In 1966 a woman sat down at the Destruction in Art Symposium at London’s Africa Centre and invited people to cut off her clothes. It was an era when Yves Klein used naked women as paintbrushes and Allen Jones made sculptures of fetishistically dressed women posed as furniture. But Yoko Ono was in control of her own self-sacrifice. It was the third time she’d performed this paradoxically passive action, and each time it was the audience who exposed themselves as they took scissors to her clothing.
This was also the beginning of a sojourn in London for the Japanese-born New York artist that would catapult her from avant garde obscurity to global fame. Her exhibition at the Indica Gallery that same year was visited by John Lennon, who climbed one of her artworks, a ladder to the ceiling. At the top he used a magnifying glass to read the tiny word “YES”. The love kindled that day would be blamed for breaking up the Beatles.
