her and to yourself.
If it gets to be a love letter,
a poem or a very long message
as long as a novel (!)
that's fine.
Make sure to squeeze her with
big hugs and kisses in your mind
and send it
with a sprinkle of i ii iii
y.o. '10
Yoko Ono
For Mothers Day: Sunday 9 May 2010
MY MOMMY IS BEAUTIFUL
By urging us to celebrate the maternal love we experienced as children, or perhaps much later in life, MY MOMMY IS BEAUTIFUL engages our most personal memories.
Let's fill these groups with thousands of tributes to the love that nurtures us all:
The top floor with the .. 'fence' all around it is the resident of Yoko Ono!
PART ONE ASCOT
In 1969, John and I went to see three houses, before deciding on Ascot. One estate had a beautiful winding road with huge birch trees on both sides going all the way up to the house. We liked that one very much, but sadly they declined to sell it to us. The Class thing, you know.
Next we saw a mansion which once belonged to a very famous English poet of the olden days. His offspring were living in it at the time we visited. In our generation, all of us read and memorized this poet's work in English classes throughout the world. The mansion was on a rolling hill full of daffodils and had the beauty and the warmth you expected from the poet. There was a certain excitement in the idea of John Lennon taking this poet's mansion as his residence. But John and I soon realized that the mansion was like a shrine to many people, and we probably would have felt bad even putting a fresh coat of paint on the walls.
The last one was a beautiful, old and rambling castle. It was a true Saxon castle. John loved it. I loved the outside look of the castle, with a moat and beautiful flower beds. But it was too scary for me to think of actually living there. The main bedroom had a triple high ceiling and a window way up high. like one would imagine a room would be in the Tower of London. John thought it was great. “It’s like being in a horror film" (That, in John's book, meant exciting)."On a strong windy night, we can hold each other and stay under the covers!" There was a full set of old armour standing like a real warrior in the corridor outside the bedroom. Then we went to the kitchen downstairs. There were rows of huge, rusty, iron pots each, of which could easily feed 50 people. I'd never seen anything like that before. You could boil a witch in one. I wondered if John was thinking I would cook for him in this kitchen on the cook's day off. For that matter, I wondered if anybody would want to come to cook for us in this kitchen. Peter Shotton, John's old buddy who drove us there kept saying "Yeah, man this is great" - at the same time throwing a concerned look in my direction like saying "I hope you're not gonna say no to this one.” Well, I did. I took John aside and said, "John it's alright when we're together. but what if you go out one night without me? I'd be too scared to be here alone." John kissed me and said, "Don't be silly. I would never go out without you, you know that. Now, that's a silly thought isn't it? To think I would ever leave you alone!" John meant it when he said he would never leave me alone. But how was I to know that at that point in our relationship that we would always be together like a pair of jeans? I was coming from the 20th century, you know, not from Wuthering Heights. I heard John say quietly to Peter, "Too bad, Yoko doesn't like it." "What a pity" Peter said. In hindsight, I kind of regret that we never lived in that beautiful old castle. I regret that I wasn't a Saxon warrior woman who could stir those big pots with one arm without tumbling into it.
Ascot was just right for us. It was Georgian, thank God, not Saxon. John said, "You like it?" seeing already from my expression of relief that it was a go. “Yes," I nodded.” Okay we'll take it" "But..." "What, what?" "There's no water on the land." "Oh, that. We'll build a lake then. It's easy." John and I thought we would make Ascot our home and live there for many, many years to come. Otherwise, why did we plunk a huge lake in the garden and plant feeble looking plum and cherry saplings around the lake which promised to become trees in twenty years time?
Yoko Ono Lennon NYC 1998
Illustration "A Family Tree" by John Lennon, colored by Yoko Ono Lennon.
from John Lennon Anthology CD box set booklet.
Yoko Ono
Book :
Yoko Ono
MoMA
2017
CD :
Taylor Deupree
Snow (Dusk / Dawn)
12K
12K216
Limited Numbered Edition . 57 / 63
Sounds & Design . Taylor Deupree
iMusic :
Autechre
Stop Look Listen
Warp Records
WARP100
GMA Is Over ...
(for English scroll down)
Eröffnung: 10. September 2010, 18:00 - 21:00 Uhr, Heidestrasse 46, 10557 Berlin (10. September - 13. November 2010)
Haunch of Venison präsentiert Yoko Ono mit der grundlegend neuen Installation ‚Das Gift‘ vom 10. September bis zum 13. November 2010 in Berlin.
Yoko Ono gilt als Pionierin der Konzeptkunst. ‚Das Gift‘ besteht aus Filmen, Tonaufnahmen, Skulpturen und partizipativen Elementen und wurde eigens für die Ausstellung bei ‚Haunch of Venison‘ konzipiert.
Ono begann in den 1950er Jahren sich mit Konzeptkunst und partizipativer Kunst auseinander zu setzen. Ihre konzeptuelle Arbeit Grapefruit, eine Ideensammlung für Performances in Buchform, die 1964 entstand, liegt der Ausstellung in Berlin zugrunde. Ono behandelt die Themen Gewalt, Heilung, Veränderung oder Liebe mit sehr unterschiedlichen Mitteln und hinterfragt die Dichotomie von Persönlichem und Globalem.
Die Arbeit ‚A Hole‘, eine zugleich fragile, aber auch brutal anmutende Skulptur, welche einen Schwerpunkt in der Ausstellung bildet, besteht aus einer Glasfront, in deren Mitte ein sternförmiges Einschussloch prangt. Ins Glas eingraviert ist eine Aufforderung: „Gehen Sie auf die andere Seite der Glasscheibe und blicken Sie durch das Loch.“ Onos Anweisung fordert auf, beide Perspektiven, die des Aggressors sowie die des Opfers, einzunehmen, und somit zwei entgegengesetzte Standpunkte zu beziehen.
Yoko Ono sagt zu ihrer Ausstellung: „Ich will auf die Gewalt hinweisen, die überall in der Welt passiert. Ich bitte die Menschen, die in die Ausstellung kommen, ein Zeugnis einer persönlichen Gewalterfahrung mitzubringen, beispielsweise ein Foto oder einen Text, die an der Wand angebracht werden sollen. Im Obergeschoss der Galerie wird es hingegen einen Raum geben, in dem man einfach lächeln soll.“ Das Lächeln der Besucher wird auf Video aufgenommen und im Ausstellungsraum projiziert.
Yoko Ono wurde 1933 in Tokio geboren. Sie wuchs in Japan und New York auf und besuchte das Sarah Lawrence College. Ono gilt als eine der bedeutendsten Vertreterinnen der Fluxus-Bewegung der 1960er Jahre. In ihrer Arbeit konzentriert sie sich hauptsächlich auf Performance und Konzeptkunst, wie auch experimentellen Film und Musik. Zu ihren wichtigsten Arbeiten werden die Konzeptarbeit Cut Piece und ihr Buch Grapefruit gezählt (beide 1964). - Ono lebt und arbeitet in New York.
Haunch Of Venison
Seit ihrer Gründung im Jahre 2002 in London präsentiert die Galerie Haunch of Venison in London, Berlin und New York ein breites und von Kritikern viel beachtetes Ausstellungsprogramm mit einigen herausragenden Vertretern zeitgenössischer Kunst. Die Berliner Dependance wurde im September 2007 eröffnet.
____________________________________________________
THE POISON - Yoko Ono Exhibition, Berlin 2010
Opening: September 10, 2010, 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m., Heidestrasse 46, 10557 Berlin (September 10 - November 13, 2010)
Haunch of Venison presents Yoko Ono with the fundamentally new installation 'The Gift' from September 10th to November 13th, 2010 in Berlin.
Yoko Ono is considered a pioneer of conceptual art. 'The Gift' consists of films, sound recordings, sculptures and participatory elements and was conceived specifically for the exhibition at 'Haunch of Venison'.
Ono began to engage with conceptual art and participatory art in the 1950s. The exhibition in Berlin is based on her conceptual work Grapefruit, a collection of ideas for performances in book form, which was created in 1964. Ono deals with the themes of violence, healing, change and love using very different means and questions the dichotomy of the personal and the global.
The work 'A Hole', a fragile yet brutal-seeming sculpture that forms a focal point of the exhibition, consists of a glass front with a star-shaped bullet hole in the middle. Engraved into the glass is an instruction: “Go to the other side of the glass pane and look through the hole.” Ono's instruction calls for you to take on both perspectives, that of the aggressor and that of the victim, and thus take two opposite points of view.
Yoko Ono says of her exhibition: “I want to point out the violence that is happening all over the world. I ask people who come to the exhibition to bring with them a testimony of a personal experience of violence, for example a photo or a text, to be hung on the wall. On the upper floor of the gallery, however, there will be a room where you can simply smile.” The visitors' smiles will be recorded on video and projected in the exhibition room.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. She grew up in Japan and New York and attended Sarah Lawrence College. Ono is considered one of the most important representatives of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s. Her work focuses primarily on performance and conceptual art, as well as experimental film and music. Her most important works include the conceptual work Cut Piece and her book Grapefruit (both 1964). - Ono lives and works in New York.
Haunch Of Venison
Since its founding in London in 2002, the Haunch of Venison gallery has presented a broad and critically acclaimed exhibition program with some outstanding representatives of contemporary art in London, Berlin and New York. The Berlin branch was opened in September 2007.
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Zur Ausstellung DAS GIFT / About the exhibition THE POISON
"Mein neuestes Installationskunstwerk, DAS GIFT, bittet um Ihre Teilnahme, um die Welt von Gewalt zu heilen." - YOKO ONO
"My latest installation artwork, THE POISON, asks for your participation to heal the world of violence." - YOKO ONO
***** Erste Etage / First Floor *****
HELME (STÜCKE VOM HIMMEL) / HELMETS (PIECES OF SKY)
Alte deutsche Helme aus den letzten Kriegen sind hier und bilden einen eigenen seltsamen Wald mit STÜCKE VOM HIMMEL in jedem von ihnen. - Nimm ein Stück Himmel mit nach Hause.
Old German helmets from the last wars are here, creating a strange forest of their own, with PIECES OF SKY in each one of them. - Take home a piece of sky.
SCHATTEN / SHADOWS
Drei Realitätsebenen werden gleichzeitig gezeigt, indem sie sich gegenseitig überlagern und zu einer Realität werden. Die erste Ebene ist das, was in der Welt geschieht. Die zweite Schicht sind die Menschen, die Schatten sind. Die dritte Schicht bist DU, der steht, geht und die beiden Schichten beobachtet und Teil dieser Realität wird.
Three layers of reality are being shown simultaneously, by overlapping each other and becoming one reality. The first layer is what is happening in the world. The second layer is people who are shadows. The third layer is YOU, standing, walking and observing the two layers and becoming part of this reality.
HEIL / HEAL
Eine große Leinwand mit Rissen und Schnitten auf der Leinwand. Sie sind eingeladen, sich am Flicken der Risse und Schnitte zu beteiligen. Denken Sie daran, dass Sie sich selbst und die Welt flicken, während Sie sie flicken.
A large canvas with rips and cuts in the canvas. You are invited to take part in the mending the rips and cuts. Think that you are mending yourself and the world, as you mend.
EIN LOCH / A HOLE
Es ist ein Werk, bei dem man zweimal die Position wechseln muss, um es zu betrachten. Einmal von vorne, um sich selbst als Schütze zu sehen. Einmal von hinten, um sich selbst als denjenigen zu sehen, auf den geschossen wird.
It is a work which asks you to change your position twice to observe it. Once from the front to see yourself as the shooter. Once from the back to see yourself as the one being shot.
MANTEL / COATS
Ganz am Ende des Raumes hängen sieben Mäntel in einer Reihe, die alle den Personen gehören, die sie trugen, als sie aus nächster Nähe erschossen wurden. Gehen Sie durch die sieben Mäntel, um Ihren Schatten mit dem der anderen zu vermischen.
Seven coats hang at the very end of the room in a row, all belonging to people who were wearing the coats when they were shot point blank from close range. Walk through the seven coats to mix your shadows with theirs.
DER SCHREI / SCREAM
Ein Schrei durchschneidet den riesigen Raum, der mit Gewalt aus allen Ecken der Welt gefüllt ist. Es ist die Stimme der Seevögel namens Kittiwakes aus Gateshead in England. Die Geräusche der Kittiwakes sollen der Klang der "Seelen der verlorenen Kinder" sein. Dann hört man die Krähen und Zikaden aus Tokio zusammen schreien.
A scream cuts through the huge room filled with violence from all corners of the world. It’s a voice of the sea birds called Kittiwakes from Gateshead in England. The sounds of Kittiwakes are said to be the sound of the “The Souls of Lost Children.” Then you hear the crows and cicadas from Tokyo screaming together.
TAUSENDFÜSSLER / CENTIPEDES
Als Sie aufschauen, um den SCHREI zu hören, bemerken Sie riesige Tausendfüßler, die an der Wand krabbeln, und die Tatsache, dass die Größe aller Ereignisse im Raum im Verhältnis zu den Tausendfüßlern verschwindend gering ist. - Da wird Ihnen klar, dass der Raum, den Sie für die Weltkarte hielten, nur ein dunkles KELLERGESCHOSS DES TAUSENDFÜSSLERS war.
As you look up to listen to the SCREAM, you notice huge centipedes crawling on the wall, and the fact that the sizes of all happenings in the room are infintessimal in proportion to the centipedes. - You realize then that the room which you thought of as the Map of the World was only a darkish BASEMENT OF CENTIPEDES.
PASSAGEN FÜR LICHT / THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT
Ganz am Ende des ersten Stocks gibt es einen kleinen Raum mit dem Titel PASSAGEN FÜR LICHT, der aus drei Veranstaltungen besteht.
There is a small room at the very end of the first floor called THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT consisting of three events.
Das erste Werk trägt den Titel: / The first work is titled:
ERINNERTE GEWALT / MEMORY OF VIOLENCE
Neun Leinwände mit Stadtplänen von Berlin sind an der Wand zu sehen. Es sind Leinwände mit Stadtplänen von Berlin aus verschiedenen Epochen, der erste stammt aus dem Jahr 1890. - Sie werden gebeten, Ihre persönlichen Erinnerungen an Gewalt mitzubringen, wenn Sie DAS GIFT betreten.
Sie können sich an GEDENKEN DER GEWALT beteiligen, indem Sie ein Foto, einen Brief und/oder etwas Geschriebenes mitbringen und es an die Leinwände in der Zeit und an dem Ort in den Karten anheften, wo es Ihrer Meinung nach hingehört - vielleicht an einem Ort, an dem Sie einst gelebt haben, an dem Ihre Familie einst lebte oder an dem Sie eine besondere Erinnerung haben, die Sie mit uns teilen möchten. Da immer mehr Erinnerungen an Gewalt zu den Leinwänden hinzugefügt werden, ist es möglich, dass Ihre Erinnerung von den Erinnerungen anderer überdeckt wird.
Nine canvasses of maps of Berlin are on the wall. They are canvases of street maps of Berlin from different periods, the first one being from 1890. - You are asked to bring your personal memories of violence when you enter DAS GIFT.
You can participate in MEMORY OF VIOLENCE by bringing a photograph, a letter, and/or something you have written, and pinning them onto the canvases in the period and the place in the maps you feel they belong – perhaps in a location where you once lived, or where your family once lived, or where you have a particular memory you wish to share with us. As more and more memories of violence are added to the canvases, it’s possible that your memory may be covered by memories of others.
Das zweite Werk von DIE PASSAGE FÜR LICHT ist
The second work in THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT is
SAMEN / SEEDS
Auf dem Boden dieses Raumes DIE PASSAGE FÜR LICHT liegen Mullkugeln mit Grapefruitkernen darin. - Sie sind eingeladen, immer mehr Gaze um diese Kerne zu wickeln, bis die Kugeln so groß werden, dass sie nicht mehr aus dem Raum herauskommen.
Balls made of gauze with grapefruit seeds in them are on the floor of this room THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT. - You are invited to continue to wrap more gauze around these seeds until the balls become so large that they cannot get out of the room.
Das dritte Werk von THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT ist
The third work in THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT is
ZERSCHLAGENES KRISTALL / SHATTERED GLASS
Fegen Sie den Raum mit einem Besen.
Sweep the room with a broom.
***** Zweite Etage / Second Floor *****
Der letzte Raum der Ausstellung, der sich direkt über dem GEDÄCHTNIS DER GEWALT befindet, ist…
The last room in the show, which is a room right above the MEMORY OF VIOLENCE, is…
BERLINER LÄCHELN / BERLIN SMILE
Setzen Sie sich auf den dafür vorgesehenen Stuhl vor die Kamera und schenken Sie der Welt Ihr Lächeln aus Berlin. Ihr Lächeln wird sich zu anderen Lächeln aus anderen Städten und Ländern gesellen, indem es ins Internet gestellt und in meinem Archiv aufbewahrt wird, damit es bei jeder Gelegenheit gezeigt werden kann. Es ist eine Petition für den Frieden.
Sit on the designated chair in front of the camera, and give your smile to the world from Berlin. Your smile will join other smiles from other cities and countries, by being sent out on the internet, and being also preserved in my archive to be shown whenever there is a chance. It is a petition for peace.
Photo from 'JOHN & YOKO: A New York Love Story' by Allan Tannenbaum
Publisher: Insight Editions (October 9, 2007)
Photo by & © Allan Tannenbaum.
atelier ying, nyc.
getting inspiration from reading Ono's wonderful book, "Grapefruit". She's so brainy. This design is adapted from her "City Piece, 1961". The small Moleskine reporter is close to the size of her book too. I thought any design that I would make in honor of this book should also have a kind of short poem quality.
This city camera is an empty depository of images as you walk all over New York city.
The empty 'chambers' are two detachable sake cups that metaphorically collect city images; in camera functionality they are double lens hoods for two pinhole apertures. The cube volume is the actual picture-taking chamber with a pair of insertable back plates so that the camera can take photos in two positions, one image of the sky and one of what is in front of you. The cup locks faintly recall those of the Kodak Brownie. Offered in a delightful yellow plastic.
Design, concepts, text and drawing are copyright 2015 by David Lo.
Special thanks to my good friend Scud aka Privatenobby, his wonderful mother Oddy, and his beautiful actress girlfriend karen aka k.l.u.m!
This was shot today. And it all started here a few days ago. And then inspiration struck. And then we were planning it for days online. And conveniently scud and his girlfriend were due to pop down this weekend, so it all kinda worked out well!
WARNING: please do not think that there are things going on. Scud is a good good friend I have kept in touch with since high school. He has links with me to get hello kitty freebies. I have links with him to get technical support. There is nothing to it. Platonic friendship only! (just saying because my family will assume otherwise!)
//About the photo: Scud is actually wearing a thong but he insisted I clone it out. The dark patch was especially hard. haha. And his leg was so heavy. And the heavy breathing in my ear! Had to take a few test shots (thanks oddy for being my human tripod) and then finally shot it with my remote control! Well anyway. Fun photoshoot. All this for the sake of photography eh? haha...
The original magazine cover can be found here.
And you can read up on the original photographer Annie Leibovitz here too.
You may also want to check out the imagine video we filmed, and theand the Bloopers and Behind the scenes video too!!
the foreground is an artwork by Yoko Ono which I saw at the MoMA - in the background was just the rest of the gallery, so I gave it a more colourful/suggestive background (I didn't edit the foreground - yes, the pieces and squares are all white)
(for English scroll down)
Eröffnung: 10. September 2010, 18:00 - 21:00 Uhr, Heidestrasse 46, 10557 Berlin (10. September - 13. November 2010)
Haunch of Venison präsentiert Yoko Ono mit der grundlegend neuen Installation ‚Das Gift‘ vom 10. September bis zum 13. November 2010 in Berlin.
Yoko Ono gilt als Pionierin der Konzeptkunst. ‚Das Gift‘ besteht aus Filmen, Tonaufnahmen, Skulpturen und partizipativen Elementen und wurde eigens für die Ausstellung bei ‚Haunch of Venison‘ konzipiert.
Ono begann in den 1950er Jahren sich mit Konzeptkunst und partizipativer Kunst auseinander zu setzen. Ihre konzeptuelle Arbeit Grapefruit, eine Ideensammlung für Performances in Buchform, die 1964 entstand, liegt der Ausstellung in Berlin zugrunde. Ono behandelt die Themen Gewalt, Heilung, Veränderung oder Liebe mit sehr unterschiedlichen Mitteln und hinterfragt die Dichotomie von Persönlichem und Globalem.
Die Arbeit ‚A Hole‘, eine zugleich fragile, aber auch brutal anmutende Skulptur, welche einen Schwerpunkt in der Ausstellung bildet, besteht aus einer Glasfront, in deren Mitte ein sternförmiges Einschussloch prangt. Ins Glas eingraviert ist eine Aufforderung: „Gehen Sie auf die andere Seite der Glasscheibe und blicken Sie durch das Loch.“ Onos Anweisung fordert auf, beide Perspektiven, die des Aggressors sowie die des Opfers, einzunehmen, und somit zwei entgegengesetzte Standpunkte zu beziehen.
Yoko Ono sagt zu ihrer Ausstellung: „Ich will auf die Gewalt hinweisen, die überall in der Welt passiert. Ich bitte die Menschen, die in die Ausstellung kommen, ein Zeugnis einer persönlichen Gewalterfahrung mitzubringen, beispielsweise ein Foto oder einen Text, die an der Wand angebracht werden sollen. Im Obergeschoss der Galerie wird es hingegen einen Raum geben, in dem man einfach lächeln soll.“ Das Lächeln der Besucher wird auf Video aufgenommen und im Ausstellungsraum projiziert.
Yoko Ono wurde 1933 in Tokio geboren. Sie wuchs in Japan und New York auf und besuchte das Sarah Lawrence College. Ono gilt als eine der bedeutendsten Vertreterinnen der Fluxus-Bewegung der 1960er Jahre. In ihrer Arbeit konzentriert sie sich hauptsächlich auf Performance und Konzeptkunst, wie auch experimentellen Film und Musik. Zu ihren wichtigsten Arbeiten werden die Konzeptarbeit Cut Piece und ihr Buch Grapefruit gezählt (beide 1964). - Ono lebt und arbeitet in New York.
Haunch Of Venison
Seit ihrer Gründung im Jahre 2002 in London präsentiert die Galerie Haunch of Venison in London, Berlin und New York ein breites und von Kritikern viel beachtetes Ausstellungsprogramm mit einigen herausragenden Vertretern zeitgenössischer Kunst. Die Berliner Dependance wurde im September 2007 eröffnet.
____________________________________________________
THE POISON - Yoko Ono Exhibition, Berlin 2010
Opening: September 10, 2010, 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m., Heidestrasse 46, 10557 Berlin (September 10 - November 13, 2010)
Haunch of Venison presents Yoko Ono with the fundamentally new installation 'The Gift' from September 10th to November 13th, 2010 in Berlin.
Yoko Ono is considered a pioneer of conceptual art. 'The Gift' consists of films, sound recordings, sculptures and participatory elements and was conceived specifically for the exhibition at 'Haunch of Venison'.
Ono began to engage with conceptual art and participatory art in the 1950s. The exhibition in Berlin is based on her conceptual work Grapefruit, a collection of ideas for performances in book form, which was created in 1964. Ono deals with the themes of violence, healing, change and love using very different means and questions the dichotomy of the personal and the global.
The work 'A Hole', a fragile yet brutal-seeming sculpture that forms a focal point of the exhibition, consists of a glass front with a star-shaped bullet hole in the middle. Engraved into the glass is an instruction: “Go to the other side of the glass pane and look through the hole.” Ono's instruction calls for you to take on both perspectives, that of the aggressor and that of the victim, and thus take two opposite points of view.
Yoko Ono says of her exhibition: “I want to point out the violence that is happening all over the world. I ask people who come to the exhibition to bring with them a testimony of a personal experience of violence, for example a photo or a text, to be hung on the wall. On the upper floor of the gallery, however, there will be a room where you can simply smile.” The visitors' smiles will be recorded on video and projected in the exhibition room.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. She grew up in Japan and New York and attended Sarah Lawrence College. Ono is considered one of the most important representatives of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s. Her work focuses primarily on performance and conceptual art, as well as experimental film and music. Her most important works include the conceptual work Cut Piece and her book Grapefruit (both 1964). - Ono lives and works in New York.
Haunch Of Venison
Since its founding in London in 2002, the Haunch of Venison gallery has presented a broad and critically acclaimed exhibition program with some outstanding representatives of contemporary art in London, Berlin and New York. The Berlin branch was opened in September 2007.
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Zur Ausstellung DAS GIFT / About the exhibition THE POISON
"Mein neuestes Installationskunstwerk, DAS GIFT, bittet um Ihre Teilnahme, um die Welt von Gewalt zu heilen." - YOKO ONO
"My latest installation artwork, THE POISON, asks for your participation to heal the world of violence." - YOKO ONO
***** Erste Etage / First Floor *****
HELME (STÜCKE VOM HIMMEL) / HELMETS (PIECES OF SKY)
Alte deutsche Helme aus den letzten Kriegen sind hier und bilden einen eigenen seltsamen Wald mit STÜCKE VOM HIMMEL in jedem von ihnen. - Nimm ein Stück Himmel mit nach Hause.
Old German helmets from the last wars are here, creating a strange forest of their own, with PIECES OF SKY in each one of them. - Take home a piece of sky.
SCHATTEN / SHADOWS
Drei Realitätsebenen werden gleichzeitig gezeigt, indem sie sich gegenseitig überlagern und zu einer Realität werden. Die erste Ebene ist das, was in der Welt geschieht. Die zweite Schicht sind die Menschen, die Schatten sind. Die dritte Schicht bist DU, der steht, geht und die beiden Schichten beobachtet und Teil dieser Realität wird.
Three layers of reality are being shown simultaneously, by overlapping each other and becoming one reality. The first layer is what is happening in the world. The second layer is people who are shadows. The third layer is YOU, standing, walking and observing the two layers and becoming part of this reality.
HEIL / HEAL
Eine große Leinwand mit Rissen und Schnitten auf der Leinwand. Sie sind eingeladen, sich am Flicken der Risse und Schnitte zu beteiligen. Denken Sie daran, dass Sie sich selbst und die Welt flicken, während Sie sie flicken.
A large canvas with rips and cuts in the canvas. You are invited to take part in the mending the rips and cuts. Think that you are mending yourself and the world, as you mend.
EIN LOCH / A HOLE
Es ist ein Werk, bei dem man zweimal die Position wechseln muss, um es zu betrachten. Einmal von vorne, um sich selbst als Schütze zu sehen. Einmal von hinten, um sich selbst als denjenigen zu sehen, auf den geschossen wird.
It is a work which asks you to change your position twice to observe it. Once from the front to see yourself as the shooter. Once from the back to see yourself as the one being shot.
MANTEL / COATS
Ganz am Ende des Raumes hängen sieben Mäntel in einer Reihe, die alle den Personen gehören, die sie trugen, als sie aus nächster Nähe erschossen wurden. Gehen Sie durch die sieben Mäntel, um Ihren Schatten mit dem der anderen zu vermischen.
Seven coats hang at the very end of the room in a row, all belonging to people who were wearing the coats when they were shot point blank from close range. Walk through the seven coats to mix your shadows with theirs.
DER SCHREI / SCREAM
Ein Schrei durchschneidet den riesigen Raum, der mit Gewalt aus allen Ecken der Welt gefüllt ist. Es ist die Stimme der Seevögel namens Kittiwakes aus Gateshead in England. Die Geräusche der Kittiwakes sollen der Klang der "Seelen der verlorenen Kinder" sein. Dann hört man die Krähen und Zikaden aus Tokio zusammen schreien.
A scream cuts through the huge room filled with violence from all corners of the world. It’s a voice of the sea birds called Kittiwakes from Gateshead in England. The sounds of Kittiwakes are said to be the sound of the “The Souls of Lost Children.” Then you hear the crows and cicadas from Tokyo screaming together.
TAUSENDFÜSSLER / CENTIPEDES
Als Sie aufschauen, um den SCHREI zu hören, bemerken Sie riesige Tausendfüßler, die an der Wand krabbeln, und die Tatsache, dass die Größe aller Ereignisse im Raum im Verhältnis zu den Tausendfüßlern verschwindend gering ist. - Da wird Ihnen klar, dass der Raum, den Sie für die Weltkarte hielten, nur ein dunkles KELLERGESCHOSS DES TAUSENDFÜSSLERS war.
As you look up to listen to the SCREAM, you notice huge centipedes crawling on the wall, and the fact that the sizes of all happenings in the room are infintessimal in proportion to the centipedes. - You realize then that the room which you thought of as the Map of the World was only a darkish BASEMENT OF CENTIPEDES.
PASSAGEN FÜR LICHT / THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT
Ganz am Ende des ersten Stocks gibt es einen kleinen Raum mit dem Titel PASSAGEN FÜR LICHT, der aus drei Veranstaltungen besteht.
There is a small room at the very end of the first floor called THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT consisting of three events.
Das erste Werk trägt den Titel: / The first work is titled:
ERINNERTE GEWALT / MEMORY OF VIOLENCE
Neun Leinwände mit Stadtplänen von Berlin sind an der Wand zu sehen. Es sind Leinwände mit Stadtplänen von Berlin aus verschiedenen Epochen, der erste stammt aus dem Jahr 1890. - Sie werden gebeten, Ihre persönlichen Erinnerungen an Gewalt mitzubringen, wenn Sie DAS GIFT betreten.
Sie können sich an GEDENKEN DER GEWALT beteiligen, indem Sie ein Foto, einen Brief und/oder etwas Geschriebenes mitbringen und es an die Leinwände in der Zeit und an dem Ort in den Karten anheften, wo es Ihrer Meinung nach hingehört - vielleicht an einem Ort, an dem Sie einst gelebt haben, an dem Ihre Familie einst lebte oder an dem Sie eine besondere Erinnerung haben, die Sie mit uns teilen möchten. Da immer mehr Erinnerungen an Gewalt zu den Leinwänden hinzugefügt werden, ist es möglich, dass Ihre Erinnerung von den Erinnerungen anderer überdeckt wird.
Nine canvasses of maps of Berlin are on the wall. They are canvases of street maps of Berlin from different periods, the first one being from 1890. - You are asked to bring your personal memories of violence when you enter DAS GIFT.
You can participate in MEMORY OF VIOLENCE by bringing a photograph, a letter, and/or something you have written, and pinning them onto the canvases in the period and the place in the maps you feel they belong – perhaps in a location where you once lived, or where your family once lived, or where you have a particular memory you wish to share with us. As more and more memories of violence are added to the canvases, it’s possible that your memory may be covered by memories of others.
Das zweite Werk von DIE PASSAGE FÜR LICHT ist
The second work in THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT is
SAMEN / SEEDS
Auf dem Boden dieses Raumes DIE PASSAGE FÜR LICHT liegen Mullkugeln mit Grapefruitkernen darin. - Sie sind eingeladen, immer mehr Gaze um diese Kerne zu wickeln, bis die Kugeln so groß werden, dass sie nicht mehr aus dem Raum herauskommen.
Balls made of gauze with grapefruit seeds in them are on the floor of this room THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT. - You are invited to continue to wrap more gauze around these seeds until the balls become so large that they cannot get out of the room.
Das dritte Werk von THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT ist
The third work in THE PASSAGE FOR LIGHT is
ZERSCHLAGENES KRISTALL / SHATTERED GLASS
Fegen Sie den Raum mit einem Besen.
Sweep the room with a broom.
***** Zweite Etage / Second Floor *****
Der letzte Raum der Ausstellung, der sich direkt über dem GEDÄCHTNIS DER GEWALT befindet, ist…
The last room in the show, which is a room right above the MEMORY OF VIOLENCE, is…
BERLINER LÄCHELN / BERLIN SMILE
Setzen Sie sich auf den dafür vorgesehenen Stuhl vor die Kamera und schenken Sie der Welt Ihr Lächeln aus Berlin. Ihr Lächeln wird sich zu anderen Lächeln aus anderen Städten und Ländern gesellen, indem es ins Internet gestellt und in meinem Archiv aufbewahrt wird, damit es bei jeder Gelegenheit gezeigt werden kann. Es ist eine Petition für den Frieden.
Sit on the designated chair in front of the camera, and give your smile to the world from Berlin. Your smile will join other smiles from other cities and countries, by being sent out on the internet, and being also preserved in my archive to be shown whenever there is a chance. It is a petition for peace.
"Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear"
--Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917 - 2008)
February 15th, 2008:
I would like to use this opportunity to write few words to remember a man who recently passed away and influenced my life in a profound way. I never met him, though back in 1985 I saw him once from a distance. This man was an inspiration.
During the years from 1985 to 1991, I was a student in a university which was named after what people called him. While studying there I met many great people. Some of them are close friends of mine, though physically they're living far away. We still keep in touch.
But when returning back home to Iceland, my life and priorities changed. Slowly to begin with. And since being blessed with meeting my wife and becoming a father, this time I spent absorbing knowledge this man bestowed upon me, faded into a distant haze.
A couple of hours after his passing, my brother called me to bring me the news. I did not feel any grief --not even sad. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a man who found his dharma, his path in life. He lived a long life, filled with purpose and joy. He had and shared something of great value with the rest of us, for which he earned great respect. Having watered the roots he now still enjoys the fruits.
Things are though sinking in these days. Since hearing of his death, what for me had faded into a distant haze, is slowly uncovering. He still inspires.
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I took this photograph in October 2007, shortly after the initial ignition of Yoko Ono's Imagine Peace Tower in Viðey, Iceland. Besides the obvious relevance to Maharishi's quote above, this example, an article written by Cynthia Lennon, describes it's relevance to a greater extent:
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainmen...
Yoko Ono runs a website dedicated to peace, called www.imaginepeace.com/. I truly admire her determination to promote peace here on earth, and as an Icelander, I feel privileged that she chose my country to host this remarkable work of art. When this tower of light is on, its beauty is ever changing, depending on weather and clouds flying by. If you want to see the tower, it will light up between October 9th (John Lennon's birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death).
Besides the promotion of peace, there at least used to be a small thing on Yoko Ono's website that I found relevant to Maharishi, a link to NASA's news release from February 1st 2008, stating that "At midnight GMT (7pm EST) on the night of Monday 4th February, The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space .... The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second ...", the speed of light:
Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing me
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva
-- Lennon & McCartney
The following day, Tuesday February 5th, Maharishi joins in heaven his beloved teacher, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, known as Guru Dev.
Jai Guru Dev
INTRODUCTION
In person, John was a much more attractive man than the one you saw in photos and films. He had very fair, delicate skin and soft, sandy hair with a touch of red in it when the light hit a certain way. I would kid him and say, "You're a red head!" He would say "Never", but the way he laughed, I knew that that idea had been suggested before. When he grew his beard, it was very definitely predominantly red. He had three small but distinct moles straight down the center of his broad forehead, ending where the third eye was. Buddha was supposed to have had one mole in the center of his forehead, and that was considered in the Oriental Physiognomy as a sign of a very wise man. I always thought John's oval and well-chiselled classic face looked very much like a Kabuki mask or a face you'd expect to see in a Shakespearean play. And he carried his body with a certain lightness that gave grace to his movements. He was in his twenties when I met him. I was eight years older. But I never thought of him as somebody younger than me. When you were near him, the strong mental vibe he sent out was too heavy for a young person. Some people are born old. That was John. His slumming, clowning and acting the entertainer was just a kind of play acting he enjoyed. But it was obvious to anybody around him that he was actually a very heavy dude: not a prince, but a king.
London, then, was a gathering place of the new aristocrats in music art and films. They exuded new energy with a certain elegance of self-made people who would change the class structure in England, and would go on to change the world in a big way. John and I got together in that atmosphere. So we were very surprised that the so-called hip society of the times, to which we both belonged, turned against us as soon as we announced our unity. It seemed as though they had a separate standard for John, or shall we say that their hipness ended at the point where John, their ring-leader, chose an oriental woman as his partner. This was in the 60's in "Swinging London"! It made us feel as though, suddenly, the wind of the Middle Ages was blowing around us.
They say that Venus is jealous of lovers. Forget Venus. In our case it was the whole world. But as far as we were concerned, we felt so lucky that we had found each other. Aside of the fact that we were both rebellious and emotional, we were true opposites. John was tallish. I was smallish. John made music for the people. I made music for the avant-garde, though I did not think of my music in those terms at the time (I thought I was big time). John was humble, in a way only a very successful person could be. l was proud, like most people living in an Ivory Tower, who never had to test the big water. Coming from a semi-working class background, John was street-wise. I was totally inexperienced when it came to the games of the real world. And we felt so, so lucky that we fell in love with each other. It was a blessing neither of us expected at that time in our lives. We couldn't take our eyes off one another. We couldn't get enough of each other, But the outside pressure was very strong. It was so strong, that sometimes we had to separate from each other in order to protect our love. We thought we were clever, that we did everything right, and nothing and nobody could tear us apart. Never, never, never. But it happened: our separation. So sudden, too. He was taken away from me for good.
Even now, I think there are people who still cannot reconcile themselves to the idea that I had been in John's life. To those people, led like to say, I'm sorry that we had hurt you, But that's what happened. That's how it was. When we made Double Fantasy, our last album together, we used a photo of us kissing for the cover. There was a phone call from our record company. They wanted the album cover to be John alone, looking like he was a bachelor and available. When I reported that to John, he was livid.” They don't want their white boy to be kissing an oriental woman... Okay. from now on we won't release any photo unless we're both in it! No. From now on we won't release any photo unless it's a photo of us looking at each other!" I started laughing. John smiled, too. But he said, "Tell them I'm serious." That game was over when John passed away. The whole world was calling our office to get John's picture without me in it. I remembered what John had said, but of course, it was a different time. I kept releasing John's photos and his work for the next 18 years, getting a new name "professional widow" for it. I continue to distribute John's work for many reasons: first for John, who was a communicator/artist/musician. who would have liked for his work to go on; second, for the fans who want more, more and more; and third, for the family, including myself, who are proud of father John's work and would like to see his work out there for a long time to come.
Frankly, I was very reluctant to do this project: The Lennon Anthology. By now I was used to listening to John's music for various projects.” We want your okay to cover this song", "We want to use this part of a song for a commercial", etc. But these tracks are different from those songs. These are never before released home tapes and studio outtakes, showing John at his most relaxed and natural. I knew it would be hard for me to just go through them, to listen to the huge volume of tapes. EMI kept suggesting that I do this project. They were very patient and very sensitive to my feelings. However, it was "for the millions of fans around the world. It would make them so happy". I knew that was true. But what about what I would have to go through in the process?! But I said yes. Sure enough, it was very hard for me. As I listened to John's voice on the tapes, l felt as though I was going through a time warp, and that John was actually in the same room with me, sipping coffee as we used to in the long sessions at home or in the studio. Are we in Ascot? I felt the birds singing. The Oak trees were making a shuffling noise with their leaves in the garden. Are we in Bank Street? Isn't it time to get up in the morning? I had to pinch myself and remember that it was a different time. Whatever that was - that period in our lives - was over - gone.
I couldn't stop the tears running down my cheek. It was so hard. It was so sad. I took the first rough stringing to Sean.” Sean, there's something you might enjoy hearing..." He cried, too. Then I realized that he was coming from a slightly different place from me.” Mom, he was so good..." Sean's take was about his dad's musicianship.” Thank you, Sean. You're making your mom feel better.” Then I cried again, because it was so beautiful. John would have liked that his now grown son, a musician himself, liked what dad did.
I hope you enjoy this box. This is the John that I knew, not the John that you knew through the press, the records and the films. I am saying to you, here's my John. I wish to share my knowledge of him with you. He was brilliant, he was happy, he was angry, he was sad. Above all, he was a genius who worked hard to give his best to the world. I loved him. It was nice to know that such a person was part of our generation. our century, and the human race. It was an incredible honour for me to have been with him.
Yoko Ono Lennon NYC 1998
Illustration "He Tried To Face Reality" by John Lennon, colored by Yoko Ono Lennon.
from John Lennon Anthology CD box set booklet.
Yoko Ono (Japanese: 小野 洋子 Ono Yōko; born February 18, 1933 in Tokyo Prefecture, Imperial Japan) is a Japanese-American artist, filmmaker, experimental composer, and singer. She is considered one of the most important representatives of the Fluxus movement. Even before her marriage to the "Beatle" John Lennon, Ono had already made a name for herself in artistic circles in the early 1960s and increasingly acted as a peace and human rights activist.
by Yoko Ono
Several cat sculptures called 'Bastet' created by artist Yoko Ono are shown at Kunsthalle Bielefeld. EFE/Oliver Krato.
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BASTET
by Yoko Ono, June 1996
Suddenly one morning, 100 cats landed in my mind. The image was specific, the posture, the size and the colors. They all had large gleaming phosphorus eyes, come in groups of nice with one on the centerfront, and seemed to be demanding to be materialized. On one hand, I felt like a fool. I regarded myself an intellectual. I was not about to materialize the cats as my work. But on the other hand, I thought, wasn’t that what I was precisely against – to allow my petty intellectual snobbery to block the marvellous flight that art allows us to make? Anyway, to go with the flow and materialize these cats seemed to be the most natural thing to do at the time, and I followed it. I shaped the cats after the one Egyptian cat which permantly looked over the Strawberryfields from our white room in Dakota.
Then there was a question of what to call them, Usually, I had no difficulty in titling my work since the physical part if the entities seemed to be merely an instrument to enact the concept I expressed in the title. But I didn’t know what to call these cats since I only had a vague clue of what they were. It was a totally new game for me. I knew that they were some kind of carriers of a message that descended on us. Should I call them “Transmitters”? That sounded more like parts of electric gadgets. How about “Descendents?” That sounded like a TV soap opera following “Dynasty?” Not only was I embarrassed tat I could not find a title for them, but I felt worse that I materialized something and I didn’t what it was about. Finally, exasperated, I called a friend in New York. “I don’t have my Webster Dictionary here. Could you look up some words for these cats? They’re some kind of messengers – from far away – I don’ know from where tough. Could be from Atlantis or something – or another planet – from way back is hat I’m getting.” It was interesting that my mind kept playing tricks even at that point. Though I already shaped the cats after the Egyptian cat, somehow I didn’t think Egypt. I thought Atlantis. That was my gut feeling; Atlantis or another planet. Five minutes later, my friends called and said that he also did not have a Webster Dictionary at hand and instead he had looked into a theosophical dictionary. A word jumped into his eye from the first page he opened. The work was BUBABSTE and it followed with the explanation.
“A city in Egypt which was sacred to the cats, and where was their principal shrine. Many hundreds of thousands of cats were embalmed and buried in the grottoes of Beniassan-el Amar. The cat being a symbol of the moon was sacred o Isis, her goddess. It sees in the dark and its eyes have phosphorescent lustre, which frightens the night-birds of evil omen. The cat was also sacred to BAST and thence called (BASTET) the destroyer of the Sun’s enemies.”
“Oh dear. If you didn’t know that I had materialized the cats before reading this information about Bastet you would think that I had made the cats according to what was said here, wouldn’t you?” My friend agreed. So what did this mean? I still wasn’t sure. Maybe my mind was not playing tricks after all. Maybe Egypt had something to do with Atlantis and the Space.
The inspiration and materialization of Bastet happened in parallel to my initial thought and the performance of hammering nails in a cross in public. On hindsight, I think Bastet may have come to me as my protection. Somehow I know that the two events are connected, that unless I have decided to hammer a nail in the cross, Bastet would not have come to me.
y.o. June 1990
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In Egyptian mythology, Bastet or Bast was a solar deity and a goddess of fertility and protector of pregnant women. She also has power over solar eclipses. Bastet was represented as early as the Second Dynasty of the Old Kingdom as a woman with a feline head. Domestic cat-headed Bastet, as she appears in the Middle Kingdom, is a content goddess; lioness-headed Bastet is potentially dangerous.
She is also considered by some to be another aspect of Sekhmet. Her cult was centered in Bubastis. After the period of Hellenistic civilization, Bastet became a lunar deity whom the Greeks associated with their Artemis. She was considered the daughter of Isis and Osiris, and was associated with Hathor. She was the wife of Ptah, with whom she was the mother of Nefertum and Mihos. She was also the patron goddess of cats. Mummified cats were dedicated in her honor.
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IELEFELD, GERMANY.-Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi.
On her mother’s side, Ono is a member of one of Japan’s most respected families, and so, as a child, she attended a school for members of the Japanese imperial family. Her father, who originally intended to be a pianist before he ultimately became a leading Japanese banker, insisted she take piano and voice lessons at an early age. Her parents and relatives acknowledged that Yoko had a strong will and an irrepressible desire for freedom. The lengthiest publication on the artist to date says that her main intention was “to think the unthinkable—and then do it.” After beginning a relationship with John Lennon in 1967, Ono began working on no less an ambition than to bring inner peace to different peoples. Representing one of her chief messages, her work Imagine Peace will be presented in front of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle.
As a young artist, Ono left New York in the early nineteen-sixties in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In 1962 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in several editions. Some of the works in it date back to 1953. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she has remained interested in the process of tearing apart various forms of presentational media to the point where their boundaries dissolve.
Therefore, for the 2008 exhibition in Bielefeld (featuring a selection of Ono’s work from 1961 to the present), works placed outside the museum will relate to the city itself. One of these will be a Wish Tree. The Wish Tree differs greatly from the “wish pieces” in Japanese temple gardens or the “fortunes” in Chinese fortune cookies. While those preprinted prayers and fortunes are materialistic, the Wish Trees invite the public to express hopes and dreams. Just before the opening of the exhibition, children and teens from three schools in Bielefeld will hang their wishes on a selected tree outside the Johnson building.
A Golden Ladder, which is an allegory for the exhibition’s title, Between the Sky and My Head, will be installed in the Kunsthalle park. The work is an imaginary, spiritual space centered between sky and earth Since Ono works not only with grand dreams, but also with poetic visions of how one can change, she plans a third work that will take place outside the Kunsthalle. It will be the realization of a work she originally noted down in 1962: titled Riding Piece “Ride a coffin car all over the city.” During the run of the show, visitors to the Kunsthalle can decide to be chauffeured around the city in a hearse for a short time.
Inside the Kunsthalle, visitors will experience three floors of sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, and sound installations. An interview with the artist, filmed in Bielefeld, will accompany the exhibition. One of the earliest works is Cough Piece, first written down in 1961; and Keep Coughing a Year, a sound installation featuring the artist’s cough and other sounds, will be heard in dark rooms. Laughing and coughing were important anchors in Ono’s work at the time she began creating conceptual art: they considerably expand the sense of time during a performance. In the entrance to the Kunsthalle is Play It by Trust, a chess game that has been set up several times in various places since 1966. In Bielefeld, it will be in marble, with chess pieces one meter high, on a surface measuring five by five meters. One can imagine playing the game with the heavy, fragile marble pieces, all of which are white. Morning Beams, consisting of one hundred nylon threads running throughout all of the floors of the Kunsthalle, illuminates the twelve-meter-high staircase. Since the mid-1990s, Ono has been working with ink on paper, and the show will feature a drawing called Franklin Summer. Other pieces in the exhibition include a labyrinth made of Plexiglas, titled Amaze; the famous film Fly, showing a fly on a woman’s body in a six-part installation; and a participatory piece, My Mommy is Beautiful, in which visitors are invited to put photographs and other thoughts of their mothers onto the bare canvas of the work, or other feelings that they themselves write.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. To celebrate the re-opening of the sculpture park on 27 September, 2008, at 6 p.m., the work Golden Ladder, made in Bielefeld at Ono’s behest, will be installed on a temporary basis.
Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will run until 16 November, 2008, and is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Pro Bielefeld.
Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band perform in concert at the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music.///
Photo by & © Allan Tannenbaum 2010
Dear Friends
A big THANKYOU to all who came to and participated in TO JAPAN WITH LOVE last night.
We raised $71,103.35 for Japan relief!
Le Poisson Rouge will be issuing a check for this amount tomorrow to be paid to Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.
This donation will be noted that it is from the benefit concert event YOKO ONO & FRIENDS TO JAPAN WITH LOVE.
If you would like to make an additional donation you can do so here: www.japansociety.org/earthquake
love, yoko
Yoko Ono
30 March 2011
Portrait ©2011 Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, courtesy of Yoko Ono.
my love will turn you on.
(John Lennon, Imagine, 1971)
exhibition poster seen in Leipzig Main Station
Every year the Imagine Peace Tower is lit on John´s birthday and turned off on the date of his death.
Numero Ono
By Seth Colter Walls | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009
To talk about Yoko Ono is to talk about The Scream. An impossibly long, warbling vocal tremor, it confirmed the public’s worst prejudices about Ono—that she was an unmusical self-promoter who’d put John Lennon under her spell and split up the Beatles. Never mind that her experiments with musique concrète played at Carnegie Hall’s recital space five years before she ever met Lennon, or that Ono’s studio art had previously become a pillar of Fluxus, the conceptual-art movement organized around chance. Perhaps it was an unintentional testament to the raw force of her act, but the public’s reaction constituted a frenzied rhetoric beyond the influence of such information. Today Ono recalls being blamed for whatever Lennon’s failings were seen to be by any given group. She says the radical left, frustrated with Lennon’s peacenik refusal to sign up for violent protest, thought her the culprit. So too did Middle America, except that its beef seemed like an after-the-fact explanation for the onetime moptopper’s pivot away from adorableness. “Maybe it made me stronger,” she says today of her time taking shots from both sides of an ideological crossfire. But while the experience may have made Ono tough, it didn’t help anyone construct an honest appraisal of her work.
Then something odd happened—even stranger than a member of Fluxus finding herself the subject of tabloid innuendo. To a younger generation growing up after the baggage of Lennon’s personal life had largely been laid to rest, Ono became an esthetic godmother. As the world itself got noisier, her scream seemed more and more legitimate as a response—to anything from the panic of AIDS to the specter of WMDs. “It is a scream of the human race, in a way,” she says today, and it makes sense: you can think of her music as an aural accompaniment to the paintings of Munch or Bacon. It may have taken a couple of decades, but the world caught up to that sound. It’s difficult to imagine the X-Ray Spex anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,” the Riot Grrl movement of the ’90s (featuring groups like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill), or even contemporary dance-punk heroines like Peaches or Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs existing apart from Yoko’s trailblazing, proto-feminist howl.
On her 2007 album Yes, I’m a Witch, Ono attracted a diverse crew of modern indie acts to reinterpret songs from her back catalog. The Flaming Lips, the best-known group to take part, elected to reinterpret the noise freak-out “Cambridge 1969″ (from the oft-reviled Unfinished Music No. 2 album she cut with Lennon)—an activist assertion that even Ono’s most out-there music deserves a fresh listen. And not only her old recordings are worth hearing. For more than a decade now, the shadow side to Yoko’s scream has been her fascination with dance and remix culture. This year she became the oldest woman—at 76, likely by a long shot—to notch a hit on Billboard’s Dance/Club Play chart, for the ironically titled remix album I’m Not Getting Enough. Devoid of pain-engorged screams, her exultant play with rhythm still points toward a unifying theme of her work: out-of-body transcendence, whether it be hellish or heavenly.
This September Yoko is releasing a new record, Between My Head and the Sky, that spends some time in both realms – rocking feverishly and then blissing out. It’s credited to the Plastic Ono Band, a moniker last used for 1973’s Feeling the Space. In part, Yoko’s return to that iconic brand is a family matter. While Lennon played the slashing riffs on her first two Plastic Ono Band LPs, their son, Sean, acts as ringleader on the new disc -assembling an impressive roster of musicians from modern-day scenes in New York and Japan. Yuka Honda’s digital sampling and piano work were a principal pleasure of the band Cibo Matto, and she brings a similar buoyancy to Ono’s latest. The production on the album’s second song, “The Sun Is Down,” is credited to electronic pioneer Cornelius, who adds frothy funk to Ono’s arsenal of sounds. And along with in-demand jazz session man Shahzad Ismaily, Sean Lennon lays down some pleasingly dirty guitar and fierce percussion. Which isn’t to suggest that the album is an unremitting stomper. There are a couple of meditative piano interludes, featuring violin and a muted trumpet, during which Yoko employs a talk-song cadence that approaches sweetness. Her voice, which could once fry the treble frequencies on any speaker system, has assumed a fuller quality with age. At times, it even sounds-gulp-pretty.
The album’s greatest weakness comes in the form of some undercooked lyrics. “Time … the great equalizer of all things” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. This comes as no surprise, since several of the album’s 15 songs were improvised live in the studio. Yet there’s a fine line between employing a light conceptual touch and actually sounding insubstantial. Similarly, some of the Zen-like koans that animated John and Yoko’s ’60s politics seem dated today, a reality Ono recognizes. “You guys will have to be much more intelligent than us,” she says. “We did things like waving flags for peace. But now it doesn’t make any impact.” But that scream still carries a charge. On the album opener, “Waiting for the D Train,” Yoko turns in a vocal performance that, for its uncanny marriage of power with nuance, puts most postpunk singers to shame.
Surprisingly, for someone subjected to so much unkind snark over the years, Yoko is an optimist late in life – particularly about the power of the Web. With the help of an assistant who feeds her questions, she replies to Twitter followers approximately once a week. Fear and wonder over the state of the physical being continue to grip her, as she likens the disembodied online community to the concept behind her ’60s-era “bag events,” in which participants covered themselves from head to toe in order to render themselves blind to visual perceptions of one another. “It’s now like we have become spirits on the Internet. The time sense and the physical-location sense is lost. And of course the visual looks are lost, too.” Worrying about appearances is, somewhat charmingly, still on Ono’s agenda—even as she’s invited to headline hip summer festivals from Chicago to London. “You probably shouldn’t say ’screaming,’ ” she advises me at one point, “or else people will … you know.” But Lennon actually had this issue nailed back on his first solo record, also titled Plastic Ono Band. “Hold on Yoko, Yoko hold on, it’s gonna be all right,” he sings, as though he’s aware Ono’s first record is due for a rough public reception, but also trusts time will deliver some measure of vindication.
After a week-long Bed-In for Peace in Montreal and a Peace conference at The University of Ottowa, John and Yoko visited Niagara Falls in Canada at 4pm on Wednesday 4 June 1969.
They were on their way to Toronto and then home to London.
On the same day (4 June 1969), the Beatles single “The Ballad Of John and Yoko” was released.
Download, print & display these posters in your window, school, workplace, car and elsewhere.
Post them on your Social Media feeds.
Send them as postcards to your friends.
We say it in so many ways, but we are one.
I love you!
Yoko Ono Lennon
1 December 2015
Photo from 'JOHN & YOKO: A New York Love Story' by Allan Tannenbaum
Publisher: Insight Editions (October 9, 2007)
Photo by & © Allan Tannenbaum.
PART TWO NEW YORK CITY
It was July, 1971 in New York City. We were having our morning coffee in a hotel room facing the park. Two things were upsetting John . One was he had learned that his manager suggested that the other Beatles use the same bank that he used. A big faux pas on the part of the manager as far as John was concerned. To John, that meant that he was not special to the manager. He was just part of the package deal. The other was that George was doing a Bangladesh Concert at Madison Square Garden, and because of that, many musicians from India had been put up in the same hotel as us. John had so many years of being bundled together with the other Beatles in a hotel, with hangers-on of the famous and near famous, that he was particularly sensitive to those situations. “It’s getting mighty crowded," he said, wiggling his nose.
Then, still in the middle of our breakfast, we got this idea to write an Xmas song. We were fast workers, so the song was born by the time we finished our last morning coffee. That made John feel better.” This is going to be bigger than White Xmas, you’ll see." He wiggled his nose again, this time with satisfaction. Then a phone call came and John picked it up. He was saying "Yeah....yeah.....yeah," I saw that he was getting very upset. He hung up the phone without saying a word. “What was that?" "Oh, that was George." A long pause.” He’s saying. 'Join the Bangladesh concert,' and all that. Dylan is coming. too. I'm not going." "Why? I think we should go. It's a charity. It's for a good cause." I said. “We’re not doing it." "Why?" "Because it's George's little thing. We’ll do our own. you and me." "I think we should go", I said. "Does it matter that it's George's?" John was getting angrier and angrier. I was getting angry. too. I thought John was being big-headed about it. “Okay. if you don't want to go I'll go. I'll go alone." I said. John flipped out. "You want to be a performing flea, go ahead! You'd perform with a drop of a hat with any excuse, anywhere...!"
Well, it was true that before I got together with John. I was an avant-garde performer. who believed in performing in situations that most people would not even consider. It was also true that I was beginning to miss those days when I used to perform all the time as a performance artist. But this was something else. altogether. “I think we should go." "I'm leaving!" John left the room in a huff. I just sat there. Then after quite a while. I called D's room. D was our assistant. John called him Dracula behind his back because he looked pale during the day and bright at night.” Is John there?" I asked. D said "Wait." and obviously went to another room. “Yes, he is," he said in a whispering voice.” Well. is he okay?" "Yes, he is. He is fine. He wants me to take him to the airport. He wants to leave New York. It'1I be fine. My suggestion is that you shouldn't worry. I'll take care of it." D sounded like he couldn't hide his excitement about all this. "Oh. okay then." I couldn't think of what else I could say or do.
I got a call from John's manager the next morning. ”Come to my office". As I opened the door to the office, the manager was sitting behind a huge desk. He gestured to me to sit on the chair opposite to him. I sat and waited for what he had to say. The manager seemed like he was searching for the right words. and then gave up and just said. "John's waiting. He kept calling me all night. You've got to go to him right away." "Why should I? He walked out on me." "I know. He told me everything. You've got to go to him. He's waiting." I started to tell him about how New York was my town, and it would be good if I could stay around here for awhile... to think what I'm doing with myself... with my life... "I need a rest from all this, you know." I said. The manager was looking at me like he couldn't believe his eyes, like what is this woman talking about! JOHN LENNON is waiting for her. "John is not sleeping well. He didn't stop talking to me all night. You gotta go to him right away." He looked at his watch. "I gotta go now. Patti Harrison is in town. I have to take her to George. He's on the boat. There's a party." It seemed like there was a Bangladesh bash. Patti was a strikingly beautiful blonde woman, and I always wondered why when New York businessmen talked about Patti, their voices went a notch higher. “You gotta go. John's waiting." The manager stood up and left me there.
I went back to my hotel room. I thought of calling my friends in New York from the old days. But when I tried to think who, I went blank. I couldn't think of anybody I wanted to talk to at that very moment. I started to miss John. I called D and asked him to escort me to the airport. I expected John to be at the London airport waiting for me. He was not there. Only Les Anthony, our driver was standing there with a grim face. Maybe John is standing at the entrance of Tittenhurst (our home in Ascot), I thought. John was not. I went inside the house and asked the maid where John was. "He's upstairs." "Oh." I was really upset by then. I went to our bedroom and opened the door in a huff. There on the floor John was kneeling inside the black bag. "I'm sorry" he said.
We compared notes. At the hotel, John thought I would run after him as soon as he had left our room. He waited for me at the elevator for awhile, but I didn't come after him. So he went to D's room since he couldn't think of anywhere else to go. "I called D's room, you know," I said. "I thought you might want to talk to me." "He didn't tell me that!" John said, "I thought of ways to go back to our room, like open the door and say, 'Oh, did I forget something?' but I thought, 'Sod it', because you were so angry." "Oh, alright so I was angry." "Damn right you were." We laughed. I told John that I nearly turned around and went back to New York when I realized that he wasn't waiting for me at the airport. "Good thing you didn't. It was getting hot inside the bag," he said. It was nice to relax in each other's arms, listening to our heartbeat. But then I suddenly felt very sad. "We're probably going to lose each other... you know... if we ever separate... because nobody wants us to be together... and you're so emotional and I'm so proud." "Well, we'll be careful, won't we!" John said in his sleepy voice.
John and I totally forgot about the Xmas song we wrote in the hotel room because of what happened that morning. in November, John remembered the song and called the manager to release it as a single for Xmas.
"John, it's too late... printing the cover... advertising." "Well, try." The single was out, but the manager was right: it was too late for anything and it bombed. Happy Xmas only became big after John's passing in 1980.
There is a twist to the story of "that morning." I heard much, much later, that George Harrison told John to come alone to the Bangladesh show, without me, that is. Was that the real reason John did not want to do the show? I guess I will never know.
Yoko Ono Lennon NYC 1998
Illustration "Power To The People" by John Lennon, colored by Yoko Ono Lennon.
from John Lennon Anthology CD box set booklet.
A dream you dream alone may be a dream,
but a dream two people dream together
is a reality.
Yoko Ono
1964
From 'Six Film Scripts' by Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964.
Published in Grapefruit
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLAYBOY:
Was your decision to become a househusband a result of the separation as well?
LENNON:
I could say yes and then it would be a pat thing: "Oh, they did this because of this...." But it's not true at all. There's just more to it than that. But you could say, or I could say 'cause she might say a different thing entirely and it would still be true - "Yes, right, we got back together and we decided that this was our life, that having a baby was important to us and that everything else was subsidiary to that, and therefore everything else had to be abandoned."
That abandonment gave us the fulfilment we were looking for and the space to breathe and think and re-establish our dreams. As she said in one of her songs a long time ago, which was a quote from one of her books which was even twenty years earlier than that, "A dream you dream together...” or "A dream you dream alone is ..." I don't know, you'll have to look it up. "A dream you dream alone is one thing, a dream you dream together is reality." So we re-established our dream together.
[We both laughed.]
David Scheff interviews with John & Yoko for Playboy magazine, 1980.
.The Hilton Amsterdam is a five star hotel in Apollobuurt, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. It is located at Apollolaan 138 along the Noorder Amstelkanaal, a canal connected to the Amstel river. The hotel opened officially in 1962 and is a branch of the Hilton Hotels chain. It is famous for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Bed-In" for peace which was staged in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War and other conflict.