The art exhibition where John Lennon fell in love with Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono and John Lennon remain the original and foremost pop culture power couple. From bedding in for peace to provocative joint interviews, their ideas coalesced, and they tried to spread them to the world. As ever, this was bound by Ono’s mantra on life: “You change the world by being yourself.” From the get-go, this individualism was bound by the power of creativity as Lennon fell for the radical artist at an exhibition.
In 1966, Ono unveiled a work titled ‘Yes’ whereby at the top of a ladder hung a magnifying glass. When you held the magnifying glass to the roof above, in small print, the word “Yes” was etched onto the ceiling. “There was another piece that really decided me for-or-against the artist: a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling,” Jon Lennon recalled when he first saw the work.
“It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says ‘yes’. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes’.”
For many people, the artwork was about light at the end of the tunnel and overcoming struggle. Ono had just endured a divorce and the notion of scaling the heights of suffering to find some light amid the darkness, no matter how small, was profound. When considered in this light, what once might have seemed somewhat pretentious on the surface, in the age where cameras can capture realist beauty in all of its guises, this abstract expression was as alleviating as laughter without a joke being told. “I thought it was fantastic – I got the humour in her work immediately. I didn’t have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humour got me straightaway,” Lennon remarked.
That notion of salvation proved fitting for both of them. They soon met, and Lennon would later comment: “That old gang of mine. That’s all over. When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman, and you leave the guys at the bar, and you don’t go play football anymore and you don’t go play snooker and billiards.” The kindred spirits then entwined their self-expression, and their love almost became an art piece. As Ono would happily conclude when the first searching chapter of her life found what it was looking for, “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
What art did Yoko Ono and John Lennon create together?
From the moment Lennon left The Beatles, he started collaborating with Ono on music. In fact, her debut musical output was Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band which was released in conjunction with John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. They would then release five other records, the last being Double Fantasy, which was released in 1980, shortly before Lennon’s tragic death.
In fact, on the day that Lennon was murdered, he took a cab with Ono to The Record Factory where they began work on a new song called ‘Walking on Thin Ice’. During the session, the duo were informed by David Geffen that Double Fantasy had gone gold. Lennon was so confident that ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ would continue their success that he told Yoko Ono that she had just recorded her first number one.
Sadly, he was killed after the pair left the studio at 10:30pm that day. Ono would later poetically comment: “I saw John smiling in the sky. I saw sorrow changing into clarity. I saw all of us becoming one mind.”
