Hayden Donnell is in Sydney for Aria Week, the Australian Recording Industry Association awards being held on Sunday and at which Lorde is performing. He's filing daily updates for nzherald.co.nz.
Yoko Ono is known mostly for something she didn't do. She's the woman who broke up The Beatles, even though, by Paul McCartney's own admission, she isn't. The shadow of that accusation has hung over, and at times obscured, the work she has been doing for decades as a conceptual artist and activist.
That work is commemorated in a special gallery at Sydney's recently refurbished Museum of Contemporary Art. War Is Over! (if you want it) is a trip through Ono's real career.
It begins with her seminal performance piece Cut Piece. Ono first performed the work in Kyoto, Japan, in 1964. She knelt passively on stage in a beautiful dress. Audience members were invited to cut parts of the dress off until she was naked.
At the time, Cut Piece was financially crippling. Ono had little money and the work called for her to wear her best clothes. The emotional toll was more taxing. She wrote: "People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it's like in the stone."
