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Visitors to Music of the Mind, a new exhibition just opened at Tate Modern, are left in no doubt as to its subject. “Hello this is Yoko,” says the artist in a sound piece called “Telephone Piece” that plays on a loop at the entrance, where a large screen shows a single blinking eye.
Even the eye is recognisable, but then Ono has been in those of the public since the late 1960s, her centre-parted black hair and steady gaze inscribed on to our retinas, mostly as the other half of the John Lennon story. Before all that, though, was Yoko the artist, and curator Juliet Bingham is determined to remind us of the fact in a series of elegantly arranged monochrome rooms: the whitest of white cubes you’ll see this year.
Walls are lined with evocative instructional texts, such as a Dada-Zen mash-up, to stimulate the mind. “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put it in,” says one. “Take a tape of the snow falling. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with.” There are anti-war messages: an all-white chess board where, once the game begins and the pieces intermingle, any hope of contest dissolves. A film of 365 waggling artworld buttocks (“Film No4, (‘Bottoms’)”) that’s meant to make us giggle. “I hope,” said Ono in 1967, “[people will see] that the ’60s was not only the age of achievement but of laughter.” Ono delivers the avant-garde with precision and taste.
Born in Tokyo almost exactly 91 years ago to a patrician family (near ancestors were samurai; father was a wealthy banker), Ono’s life ricocheted between the US and her native country. She learnt German Lieder and Italian opera and a Japanese practice of translating the sounds of the day into musical notes. Her early teens were marked by American wartime bombing of Japan, culminating in the dropping of two atomic weapons. By the 1950s, she was at Sarah Lawrence college in upstate New York studying poetry and developing a taste for 12-tone music.
In 1960, she signed a lease on a loft in Chambers Street, and with La Monte Young organised events that attracted the alternative elite. Photographs show her with Simone Forti, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg; Ono is chicly dressed in black, sometimes wearing a cardboard mask that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Bauhaus student party. Fluxus-adjacent, she never officially joined that New York art movement, but she shared its values of replacing objects with sounds and actions. By 1962, she was back in Japan, yelping orgasmically over David Tudor’s heavily hammered piano notes at the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo. (John Cage is on the billing, as “assistant performer”.)
The clues to her character run through her work. The roiling imagination of her instructional texts got her through the painful war years in Japan when she and her brother spent hours staring at the sky conjuring images of escape and ice cream. She developed a stoicism and humour that deflected her marginalisation — as an Asian woman in 1960s America — and the PTSD of war. In 1964, she self-published a compendium of the instructions and called it Grapefruit. She often referred to the fruit: in its unsettling combination of lemon and orange, she saw it as an awkward hybrid like herself.
In that same year, she created “Cut Piece”, shown here as a crisply remastered black and white film. Ono sits silently in a classic Japanese feminine pose, pulsing with patrician sangfroid, as her expensive clothes are cut away from her body by a participant. It is a sleek exercise in ambiguity — is she victim or controller, passive or active? — and a cornerstone of second-wave feminism. It took another 10 years for Marina Abramović to make “Rhythm O” in which 72 implements are offered with which to touch the artist’s body.
In 1966, Ono installed a white ladder in the Indica Gallery in London (the original is here). At its top is a magnifying glass to enable the climber to read a tiny word inscribed on the ceiling above. When John Lennon made the ascent, he discovered it said “Yes”. And the rest, as we know, is history.
It’s not all bad: “Imagine” was a joint production, and a 1970 film, Fly, where an insect crawls across a woman’s naked body, is a visual and sonic high point. The “Bed-In For Peace”, though, conducted in Amsterdam, then in Montreal, in 1969, shows a self-obsessed and substance-addled pair. Lennon is rude to the hotel staff, often inarticulate and patronising. The couple’s nightwear is smart — 1960s White Company — although their hair and their manners are terrible.
But John-and-Yoko is not the subject here. An audio room, where you can listen to dozens of tracks made between 1968 and 1998, is set to one side. (Possibly designed to feel like the breakout space of a 1970s recording studio, it feels more like a business-class lounge in a regional airport with its squishy brown leather seats.) There is the brighter side of activism as acorns were sent to world leaders to plant trees for peace and several replied in the affirmative. There are participatory works. Black bags are to be climbed into — abyss or the warm velvety night? A suspended canvas has a central hole through which to shake hands. It is a rare invitation to touch an artwork within the walls of an art gallery. The all-white “Refugee Boat”, which visitors are invited to cover in messages and motifs with provided magic markers, could hardly be more timely. It was first shown in 1960.
Since the 1980s, Ono’s time has mostly been taken up with music, activism and the upkeep of the Lennon legacy. What this show doesn’t dwell on is her influence, which is everywhere. The crisp sans-serif capitals of the War Is Over posters reprised in Katharine Hamnett’s protest T-shirts; the performers from Elvis Costello to Bikini Kill to Lady Gaga for whom she paved the way; the extraordinary films that call to mind Douglas Gordon and Martin Creed.
The finale is Ono performing, aged 80, at the Sydney Opera House, fancy fedora and shades firmly in place, wibbling and warbling. “Wish, wish, wish” are the words I heard as I left. A wistful end to a reputation-defining exhibition.
To September 1, tate.org.uk
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