The first I heard of Yoko Ono was when my sister’s boyfriend brought home a little book of hers called Grapefruit. It was 1970, four years after John Lennon took the bite out of an apple that led to the break-up of the Beatles. The apple had been on a plinth in Ono’s 1966 exhibition at London gallery Indica with a price tag of £200, for which the purchaser was promised the ‘excitement of watching the apple decay’. Lennon then offered Ono an imaginary five shillings to bang an imaginary nail into her conceptual piece, ‘Painting to Hammer a Nail’ (1961). ‘I met a guy who plays the same game I played,’ she reported.
Ono’s public performances earned her notoriety, but her genius was in her haiku-like ‘instructions’
Lennon is the support act in the 91-year-old artist’s retrospective at Tate Modern: it’s the Yoko show. From the start it establishes her as an avant-gardist in her own right: she was a leading light of the Fluxus movement which staged events at her Chambers Street loft in New York, attended by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Peggy Guggenheim; she toured Japan with John Cage in 1962 and was one of only two women invited to speak at Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966.
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