2024-03-08 10:36:06
“Everybody knows Yoko Ono’s name, but nobody knows what she really does,” her husband John Lennon once said. The work of the ninety-one-year-old Japanese artist is now brought closer to a large retrospective in London’s Tate Modern gallery. One of the largest exhibitions of her works in history started last week and will last until September 1.
According to AFP, the show, called Music of the Mind, primarily illustrates the undeniable influence Yoko Ono had on conceptual art. She left a strong mark in this field, inspired the international Fluxus movement, paved the way for the noise-rock genre or feminist collectives of the riot grrrl type, as well as female performers led by Marina Abramović.
Even so, she is still considered by some to be the woman who broke up The Beatles in 1970. Or reduced to the widow of a member of this band Lennon, tragically murdered in 1980.
“Lennon was, of course, her key collaborator, but we’re delighted to be exhibiting her works. This is first and foremost a celebration of Yoko Ono’s art,” emphasizes London gallery curator Andrew de Brún. “One of the goals was to introduce her work to the next generation of visitors, including her activism and calls for peace,” he adds.
The show includes 200 works created over seven decades. Drawings, paintings, installations, objects, videos, photographs, songs, recordings of performances and ordinary sounds await visitors. For example, right at the entrance you can hear a recording of the phone, which after a few rings the artist herself picks up and introduces herself by name. The half-minute track comes from the album Fly, which Yoko Ono released in 1971. By that time, the whole world already knew her.
The idea above all else
Less well known are the beginnings. Born in Tokyo to a high-ranking aristocratic family, she received a classical education. She spent World War II in Japan, where she went to school, experienced the bombing of Tokyo, and suffered food shortages after that, having to beg for food with her relatives. Later, for example, she recalled how she and her brother in the countryside during the war looked at the sky and imagined various wonderful dishes.
Yoko Ono visited the Lennon Wall in Prague in 2003. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
After the war, Yoko Ono went to visit her family in New York, where she studied poetry and composition at a private school. It was here in the 1950s that she entered the circle of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, La Monte Young or Toshi Ichijanagi, whom she married in 1956. But the cohabitation did not last long, as did the subsequent marriage with film producer Anthony Cox.
Today, Yoko Ono is most often associated with conceptual art, in which the thought or idea is more or as important as the formal side of the work and what shapes it materially.
Cutting off clothes
The exhibition at Tate Modern also recalls her apparently more radical performance called Cut Piece, which she first staged in 1964 in Japan and again in New York’s Carnegie Hall.
On the recording, Yoko Ono comes on stage in a black dress, sits down on the floor and puts a pair of scissors in front of her. Randomly selected spectators then come up to her one by one and cut off pieces of her clothing. The artist keeps a stony face the whole time, doesn’t move or speak.
Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece in New York in 1965. | Photo: Minoru Niizuma
The goal of the event, which predated Marina Abramović’s even riskier performance by a decade, was to draw attention to violence in society against women.
Later, Yoko Ono also mystified, for example when she thought she was going to exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Without his permission, she paid for advertisements, printed posters, published catalogs, and posted a sign at the entrance to the museum announcing that she had released hundreds of perfumed flies inside for visitors to find.
Of course, no flies were flying in the famous museum. And in the end, the audience coming out was only interviewed by a man and asked how they liked the imaginary exhibition. Some did not know what they were talking about, others admitted that they could not find Yoko Ono’s works, others pretended to be excited, reports the New York Times.
An imaginary nail
John Lennon became interested in Yoko Ono’s 1966 installation at London’s Indica Gallery. There she presented a work called Ceiling Painting. The visitor had to climb the ladder and look at the word yes with a magnifying glass hung from the ceiling.
Lennon climbed the ladder, he was amazed by the work and on the basis of it he became close to Yoko Ono, AFP reports.
Yoko Ono at the Ceiling Painting at London’s Indica Gallery, November 1966. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
The so-called instructional painting Painting to Hammer and Nail was part of the same show. Attached to the white canvas is a hammer and a bucket of nails. The sign invites the viewer to nail one nail to the canvas and thus symbolically become one of the authors of the work.
“At an exhibition at the Indica Gallery, a man came up to me and asked if he could drive a nail too. I said he could. For five shillings. He asked instead if he could drive an imaginary nail. And it was John Lennon.” recalled Yoko Ono.
Both works, with which she impressed the Beatles member, are also part of the current retrospective at Tate Modern. “But we made sure to show enough of the basics and everything she managed to do before she even came to London and met Lennon for the first time,” explains the exhibition’s other curator, Juliet Bingham.
Apparently, Yoko Ono charmed John Lennon immediately. He later said that only with her did he know what love is. In May 1968, they already recorded the album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, on the cover of which they are both naked. The record therefore had to be sold in a paper bag.
A year later they were married at the British Consulate in Gibraltar. They remained together until 1980, when the former Beatles member was the victim of an assassination attempt in New York. He was 40 years old. The murder in the current exhibition is commemorated by a work that Yoko Ono created decades later – glass shattered by a bullet shot.
The murder of John Lennon is commemorated in the exhibition by glass shattered by a bullet shot. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
Peaceful parties
During the 13 years they spent together, the pair released six albums under the banner Plastic Ono Band. She created experimental music, short films, installations and also staged various protests for world peace, for example the so-called bed-ins in hotel rooms in Amsterdam and Montreal, where Lennon and Yoko Ono invited journalists and politicians to peace parties. They lay in bed for several days “in protest”. At one of the events, the well-known song Give Peace A Chance was created.
The exhibition commemorates all these initiatives, as well as the event when world leaders were sent acorns with a request to plant them – and thus contribute to world peace. The exhibition at Tate Modern also includes answers from selected politicians, for example Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
For the double album Double Fantasy, recorded shortly before Lennon’s death, the pair received the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1980. “To this day, when I hear music, I want to dance,” said Yoko Ono back in 2013. “I’m just like that. My body is like that . It was like that when I was little,” she added.
People don’t just want to watch
According to the AP agency, the highly interactive exhibition at Tate Modern includes works on which visitors are asked to step, watch their shadow on the wall, strike a match, listen to the hum of the earth, shake hands with someone through a hole in the canvas, write something about their mother, write something else on a wooden boat, or play chess, where both sets of pieces are white.
“The goal is to play until you forget which pieces were yours,” explains curator Juliet Bingham, who sees a parallel to Yoko Ono’s eternal appeals for peace. “This is also something that may not be definitively won, but it is important to persevere,” he compares.
Leaving messages on the wishing tree refers to Yoko Ono’s childhood. | Photo: ČTK / AP
The retrospective does not neglect what Yoko Ono has been doing in the last four decades, when she followed up on her former collaboration with Lennon through, for example, the so-called wishing trees. People are supposed to hang greeting cards on them with a message of what they would like to see happen. Tradition refers to a similar tree from a Japanese church where the artist went as a child.
According to the British newspaper Guardian, the instructions are sometimes too much. “I’m supposed to find a broken sewing machine, then a huge glass display case to put it in, then drag the whole thing into the square and get people to start throwing rocks at it when it snows at night. Don’t ask me why,” summarizes one reviewer works.
According to him, Yoko Ono doesn’t create that many works of art anymore, she came up with the most important ones in the 1950s and 1960s, while many of the later ones are weak. Nevertheless, the exhibition is sure to be popular precisely because of the constant calls for interaction. “People today want more than silent observation. They want to feel that you have included them in it,” explains the critic, according to whom Yoko Ono was ahead of her time in this respect.
Czech viewers were able to meet the Japanese artist in 2003, when, despite a cold, she personally opened a show of her works in Prague’s Museu Kampa. The exhibition called Women’s Room was then brought from Paris to the Czech capital by the museum’s founder, Meda Mládková.
“Every day you should do one thing that will make your heart dance. It can be something simple, just look at the sky,” Yoko Ono told the visitors of the exhibition her guide to a better mood. “When you do this every day for three months, your life will completely change,” added the artist, who said goodbye to Prague by stopping at the famous Lennon wall in Malostra. There she lit a candle and wrote several messages in small print.
The current retrospective of her works will move from Tate Modern to Düsseldorf, Germany this fall.