Love Magic Power Danger Bliss Review by Paul Morley – Yoko Ono before the Beatles | Autobiography books

CJohn Lennon once described Yoko Ono as “the most famous unknown artist in the world. Everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” Others were more virulent, portraying her as a family destroyer (the family being the Beatles), a cultural vandal, an Asian virus, and a screaming harridan. He also ventriloquized Paul Morley in his horrific book titled Love Magic Power Danger Oh Bliss, they saw her as someone whose “only reason she was on this planet was to drive them up the wall with her lack of talent and decency.” Or, a little more generously, “a disorganized diva channeling the supposed genius of male creators.”

Morley’s book focuses on Ono’s life and art before she met Lennon at the Indika Gallery in London in 1966. He refers to the Beatles as “those other acts.” Ono is stubborn and striving. Born in 1933 to a wealthy banking family (her schoolmates included the sons of Emperor Hirohito), she survived the firebombing of Tokyo and took refuge in the country where she and her mother, now virtual beggars, were taunted by the locals. Later, she became the first woman to be accepted into the philosophy department of the prestigious Gakushuin University. She left early, just as she was also leaving Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York after two terms.

Ono found her way to downtown New York City where a fleet of dancers, musicians, and artists began occupying abandoned industrial buildings to perform acts that were mocked by major art galleries. Drone music. “Event Outcomes” in which everyday tasks (preparing a salad, massaging hands with Nivea cream) are recast as art; Counter-physicality (Nam June Paik’s Zen for Head asked him to dip his head in a bowl of ink before dragging it onto a blank scroll of paper): Was this inspired or stupid? both of them?

Morley points out that a fair number of artists who moved in these circles were, like Ono, expatriates and exiles. Paik was Korean, George Maciunas – founder of the Fluxus art movement – was Lithuanian, and Joseph Beuys was German. Each of them, in their own ingenious way, was exorcising the spirits of a horrific past. Each of them was imagining a brave new world in the wake of war and displacement. The book, despite its subtitle, doesn’t quite do justice to this aspect of its story. Instead there are numerous lists, long asides and capsule summaries – relating to the nineteenth-century political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, the art movement “Incoherent”, Dada, Futurism and Surrealism – which, despite tracing suggestive genealogies to Ono’s work, often feel like padding.

“Facts are important, but they can also be where biography comes to grief,” Morley writes. Anyone hoping for new facts about Ono’s stay in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in the early 1960s or her custody battles with her second husband, Tony Cox, will be disappointed. Oddly, in a book full of characters, where the Fluxus scene itself is an important one, other Japanese women artists in New York—Shigeko Kubota and Takako Saito among them—receive little attention. Even more surprising, given the author’s anger at the sexism that fuels much of the anti-Ono invective, is his failure to cite any of the women (Chrissy Eales, Brigid Cohen, Lisa Carver, take your pick) who have raised the flag for her work over the years.

Morley’s retellings of key projects such as Cut Piece (1964), in which Ono invites audience members to cut out as much of her clothing as they wish, are excellent. He also did well to capture some of her dry sense of humor – she put out a call to the UK underground press for Bottoms (1966), an 80-minute film consisting of close-ups of people’s backsides: “Smart-looking clothes are required for filming. Those with unsmart-looking clothes need not apply.”

More important is Morley’s defense—no, his celebration—of Ono’s vision of art which, “particularly when it is ephemeral, disorienting, and non-linear, fundamentally defines humanity.” Its vanguard – tangible, open-armed, rich in imagination and wonder – rebukes the “despots, controllers, and soulless digital rulers” of our age. To celebrate Ono is to celebrate “one of the last witnesses, one of the last survivors of a strange, innocent, and elaborate battle for freedom.”