YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND

There are occasionally exhibitions where simply attending them can feel life changing. They are not necessarily the ones, which have received the most publicity but they just seem to somehow, stay with you for weeks, months even years after seeing them. That has very much been the case for me with YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, which was recently at London’s Tate Modern. It was, an enormous retrospective of a towering artist who finally appears to be escaping the long shadow cast by her famous husband John Lennon. This show highlights the fact that Yoko Ono should be seen, now as one the greatest contemporary artist. Someone who has influenced a generation.

Hung in chronological order, this exhibition begins at the very start of her career, with photos from the period in which Ono lived in New York and was very much part of New York’s avant-garde movement. This section highlights some of her famous “instruction pieces”, pieces where viewers are encouraged to become co-creators. The written instructions ask readers to imagine, experience, or complete the work. Some instructions exist as a single verb such as “fly” or “touch”. Others are simply short phrases like ‘Listen to a heartbeat’ and ‘Step in all the puddles in the city’ to tasks for the imagination like ‘Painting to be Constructed in your Head’.The instruction pieces were created at Yoko Ono’s New York loft and they include Big Bag, a piece where people were invited to inhabit a large canvas bag. One of the most famous pieces from this period would be Cut Piece, a conceptual piece where people were invited to cut a piece of Yoko Ono’s clothing while she sat silently. A video of an early performance of Cut Pieces is quite illuminating to watch as we see mainly men cutting huge swathes of Ono’s clothing, leaving her clutching the few fragments of clothing she has left, while the film shows her to be visibly quite shaken. In this piece Ono seems to highlight the violence, which lies latent perhaps in all of us. The piece seems to be saying that once the guardrails are removed and people are given permission to behave as they wish, they can sadly behave very badly.

^{Yoko Ono, Cut Piece 1964 Performed by Yoko Ono in “New Works by Yoko Ono”, Carnegie Recital Hall, NYC , March 21 1965. Photo by Minoru.}

This was one of Ono’s most experimental periods, where in her New York loft studio – she along with composer La Monte Young hosted concerts and events – and it was at the same time that she had her first solo exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961. During this period, she would also self-publish her ground-breaking, self-published anthology Grapefruit, compiling her instructions written between 1953 and 1964, and is displayed in the UK for the first time.Another instruction piece created during this period was Shadow Piece 1963 where viewers are asked to sketch their own shadow. The resulting piece is simply beautiful.

Something, which is highlighted throughout the exhibition, is how participatory much of Yoko’s art is, some visitors comment on how much it reminds them of the work of current performance art super star Marina Abramovic. With some even saying that Yoko Ono took a lot from Abramovic. What they seem to forget is that Yoko Ono covered this ground first, so in fact a lot of Abramovic’s work references hers.

As you walk through the exhibition, you are also reminded that as Ono’s work grew in stature so did her activism. With Lennon now her husband many of their famous collaborations together, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, were created to highlight the cause of peace. Perhaps most famously in the song Imagine, although Lennon was originally credited with being the sole author, in 2017 that was changed to include Ono but in an interview with NPR in the states before his death Lennon states: “actually, that should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of the lyric and the concept came from Yoko. But those days I was a bit more selfish, bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution.”