Yoko Ono – Music of the Mind

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 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 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 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 Ono’s radical works created during her five-year stay in London from 1966. Here she became embedded within a countercultural network of artists, musicians and writers, meeting her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon. Key installations from 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 Ono’s anti-war stance.

For further information see YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND – Press Release | Tate