How to immerse yourself in the fantastical world of Yoko Ono, excerpt from a non existent sequel to “Grapefruit”:
Wake up on the wrong side of the bed for the sake of spontaneity. Pick a preferred mode of transport and grin the whole way to the Tate Modern, London. Even better if you’re humming a song you haven’t listened to since your childhood. Book a ticket to “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” and allow yourself to become both the art and the artist. Bonus points if you read this entire article beforehand, with a snack from your very own menu.
Have you just read the above and are thinking “what is she on about?”. It was me taking a shot at channelling my inner Yoko, and if you want to do the same- something I would encourage not just all creatives but all human beings to do- then read on. Before she even knew how influential she’d be, 12 year old Yoko Ono created what she famously calls her first piece of art: a game with her little brother where they make up imaginary menus of things they’d like to eat. In fact, Sean Ono Lennon, Yoko Ono’s son, believes this “directly led to the song Imagine, which becomes this world famous anthem”, referring to the song she co wrote with John Lennon and wasn’t given credit for at the time. However, when she first started playing the game it mainly provided comfort during a tumultuous period in 1940s Japan, after her parents sent the two to the countryside following attacks on their native Tokyo in 1945. Back then, amidst war and confusion, she probably had no idea that London’s Tate Modern would be hosting ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” a popular exhibition following her performance art form the mid- 1950s to now, when she is 91 years old.
John Lennon, Ono’s latest husband until his tragic murder in 1980, described her as “the most famous unknown artist” of the world. However, thanks to exhibitions such as the one at the Tate, Yoko is becoming renowned and remembered as more than just a Beetle's wife, but a beautiful moth who is finally getting their time in the light. Although Yoko already established herself as the first woman to be admitted to the philosophy programme at Gakushūin University, Tokyo, in 1952, and a year later left to pursue studies in poetry and music at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, she spent much of her early adulthood searching for that creative liberation so many artists spend their lives cultivating. So she left university and joined the New York art scene, hosting some of her first shows from her own loft apartment in Manhattan. I guess home is where the he(art) is, after all. Many of the pieces featured in the exhibition came from the birth of Yoko’s career in the early to mid 60s, and most of them have been wonderfully preserved with the original intention of being interacted with. In one room, I got to step on the- accurately named- “Painting to be Stepped On” featuring a piece of canvas on the ground that allows us to leave a mark, or rather, a footprint, on Yoko Ono’s world of conception and irreverent expression. One of the other major pieces featured in this exhibition was “Bag Piece” where visitors are given the opportunity to climb into a bag and move however they want once inside, this can include taking off and putting back on clothing, making shapes with their bodies, even taking a nap. Ono created ‘Bag Piece’ as a way of capturing the fluidity of human motion so as to make a living statue.
While encouraging the audience to take away a sense of participation and escapism from her works, Ono also gives something of herself to them. This was demonstrated in a projection recording of her original performance of “Cut Piece”, where she sat, stoic and serene, upon stage in her best suit and allowed audience members to cut off pieces from it. Some even went as far as cutting a bra strap, or pieces from the thigh section, but, rather than being fazed by this, Yoko embraces the vulnerability and uses it to add further depth to her work, like a river flowing to the ocean. According to an article by “Pop Matters”, Ono describes Cut Piece as “the relationship between a performer and her audience… as if Ono was the tree in Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s book “The Giving Tree”, generously giving away parts of herself to the audience.
What’s more, apart from simply giving away parts of herself to the audience, Ono also gave away parts of time itself to her audience (I’ll have to seriously step up my gift giving game). In “Morning Piece”, Ono sold shards of milk bottles in Tokyo with an attached tag of a past or future date and time. People could order them by mail or in person, and she said that despite being randomly picked dates, many customers would come up to her and say “did you know that was my birthday?” or “the day I got married?”. As I, a girl from a generation far removed from Ono’s, stared at dates spanning the 60s, I felt an odd nostalgia for a time I hadn’t even touched. It reminded me of writing dates in my primary school books as a child, of getting excited when it was a new year because we’d have something different to write, of the thought of all that is to come and all that’s been and later, I realise it’s so much more than just past, present, or future, but it’s all jumbled up and messy and can sometimes hurt but others time shine, just like the shards of these glass bottles. I wasn’t the only one in a reminiscing mood that day. A group of ladies nearby were talking about how Yoko reminded them of their own childhood games, when there was no technology and they had to amuse themselves on street corners playing games like “shop”. One of them said that Yoko reminds us what it is to play, to allow ourselves to have fun and look at things imaginatively, and I think that’s one of the things that really distinguishes her work from other artists- she reminds us of the power of play, and that the inner child doesn’t just deserve to be listened to in the classroom but everywhere, be it in 60s Manhattan or 20s (and I’m talking circa 2024) London- that fun and a well nurtured sense of whimsy can prevail through war, cost of living, pandemics, and anything else this crazy world has to throw at us.
Unfortunately, this crazy world can also be a cruel world, and Yoko was an activist at the core of her art, inspired by ever prevalent topics like the Vietnam War, feminism, and now her work can even be applied to current conflicts like the genocide in Gaza and the Ukraine war. One of her most poignant and moving pieces was the boat sculpture in a white room, where visitors can add a message for refugees in blue pen, with the intention that the room will be “blue, like the ocean”. Standing in that room, looking at messages like “Ceasefire Now” or “Love, not War”, I felt that as much as the world is riddled with ruin and destruction, there is always hope, and this hope is in the form of ordinary people like us with extraordinary hearts. Yoko Ono also reminds us that “Art” isn’t some mythological concept gifted to a select few, but that we all have the ability to make art because it is as intrinsic to the human condition as perception, opinion, and emotion. In her book “Grapefruit” released shortly after the birth of her daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, she left us a series of simplified instructions on how to create art. These included things like “Instructions for a Poem: Give birth to a child, See the world through its eye, Let it touch everything possible and leave it’s fingermark there in place of a signature” or “Drill a small, almost invisible, hole in the middle of the canvas and see the room through it.”
So, if you would also like to see a room through a small hole known as Yoko Ono’s eye, which will inevitably lead to seeing every room with a scope for the beautiful messiness of imagination, I would highly recommend visiting this exhibition.
Bibliography:
Cunningham, J.M. (2019). Yoko Ono | Biography, Art, & Facts. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono.
Adesina, P. (2024). The childhood WW2 trauma that inspired Yoko Ono. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240215-the-artists-son-talks-about-her-work-and-her-collaborations-with-john-lennon#:~:text=As%20a%20major%20retrospective%20of [Accessed 12 Jun. 2024].
Epps, P. (2024). Yoko Ono’s Memorable ‘Bottoms’. [online] Frieze. Available at: https://www.frieze.com/article/yoko-ono-one-take-241.
Bag Piece (1964) image from Digital Public Library of America
All other images taken by author: Zoha Khan
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