Yoko Ono: ‘Music of the Mind’
It’s all in your mind, a figment of your imagination, and that’s how Yoko Ono wants it. The pioneering nonagenarian conceptualist – whose life’s work has been unfairly eclipsed by her Beatles-adjacent fame – wants to plant a seed in your brain, and that’s it. That’s the art. At its best, her art is simple, direct, and, when she started doing it in the mid-1950s, absolutely revolutionary. Ono moved to New York from Japan, rented a loft, and let the ideas win. In the fertile experimental atmosphere of that city at that time, surrounded by like-minded creatives including John Cage, George Maciunas, David Tudor and the incredible LaMonte Young, Ono went about changing art. She did it with performances and instructions. The opening walls here are lined with note cards, each with a simple order: ‘light a match and watch till it goes out’, ‘let a vine grow, water every day’, ‘draw line, erase line’, ‘polish an orange’. Some instructions are meant to be performed, others (like ‘go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle’) exist only in your mind. Conceptualism had existed in some form since Duchamp and his urinal, maybe even since Gustave Courbet if you wanted to argue that way, but this is Ono getting rid of all the stuff of art, all the colour, the form, the physical reality, and leaving behind only the idea. It’s powerful, incredible, smart, beautiful. A final video shows Yoko in a trilby screaming and making funny noises Performance was essential
