[Jamillah James] What was your first encounter of Yoko Ono and her work?

[Jon Hendricks] Back in 1965, that’s a long time ago, I met her at the subway station.

[James] Wow.

[Hendricks] And encountered her. And we started talking. And we talked for an hour.

[James] My first encounter of Yoko was really through her music. As someone who’s an avid record collector, picking up Season of Glass when I was in college was really a formative exchange with her work, and also as someone who’s deeply into psychedelic music, Plastic Ono Band is a critical, crucial album. So it wasn’t through the art necessarily until I was in college and learning about Fluxus. That was the second introduction, but it was really through her music, which I think is a way that a lot of people understand and know her work.

[Connor Monahan] For Yoko, it all started with music. When she was around four years old, her parents enrolled her in a special preschool for musical training. In that school, one of the homework assignments was to listen to the sounds of the day and try and transcribe those into notes. It’s something that Yoko remembered vividly. It led to her first instruction work called Secret Piece: “Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment, the woods from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. in summer.”

Something that always followed Yoko is an idea that nothing remains the same. A statue, a painting, a sculpture in time will vanish. And so rather than try and hold onto something that can’t be held onto, Yoko wanted to make it into a positive and to put change into the work.

Yoko grew up between America and Japan, and that led to her having a sense of not really belonging in one place. I think it’s really important to try and recognize what it could be like to be a Japanese woman coming to America in the late 1950s and trying to establish herself as an artist and a composer in a world where there was no such thing as a female composer. By 1960, Yoko’s practice had mainly been focused on music, poetry. When she made her first public display of any work, it was about painting, Painting to Be Stepped On, 1960, which invited some physical participation, but also this mental participation of viewing the canvas through the idea of an instruction. In 1962, when she went to Japan, she then pivoted away completely from the object and began showing the instructions as just the texts themselves. Yoko indisputably became a critical bridge, first by bringing the ideas around Fluxus and the downtown artistic movements of New York to Japan in 1962, and then again bringing those ideas back to New York and then bringing those ideas to London. She was a communicator and an organizer.

[James] In 1964, the book Grapefruit was produced, which is a compilation of various instructions that Yoko wrote to engage the audience. Why has text and language been so important to her, and an enduring material?

[Monahan] In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” and Yoko countered that by saying: “The message is the medium.” It’s inviting the audience into some form of participation, whether that be physically or mentally.

[James] Cut Piece is perhaps Yoko’s best-known work. Why do you think it continues to be influential?

[Hendricks] There are so many meanings or elements to Cut Piece. She was interested in the sound of the scissors. It’s traditionally framed as a feminist work, but it also has to do with class.

[Monahan] Concealment, revealing. Cut Piece is a new performance each time it’s performed, and it reflects something new about the time we’re living in in terms of tensions and aggressions and consent. From the very beginning, all of Yoko’s performances were instructionalized. She considered all of them as works for other people to perform as well. It was never just about Yoko performing them.

[James] Naturally, this leads into her peace activism. Thinking about the Bed-In, War Is Over, the Imagine Peace campaign, so on and so forth. Why do you think that this has been an ongoing concern for her?

[Monahan] I think there’s, you know, direct lines between all of the events you list. And Yoko’s work, so you look at something like the War is Over! if you want it campaign, and we have Yoko’s earlier infiltration of art as advertising in the mid-1960s. She’s interested in bringing forward these ideas that the audience has agency, the individual has agency, and individual actions have ripple effects. Something like the Bed-In for Peace that Yoko Ono and John Lennon stage in 1969, that is performance, that is theater. When they move into music, it’s the same thing about using language to communicate ideas and communicate activism. “Give Peace a Chance,” “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” “Imagine,” all of this is about giving the individual agency to change the world.

[Hendricks] Basically, it happened as a very young child. Her experience of the fire bombing in Tokyo, hearing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of her life, she was trying to find, is trying to find ways to express it. War Is Over! if you want it is one expression, but Refugee Boat is another.

[James] As someone who’s really invested in looking at the different ways that artists are engaging with the world around them, I appreciate that Yoko’s work is really open and inviting to people to have an encounter or to take an idea and run with it.

[Monahan] This idea that Yoko says, I just always come back to, “The job of the artist is not to destroy but to change the value of things.” The amount of potential in that is incredible to me. Everything’s unfinished. There’s always the possibility of change, and I think this puts you in a really hopeful place to live.