Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

Spotlighting Ono’s relentless commitment to world peace, the exhibition is most profoundly moving as both a memorial to humanitarian crises of the past and a protest against humanitarian crises of the present. The entrance to the exhibition is shaded by the artist’s interactive artwork, Wish Tree, which invites guests to write and hang their own wishes on the branches. First released in 1969, many of the wishes hung today read variations on ‘Free Palestine’ and hopes for the end to the trauma in the Middle East.

This theme of peace, the defining idea of Yoko Ono’s work and life is carried throughout the exhibition. In Helmets (pieces of the sky), first released in 2001, German WW2 helmets hang from the ceiling, filled with hundreds of sky-blue jigsaw pieces. Visitors are encouraged to take home these puzzle-pieces in a metaphorical act of pacificist resistance, as if acknowledging a historical trauma and building from it a new space for peaceful human connection. Indeed, that space might well be between the walls of this exhibition.

Her Instruction Pieces foster connections between the viewer and the artist. These pieces, collected between 1953 and 1964, are displayed in the typescript draft of Ono’s anthology, Grapefruit. Artworks crafted through daintily written commands like ‘listen to a heartbeat’ or ‘painting to be constructed in your head’ exceed the glass screens of conventional artworks by inviting the viewer to construct that art themselves. What results is an infinitely citated piece created in collaboration between an artist, a viewer, and everyone they might interact with.

Other pieces bring visitors together as bagged forms in Bag Piece, 1964; within each others shadows in Shadow Piece, 1963; and through a hole in a canvas in Painting to Shake Hands, 1961. At times comedic, they evoke a delicate sense of hope. While in isolation, the hopeful human connection established by two people flailing under black sacks might seem whimsical or at worst frivolous, it becomes incredibly sincere within the wider context of the exhibition.

It is a testament to the curatorial hands of Juliet Bingham, Andrew de Brun, Patrizia Dander and Catherine Frerejean, that this balance between earnest activism and surrealist art, that Ono perfected, is maintained throughout the exhibition. Perfectly paced, one of the most moving pieces, a hole, 2009, is displayed towards the end. A single bullet hole in a plane of glass, the piece is an evocative memory of Ono’s husband John Lennon’s assassination in 1980. The accompanying command to look through the hole places the viewer in Ono’s position of mourning after the landmark death of one of the most renowned figures of the last century.

While Lennon’s death inevitably shattered Ono as it did much of the rest of the world, we witness her continuation of the life she lived with Lennon even after his death. Beyond that, we see that continuation extend back to Ono’s work before Lennon, uncovering the creative equality in a relationship that so long publicly overshadowed her as an artist in her own right. As this career-spanning exhibition justly shows, Ono could only be overshadowed by someone like John Lennon, though even still their careers ought to be creatively matched. As Ono turned 91 years old in February, then, the time for this exhibition is long overdue.