Yoko Ono made a painting that visitors finished with their feet
At a Manhattan loft in 1960 and 1961, Yoko Ono laid a scrap of canvas on the floor and called it Painting to Be Stepped On. It became complete only as people walked across it, leaving footprints. The point was that art need not hang untouchable on a wall, an idea she developed years before meeting John Lennon.
Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933 into wealth: her father was a banker and former classical pianist from a samurai scholar line, her mother a descendant of the Yasuda business dynasty. Her given name means ocean child. She began piano at four, attended the elite Gakushuin school, where the future Emperor Akihito was a classmate, and in 1951 became the first woman admitted to its university philosophy course, though she left after two semesters. During the post-war hunger in Japan, her mother traded a German sewing machine for 60 kilograms of rice.
Moving to join her family in New York in 1952, she studied at Sarah Lawrence College and adored the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. When her own music drifted off course, her teacher told her such people were called avant-garde and pointed her to John Cage. After Ono set a painting alight at one performance, Cage suggested flame retardant.
The loft at 112 Chambers Street hosted events with the composer La Monte Young that drew Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim. George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus movement, gave her a first solo show at his AG Gallery in 1961 and invited her to join; she declined to stay independent while still collaborating. In 1965 she debuted Cut Piece at Carnegie Recital Hall, and at a 1966 London symposium she was the only woman chosen to perform her own events.
Her first contact with the Beatles came while seeking a song manuscript for a Cage book; Paul McCartney refused and suggested Lennon, who gave her the lyrics to The Word. They married in 1969 and staged a bed-in against the Vietnam War on their honeymoon. Double Fantasy, released weeks before Lennon's death in 1980, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and she has since had twelve US dance chart number ones.
Source: Yoko Ono
