Yoko Ono – Music of the Mind – Exhibition

Tate Modern, London

*****

Blog Piece No. 68 (2024): A Music Critic’s View of an Art Exhibition

A fascinating and moving exhibition reveals the breadth and of depth of Yoko Ono as conceptual artist, activist, musician, artistic and life partner of John Lennon, mother…and her unexpected sense of humour.

‘The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people.’

When Beatles fans saw images of Yoko Ono sitting in the studio next to Beatle John, quietly knitting and saying very little, few would have realised that she was one of the most important and creative avant-garde artists of the twentieth century. Even Lennon himself didn’t always publicly recognise his wife’s talent – his most famous and beloved solo song, Imagine was credited only to him for many years until he recognised her contribution to the concept and the lyrics. From 2017, nearly 40 years after her husband’s death, Ono received a co-writing credit. This exhibition celebrates Ono’s remarkable and immensely varied solo work as an artist, both the ‘music of her mind’ but also her actual music as a solo artist and with Lennon. The exhibition also celebrates her relationship with Lennon and their joint efforts to bring awareness to the possibility of world peace, expressed in the naïve but profound slogan ‘WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT.’

It’s easy to overlook the rather startling fact that Ono and Lennon only knew each other for fourteen years from their first meeting in 1966 to his murder in 1980, and that they were only married for eleven of those years. The exhibition covers over six decades of Ono’s creative life. Beautifully curated by Juliet Bingham and others, the show is in chronological order, with each work given enough space to breathe, and just the right amount of context and explanation given in the galleries themselves.

By the entrance there’s a haunting black and white film of Ono’s left eye, before a darkened room containing Telephone Piece (1964/1967) in which we hear an analogue phone ring followed by an unsettling, disembodied voice, ‘Hello, this is Yoko.’ In the next room, the sense of unease is heightened by a large screen with a black and white film of a lit match dying in slow motion called Lighting Piece (1955/1962). We seem to have been plunged into a world in which we are already faced with a metaphor for our own mortality.

It’s a relief therefore that the next room begins to reveal the humorous, playful side of Ono’s work, part of her endlessly fertile imagination. On the floor of the gallery there’s a piece of cloth canvas titled, A Work to be Stepped on (1961/2024). A polite enquiry to a member of the Tate Modern team elicited the reply that the title was meant to be taken literally, and a warm smile in response from him to the author’s delight in being able to tread on a work of art. The same member of staff was also responsible for ‘intermittently’ operating Waterdrop Painting VI (1961) by dropping water on the floor from a suspended bottle. Toilet Piece (1961/1971) which was performed at various concerts in New York, is the sound of a flushing toilet.

Humour continued in the next room with Bag Piece (1964) in which visitors are encouraged to join each other in a large black bag. Two young women accepted the challenge, constantly shapeshifting like cats in a sack, shrieking with laughter, emerging looking rather hot and saying it was difficult to breathe in there. But like many of the pieces in the show, it has a more profound meaning, as Yoko is quoted as saying on The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA’s) website:

‘By being in a bag, you show the other side of you, which is nothing to do with race, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with you know, age, actually. Then you become just a spirit or soul.’ 

Bag Piece © Yoko Ono 1966, performed at Tate, London on 29 April 2024

The room also included the famous Cut Piece (1964/1965), again filmed in black and white, in which members of the audience at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York gradually cut pieces of clothing off Ono’s body. It’s difficult not to find the piece disturbing, as well-dressed men gradually remove her clothing while Ono remains impassive, sometimes casting her eyes upwards as if trying to distance herself from what is happening to her. But according to Ono herself, that interpretation would be wrong. It was initially a criticism of other artists who only gave people what they wanted to give, ‘I wanted people to take whatever they wanted.’ And when she performed it in Paris in 2003, she said that her performance was ‘against ageism, against racism, against sexism, and against violence.’

Humour continues in the next room, with Painting to Shake Hands (1961/1962/2024) a large canvas hanging in the centre of the room with a slit in the middle allowing visitors to shake hands through it. The piece has the witty subtitle, ‘painting for cowards’, which could be seen as the conceptual artist poking fun at the very idea of conceptual art which avoids traditional painting or sculpture. Ironically, elsewhere in Tate Modern, Marcel Duchamp’s seminal piece of conceptual art, the urinal or Fountain is on display, a readymade, everyday object that the artist designated a work of art because he had chosen it to be a work of art. There was more humour in Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966/2024), which reveals that what had sounded like the curator anxiously building another part of the show when heard from previous rooms was in fact an invitation for members of the public to hammer nails into the wall until, ‘the surface is covered with nails.’

The room that will perhaps appeal most to music fans, and particularly Lennon fans, is that which records his relatively brief time with Ono. It’s poignant to see Lennon’s dates recorded on the wall as ‘1940 – 1980’. Behind those basic facts lies the tragedy of a life cut short in New York, a place where Lennon had felt safe to wander the streets without the level of security that a superstar would now insist on having. Perhaps the most important work in terms of their relationship is Ceiling Painting (aka YES) from 1966 as it marks the point when the couple first met. It’s a step ladder which you originally you could climb (it’s now roped off) and look through a small magnifying glass to see the single word ‘YES’ on the ceiling. Ono exhibited it at as part of Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono in later 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London. Lennon was invited to the show; the couple hadn’t previously met and, ironically, neither of them had heard of the other despite being two of the most important artists of the twentieth century. But Ono’s work had an immediate, positive effect on Lennon, as he told Jann Wenner in a Rolling Stone interview that was later published in the book Lennon Remembers (Penguin 1973),

‘I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says ‘yes’. So it was positive, I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes.’‘

The other iconic work, Bed Peace (1969), a film of Ono and Lennon’s ‘Bed-In’ in Montreal shows them in bed with Ono’s daughter Kyoko, all dressed beatifically in pure white, contrasting with the dull suits of the newsmen who were clearly baffled by the attempt to promote peace by holding court in bed . Even here, humour is evident in the posters by the bed, reading ‘Bed Peace’ and ‘Hair Peace’ (as in ‘hairpiece’, or a wig/toupée). As Lennon says in the film, ‘If we make people laugh, that’s enough. Happiness leads to peace.’

An ante-room (originally called an ‘anti-room‘ by the spell-checker on this Blog, a concept Ono herself might enjoy) titled Approximately Infinite Universe (from Ono’s 1973 album of the same name) concentrates on Ono’s music. The room displays artwork from many of the albums, and there are comfortable chairs with music players with a selection of Ono’s music to listen to on headphones. Poignantly, one of the albums from which excerpts can be heard is Season of Glass (1981) written in the aftermath of Lennon’s death, with its shocking cover image of the blood-stained glasses Lennon was wearing when he was murdered. Many of the songs feature Ono singing in a conventional rock style, her slightly fragile voice often deeply affecting. But she was also known for her ululating, screaming style, which she uses to accompany the short film FLY (based on Ono’s 1968 score for Fly (Film No.13), shown in a separate room on a large screen. The soundtrack matches the fly’s movements as it walks across a woman’s body, creating a scene that could have come from a horror film, particularly when the fly rests on the woman’s lips. But again Ono wrongfoots the viewer. As well as embodying dirt and decay, the fly also represents the freedom of Ono’s spirit, creating a deeper meaning beyond the superficial horror or disgust of the soundtrack and imagery.

Another ante-room invites visitor participation. Add Colour (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016/2014) began as a room with white walls and floor, with a small white boat in the middle. Members of the public are invited to use blue markers to add their own thoughts on the walls, the floor and the boat itself. The blue represents, in Ono’s words, ‘Just blue/like the ocean.’ She asks visitors to reflect on the international refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people crossing the oceans to come to Europe. The accompanying poster references the UN Refugee Agency’s prediction that in 2024 the number of ‘forcibly displaced and stateless’ will rise to more than 130 million. The work is playful – children are allowed to colour in parts of the boat; political – some of the comments written on the walls are overtly political; and poignant – the fragility of the boat that could carry refugees across an ocean is pitiful. A possibly unintended but beautiful consequence of the blue ink is that from a distance (see above) the boat and the room appear to be a pointillist painting. Viewed from this angle, the boat could be at the bottom of the ocean, having sunk to the ocean floor after the boat capsized. A haunting image, which demonstrates Ono’s deep humanity.

Further humanity is shown in the piece just outside the blue boat room, Helmets (Pieces of Sky) from 2001. From a distance (see above) the helmets recall the bowler hats so common in the surrealist works of René Magritte, but on closer inspection they are German soldiers’ helmets from WWII. Inside these images of destruction are blue jigsaw pieces, which Ono invites us to take away. Ono shows that war fragments hope, which is represented by the sky. Her hope is that the individual pieces of the jigsaw will be put together at some future time by a collective effort of humanity.

The final room of the exhibition is called The Personal is Political and features only two works. The first is My Mommy is Beautiful (2022) which consists of two parts. Glancing up to the ceiling, large photos of parts of a mother’s naked body can be seen. Again, Ono’s humour is evident – she says, ‘it’s rather like looking up at your mom’s body when you are a baby.’ The second part is a wall on which visitors are invited to attach a piece of paper with their thoughts about their mother, or a photo of her, to create a massive, and profoundly moving, tribute to motherhood. Examples include,

‘To mum I miss you! Hope your having a ball up there + happy.’

and

‘Hi mum you were beautiful.’

The final work on display is WHISPER (2013), a film of a performance by Ono about ten years ago when she was eighty. Ono screams and ululates, repeating the words, ‘I wish…let me wish.’ It’s challenging, like much of the work in the exhibition, but strangely immersive and moving. We have been drawn into the world of an endlessly imaginative, playful, political, compassionate, joyful, humane and ultimately hopeful artist, who in this exhibition has taken us on a wonderful, life-affirming journey.

Yoko Ono Music of the Mind is on at Tate Modern until Sunday 1 September