And she only lightens up when she sings these wistful lines from “Warzone”: “Wouldn’t it be nice to be a heroine/ Cool and slinky with an appropriate/ Smile.”Those who think she is merely repeating the best of Lennon in his angriest years should remember that she was angry and weird a long time ago. In Wall Piece for Orchestra (1962), Ono knelt on stage and repeatedly banged her head on the floor. In Cut (Carnegie Hall, 1964), Ono knelt motionless on stage while the audience was invited to cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors.At her Half the Wind show at the Lisson Gallery, London, a few years later, Ono cut household objects in half, forcing the viewer to ask where the missing half was. The missing half was John Winston Lennon, born in Liverpool during a German air-raid, losing his mother as a child and as filled with anger and a sense of loss as Yoko had been, and is now, again, since Lennon’s murder outside their home 15 years ago.It seems sad to say it, and is doubtless an offence to Ono’s feminist sensibility, but without John Ono Lennon, Yoko Ono is not the artist she was once and would like to be again.n ‘Yoko Ono: Instruction Paintings’ is published in the UK next week by Weatherill, New York & Tokyo. ‘Rising’ by Yoko Ono and IMA is out on CapitolPainting for the windCut a hole in a bag filled with seeds ofany kindand place the bag where there is wind.1961 summerPortrait of MarySend a canvas to a Mary of any country and haveher paste her photograph.Have her send the canvas to the next Mary of anycountry to do the same.When the canvas is filled up with photographs ofMarys, it should be sent back to the originalsender.The name does not have to be Mary. It can alsobe a fictional name, in which case the canvas willbe sent to different countries until a person withsuch a name will be found. The object to pasteon the canvas does not have to be a photograph.It can be a numeral figure, an insect, or a finger-print.1962 springPainting to see the skiesDrill two holes into a canvas.Hang it where you can see the sky.(Change the place of the hanging.Try both the front and the rear windows,to see if the skies are different.)1961 summer.

“If I found her floating in my pool, I’d punish my dog”

Joan Rivers
“Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed”Ralph Novak”As usual there’s a great woman behind every idiot” John Lennon”Although we both wed the same man and both had a child by him, we were, and still are, worlds apart” Cynthia Lennon”I came home and saw her listening to a clock with a stethoscope. She was running an exhibition at the time called ‘Timepiece’. Photographers were taking pictures of her, and I then realised she was unique.” Adrian Morris, fellow London artist, 1967″She gives off very bad vibes” Bob Dylan”That these delicate, fragile pieces succeed in the face of the hysterical publicity blanketing them, is a tribute to their integrity” Dale Denmark, on the first retrospective of Yoko’s work in New York, Newsweek, 1971″Even though she doesn’t have a Joplin edge to her throat, the lady’s learning how to rock’n'roll” Roy Hollingworth, on a concert by John and Yoko at Madison Square Garden, Melody Maker, 1972″Miss Ono began with a fearsome siren note, as Japanese as a Noh Play chant, and sustained it to the point of self-torture. At no time was the music comforting” Local newspaper review of her performance at an avant-garde jazz festival, Cambridge, unattributed 1969SCOTT HUGHES. Already a superstar of post-structuralist philosophy, Gilles Deleuze could hardly fail to attain further fame afterthrowing himself from his third-floor Paris apartment last October. The respect the French grant writers of oblique theoretical texts is alien to Anglo-Saxons, and it would be hard to imagine an English equivalent of the memorial concerts given by Pierre Boulez for his friend. Certainly a concert, say, conducted by Oliver Knussen in homage to Karl Popper would be unlikely to stir the crowds, but the two Boulez events sold out the day they were announced.

The venue, the recently completed Cite de la Musique by the modish architect Christian de Portzamparc, added to the soirees’ cachet, this most elegant of material structures being located in the working-class arrondissement of La Villette, so as not to offend lingering Marxist sympathies.
As part of its egalitarian, educative intentions, Cite de la Musique opens its rehearsals to the public for free, the only disadvantage being that these take place at 10.30am, but for the magical combination of Boulez- Deleuze even the morning session was capacity. In fact, to see Boulez conduct a rehearsal is all the more Deleuzian, as he insists on playing works all the way through and only going back for corrections at the end. If Deleuze’s themes are impossible to paraphrase, the structure of a reheasal under so strict a master as Boulez might serve as suitable metaphor: the repetition of short segments, the organic form of the work taken apart, put back together, the playing of certain notes again and again, attempting an impossible cohesion. Working with the relatively young Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Boulez demonstrated his supreme ability as a teacher, an extraordinary memory combined with unforgiving certainty regarding the precise coloration of every passage.

Boulez recalled Deleuze’s own role as legendary pedagogue, whose every class was packed with enthralled students. This rehearsal- lecture analogy was particularly clear in the first work, Stravinsky’s aggressively rigorous Symphonies d’instruments a vent, a mathematic formality compromised by jazzy coloration which corresponded to Deleuze’s combination of formal analysis and sensual enjoyment.By comparison, Boulez’s own Originel seemed almost lushly Debussian, though Pli selon pli (Fold According to Fold) would have seemed a more obvious choice considering Deleuze’s crucial work on the concept of “the fold”.The rich sadness of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (the equivalent of Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” in this context of death by window), ideally emoted by Wendy Hoffman, was offset by the opaque intelligence of Bartok’s Musique pour cordes, percussion et celesta. Unafraid of sentiment or emotion while dedicated to cumulative analytic systems, between 12-tone strictness and Romantic nobility, neither modernist nor reactionary, Deleuze’s way of thought, hence the texture of his life itself, was here ideally rendered.. August Wilson, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who anchors each of his plays in a different decade this century, calls Two Trains Running his “Sixties drama”. For Paulette Randall, however, director of its British premiere staging, there is a wrenching topicality about the issues raised in the piece: feelings of aimlessness, alienation and injustice, as experienced by America’s black underclass, echo down the years.