Over this past Spring Break, I was enjoying spending time with family in London and had made plans to check out the Tate Modern, London’s premier modern art gallery. To my surprise, while researching what the Tate had to offer, I learned that the gallery was holding a special exhibition: “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind.” This could not have come at a more opportune time; I had decided a few weeks prior that my final paper topic for ART 364: “Marcel Duchamp Underground” would be about Yoko Ono’s artistic practice in relation to the work of Marcel Duchamp.
After entering the Tate and ascending to the second floor, I was greeted at the entrance of the exhibition by a projected slow motion video of Ono’s eye blinking, titled “EYEBLINK.” However, the true starting point of the exhibition was “Lighting Piece,” which took the form of a small card with the words “Light a match and watch till it goes out” typed onto it. This piece—created while Ono attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1955—is largely considered to be one of Ono’s earliest artistic creations and the foundation for her instructional art pieces. The card was accompanied by another video projection of a match being lit in slow motion and photographs of Ono performing the “Lighting Piece.” Ono’s pieces being embodied by various forms such as text, performance and film is a recurring motif of her artistry and was emphasized throughout this multimedia exhibition.
Ono’s work was mostly organized chronologically as I proceeded through the exhibition. Moving to the next room I was greeted by a tattered rag on the floor with an accompanying title card that read “A WORK TO BE STEPPED ON,” another instructional piece. Some museum attendees pressed their feet firmly onto the cloth while others quickly tapped the edge of their feet to the cloth, fearing the taboo of touching works in a museum. The remainder of this room was dedicated to more of her text-based instructional pieces. The walls were adorned with Ono’s “Instructions for Paintings,” a project from the early ’60s in which text gives an instruction for a painting to be realized by the viewer physically or in their mind. Instructions for a “PAINTING TO SHAKE HANDS” reads “Drill a hole in a canvas and put your hand out from behind. Receive your guests in that position. Shake hands and converse with hands.” Later in the exhibition I had the opportunity to see a realization of this piece, taking the form of a large white canvas with a single hole cut through it.
The following section of the exhibition focused on Ono’s early performance pieces featured at various events, such as “Works by Yoko Ono,” a 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall. I was particularly intrigued by a video projection of Ono performing “Cut Piece,” in which audience members were instructed to cut off pieces of her clothing with scissors until she was naked, sitting still without any expression. Ono would perform this piece many times throughout her career and would later go on to say that she did this “against ageism, against racism, against sexism and against violence.”
The center of the exhibition included works made during Ono’s five-year stay in London beginning in 1966, where she would ultimately meet John Lennon. One of the most visually striking installations I had seen so far was “Half-A-Room,” a collection of halved household objects and furniture which Ono originally debuted at her Lisson Gallery exhibition in 1967.
The inclusion of video projections increased at this point; I was able to watch segments of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s film “BED PEACE” (1969), Ono’s film “FLY” (1970) and Ono’s film “No. 4: Bottoms” (1967), which quite literally comprised various silent close-up shots of bottoms. These films, all politically charged in some sense, were accompanied by the iconic “WAR IS OVER (if you want it)” posters that Ono and Lennon circulated in 1969 in protest of the Vietnam War. At this point, I began to notice that Ono’s work had taken a more political shift in the mid-1960s, and I continued to see that trend develop in a particularly political piece toward the end of the exhibition called “Helmets (Pieces of Sky)” in which Ono suspended German World War II helmets in the air.
The exhibition finished with two major participatory installations: “Add Colour (Refugee Boat)” and “My Mummy is Beautiful.” The former took on the form of an initially white sailboat in the center of a white room where viewers were invited to write or draw on the walls, floor and boat with blue and white ink. The latter asked attendees to write a message about their mother and attach it to the wall. The walls were completely covered with layers of these small notes; the timing was very appropriate as Mother’s Day in the UK was to be celebrated the following day.
I thoroughly appreciated this exhibition for how much I was able to learn about Ono’s work and artistic prowess. Too often, Ono has been characterized by the general public as “the lady who broke up the Beatles” or as a singer who simply screams into the microphone. It was so refreshing to see far beyond those reductive labels and to deeply explore Ono’s groundbreaking work that largely set the precedent for the conceptual art movement.