The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko
April 2 - June 21, 2009 - Free Admission
In 1966, the year that the Beatles made the radical decision to stop touring, John Lennon was attracted by the new artistic horizons opened by Yoko Ono, who gradually introduced him to the work of the American avant-garde: the films of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, free jazz and the music of John Cage. He first met Ono in November 1966, at a preview of her exhibition Unfinished Paintings and Objects at London’s Indica Gallery. He had been invited by the gallery’s owner, John Dunbar, Marianne Faithfull’s husband and a key figure on the London art scene at the time. It was then that Lennon discovered the world of that conceptual artist and the imagination and humour that so closely resonated with his own intellectual and artistic ambitions: “Imagine two cars of the same make heading towards each other and they’re gonna crash, head-on. Well, it’s like one of those scenes from a film—they’re doing 100 miles an hour, they both slam their brakes on and there’s smoke everywhere and they stop just in the nick of time with their bumpers almost touching but not quite. That’s what it was like the first time I met her.” Lennon immediately joined in the game of Ono’s Instruction pieces, which provided viewers with directions on how to create the works in their imaginations.
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