Hair Peace. Bed Peace
With Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower located near Reykjavík (Iceland), lighting up once again, and major LED screens broadcasting a message of peace (including Piccadilly Lights in London, Times Square in New York and K-Pop Square in Seoul), artists and creative platforms are remembering Hair peace. Bed peace. performance by the iconic couple back in 1969.
Just a few days into their marriage (March 25th, 1969), Ono and Lennon have invited the press into their infamous suit at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. The journalists speculated that the staging will involve explicit art performance, while the couple simply laid in bed with their pyjamas buttoned all they way up.
Hair peace and bed peace signs hanged on the window, while their hair carelessly framing their faces, now an iconic image. The couple was covered in flowers and was ready to take any questions about their act. Lennon and Ono had visitors for 12 hours a day for a week before moving with the similar performance to Vienna, following up in Bahamas and Montreal. The Amsterdam suit at the Hilton is still available for a stay, with just over 2k euros a night, and you are the very war objector yourself.
The peaceful protest worked due to the world’s major obsession with the couple. They were different from many: intersectional marriage; candid, outspoken political views, unconventional sex appeal, a divorced Beatle with a divorcee artist.
The non-violence and general toying with the concept ‘against all wars’, while the US was raging a war in Vietnam, sounds like a perfect paragraph out of art history book, longing for its reincarnation.
Projecting a similar art performance today appears as no less than stupid. Pacifism is a passé notion, now considered a “convenient" stance. Cancel culture is never asleep, with the raging crowd looking for a new witch hunt to unfold, anytime, anywhere (dominantly on social media of course). Not taking sides and chanting for peace, instead of a win for the victims, is a fatal blow for your own work, social media channel and undeniably reputation. Pleading for peace is an equivalent to staying silent, because "silence is violence" and we "reserve a special hot spot in hell for those that were quiet" (or did not hero-worship blue and yellow in their feeds).
Rage met with kindness did not work in 1969, and will not work now. And yet, Hair peace. Bed peace. is legendary, while contemporary artists fail to reimagine calls for peace in their present-time work.
By Marie Nova
