Yoko Ono, 71-year-old artist, pacifist, and widow of John Lennon, comes to Dublin this week for Amnesty International's art show. She talks to Conor O'Clery about art, growing old, and the criticisms that still hurt.
Yoko Ono apologises for keeping me waiting. She has been consoling a woman friend whose teenage son has disappeared, and the friend believes he has a gun and is threatening to shoot himself. It is a disconcerting start to a conversation with the artist whose husband, John Lennon, was shot dead at the entrance to the Dakota building on Manhattan's West 72nd Street.
We are in their seventh floor apartment in that building, reached by a wood-panelled lift which contains a tiny leather divan. In the drawing room, where visitors take off their shoes, everything is cream-coloured: the walls, the carpet, the blinds, the sofa, even the grand piano, and covered with family photographs. She suggests we move to the kitchen, which is bigger than the average Manhattan apartment. At a mosaic-topped kitchen table, we talk over coffee about her upcoming visit to Ireland, her still-busy artistic life, how she is coping with growing old - and the criticisms which still hurt.
Yoko Ono is now 71. She is wearing a casual top that shows a youthful cleavage. I tell her, truthfully, she looks no older than 60. This doesn't go down well. "Please! I feel like a woman of 40, not 60," she scolds me. After fighting sexism and racism, she now has to fight ageism, she says indignantly.
"Nothing changes as far as I am concerned, but once you say you are 70, people think, 'Oh, dear!' They want to cast away a person because she is 70? Luckily, I have so much work to do now, I am probably healthier than at the times when John and I were on drugs." She laughs at the memory. She keeps herself fit by walking rather than by working out. "I walk after dusk, when people can't see me. Sometimes I walk from here to Soho to have dinner. It's quite a walk. An-hour-and-a-half. There is frantic-ness about a workout. When you work out, you have to work out each day of your life, otherwise if you stop all those muscles will disappear. So what's the point?"
She's not depressed about being in her 70s, however. "Most people when they become 40 or 50, they say, 'Oh dear I don't want to be 40 or 50.' I did not have that feeling at all when I became 70. I thought this was something to savour. I survived. I am very proud of that. Pride is a very important feeling. I had so much love for myself. 'The poor thing suffered so much all her life and she is here now! Good job!'
"And then there was another strange feeling that overwhelmed me, which was having so much love for the world, so much love for the human race, the planet, the universe. It is almost as though somebody told me, 'You are in a boat, you are saying goodbye to these people!' and suddenly all these people become so dear to you. It is a beautiful world that the human race created. I was looking at this beautiful chandelier the other day and thought, 'What animal would think of creating a chandelier such as this?' Somebody did that. He's probably dead, or she's dead, so what did he think? He's going to die and the chandelier is going to be there. Nobody is going to know that he created it, but he just did it."
It is as if Yoko Ono - the Japanese artist whose challenging and revolutionary works have confounded critics since she emerged in the New York art world in the 1960s, and who is best known for marrying John Lennon - is contemplating how her own life's work will survive her.
She is busier than ever these days, and says she is lucky that she still has so much work to do and is still in such demand. Her musical composition, Walking on Thin Ice, completed just after John's death, was reissued and topped the US dance chart last year. In Paris in 2003, she revived her famous Cut Piece in which she invites members of the audience to snip off her clothes with scissors as an expression of the reciprocity among artists, objects and viewers.
When first staged in London 40 years ago, the audience left her naked. In Paris last year, decorum prevailed. "I was kind of resigned to the idea they were going to cut me up, I mean my clothes, but at one point they said, 'You know, nobody else is coming up to the stage.' They cut one string of the bra, I think. I still had my pants and my bra." It still works as an artistic concept, she feels. "Oh yes, if you were there, you would have noticed it was a kind of experience that all of us were going through together. It's not just me. It is the peeling of the cover, but it is something that happens in your mind, too."
A new exhibition, Odyssey of a Cockroach, was unveiled in London recently. Inspired by the violence of the 20th century, it consists largely of huge photographs showing a cockroach-eye view of such things as concentration camps and body parts. "I show some blood and gore," she says, "but only to say that we can change it." It was one of several shows in different cities and she is planning more.
Do people take her more seriously today, I ask. "They don't need to take me seriously," she replies. "As an artist I did some work; the work is meant to communicate with people, meant to inspire and encourage people on a creative level, and if they do not accept that, it is their loss, not mine. Art is a means of survival, on a spiritual level. We can change the world through creative efforts, through efforts of all of us, because I really think that we create the future through faith and trust and by visualising the future together."
Despite the current state of the world, she is optimistic about the future. "Negative thinking is a luxury that we can't afford," she believes. "Art is something that would inspire and encourage people to look beyond what they think they have. Optimism should not be coupled with hypocrisy. We should not be saying everything is fine, because it is not. It is hypocritical to say that everything is fine. So I like to show what is happening."
Thirty-five years after the famous 'Bed-In for Peace', when Yoko and John Lennon shared a double bed in public at the height of the Vietnam War, Yoko Ono is still an active participant in the peace movement. She took part in an anti-Iraq War march in New York on March 20th, though she is reluctant to talk about Iraq and President Bush specifically. Her views are more lofty. "I am against violence and killing and all that," she says. "I think it is a waste of people and time and money. It is so sad, what is happening. It does not benefit anybody."
Yoko Ono is coming to Dublin on May 6th to open an art sale and exhibition called In the Time of Shaking, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, organised by Art for Amnesty in association with Amnesty International and the museum. She has given Amnesty the rights to the song Imagine to highlight a campaign to educate people about human rights. It will feature a full-length music video of children singing the song in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Thailand, Cambodia, South Africa and the United States.
She got involved in Art for Amnesty through the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, who approached her with the concept at a party. "I thought it was a good idea and I said, 'Great, let's do it!'"
Yoko Ono has been to Ireland only once before, when she opened an exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast in 1998. There was something "very dramatic and beautiful" about the countryside, she recalls. It made her think of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights with its low clouds, the constant wind and "the girls looking so beautiful". She is delighted when I tell her the Brontës came from the north of Ireland. "Isn't it amazing I thought of her!"
John was very conscious of his Irish background. They named their son Sean "because we wanted John but John Junior would have been difficult and he would have had some complex about that." John Lennon was also proud of being Liverpool Irish, which gave him a sense of rebellion and inspired his poetry. "I really think that his poetry definitely came from the Liverpool Irish tradition," she says, citing its "beauty, sense of humour and the word play" as Irish qualities.
In New York, Lennon joined protest marches against British policy in Northern Ireland, and wrote and recorded the song Sunday Bloody Sunday after the shooting in Derry on January 30th, 1972. His political sympathies led to US government surveillance, according to released MI5 documents, though Yoko has always denied allegations that he was an IRA sympathiser. She tells me their phones were tapped in the Dakota building during the 1970s.
"We were always being listened-in to. We knew about it because when we had some trouble with the telephone and we had a telephone man come to try fix it; he went pale because there was something in there and he said he was not going to touch it. But also, after John's passing, somebody came to me and said that he was a repair man and he was downstairs in the Dakota basement to repair something and there was a guy there in a raincoat - it's really amazing, they do wear raincoats like on TV - who was trying to manipulate the line."
Recently, Yoko Ono bought Lennon's home in Liverpool to preserve it as a museum. The semi-detached at 251 Menlove Avenue was opened to the public a year ago as a National Trust project, under her guidance. She insisted on authenticity, even down to the 1950s linoleum on the floors. John showed her the house after they married in 1969, but they could not go upstairs because someone was living there. "But this time around, I went upstairs and saw John's bedroom," she says. "I was about to cry! I cried actually. It was just such an incredible experience to feel him so close."
Her decision to preserve Lennon's former home provoked some harsh comments in the UK tabloids, but criticism is nothing new to John Lennon's widow. Many of Lennon's fans blame her for the break-up of the Beatles, and others for isolating John from his friends.
She has had a lifetime of upsets and disputes, some venomous. The criticisms sting, such as Mick Jagger's recent accusation that she cut him off from his friend, which I ask her about. She laughs dismissively. "I think Mick is so cute! I mean if Mick goes and says things like that, it would be Mick, you know. You see, that's another thing I learned. A lot of attacks come to me in a form that I never heard before. I think, 'Oh my God this is how the people attack you now!' And I am surprised. But then I think, 'If I am not alive, I would not be experiencing this.' I think of it like a new play that I never saw before. I think, 'Well thank God I am watching a new play instead of being dead!'
"Of course, it does hurt me. 'Oh!' [She gasps theatrically as if stabbed in the heart.] But why do I have this emotion in the heart that always gets so hurt when it's such a little thing? Even when I am 70, I haven't learnt the lesson. I don't know how to protect myself from being hurt. But then the next moment I think, 'OK! So I am alive and that's why I am getting it, thank you'."
In the Time of Shaking: Irish Artists for Amnesty International will be on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin 8 from May 7th to 23rd and admission is free. The exhibition comprises works by 100 of Ireland's most prominent artists. For virtual views of the images, details of how to reserve them, and more information, see www.artforamnesty.org/shaking.