YOKO ONO – MUSIC OF THE MIND

"For me there is only one sound, the sound of the mind. My works are solely intended to evoke the music of the mind in people... In the spiritual world, things expand and transcend time. There is a wind that never dies."*

Yoko Ono's progressive work and political activism have had a lasting impact on culture. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she is a pioneer of early conceptual and participatory art, film, and performance, a celebrated musician and activist for world peace. Now, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London will explore seven decades of her innovative artistic practice, from the mid-1950s to the present day. MUSIC OF THE MIND has been conceived in close collaboration with Ono's studio and will also be on display from September 28 at the Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf. More than 200 works will be shown, including instructions and scores, installations, films, music, and photographs.

From the mid-1950s onwards, Ono became part of the avant-garde music and performance scene in New York, later associated with Fluxus. These artists were interested in the process of executing events, not in the production of individual art objects, and Ono was among the first to use an instruction-based method of art creation. Such works blurred the line between artist and viewer by asking the latter to perform certain actions, thus doing part of the work usually reserved for artists. Her two most significant forays into this field were her 1964 performance Cut Piece and her artist's book Grapefruit, in which she compiled her instructions written between 1953 and 1964. The book, first published in Japan in 1964 and then in a fundamentally revised edition by established publishers in the USA and England in 1970, established her reputation as a visionary in the new field of conceptual art, whose most important material was imagination.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece 1964 Performed by Yoko Ono in “New Works by Yoko Ono”, Carnegie Recital Hall, NYC , March 21 1965. Photo by Minoru

The exhibition traces this radical approach to language, art, and participation, as well as Ono's belief in the power of the mind to bring about positive action and create a peaceful world through the act of visualization. Its title is borrowed from her concert and event series Music of the Mind, which took place in London and Liverpool in 1966/67. It refers to her idea of silent music, according to which her instructions, like concerts, are intended to evoke sounds in the imagination of the listeners.

Instruction, performance, film, music or "event" are different forms of expression of one and the same idea: Our thinking is guided by an everyday gesture to notions of impermanence, the immaterial and the fleeting. We are invited to contemplate a brief sensory act, perform it imaginatively or actually, and thus direct our awareness to ourselves and our surroundings.
In a 1966 lecture outlining her artistic approach, Ono explains that her early events had no "script," but rather "something that sets it in motion—the best description would probably be 'desire' or 'hope'—and that transforms itself in the hands, thoughts, and expressions of other people." Transformation is a central aspect of Ono's work: her instructions or scores are, in a sense, "seeds" that are brought to fruition in the mind or through action.

Yoko Ono Music of the Mind | Hatje Cantz

Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who met at her exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, also literally sowed these "seeds." In May 1968, they each planted an acorn in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, which had been bombed during the German attacks in 1940 and served as a place of reconciliation after the violence and destruction of World War II—one facing east, the other west. The aim of the Acorn Event was to sow seeds of peace—as a symbol of the possibility for different things to unite, for East and West to come together. A year later, they sent Acorns for Peace to 96 heads of state and government around the world, asking them to plant their own oaks for peace.

The comprehensive catalog accompanying the exhibition traces the development of a personality who, with her visionary spirit, has transcended boundaries and challenged conventions. MUSIC OF THE MIND explores Yoko Ono's world, presents key moments in her career, and reveals the profound influence of her art on the collective consciousness of our time.