Are you ready to play a party game? No doubt you’ll remember it from when you were a kid. It was called “Simon Says” and it basically entailed a blind obedience to orders. Whatever the despotic Simon instructed, you jumped to and did it. Except that for the new high-cultural version of this old playground classic, the former commanding officer has cashed in his commission. The eponymous Simon has been replaced by the performance artist, Yoko Ono.
This spring, Tate Modern is staging a landmark show of her work. Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind encompasses more than 200 pieces created across the course of a seven-decade-long career. It represents the most extensive survey of Ono’s multidisciplinary practice ever to come to this country. Curators are keen to convey a sense of the dynamism, audacity and defiance, not to mention the sheer undaunted resolve of an artist who, outlasting her detractors much as she predicted in one of the notoriously discordant songs (“I’m not gonna die for you / You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while / Yes, I’m a witch”) celebrated her 90th birthday last year.
To millions, Ono remains best recognised as the wife of John Lennon. She met him in London in 1966 when the Beatle, persuaded by friends to pop in for a preview at the avant-garde Indica Gallery, found himself climbing a ladder to discover a slip of paper suspended from the ceiling above. On it, the word “yes” was written, but in letters so tiny it took a magnifying glass to read them. The smallness of the “yes” and the difficulty of reaching it were a reflection of the pain she was feeling at that time, explained Ono. She had just reached the end of a relationship. But she had had a vision of another voyage, she declared; one that would take her towards cathedral-like heights where hope would await. This was the vision that Ono had wanted her Yes piece to evoke.
“Cut Piece”, considered Ono’s masterpiece, is feted as a landmark in feminist art history
As it happened, her hopeful artwork was to change her life. Lennon was beguiled. And that was the beginning of one of pop culture’s most gossiped-about liaisons. By 1969 the pair (having both got divorced) were celebrating their marriage with their now legendary “bed-ins”: a pair of two-week-long performances during which the newlyweds daily hosted the world’s press in their pyjamas. The point? Riffing on what was then most popular form of direct action, the “sit-in”, they were staging a non-violent protest against the Vietnam war. A film of the second of these “bed-ins” – the one that took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal – is now included in a show that brings a particular focus to bear on her political activism: “her belief in the power of the mind to achieve positive action through the act of visualisation to realise a peaceful world,” as the principal curator puts it in the catalogue.
Lennon once described his wife as the world’s most famous unknown artist. All too many might argue that, without the back-up of a Beatle, her career would have ended in oblivion. But this survey, returning to earliest artistic beginnings, suggests otherwise. Even before her encounter with the musical megastar, the Tokyo-born artist, having abandoned a philosophy degree in her native Japan to move to New York and study musical composition, had started to forge a reputation. She was barely out of her teens when she fell in with the Fluxus Group, a countercultural association of international artists, and (though she declined to join them formally because she wanted to stay independent) began creating her first conceptual pieces. In her 1960 Touch Poem, for instance, clumps of human hair are glued into a book in place of the more usual illustrations.
Performance art in the Sixties was still all but dominated by men. Casting your eye back from today’s “me-too” perspective, it might look suspiciously like an excuse for lascivious sex pests to manhandle female models. Yves Klein, in his search for a “vessel for ‘spiritual’ pictorial space”, persuaded a fair number of young women to dispense with their knickers and turn their bodies into paintbrushes for his trademark blue tint. Piero Manzoni appears nothing if not smug as, scribbling his signature onto hourglass haunches, he claims a naked woman as his own “living sculpture” – without going to the bother of slipping out of his own togs.
Ono posed disconcerting questions about such macho domination; most famously in her landmark Cut Piece, which you can find documented in both film and photo at Tate Modern. First performed in a Japanese concert hall in 1964, it invited random audience members to come onto a stage where Ono was sitting and snip away at her clothing with a pair of scissors. At the end, the artist – who remains serenely impassive throughout – is left completely naked. This dramatisation of the unnerving interplay between domination and submission makes a powerful statement. It has been described as the ultimate distillation of victimhood turned into heroic forbearance.
Cut Piece, now widely considered Ono’s masterpiece, is feted as a landmark in feminist art history. Ono followed it with other similarly slanted commentaries. There are all sorts of pictures of bottoms and boobs in this show. But particularly striking is Ono’s 1970 performance of Fly. “Let a fly walk on a woman’s body from toe to head and fly out of the window,” runs the written instruction. The camera focuses with nerve-twitching intensity on the insect as it crawls over naked skin, rubbing its legs gleefully as it lingers upon a nipple, probing the undergrowth of the pubic hair. The unflinching composure of the female body speaks of the passivity men expect from women. But Ono is out to deliver a challenge. The fly buzzes off like a spirit set free.
Little wonder she found her greatest artistic strength in performance. This art form is typically characterised by a fighting spirit. Consider its history over the course of the last century. It was used as a weapon to attack the Establishment. Whenever culture got stuck, whenever its rules began to feel formulaic, whenever progress had reached a stubborn impasse, rebels resorted to staging mad conceptual pieces. As eagerly as schoolchildren grabbing for the blackboard rubber between lessons, scrubbing out all the old teacher’s stuff and letting their doodles run free, performance artists attacked the conventions of Cubism, Minimalism and Conceptualism in turn. Their work was possessed of an energy that could blast through the block.
Can this fundamental vitality be regalvanised for an exhibition? Can an artwork considered so quintessentially ephemeral, a high-principled stance against the commodification of culture, become the mainstay of a commercial (it costs £22 to see it) show? The wild spirit of performance does not lend itself to museum captivity.
Though commonly ridiculed at the time, Ono’s cacophonous recordings proved a prescient forecast of punk and riot grrrl feminism
Curators try to counterbalance this by including a wide selection of other pieces. Original paintings, sculptures and installations go on display. Among the most striking is Ono’s 1967 Half-a-Room: a piece made in response to the sense of growing estrangement that led to the breakdown of her second marriage (to the film producer Anthony Cox). Waking up one morning and finding his side of the bed empty, she felt, she explains, as if there was a half-empty space in her life.” Her answer was to slice a whole roomful of domestic objects in half: chairs, tables, a teapot and kettle were all cleanly bisected. Even a spectacle case and pair of shoes were chopped. The result is an installation that looks like some Dada-ist stage-set upon which her anomic story may be played out.
There are also artworks in which the visitor can participate, whether committing to paper their thoughts about their mother or hanging out in a gallery and listening to Ono’s cacophonous recordings. Though commonly ridiculed at the time, these proved a prescient forecast of subsequent musical movements from punk and riot grrrl feminism to lo-fi and noise pop.
Still, the exhibition must draw heavily on archival material: the documentary evidence (photographs, films and typescripts) that record Ono’s fleeting performances, either in their first incarnations or, as she revisited them over the years, in their repetitions, adaptations, or altered formats. Whichever, there’s an inherent dullness and deadness to the document. However concisely it may describe the action, it can never truly capture the living spirit of the moment. It’s just a bit of memorabilia. It bears about as much relationship to the lively original as a badly stuffed ferret to a squirming and nipping mustelid.
The plethora of Ono’s signature haiku-style “instructions” – textual directions which double up as sort of do-it-yourself manual – don’t do much to help. Ono compares these written pieces to musical notations. Anyone can complete them, she says. “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” “Look through a phone book from the beginning to end thoroughly.” “Observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head.”
At first you might accept them – even find yourself faintly charmed. You are in the hands of a dreamer who wants to make the world better… you hope. But this earnest idealism (Yoko is apparently never much given to laughter), gradually cedes to what feels – at least to me – like a domineering determination. Naive suggestions become bossy belligerence. It all sounds rather martial, which is ironic for a peace protestor. The daffy dreamer is transforming into a megalomaniac dictator, the flower power hippy into a mad control freak. Her instructions start to echo like barked orders in your head.
How can you not baulk at a stance so prescriptive? You are stuck in the middle of a manic round of Ono Says.
Ono says: Imagine peace. Now snap to it. And quickly.
Pause for a moment to think about it. Wouldn’t you prefer to be out?
YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND is at Tate Modern until 1 September 2024
Rachel Campbell Johnston is former art critic of The Times and now a freelance writer
