NEW YORK — No one noticed. Thousands of people were milling beneath the flashing, pulsing, gyroscopic billboards in New York’s Times Square, as they do every night. But not a soul, as far as I could see, looked up and saw the billboard inviting them to “Imagine Peace.”
The message — the latest in several decades of peace activism by Yoko Ono — appeared on a screen at Broadway and West 45th Street at exactly 8:22 p.m. Spelled out in black letters on white, it lasted three minutes.
As Russia wages war in Ukraine, the same message (an instruction? a plea?) has appeared every night this month — not only in Times Square, but also in London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne and Seoul. A limited edition “Imagine Peace” print is being sold by Circa, the platform behind the billboard program, with the proceeds going to the U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund. Meanwhile, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, is inviting people to a march to express solidarity with Ukraine this Saturday. Participants will walk past Ono’s “Imagine Peace” billboard at Piccadilly Circus ahead of a vigil at Trafalgar Square.
In the meantime, of course, war rages on. So are Ono’s efforts an exercise in futility?
It’s tempting to see them as absurdly simplistic expressions of celebrity vanity. And yet almost nothing about Ono is quite as it seems. Everything she does needs to be contemplated from a wider perspective. Her personal experience of war and her subsequent career in the avant-garde art world reveal a more complex and committed persona than most people realize.
Ono’s presence in Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, “Get Back,” was one of its main talking points. There she sat, right beside John Lennon, almost never speaking — and there she stayed, a near-constant presence throughout the marathon recording sessions. It was confounding. Some found it creepy.
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Were she and Lennon really that much in love? Was their relationship even healthy?! And how did her constant presence make Paul, George and Ringo feel? The general bafflement was increased by the exceptions to her silence — those unforgettable jam sessions when Ono, accompanied by the band, emitted a stream of bloodcurdling screams into the microphone.
Listening to friends discussing “Get Back” revealed to me the dissonance between the prevailing view of Ono in the popular imagination — peace activist, woman who “broke up the Beatles” — and her life as an artist. So I went to Times Square, hoping to reconcile the disconnect and get a clearer view of what she is about.
The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing: total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?
Most of us know her as Lennon’s widow. But in the art world, she is known as a pioneer of avant-garde performance art. From the beginning, Ono’s work was poetic, but it also had a pacifist edge.
Ono’s pacifism has never been flown in for the occasion, like a tearful Oscar’s speech. She has been campaigning for peace and raising money for the victims of war since the 1960s, with performances (including her “bed-ins” with Lennon, calls for peace made from their honeymoon suite), songs, posters, films and billboard projects.
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All of this has roots in her childhood.
Ono was born in 1933 into a Japanese banking family that Bob Spitz, in his Beatles biography, claims was “as wealthy and influential as … the Rockefellers in the United States.” Her father had brought the family to live in the United States in 1936 and again in 1940, but they were back in Japan when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
When Allied bombing escalated in 1945, Ono’s family escaped Tokyo. In the countryside, her mother was reduced to begging door to door. “Lying on our backs looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof,” Ono recalled in an interview with curator and Asia scholar Alexandra Munroe, “we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of imagination to survive.” (If, for the rest of her life, Ono has held firm to the power of imagination, it’s easy to see why.)
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Ono was 12 when U.S. forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1953, her father was asked to head the New York office of the Bank of Japan, so she once again left for America. She studied musical composition at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., under the influence of the 12-tone theories of Arnold Schoenberg. Her teacher, André Singer, told her about a group of avant-garde musicians and composers in New York, among them the experimental composer John Cage.
Cage, who was influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Zen Buddhism, was at the center of a multidisciplinary avant-garde that was changing the face of the arts. Ono left college before graduating and moved to a loft in downtown New York, married a piano prodigy, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and began hosting concerts and performances that, according to Cage, “were the most interesting things going on.”
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She got to know La Monte Young and George Maciunas, both associated with the beginnings of conceptual art. Maciunas was the guiding force behind Fluxus, a loosely affiliated group of international artists who, according to curator Helen Molesworth, were “interested in breaking down the boundary between performer and audience.”
Like the Dada artists who emerged after World War I, Fluxus artists — and Ono was one of them — were alive to absurdity (war will do that) and had an almost childlike obsession with the whys and hows not just of art, but also of life. They believed that everything is art and anyone can do it. Maciunas exhibited a box of vials containing the excrement of various animals. Ben Vautier labeled an empty wine bottle “God.” Robert Watts made a 10-hour clock.
Just as Cage was trying to blur the distinction between music and the sounds of everyday life, Fluxus artists were trying to break down the notion of art as a category separate from life. Their various perverse and amusing attempts to render art obsolete contained echoes of the Zen imperative: “Kill the Buddha!’’
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Fluxus artists were more interested in events than objects (this was the era of “happenings”). Like Cage, whose famous composition “4’33″” shifted the responsibility from the orchestra to the audience, Fluxus artists were interested in reciprocity. They mailed art to one another, and the acts of sending and receiving became more important than the things sent and received.
They also created art in the form of written instructions. Usually referred to as “event scores,” these were comparable to musical scores. Sometimes performable, sometimes not, they were poetic and often frivolous. A “mandatory happening” by Ken Friedman went thus: “You will, having looked at this page/ either decide to read it or you will not/ Having made your decision, the happening is now over.”
Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible. They were collected in her most famous book, “Grapefruit,” first published in 1964 and revised in 1970. The instructions in “Grapefruit” are like koans, those aids to meditation used by Zen Buddhists to break down the resistance of human reason to a deeper, fuller awareness.
Ono’s “event scores” included “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.” You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”
Toward the end of his life, Lennon acknowledged that the lyrics for his best-known solo song, “Imagine,” were directly inspired by “Grapefruit.” But the most famous piece in “Grapefruit” is “Cut Piece.” Ono performed it in Kyoto, Japan, in 1964, and then in Tokyo, New York and London.
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On each occasion, she took up a kneeling position, placed large scissors in front of her and asked the audience to come onstage, one by one, and cut off a portion of her clothing and take it. Ono remained silent as audience members cut small scraps, larger pieces and, eventually, parts of her underclothes.
There is something undeniably disturbing about “Cut Piece.” It has a secure position in the canon of feminist art and has been interpreted as a metaphor for rape. In the context of its appearance during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, it also taps into a tradition of nonviolent protest. Some of the questions it prompts — When will this stop? Who will intervene to stop it? — were being asked as Vietnam turned into a quagmire, and they are being asked again now about Ukraine.
But as the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued, there is “another, historically specific register of meaning” for “Cut Piece.” The performance, she points out, is about reciprocity. Ono was making an offering, providing a souvenir, encouraging a kind of commemoration.
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Of the unspeakably high cost of war.
After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Army prohibited images that showed the effects of the blasts. Ten years later, when photographs, drawings and written accounts were finally permitted, one of the most common descriptions was how the blasts had shredded people’s clothes.
“All that was left of the trousers I had been wearing were the elastic bands around my waist and ankles,” wrote one Hiroshima survivor — a 12-year-old girl. “I was stripped to my underpants by the bomb.” So to Bryan-Wilson, “Cut Piece” — which left Ono’s clothes in tatters — is an allusion to “the clothing destroyed by the atomic bomb and the repeated accounts of children wandering the streets with school uniforms hanging off them, burned and torn.”
How does Ono’s billboard in Times Square fit into all of this?
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I’m still wondering. Anyone with firsthand experience of war longs for peace. Ono is no exception. Her three-minute billboard takeover is a call for peace, which comes as war has returned to Europe, and it is drowned out by advertising.
If it is an exercise in futility, its three minutes of stillness in the context of madly flashing Times Square can nonetheless seem very eloquent. Instead of judging Ono’s gesture by its “effectiveness” (what is a billboard ever going to achieve?), we might think of it instead as her latest “event score,” an instruction we can try to carry out — or not. Peace, after all, is a kind of reciprocity — of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. War, by contrast, is a failure of reciprocity. Ono is quietly suggesting that we imagine an alternative to that failure.
correction
A photo caption in an earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono short film "Fly" as "The Flu." The story has been updated.
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