Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

Tate Modern London Feb-September 2024 – Nancy Kay Turner

Yoko Ono’s immersive retrospective at Britain’s Tate Modern is a joyful, poetic, prophetic, sprawling exhibition that is as fresh, pointed and poignant as ever, highlighting Ono’s tremendous influence on conceptual, video and performance art. Ono’s biography is instructive here as she was only 12 when Japan was embroiled in World War II, an event that cast a long shadow over her work and life. Ono and her younger brother were sent to the countryside for safe keeping. There they would lie on the grass watching the clouds and invent food menus, as food was scarce. Ono claims this as her first art piece. Healing acts of imagination and a focus on peace have long been central tenets of her varied art practice for over 70 years.

 

Always a trail blazer, she was the first female philosophy student at Tokyo’s Gaushuin University before moving to the United States and studying poetry and music composition at Sarah Lawrence College. This exhibition begins at the beginning with Yoko Ono and her first husband, Juillard-trained composer Toshi Ichiyanagi’s loft at 112 Chamber Street, where they would host performances and events with everyone from Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris, Isami Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman and Le Monte Young either in attendance or performing. There are wonderful films and photographs here detailing this fecund decade with all these revolutionary artists and musicians fomenting magic and making history together, clearly cementing Ono’s role as a leading force in both Fluxus and Conceptual Art – while also delineating her uniqueness. Even earlier, in the mid-nineteen fifties, Ono created Grapefruit, a book of instruction where Ono has the reader create paintings in their mind. The original framed works of instruction on display here are on simple typing paper and are handwritten in ink by Ichiyanagi, with an English translation on the bottom. Poetic and weirdly compelling to read, they are hung in a grid and quite absorbing.  Here’s one example:

PAINTING FOR THE WIND

Cut a hole in a bag filled with seeds

of any kind and place the bag where

there is wind.

1961 summer

Each page is dated with the season of its origin duly noted which gives it even more specificity. The difference between Ono’s instructions and Sol Lewitt is that his instructions like a composer’s sheet music annotations, result in a particular concrete work albeit with some room for interpretation, while Ono’s remain in the mind of the receiver.

Ideas came to me like I was tuning

                                                      Into some radio from the sky…

                                                      I couldn’t realize most of my

Ideas…In the conceptual world

You did not have to think about

how an idea could be realized physically.

I could be totally daring.

The exhibition then moves the viewer to Ono’s mesmerizing durational performative work. In 1965, she performed Cut Piece at Carnegie recital Hall in New York City. Here Ono is seated on her haunches, on a bare stage, in a demure black boucle long sleeved front button suit – very 1965. Nearby is a long fabric scissor. The audience is invited to cut a piece of her clothing. Filmed by the Maysles Brothers in black and white, this Is a nail biter to watch. At first, a woman comes up and carefully cuts a small piece from Ono’s shoulder which she takes with her. But eventually a man comes up and slices Ono’s sleeve from wrist to shoulder exposing her white skin, taking nothing. Meanwhile, she is motionless, her face impassive. Then another man, now empowered it seems, cuts the front of her jacket, exposing her slip, which covers her bra. Another man comes up and snips the straps holding up the slip and bra. She then crosses her arms over her bosom preventing the bra from exposing her, and the event is over.

I held my breath for the entire time. Her fearlessness is astounding. The idea of an artist letting the audience decide what to take and what to leave is incredibly brave. Perhaps this originates from the Japanese concept of “kami” that says all things in the world have a spiritual essence especially clothes. So Ono is sharing her essence with the unknown audience members who are invited to take a piece. One could ruminate on the layers of meaning behind this idea in view of classic song lyrics like “all of me, why not take all of me.?” though Ono is clearly an empowered woman. For me this was a deeply disturbing video to watch, which only speaks to its enormous staying power and relevance sixty years after its inception.

Ono has a playful side as well. Her Film No.4 (‘BOTTOMS’) shows 200 images of buttocks strung together in the most unremarkable way, which is her point. The audio contains parts of conversations with participants (some famous) and her second husband filmmaker Anthony Cox. Her film score for the film states “Strings bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” This was of course, banned at first, although it is the very opposite of erotic with all these behinds looking quite plain. Ono’s passion for peace, a legacy of her childhood experience in war time shaped her at a very young age.

What I was struck with as I walked through this vast exhibit was the wide range of community engagement opportunities. Folks were hammering a nail into a painting as per Ono’s instructions as I did as well; they were playing “chess” with Ono’s all white chess boards  White Chess set 1966 arranged  on white tables with white chairs. Perhaps a nod to chess playing Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of Surrealism.? But ironically there can be no winner if all pieces are the same. Peace and community are always on her mind. They were inhabiting her black bags to recreate her Bag Piece 1964 in which participants are enclosed in black bags and try to move around while being deprived of vision. When photographed it is quite beautiful (originally photographed June 7, 1965). There was plenty of laughter as ordinary folks inhabited the black bags. I can’t remember any exhibit that I have ever been to that so captivated, energized and engaged such a diverse audience.

Ono also made physical sculptures that are witty and seemingly simple but quite thought provoking as in Apple 1966, acrylic pedestal with brass plaque, which does indeed have one apple on it. Reminds one of Rene Magritte’s iconic painting of a pipe “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. While Magritte’s message to us is that this is not a pipe merely a flat two- dimensional depiction of one, Ono’s apple is indeed an apple. Her sculpture delves into language, categorizing objects, food, mythology, religion (THE famous Adam and Eve apple) and is also a send up of pretentious sculptures on pedestals.

Another thought provoking and stunning piece is Add Colour (Refugee Boat) concept 1960, first realized 2016, wooden boat, paint, instruction, brushes, size variable. The museum goers are invited to color the white walls, floors, and boat with text and or image. In the Tate Exhibition blue markers replaced paint. Eventually every reachable surface is densely covered over with peace signs, slogans, drawings and graffiti creating a gorgeous and moving environment as many images are buried and essentially erased – a metaphor surely for all the lost lives. There are many pieces that were conceived in the 1960s but realized later in her career. I would argue that most of Ono’s seminal work was created in the nineteen sixties and revisited in new iterations in the next several decades, morphing but ever important and timely.

Ono’s collaboration with her famous third husband John Lennon is almost a footnote in this show, though their work together is documented mostly in film and photographs. She was 31 when they met at her exhibit in London and 39 when they married and had their famous weeklong bed-in for peace in Amsterdam. He was tragically murdered in December 8, 1980 and Ono never remarried.`

Music of the Mind at the Tate Modern is a testament to Ono’s unique contribution to contemporary art and one of a string of recent museum retrospectives seeking to honor her vision. Yoko Ono’s works stand the test of time becoming even more pertinent, universal and meaningful in 2024 than when they were conceived by her some 60 years ago. Ono continues to work for peace.

After unblocking one’s mind, by dispensing with visual, auditory and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder. And my Events are spent mostly in wonderment.

Yoko Ono January 23, 1966

     — Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner