#The spectacle yoko ono beatles series#

These slurs would spiral into an indefatigable pop culture meme that has haunted generations of women accused of intruding on male genius. (In 1970, Esquire published an article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” that promised to reveal “the Yoko nobody Onos,” featuring an illustration of Ono looming over Lennon, who is rendered as a cockroach on her leash.) She was cast as the groupie from hell, a sexually domineering “dragon lady” and a witch who hypnotized Lennon into spurning the lads for some woman. The idea that Ono doomed the band was always a canard that smacked of misogyny and racism. In the catalog, she is photographed in front of the museum holding a sign that says “F,” recasting it as the “Museum of Modern art.” In 1971, she would stage an imaginary exhibition of ephemeral works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was a pioneer of participatory artwork, a collaborator of experimental musicians like John Cage and a master at coyly appearing in spaces where she was not supposed to belong.

Ono was, of course, already an accomplished performance artist when she encountered Lennon, seven years her junior, at a gallery show in 1966.

#The spectacle yoko ono beatles series#

Jackson has called his series “a documentary about a documentary,” and we are constantly reminded that we are watching the band produce its image for the camera. It’s as if she is staging a marathon performance piece, and in a way, she is. The documentary’s shaggy run time reveals Ono’s provocation in all its intensity. A “mundane” task becomes peculiar when you choose to perform it in front of McCartney’s face as he tries to write “Let It Be.” When you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes astonishing. Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tentlike appearance it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment. To deny this is to sap her of her power.įrom the beginning, Ono’s presence feels intentional. The fact that she is not there to directly influence the band’s recordings only makes her behavior more ridiculous. Of course her appearance in the studio is obtrusive. Indeed, she is not the set’s most meddlesome interloper: That is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the hapless director of the original documentary “Let It Be,” who keeps urging the band to stage a concert in an ancient amphitheater in Libya or perhaps at a hospital for children suffering from reassuringly minor ailments.Īnd yet there is something depressing about the recasting of Ono as a quiet, inconspicuous lump of a person. Her presence has been described as gentle, quiet and unimposing. In the series, McCartney himself - from the vantage of January 1969, more than a year before the band’s public dissolution - pokes fun at the idea that the Beatles would end “because Yoko sat on an amp.”

Ono, also a producer on the series, tweeted an article without comment that claims she is merely performing “mundane tasks” as the band gets to work. “She never has opinions about the stuff they’re doing,” Jackson, who crafted the series out of more than 60 hours of footage, told “60 Minutes.” “She’s a very benign presence, and she doesn’t interfere in the slightest.” “The Beatles: Get Back” is being read by some as an exculpatory document - proof that Ono was not responsible for destroying the Beatles. I was seeing intimate, long-lost footage of the world’s most famous band preparing for its final performance, and I couldn’t stop watching Yoko Ono sitting around, doing nothing.

My attention kept drifting toward her corner of the frame.