Yōko Ono – Music of the mind is the artist’s largest exhibition ever in England, open until September 1st at Tate Modern in London. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the title has been chosen as a metaphor for the way Ono sees her work as a way to stimulate and unlock the mind and imagination.
For most of the public opinion, she is the one who broke up the Beatles, and Yōko Ono was the subject of misogynistic attacks and denigrating her status as an artist. For example, in the 80s, Brian Sewell, art critic for the London Evening Standard and television personality, wrote: «She’s shaped nothing, she’s contributed nothing, she’s simply been a reflection of the times. I think she’s an amateur, a very rich woman who was married to someone who did have some talent and was the driving force behind the Beatles. If she had not been the widow of John Lennon, she would be totally forgotten by now». But in reality, Ono has not lived in Lennon’s shadow and has always demonstrated that she has her own artistic vision and intellectual beliefs and is still well radicated in people’s minds and in the contemporary art scene. Now, this huge retrospective explains who she is and what she has been able to do. Curated by Juliet Bingham, the exhibition collects over 200 works of art and music, films and photographs created by Ono in over seventy years of career. As Bingham declares, through this retrospective, “We want to show that, by the time she reached London, she was already really embedded in lots of different scenes and at the centre of the avant-garde in New York and Tokyo. She came to London at the invitation of Gustav Metzger; she performed Cut Piece and was only one of two women performing at the Destruction in Art Symposium. What happened when she met Lennon was that what she was doing was amplified, and also went into a different realm. It became a media circus; she was vilified: misogyny and racism. And some of her practice was subsumed underneath this larger media situation”. The exhibition currently set up at Tate Modern is part of what is a sort of a “rehabilitation” path of the public figure of Yōko Ono, thanks also to the recent release of Get Back, an eight-hour documentary by Peter Jackson and the retrospective at Kunsthaus in Zurich.
Through an articulated chronological and thematic path, all the most significant works are presented in order to illustrate an unconventional artistic career.
THE AVANT-GARDE IN NEW YORK
From the ashes of the World War II a society with freedom at its center had to be born. Freedom from bourgeois hypocrisies, from political constraints, from gender barriers, and so on. A social and cultural journey not yet concluded, which has also crossed the world of art and which over the decades has also given voice to new social demands, first of all feminism. Fluxux movement was the starting point of Ono’s career, but as she declared to Artribune magazine in an interview given in 2013, “I’m not just Fluxus. Like most Fluxus artists. We are simply artists”. Anyway, Fluxus represents a fundamental first step to place Ono on the confusing map of contemporary art from the 1960s to our days. Created around the Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus was more than a movement only; it was an international community of artists, architects, composers, designers etcetera. Her approach started in particular with the “instruction paintings” she made in New York at the end of the decade, when she rented a loft at 112 Chambers Street, with avant-garde musician and composer La Monte Young. In London you can admire previously unseen photographs that show Ono working in her loft studio and in her first solo exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961. These works formed 1964 artist’s book Grapefruit, where Ono included over 200 “instructions” that she had conceived in the previous ten years or so. Ono’s instructions are little pearls of uncertainty, written not to be followed (or maybe yes?), but not even written to just be read. These are tips for training creativity and flying with the imagination, believing the impossible and acting accordingly. The book also alludes to the hybrid between orange and lemon by an artist who has always perceived herself as a hybrid: between Japan and America; east and west; visual arts, music and performance. In London you can see for the first time the typescript draft of this anthology. The exhibition is a mix of artworks and documents in order to better illustrate the phases of her career.
THE ART OF PERFORMANCE
Some years before Marina Abramović, already in 1964 with Cut Piece, Ono uses the body for moments of interaction with the public; specifically, in this performance the artist was sitting on a stage on which she invited the public to cut the clothes she was wearing with scissors until she remained naked. In this performance, and in many others, the sensations of discomfort and intimacy are mutual, shared by both the artist and participants. In so doing, Ono drags the public into an entirely immersive experience, granting to the people the permission to engage on a tangible level. Cut Piece is also one of the first feminist performances, because boldly presents violence against women’s bodies in the form of cut-out clothing. No wonders that Ono herself claimed that in the first performance a man «took the pair of scissors and made a motion to stab me», thereby adding to both the physical and psychological vulnerability of being threatened, particularly by a male. Among the most sensational performances, the one in 1969 with her partner John Lennon: the well-known Bed-Ins staged in Amsterdam and Montreal, to protest against the atrocities of the war in Vietnam, and call the international political world to its responsibilities: because peace is very easier to conclude than it seems, it’s just a question of will (as the couple would have reaffirmed in the song War is over). This experience is documented in the exhibition by the film Bed Peace.
THE LONDON YEARS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE FOLLOWING DECADES
Between 1966 and 1971 Ono lived in London, where she created many radical works with different languages. The Tate exhibition focuses on them, including Apple (1966) and the poignant installation of halved domestic objects Half-A-Room (1967). The first one is an artwork that, once again, puts Ono ahead of her time; decades before Cattelan’s banana, she displayed an apple decay, reflecting on its natural beauty that soon will be gone. A surprising work, which shifts the idea of concept and meaning to a different level. Half-A-Room, instead, is a reflection on the need of people to live in a couple, and it’s an intellectual approach based on the study of solitude, to the stream of the Summer of Love that shook the year 1967.
Another topic of that period was peace, and Ono invented a provocative way to send a message in that direction: the medium-length film Film No. 4 (Bottoms) was created as a “petition for peace”(String bottoms together in place of signatures for a petition for peace) but was banned by censorship in 1966, because it involved a group of volunteers walking on a makeshift turntable while their rear end was filmed. The exhibition at Tate offers a rare chance to watch this controversial artwork. In the 70s, Ono went on approaching feminism through some films like FLY (1970), in which a fly crawls over a naked woman’s body while Ono’s vocals chart its journey, and Freedom (1970), depicting Ono as she attempts and fails to break free from her bra, or some songs like Sisters O Sisters (1972) and Woman Power (1973).
In the ’80s and the first half of the ’90s, Ono focused mainly on music, but then she came back to art with some huge installations with a social background, “Just Think about the Wish Trees”, in London. A project born in 1996 in Finland and filmed more than 20 times in as many places around the world. As a child I always went to the temple and wrote a wish on a piece of paper to tie it to the branch of a tree. From afar, these sorts of knots looked like white flowers in full bloom. And here the project continues. Yoko Ono’s trees are chosen from among those native to the area and a small forest can grow from a single specimen, an expression of social needs and hopes that never end. Or My Mommy is Beautiful (2004), another, but less radical and more poetic approach to feminism; a participatory installation featuring a 15-metre-long wall of canvases to which visitors can attach photographs of their mother and share personal messages. A work conceived as a tribute to all mothers of the world; a celebration of the love that nurtures us all.
AN INVOLVING ARTIST
At the heart of Ono’s work lay a certain faith in humanity, curiosity about the world, and commitment to improving it. The act of touching is a fundamental concept in her works – many of which reflect this gesture in the titles (Touch Piece, Touch Poem) – or of her songs, from Touch Me (Plastic Ono Band, 1970) to the piece Kiss Kiss Kiss and the refrain “touch touch touch touch me love” (1980). Ono is a multifaceted artist who has used multiple creative languages in her career, pushing people to touch, to observe, to listen, to think, to write and to wish. She plays with imagination, her art is playful and serious at the same time, it’s wonder and violence, prose and poetry, reality and dream, present and past.
This articulated retrospective demonstrates how Yōko Ono’s impact on the art world has been profound and long-lasting. She pioneered new forms of expression and inspired generations of artists to think beyond the traditional boundaries of art. Her ability to transform the personal into the universal and to use art as a means for social change continues to resonate in an era where issues of gender, race and identity are at the center of cultural debate.
Written by Niccolò Lucarelli
