YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND
Tate Modern, London
February 15 – September 1, 2024
K20, Dusseldorf
September 28, 2024 – March 16, 2025
Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer 1967
from HALF-A-WIND SHOW, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967
Photo © Clay Perry
© Yoko Ono
Installation view of Apple 1966 from
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, MoMA, NYC, 2015
Photo © Thomas Griesel
© Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono, Helmets (Pieces of Sky), 2001,
from ‘Between The Sky and My Head’
at Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2008.
Photo © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
© Yoko Ono
Installation view of PEACE is POWER, first realised 2017,
in ‘Yoko Ono: The Learning Garden of Freedom’
at Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, 2020
Photo © Filipe Braga
© Yoko Ono
Sky TV, 1966/2014
© Yoko Ono
Courtesy the artist
Photo Cathy Carver
Installation view courtesy of
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Photo © Cathy Carver
Tate Modern presents the UK’s largest exhibition celebrating the ground-breaking and influential work of artist and activist YOKO ONO (b.1933, Tokyo). Ono is a trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory art, film and performance, a celebrated musician, and a formidable campaigner for world peace. Spanning seven decades of the artist’s powerful, multidisciplinary practice from the 1950s to now, YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND traces the development of her innovative work and its enduring impact on contemporary culture. Conceived in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, the exhibition brings together over 200 works including instruction pieces and scores, installations, films, music and photography, revealing a radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.
Ideas are central to Yoko Ono’s art, often expressed in poetic, humorous and profound ways. The exhibition starts by exploring her pivotal role in experimental avant-garde circles in New York and Tokyo, including the development of her ‘instruction pieces’ – written instructions that ask readers to imagine, experience, make or complete the work. Some exist as 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 tasks for the imagination like ‘Painting to be Constructed in your Head’. Each word or phrase aims to stimulate and unlock the mind of the reader. Previously unseen photographs show Yoko Ono’s first ‘instruction paintings’ at her loft studio in New York – where she and composer La Monte Young hosted experimental concerts and events – and in her first solo exhibition at AG Gallery in 1961. The typescript draft of Ono’s ground-breaking self-published anthology Grapefruit, compiling her instructions written between 1953 and 1964, is displayed in the UK for the first time. Visitors are invited to activate Ono’s instructions, concealing themselves in the interactive work Bag Piece 1964 – first performed by Yoko Ono in Kyoto, in the same concert in which she performed her iconic work Cut Piece 1964 – and bringing their shadows together in Shadow Piece 1963.
The heart of the exhibition charts Yoko Ono’s radical works created during her five-year stay in London from 1966. Here she became embedded within a counter-cultural network of artists, musicians and writers, meeting her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon. Key installations from Yoko Ono’s influential exhibitions at Indica and Lisson Gallery feature, including Apple 1966 and the poignant installation of halved domestic objects Half-A-Room 1967. Ono’s banned Film No. 4 (Bottoms) 1966-7 which she created as a ‘petition for peace’ is displayed alongside material from her influential talk at the Destruction In Art Symposium, in which she described the fundamental aspects of her participatory art: event-based; engaged with the everyday; personal; partial or presented as unfinished; a catalyst to creative transformation; and existing within the realm of the imagination. Visitors can participate in White Chess Set – a game featuring 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 realised in 1966 that demonstrates Yoko Ono’s anti-war stance.
Key themes that recur throughout Yoko Ono’s work are explored across decades and mediums. These include the sky, which appears repeatedly as a metaphor for peace, freedom and limitlessness. As a child fleeing Tokyo during World War II, Yoko Ono found solace and refuge in the constant presence of the sky. It appears in the instruction piece Painting to See the Skies 1961, the 1966 installation SKY TV, broadcasting a live video feed of the sky above Tate Modern, and the moving participatory work Helmets (Pieces of Sky), first realised 2001, inviting visitors to take away their own puzzle-piece of the sky. The artist’s commitment to feminism is shown in films like FLY 1970-1, in which a fly crawls over a naked woman’s body while Yoko Ono's voice chart its journey, and Freedom 1970, in which Ono attempts and fails to break free from her bra. In a section devoted to Yoko Ono’s music, feminist anthems such as Sisters O Sisters 1972, Woman Power 1973 and Rising 1995 embolden women to build a new world, have courage and rage, amplifying Ono’s works that denounce violence against women.
Yoko Ono has increasingly used her art and global media platform to advocate for peace and humanitarian campaigns, initially collaborating with her late husband John Lennon. Acorns for Peace 1969 saw Yoko Ono and John Lennon send acorns to world leaders, while the billboard campaign ‘WAR IS OVER!’ (if you want it) 1969 used the language of advertising to spread a message of peace. The film BED PEACE 1969 documents the second of the couple’s infamous ‘bed-in’ events staged in Amsterdam and Montreal, during which they spoke with the world’s media to promote world peace amid the Vietnam War. Tate Modern has also staged Ono’s recent project Add Colour (Refugee Boat), first activated in 2016, inviting visitors to add paint to white gallery walls and a white boat while reflecting on urgent issues of crisis and displacement.
The exhibition culminates in a new iteration of Yoko Ono’s participatory installation My Mommy Is Beautiful, first realised 2004, featuring a 15-metre-long wall of canvases to which visitors can attach photographs of their mother and share personal messages. Moving beyond the exhibition space, Yoko Ono’s work also extends across Tate Modern’s building and landscape. Gallery windows overlooking the River Thames feature the artist’s powerful intervention, PEACE is POWER, first shown 2017, translated into multiple languages, while the interactive artwork Wish Tree, first realised 1996, greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, inviting passers-by to contribute individual wishes for peace.
Music of the Mind
Edited by Juliet Bingham, Connor Monahan and Jon Hendricks
Contributions by Yasufumi Nakamori, Andrew Wilson,
David Toop, Midori Yoshimoto, Helen Molesworth,
Sanford Biggers, Catherine Lord
Yale University Press - Published in association with Tate
304 Pages, 6.75 x 9.25 in, 60 color + 200 b-w illus.
ISBN: 9780300276343
TATE MODERN, LONDON
Related Post on Wanafoto:
Yoko Ono : Lumière de l'aube (in French)
Musée d'art contemporain, Lyon
9 mars - 10 juillet 2016
Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (in English)
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
14 December 2008 – 15 March 2009
Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? (in English)
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000
