A look at the life and artistic career of Yoko Ono.
This paper describes Yoko Ono’s artistic work and career and her affiliation with the sixties avant-garde art movement. The paper focuses on her marriage to John Lennon of the Beatles and discusses how when the Beatles split up in 1970, the media and the fans made Yoko the scapegoat for many years to come. According to this paper, Yoko Ono is perhaps one of the most under appreciated female artists of the last 100 years.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo, Japan on February 18, 1933. She came from very upper class parents. Her parents families were both very prominent. Her father was the head of the Bank of Japan. Yoko was given the best of everything. She was taught in an exclusive Japanese school and also on top of that was privately tutored at home in the subjects of English , religion and ballet. When Ono moved with her parents to New York City she attended Sarah Lawerence College but did not earn a degree there.
Ono became aquainted with the avant-garde artistic scene through first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi who was a musician by the 1960’s Ono became an active participant in the Fluxus movement. Their main goal was to seek “-the abolition of the distance separating art from life, performance from spectator, would, as a Fluxus manifesto stated, “dismantl[e] the repressive effects of a senile social system” by making every individual an artist. “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible,” (Vincent).”
Ono became aquainted with the avant-garde artistic scene through first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi who was a musician by the 1960’s Ono became an active participant in the Fluxus movement. Their main goal was to seek “-the abolition of the distance separating art from life, performance from spectator, would, as a Fluxus manifesto stated, “dismantl[e] the repressive effects of a senile social system” by making every individual an artist. “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible,” (Vincent).”