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 too. For ‘Cut piece’ she sat on a stage as people cut holes in her clothes. In other works she performed inside a black sack. She toured Japan with John Cage and David Tudor, creating a sonic assault that would shock the nation.
Objects appear too: a canvas with a hole for you to shake strangers’ hands through, an apple on a plinth, all-white chessboards for you to play until you can’t remember where your pieces are. In all of this, Ono gives the viewer power to complete the work, she prioritises thought, prioritises you.
But that wasn’t enough, and eventually it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the message. With her marriage to John Lennon, she formed an artistic partnership that fought for change, peace, an end to war. It’s a worthy shift in focus, but it doesn't make for great art. ‘War is over’ exclaims a poster, ‘we think it will work’ says Lennon from one of their bed-in performances. All the subtlety of ideas is swapped for the bludgeon of sloganeering.
After Lennon’s death, Ono only became more utopian. You’re invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue ink on a pristine white refugee boat, to pull a puzzle piece of the sky out of a soldier’s helmet, to tie your wishes to an olive tree. A final video shows Yoko in a trilby screaming and making funny noises
Some of this will rub a cynical mind the wrong way, some of it’s impossibly silly, lots of it unbearably crap. The last bit’s all heavy-handed and awkwardly over-earnest, but it’s the earnestness that saves it. Because Ono means it, she believes peace is possible, and wants you to believe it too. You can’t be mad at someone who just wants to make a better world, even if it’s just an idea.