John Lennon once called Imagine “an ad campaign for peace”. Sadly, it wasn’t a very successful campaign; war has remained incomprehensibly popular even as the song itself has become ubiquitous – it topped a 1999 poll to find Britain’s favourite song lyric. Written as the Vietnam war raged, Imagine now seems clearly influenced by Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, and her 1964 book Grapefruit, a collection of instructions that stand in for physical artworks. “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in,” run the familiar-sounding instructions for Cloud Piece.
Ono wouldn’t be given a songwriting credit on Imagine until 2017, but by 1971 she had already become the most significant artistic influence on Lennon since Chuck Berry. For decades, Ono was vilified by rubber-necking journalists and bitter Beatles fans alike, and her work – encompassing some of the most provocative and original feminist art of the era – was largely ignored. (Lennon once called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist”.) But at the turn of the millennium, the Japanese conceptualist finally began to be recognised as a major artist, with international retrospectives and even a reunion of the Plastic Ono Band, her caterwauling avant-rock ensemble, whose albums repelled 70s critics but inspired a generation of punks such as Sonic Youth.
The world’s perception of her may have changed, but today the famously dogged Ono is still banging the same drum – or, more accurately, ringing the same bell. In her latest artwork, she is enlisting thousands of ordinary folk to ring in this year’s Manchester international festival with Bells for Peace, a mass participatory artwork that returns to her most enduring theme.
At 6pm on Thursday, Manchester’s Cathedral Gardens will resound with the peals of 4,000 ceramic bells, handmade and engraved for the occasion, along with the mightier clangs of a huge Buddhist bell and antique church bells. Those will be harmoniously tuned, but the festival is also encouraging the public to bring along their own bells: the result, you imagine, will be a kind of joyful discord. (As well as being free and open to the public, the event will also be livestreamed through the MIF website.)
“I always wanted to do a bell piece [of] music, and I got a chance to do it, so I’m doing it,” emails Ono (now 86, she has retired from face-to-face interviews). “Whenever we win the war, we bring out our own bell to say, we won!” Invoking the bells that rang out to declare the armistice in 1918, Ono interprets the resonant peal of bells as “a peaceful sound, and that’s why it’s desperately needed now”.
But why does peace still need an ad campaign? What returns is a rather baffling one-liner: “Because [people] like to run, jump, and skip, and it’s not the so-called interesting thing to do.”
Spend some time turning that sentence over in your head, like a Zen koan, and something instructional eventually falls out. The problem with peace, Ono suggests, is that it inevitably struggles to cut through our frantic, accelerated lives; it’s our responsibility to make space for peace purposefully, rather than expecting it to come to us. Bells for Peace brings people together in a single moment to pause, reflect and recharge our imaginations.
Ono’s clipped communiques – little kernels of lateral thinking, as if she’s entering each thought from a side door – have always been the engine of her creativity. Inher hands, Twitter becomes a proper artistic medium; her 4.8 million followers receive daily wisdom in under 240 characters: “I am more interested in experiencing life rather than finding out its meaning,” she muses one day; “Listen to the sound of the Earth turning. We are all turning together. Isn’t it nice?” It’s all part of the continuing performance piece that is Yoko Ono, a woman who was turning her life into art long before a stray Beatle wandered into her London gallery show.
Two years before Lennon wrote Imagine, the newly married couple spent their honeymoon in a hotel bed, surrounded by cameras. Their Bed-Ins for Peace merged Lennon’s rock’n’roll populism with Ono’s avant garde audacity, honed through her radical performances such as Cut Piece, in which she sat calmly as her audience cut off her clothes with scissors. Through the Bed-Ins, John and Yoko merged their life with art and laid the groundwork for the next generation of pop protest, from Red Wedge to Live Aid. When I quiz her on whether art can really bring about political change, there’s still a hint of revolutionary thinking at work. “Art is just part of the world,” she deflects. “We have to rely on people, including yourself. Not government. Governments always have red tape. Our imaginations don’t.”
As one of the most visible artists of her generation, Ono’s influence is subtle but huge, running through several generations of younger artists, from the Guerrilla Girls’ feminist critique of the art world, to Marina Abramović’s provocative performances, to the many artists, including Sam Taylor-Johnson, who have made music along with visual art.
“As soon as you start becoming aware of the tradition of body art and conceptual art, you realise that a lot of it is rooted in her practice from many decades previously,” says John McGrath, Manchester international festival’s artistic director. At the core of it all is Ono’s conception of art “as something that the public completes – an invitation to the public to make the work with her”.
Two years ago, the festival made the decision to kick off with a public event – a commissioned work of art rather than fireworks or fancy ceremony. Jeremy Deller was chosen to initiate this tradition, which he did by inviting 150 Mancunians to walk a fashion runway above the city’s bustling transport hub, Piccadilly Gardens. Painting a portrait of Manchester through its people – dog walkers, doctors, a cab driver who offered free rides after the terror attack at Manchester Arena in 2017 – the commission had “an extraordinary response,” says McGrath.
Ono was the obvious choice to continue this new tradition. After gauging her interest, McGrath soon found himself in Ono’s living room in the Dakota Building, the New York block where she has lived since 1973. “What we really wanted was what she became excited about,” says McGrath, “which was a mass participatory artwork. One of the things she always said is that peace isn’t absence of war – peace is a thing that you have to do, together, and the ringing of bells together is her expression of that.”
Ono breezes through the rest of my questions. What’s the best thing about being in your 80s? “By then you will know how to live.” When was the last time a work of art affected you deeply? “I feel that a work of art, depending on how you see it, affects us all the time. The beautiful sky, like today.” What can I do to boost my imagination? “You are already improving.” Glad to hear it.
Working with an artist who makes a virtue of deflection comes with its challenges. “You ask a question and the answer you get isn’t necessarily the practical, head-on answer,” says McGrath with a chuckle. “Sometimes the answers require some thought and interpretation. But then she’ll make these leaps – I sat there in one meeting with quite a few people and we were talking about the whole ethos of peace behind the work, and suddenly she says: ‘Maybe we’re going to end up with too much peace and we’ll need some revolution instead!’ So she also has that capacity to turn the thing on its head. There isn’t Yoko Ono the work separate to Yoko Ono the person. How she exists in the world is very much an embodiment of the work that she makes.”
Whether she’s issuing art instructions by tweet, inviting us to write down our wishes and hang them on a tree, or daring us to slice off her clothes, Ono’s work is always an attempt to pull people towards each other, simultaneously cracking open our fears and desires. The phrase “audience participation” can strike fear into the hearts of uptight unbelievers, but for Ono there’s nothing better, as she notes with bitesize wisdom: “Because when 20 birds are singing, it’s very beautiful.”
