Opinion The Ono you didn’t know

For so many,Ono (and Lennon) seemed to capture an era: an experimental counter-culture,manifested to the extreme in all that was ailing the West,especially those foggy,drug-addled years of the 1960s and ’70s. Her husband’s assassination in 1980 seemed a violent closure to the excesses of those decades,a door slamming shut on the “turn on,tune in,drop out” generation.

After Lennon’s death,Ono did not recede into the background. Never far from our collective consciousness,her image lingered in popular culture. Long before the proliferation of celebrity magazines and TV shows,her sightings at Central Park’s Strawberry Fields or zipping in and out of the Dakota,her longtime apartment building in the city,made for water-cooler conversation and tabloid blurbs.

That’s mostly because Ono,although a famous widow,continued to make art,putting herself out there,performing for an audience that slowly began to appreciate her. The multidisciplinary artist — she’s a musician,performer,conceptual artist,film-maker and painter rolled into one — refusing to be typecast. John Lennon once called his wife,“the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name,but nobody knows what she does.” Indeed,Ono has been involved with the contemporary art movement since the early 1950s. Born to affluent parents in Japan,she had a privileged upbringing,but suffered deprivations during World War II. A gifted student,she was the first woman admitted to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Japan in 1952. The following year,she moved to the United States with her parents,enrolled at university but dropped out,choosing instead to hang out in New York City,where she became involved with the avant garde Fluxus movement. She held performance art events at her Tribeca loft. (Even then she was prescient —Tribeca went from being a derelict warehousing neighbourhood to one of the hottest real estate pockets in Manhattan in subsequent decades.)

Since those early years in the ’50s,Ono has produced a remarkable body of work across different media — she has cut over 25 albums and compilations (including those with Lennon),created more than two dozen films,mounted off-Broadway shows and participated in group and solo exhibitions of her art. In 1989,the Whitney Museum in New York mounted a retrospective of her work,and ten years later,she received a Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale for lifetime achievement. In between,she received honorary doctorates,won other accolades and promoted her political peace messages. In 2010,she became a global ambassador for autism. It is hard to believe that Ono,in her 77th year,is feted and even embraced,considering the infamy bestowed upon her those many moons ago.

Perhaps it is because,even after all these years,she embodies one half of a couple that imagined a world bereft of war,hunger and human suffering. Albert Camus wrote,“The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.” Perhaps that’s why Ono,so obviously adored by Lennon,continues to remain one.

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist