“For me, art is a matter of mental survival: if I don’t do these things, I might go crazy or something. So doing so helps me maintain my sanity. You have to release your emotions to preserve it,” expressed Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933) in an interview with Interview Magazine on November 26, 2013. And, in this way, she put words to her way of being in the world. Because, before the wife and widow of John Lennon – the man made into a myth – or the cause of the breakup of The Beatles – the curse that she has carried for half a century – Ono is an artist. She is a pioneer of conceptual and participatory art, film and performance. She is a famous musician and a fantastic defender of world peace.
Now the Tate Modern in London is dedicating the largest exhibition ever held on his figure in the United Kingdom to his powerful and multidisciplinary work. Until September 1, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind uncovers seven decades – from the mid-1950s to the present – ??that chart her (just turned 91) impact on contemporary culture. The exhibition takes its title from the series of concerts and events organized by the artist in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967. And it reflects the concept of silent music, in which her “instructions” produce sound in the imagination of the listeners.
“When a violinist plays, what is incidental: the movement of the arm or the sound of the bow? I think of my music more as a practice than music. The only sound that exists for me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce the music of the mind in people…”, explained the artist in 1966. In the 200 works on display there are instructional pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography.
Lennon already said it: “Yoko Ono is the most famous unknown artist in the world, everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” We discover it for you.
She was 12 years old when a bombing she survived forced her to flee Tokyo. It was 1945, and in the context of World War II, Ono found solace and refuge in the constant presence of the sky, which appears repeatedly in her work as a metaphor for peace, freedom, and limitlessness. Her exquisite education between Japan and the United States – she was the daughter of an important banker and her paternal grandfather was descended from the ninth emperor of Japan – was interrupted by the conflict and she had to be evacuated to the countryside, with the corresponding famine of those difficult days.
“Lying on our backs (she and her little brother), looking at the sky through an opening in the ceiling, we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive,” the artist recounts in the book Yes Yoko Ono by Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks. The sky is present in her instructional work Painting to See the Skies (1961) and in the installation SKY TV (1966), which broadcast a live video feed of the sky above the Tate Modern. She also in the participatory work Helmets (Pieces of Sky), made for the first time in 2001, which invites visitors to take their own puzzle piece of the sky.
At the age of 23 she married the Japanese musician Toshi Ichiyanagi, whom she met in New York. The year was 1956. The marriage ended in divorce in 1962. A year later, in 1963 and pregnant with her first daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, she said “I do” with film producer Anthony Cox. The relationship soon began to fail and ended in 1969 with their separation and a bloody battle for custody of her daughter. From this distancing was born the moving installation of domestic objects divided in half Half-A-Room (1967), present in the exhibition.
It was on March 20, 1969 when Lennon and Ono were secretly united in a very short ceremony (it lasted 10 minutes) in Gibraltar, a British enclave on Spanish soil. In the United Kingdom, the law allowing marriage between people of different nationalities had not yet been approved. It was the second marriage for him (after Cynthia Lennon) and the last for both of them. Together they had a son: Sean Lennon. The marriage certificate is displayed on display.
Lennon and Ono met at the Unfinished Paintings and Objects art exhibition, held at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966. The then Beatle was invited by his friend the art dealer John Dunbar a day before the opening. Lennon, at first, was baffled by what he found there, but his enthusiasm surfaced when he discovered an installation, Ceiling Paiting/Yes Painting (1966), in which the Japanese woman had placed a ladder that led to a canvas hanging from the ceiling of The galery. The word “yes” was written there in small letters, which could only be read with the help of a magnifying glass. A second work ended up conquering Lennon.
“When Painting to Hammer a Nail was exhibited at the Indica Gallery, a person came and asked me if it was okay for me to hammer a nail into the painting. I said yes if he paid 5s. Instead of paying the 5 shillings, he asked me if it was okay for me to hammer in an imaginary nail. That was John Lennon. I thought I had met a guy who played the same game as me,” Ono wrote in the text accompanying another of his exhibitions, Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show, in 1967.
A few days after getting married, the honeymoon of the musician and the artist took place in the presidential suite of the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam, where the couple stayed in bed, between March 25 and 31, 1969, as a non-violent form of protests against the Vietnam War, inviting the world press to his hotel room. The campaign was known as bed-in for peace. Two months later, from May 26 to June 2, the famous couple once again participated in another bull run for peace, this time in a suite at the Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth in Montreal.
The room also became the setting for the recording of the song Give Peace a Chance, an anthem against a conflict that had begun 16 years earlier. Large billboards and posters reading War Is Over! were placed in 12 cities around the world. (If You Want It) (1969). In the action Acorns for Peace (1969), Ono and Lennon sent acorns to 96 heads of state and international political figures. All this can be seen at the exhibition.
The artist not only mobilized with John Lennon. Ono has increasingly used her art and her global media platform to advocate for peace and humanitarian campaigns. That is why the Tate Modern has staged its recent project Add Color (Refugee Boat), presented for the first time in 2016, which invites visitors to paint with blue markers the white walls of the gallery and a white boat while reflecting on issues urgent needs of crisis and displacement.
“The work of an artist is not to destroy, but to change the value of things. And by doing so, artists can turn the world into a utopia where there is complete freedom for everyone. That can only be achieved when there is total communication in the world. Total communication equals peace. That is our goal. That is what artists can do for the world,” he wrote in his essay What Is the Relationship Between the World and the Artist? (1971).
Her first experimental works helped consolidate her in the Japanese and American avant-garde between the late 1950s and early 1960s. With artists of the stature of Alan Kaprow she began in the discipline of performances and happenings. She was linked to Fluxus, an international group of artists founded by George Maciunas who sought, between the sixties and early seventies, the fusion and mixing of sound, film and performance, evoking Dadaist rebellion.
In her famous Cut Piece (1964), Ono invited viewers to go up to a stage, where she was kneeling or sitting, to cut pieces of her dress with scissors until she was completely naked. In Wish Tree (1993) she asks the audience to write her dreams on pieces of paper and hang them from a live tree. Both works can be admired in the exhibition.
“I propose the feminization of society; the use of feminine nature as a positive force to change the world. We can change ourselves with feminine intelligence and consciousness, in a basically organic, non-competitive society, based on love rather than reasoning. The result will be a society of balance, peace and satisfaction. We can evolve instead of rebel, unite instead of claiming independence, and feel instead of thinking. These are characteristics that are considered feminine; characteristics that men despise in women. But, have men really done so well by avoiding the development of these characteristics within themselves?” reads the pages of the book Yes Yoko Ono.
The artist’s commitment to feminism is evident in her life and in the exhibition with key films such as FLY (1970-71), in which a fly crawls over the naked body of a woman while Ono’s voice traces its path. , and Freedom (1970), which shows Ono attempting and failing to free herself from her bra. In a section dedicated to her music, there are feminist anthems such as Sisters O Sisters (1972), Woman Power (1973) and Rising (1995), which empower women to build a new world, have courage and rage, and amplify the works by the artist that denounce violence against women.
The core of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is the radical works of Yoko Ono, which correspond to her five-year stay in London starting in 1966. There she joined a countercultural network of artists, musicians and writers, and met to her future husband and collaborator John Lennon.
His works include Apple (1966) and the banned film Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966-67), which he created as a “petition for peace,” exhibited along with material from his influential talk at the Destruction In Art symposium, in which described the fundamental aspects of his participatory art: based on events; committed to everyday life; staff; partial or presented as unfinished; catalyst for creative transformation; and existing in the realm of the imagination.
In addition to viewing these pieces, at the exhibition, visitors will be able to participate in White Chess Set, a game in which there are only white chess pieces and a board of white squares, with the instruction “play as long as you can remember where all your pieces are.” ”, a work first made in 1966 that demonstrates Ono’s anti-war stance.
Ideas occupy a central place in Ono’s art, often expressed in poetic, humorous and profound ways. His written conceptual pieces called “instructions” ask readers to imagine, experience, make, or complete the work. Some are made up of a single verb, such as Fly or Touch. Others range from short phrases like “Listen to a heartbeat” and “Step in all the puddles in the city” to imagination tasks like “Build a picture in your head.” Each word or phrase is intended to stimulate and unblock the reader’s mind.
On this occasion, unpublished photographs will show Ono’s first “instruction paintings” in her studio at the 112 Chambers Street loft in New York, where she and composer La Monte Young organized concerts and experimental events, and also some from her first exhibition solo at AG Gallery in 1961. For the first time, the typed draft of his self-published anthology Grapefruit, which compiles his “instructions” written between 1953 and 1964, is on display in the UK. In addition, visitors will be invited to hide in the work interactive Bag Piece (1964) and to unite their shadows in Shadow Piece (1963).
In 2017, 46 years after its creation, the National Music Publishers Association of the United States (NMPA), in addition to awarding the song Imagine the Centennial Song award, the song of the century, recognized Yoko Ono as its legitimate co-author. As the former Beatle revealed in the last surviving interview of him, conducted for BBC Radio 1 shortly before his murder, reading Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit had a lot to do with it. Lennon acknowledged that both the idea and different parts of the lyrics came from the book.
Together with Lennon and also without him, Yoko Ono has recorded twenty studio albums. Among them, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970), Season of glass (1981) or Rising (1995), which were well received by critics. In 2011, when she was about to turn 78, her song Move On Fast managed to reach number 1 on Billboard’s dance chart. The song was released for the first time in 1972 and renewed in 2011 thanks to a remix that invites you to dance. Previously, she had already allowed artists such as Pet Shop Boys, Basement Jaxx or Felix Da Housecat to create mixes of her work on the albums Open Your Box (2001) and Yes, I’m A Witch (2007).