Review: Yoko Ono's Music Of The Mind Is Bizarre, Baffling, Laughable, Brilliant

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You can barely find an exhibition these days that isn't 'immersive' one way or another, but Yoko Ono was doing it 70 years ago.

Visitors are urged to thwack nails into a board and scribble over a white row boat at Tate Modern's retrospective of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. Ono — now in her 91st year — has always been a collaborative, unselfish artist, running salons in her New York loft apartment, and putting on shows like Promise Piece, in which she smashed a vase with a hammer, handed out the pieces, and got people to vow to return to the same spot in 10 years time, to piece the vase back together. Early on in this show, you're invited to trample over a canvas laying on the floor. Yoko Ono is not precious, even if her work is.

You're probably not going to 'get' everything. Now and again, a faint whiff of the Emperor's New Clothes pervades — take Strip Tease for Three, which amounts to three empty chairs on a stage. Then again, if you don't find some of Ono's output ridiculous, there's probably something wrong with you. What she has never lacked is a marvellous sense of self-deprecation — relentlessly honed as part and parcel of spending most of her working life unfairly ridiculed — and a bonkers, Goons-esque wit (something a lot of contemporary conceptual art could do with in enema form).

In her book of musings/directions, Grapefruit, Ono suggests the reader puts a broken sewing machine in a huge glass tank, wait for it to snow, then have everyone throw stones at it. In 1971, she announced she was doing a show at NYC's Museum of Modern Art, putting up a sign inviting visitors to seek out hundreds of flies she'd soaked in perfume then let loose in the museum. She also neglected to tell MOMA the show was happening. Sorry, but that's brilliant. There's also often a depth to Ono's artworks for which you needn't go spelunking to find. The comic appearance of an all-white chess set (which you can play on, here, of course) is underlaid with a blindingly obvious statement on peace.

Peace is a central theme of many of Ono's works, and that makes a lot of sense when you know she was a child in second world war Japan, a country on the brink of annihilation. Back then, she'd lay on her back with her brother, and watch the sky; it's a gentle, contemplative way of seeing the world which seeps into works like her five-minute film of a burning match. While Ono is notorious for her 'screeching' (and, let's be honest, it's an acquired taste), Music of the Mind allows you to appreciate her soft, subtle touch. As the musician Peaches said recently "I love how her work is loud in a quiet way." And while Ono may have had limited success with the whole world peace thing, the role she'd played in championing female, minority art cannot be overstated.

The only thing missing from this exhibition? Ono herself. Especially when it comes to the performance art, which really calls for an in-the-momentness. Mind you, knowing Yoko Ono she's probably hiding under a blanket somewhere in the corner of the Tate, giggling at us, as we contemplate her video essay of 200 naked backsides.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Tate Modern, 15 February-1 September 2024