On 9 November 1966, John Lennon visited the Indica Gallery at 6 Mason’s Yard in St James’s, London. Co-founder John Dunbar had invited the Beatle to a preview of Unfinished Paintings and Objects, a conceptual art exhibition by Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Prior to this meeting, Ono had established a formidable reputation within the New York and Tokyo underground scenes, aligning with the Fluxus movement alongside experimental composer John Cage and founder George Maciunas. Lennon, navigating the global hysteria of Beatlemania, engaged directly with Ono’s interactive installations. He encountered Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, a piece requiring viewers to climb a white stepladder and use a magnifying glass hanging from a chain to read a singular, miniature word printed on the ceiling: “YES”. Lennon later cited this overriding positivity as the primary catalyst for his interest. He subsequently examined Apple, a fresh Granny Smith apple sitting on a Perspex pedestal priced at £200. When Lennon took a bite out of the apple, the interaction codified a partnership that would permanently merge the world’s most visible pop infrastructure with rigorous conceptual art practices.
Ono’s intellectual framework heavily influenced Lennon’s subsequent songwriting, most notably through her 1964 artist’s book, Grapefruit. Originally published by Wunternaum Press in a limited edition of 500 copies, Grapefruit functioned as a catalogue of “event scores” – instructional text directing the reader to perform physical or mental tasks. Directives such as “Step in all the puddles in the city” or “Imagine the clouds dripping” removed the necessity for a physical artefact, placing the creative burden entirely upon the audience’s participation. This instruction format laid the structural foundation for Lennon’s 1971 solo track “Imagine”, which utilises Ono’s prompt-based methodology to guide listeners through visualising a world devoid of borders, religion, and capital. In 2017, the National Music Publishers’ Association officially added Ono as a co-writer to the song, correcting decades of historical omission. Ono’s boundary-pushing integration of audience participation parallels the immersive environments later championed by her contemporaries. Visitors seeking experiential art today, such as those attending the Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons – A Psychedelic Pop-Art Garden of Earthly Delights exhibition, engage with the exact dismantling of viewer-creator barriers that Ono pioneered in the 1960s.
Lennon and Ono formalised their relationship on 20 March 1969, participating in a ten-minute civil ceremony at the British Consulate Office in Gibraltar. Acutely aware that their union would attract unprecedented media scrutiny, the couple strategised to weaponise their celebrity for political advocacy. Rather than retreating for a private honeymoon, they booked the Presidential Suite (Room 902) at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel from 25 to 31 March 1969. Inviting the global press into their bedroom for twelve hours a day, they conducted the inaugural “Bed-In for Peace”. Reporters expecting a scandalous spectacle arrived to find Lennon and Ono sitting upright in bed wearing white pyjamas, surrounded by hand-drawn signs reading “Hair Peace” and “Bed Peace”. The strategy redirected the voyeuristic hunger of the tabloid press towards substantive conversations regarding the ongoing Vietnam War. By offering themselves as static, accessible subjects, they ensured international newspapers printed the word “peace” on their front pages for seven consecutive days.
A second Bed-In was initially scheduled for New York, but Lennon was denied entry into the United States owing to a 1968 conviction for cannabis possession. The couple briefly relocated to the Bahamas before finding the climate too humid, ultimately settling in Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, from 26 May to 1 June 1969. This Montreal iteration produced a tangible cultural artefact: the live recording of “Give Peace a Chance”. On 1 June, recording engineer André Perry brought four-track audio equipment into the hotel suite. Surrounded by counterculture figures including Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Tommy Smothers, and Petula Clark, Lennon led an acoustic sing-along. The track was captured entirely within the confines of the room, featuring impromptu percussion generated by striking wardrobe doors and hotel wastebins. Initially credited to the Lennon-McCartney partnership but later revised to reflect Ono’s conceptual co-creation, the single immediately became an anthem for the anti-war movement, sung by half a million demonstrators at the Vietnam Moratorium in Washington, D.C., in October 1969.
To bypass the restrictive commercial expectations associated with The Beatles, the couple formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1969. Conceived as a fluid, conceptual supergroup, the project featured a rotating roster of session musicians and peers. Its public debut occurred at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in September 1969, featuring an impromptu lineup of Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Alan White on drums. The performance, released as the live album Live Peace in Toronto 1969, merged standard rock instrumentation with Ono’s avant-garde vocalisations. In 1970, the couple released concurrent solo studio debuts: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Both records were heavily influenced by Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream therapy, which the couple underwent in California. Lennon’s album stripped away standard pop production in favour of raw, confessional rock, while Ono’s record aggressively challenged musical orthodoxies through abrasive, free-jazz vocal improvisations alongside saxophonist Ornette Coleman. This deliberate subversion of mainstream expectations underscores a broader truth regarding creative evolution: frequently, the art you need is not the art you want. Ono’s willingness to alienate casual listeners in service of raw emotional honesty predated the punk rock movement by nearly a decade.
Lennon and Ono continually generated high-concept media campaigns to dissect prejudice and militant nationalism. At a press conference in Vienna in March 1969, they introduced “Bagism,” conducting their entire interview whilst concealed inside a large white cloth bag. This exercise forced journalists to evaluate the couple’s statements without judging their physical appearance, celebrity status, or Ono’s Japanese heritage. In 1968, they initiated the “Acorns for Peace” project, mailing pairs of acorns to fifty world leaders – including British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir – with instructions to plant them as a symbol of organic diplomacy. Their most ambitious conceptual artwork arrived on 1 April 1973, when they hosted a press conference at the New York City Bar Association to declare the founding of “Nutopia”. Announced amid Lennon’s exhausting deportation battles with the Nixon administration, Nutopia was defined as a conceptual nation possessing “no land, no borders, no passports, only people.” The national flag was entirely white, representing total surrender to peace, and the official national anthem consisted of three seconds of absolute silence.
By 1971, the couple had permanently relocated to New York City, immersing themselves in the politically charged atmosphere of Greenwich Village. They associated with radical activists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, culminating in the politically overt 1972 double album Some Time in New York City. The record addressed the Attica Prison riot, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and feminist intersectionality through the controversial track “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”. Following an eighteen-month separation known as the “Lost Weekend,” the couple reconciled. With the birth of their son Sean Lennon on 9 October 1975 – sharing John’s exact birthday – Lennon effectively retired from the recording industry for five years to become a full-time househusband, while Ono assumed complete executive control over their complex financial empire. They returned to public life in November 1980 with the release of Double Fantasy, a highly polished studio exploration of domesticity and mature love.
The partnership ended violently on 8 December 1980, when Mark David Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back with a .38-calibre Charter Arms revolver outside the Dakota apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. In the subsequent decades, Ono has meticulously curated his legacy whilst continuing her independent artistic practice. She personally funded the creation of Strawberry Fields, a 2.5-acre landscaped memorial in Central Park located directly across from the Dakota, which officially opened on 9 October 1985. The site features a circular mosaic of the word “Imagine,” funded by the city of Naples, Italy. In 2007, Ono inaugurated the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island near Reykjavík, Iceland. The physical monument projects a towering beam of light into the sky annually from 9 October to 8 December, fuelled entirely by Iceland’s renewable geothermal energy network. Through these enduring installations, Ono ensured that the methodology they pioneered together – utilising conceptual art to demand global pacifism – remained permanently embedded within the physical landscape.
