Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind
Yoko Ono, 'Wish Tree', by the author.
Ask most people if they've heard of Yoko Ono, and you're likely to receive a particular kind of response; “She's the woman who broke up the Beatles”, or something similar to that. For sure, the events that projected Yoko into the international limelight were connected to her relationship with John Lennon. From the “Bed-in for Peace” protests, through a number of joint musical projects, to Lennon's murder on the streets of New York in 1980, their careers and activism were long intertwined. However, Yoko Ono's career as an artist of considerable originality predates that relationship and has continued unabated since.
Yoko Ono, 'Add Color (Refugee Boat)'
The current Tate Modern show, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, is the largest exhibition of Yoko Ono's work staged in Britain to date, and as such constitutes a major retrospective. It represents the wide scope of her works, ranging through installations, films, photography, music, instruction pieces and event scores.
A key element in the development of Ono's art was her engagement with Fluxus, a loose network of artists originally inspired by the ideas of the Lithuanian artist, George Maciunas. Fluxus emphasised – and as an ongoing influence, continues to emphasise – the concept of art as being collective, participatory, playful, and explicitly revolutionary in its aims. The first Fluxus Manifesto, written by Maciunas, proclaimed the objective:
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals, FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.
A thread running right through Music of the Mind is precisely an emphasis on art as a radical form of serious play “to be grasped by all peoples”. I was reminded of Corita Kent's semi-humorous suggestion to fuse play with work in the form of “plorking”. And for sure, visitors to the exhibition have been responding very much in that spirit, their own sense of play awakened.
For instance, I was quite keen to try playing a game using the all-white chess set at the heart of Play It By Trust, a work intended to emphasise the futility of war by subverting the game's foundations as a representation of military conflict – “play for as long as you can remember which pieces are yours” – but it was a very long wait to find a board that wasn't already being used.
Yoko Ono, 'Play It By Trust'
Similarly, when I came to the room where Add Color (Refugee Boat) is installed, it was so crowded with people already writing their own responses to that work on the walls and on the floor that I couldn't find space to enter at first, and had to linger at the entrance for a while before I could participate.
I actually regard such “problems” as positive signs. Interaction is at the heart of Yoko Ono's art. This is art as intervention and as experience, not as an object that can be easily framed, bought and sold as a commodity. Participation is essential to its function. There can be no passive audience. People are brought into the art as subjects rather than mere observers, as an integral element of the art, and thus become artists themselves.
The trigger, or point of entry for participation, in Ono's work is generally simple and accessible. Wish Tree, represented by three examples at the exhibition entrance, asks visitors to write their own wish on paper and tie it to the branches. Democracy can be unpredictable, perhaps especially so in the context of art. The wishes blossoming on Ono's trees range from the abstract and banal, if laudable (“I wish for world peace”), to the frankly self-serving (“I would like more work for my business as a financial adviser”, for example). But they can also surprise and illuminate; more poetically, for instance, “I wish my home was a forest”.
In a similar vein, My Mommy is Beautiful, the last piece in the Tate Modern show before the exit, asks people to write a thought about their mother on a post-it note and add it to the assemblage of those notes on the wall. The result is an extraordinary blossoming of emotional connections and memories.
Perhaps no exhibition of Ono's works would feel complete without a representation of her seminal performance, Cut Piece. In this, first performed in Kyoto in 1964, Ono invited members of the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing until she was left naked, as she sat passively. Cut Piece, sure enough, appears at the Tate Modern show in the form of a film documenting one of Ono's early performances of the work. Arguably, Cut Piece was an inspiration behind Marina Abramovic's terrifying 1974 performance Rhythm 0; but still stands the test as a powerful work in its own right.
Of course, any such performance art is in essence live art, by its very nature, energised by the experience of performer and participant “audience” in a kind of symbiotic relationship. A large measure of that energy is necessarily lost when the work is captured in photographs, film or video. Still, Cut Piece retains an edge, even with the distance of a moving image.
One of the usual popular criticisms – or rather, dismissals – of art such as Yoko Ono's is that it's not art at all, but perhaps a gimmick, or a trick for the gullible. This isn't new, or restricted to Yoko Ono or even to conceptualism and performance art, of course. It's a criticism tied to an understanding of art as a product, as in fact a commodity that can be traded in the marketplace. While there have been various, and variously ludicrous, attempts to ensnare Ono's work in that particular web, they've more or less failed. Yoko Ono still, in her nineties, largely manages to elude the trap of commodification.
I feel there are some interesting thoughts here to be considered by Pagans and by the radical left as a whole. The key is in a revisioning of art as process, relegating the necessity of art as product to being a secondary factor in its creation. This opens up the fields of artistic expression as potentially democratic, activist experiences; not a commodity suspended in the blank white space of a contemporary gallery, so much as a living creative matrix. The boundaries that are raised in order to falsely separate art from ritual and magic then begin to dissolve, and art itself may be revitalised as a tool for the magic-worker and the activist alike.
Such an approach isn't new, any more than criticism from more “traditionalist” quarters is new. It's been explicitly a driving force in conceptualism and performance art for decades; the pioneers and key figures often being women who have consciously evoked ritual and magic in their work. Yoko Ono has been among the most prominent, for decades. Music of the Mind is a marvellous opportunity to directly experience her clever sorcery.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is at Tate Modern, in London, until 1st September 2024.
Philip Kane
Philip Kane (by Grace Sanchez)
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).