Across a wall in Tate Modern stretch 150 typescripts for Grapefruit, Yoko Ono’s self-published book of “instruction works”. They range from the simple and achievable, like Pea Piece (1960) – “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go” – to the surreal or philosophical, like Clock Piece (1963), which urges setting every clock and watch in a town to an arbitrary but incorrect time. They’re intended to trigger imaginations, to unlock our minds as to what art – and life – could be.
Much of this show is like a conversation with us, an invitation to collaborate. Indeed, it begins with the sound work Telephone Piece (1964): “Hello. This is Yoko.”
From here, we follow her journey from prominence in the New York and Tokyo avant gardes of the late Fifties and Sixties, including performance works, including those with composer John Cage, and her contributions to the radical Fluxus movement, through her London period in the Sixties, where she met John Lennon and, with him, embarked on a rich seam of collaborative work, to pieces made a decade ago.
From the start, for Ono, fantasy was tethered to social strife: in late-Second World War Japan, she stared dreamily into the sky as a defence against the daily hardships. Later, imagination was activism – she intended A Box of Smile (1967), the tiny mirrored cube with which you can “capture” your grin, to be a message to Lyndon Johnson about humanity during the Vietnam war.
Bottoms (1966-67), the film with 15-second zooms on 200 art-world arses, used what Ono called the most “defenceless” part of the body as an anti-war statement. The seriousness of Ono and Lennon’s Bed Peace performances in Amsterdam and Montreal in 1969 is underlined by a lengthy film full of serious debate about the action and its purpose.
Sensibly, the exhibition focuses primarily on the first two – hugely pioneering – decades of Ono’s activity, where she had an extraordinary knack for deceptively simple ideas and images, rather than the more repetitive, uneven years after 1970. Her Instruction Paintings (1999) – hand-painted individual words on canvas that echo those used in the Grapefruit cards, feel somewhat pointless.
That aside, this is a tautly structured argument for Ono’s place as a major figure in conceptual and performance art. Lennon quipped that she was “the world’s most famous unknown artist”. In this country at least, this still partly holds true. This exhibition should finally correct the record.
