– Yoko Ono, 1971
Yoko Ono has been ahead of her time – leaving her mark on visual arts, music and political activism since the 1950s.
Following a loose chronology, YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND traces Ono’s works in the United States, Japan, Great Britain and elsewhere. Her art takes many forms: from scores and performances, objects, film and music to large installations and events. A defining characteristic of her work is that it involves the audience from the very beginning.
In 1964, Ono published Grapefruit, her foundational book of instruction works. These concise texts, somewhere between poem and score, aim to unlock the mind. Such instructions are presented throughout this exhibition, inviting you to participate, often with others.
Ono wants you to imagine and – as the exhibition title suggests – induce music of the mind in you. Her art is a collective call to action and a provocation to change the world.
Ono has been installing variations of Wish Tree around the world since 1996. You are invited to write your wishes for peace on small pieces of paper and tie them to the branches of the trees. With this work, the artist refers to her visits to temples as a child in Japan: “Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.”
In the atrium of Gropius Bau, the trees also reflect the history of this institution: during the Second World War, the building was severely damaged by the air raids on Berlin in 1944. Before it was reconstructed in 1978, the ruins were left to nature and various deciduous trees grew on the site. Wish Tree for Berlin thus not only gives space to the present wishes of visitors but also refers to the past destruction and restoration of this building.
In almost 30 years, Ono has collected more than two million wishes. They continue on in connection with the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland, which Ono established in 2007 in memory of her late husband John Lennon.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. She spent most of her childhood there, also living for short periods in the United States. Music and performance were an important part of Ono’s early education. She studied classical music and learnt how to translate everyday sounds into musical notation.
In the 1940s, Japan was deeply involved in the events of the Second World War, partly due to its military alliance with Nazi Germany. In spring 1945, US Army Air Forces bombed Tokyo. Ono, aged twelve, was evacuated to the countryside, where food and other essentials were in short supply. She and her younger brother, Keisuke, frequently escaped in their imaginations. She remembers “we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualisation to survive.” Looking back, Ono describes this as perhaps her first piece of art.
In 1952, Ono attended Gakushūin University as its first female philosophy student. A year later, she joined her parents in Scarsdale, New York, to study poetry and musical composition at Sarah Lawrence College. During this period, Ono developed some of her earliest instructions, including Lighting Piece. The work is shown in the exhibition at Gropius Bau in three versions: as an instruction, a performance and a film.
In 1956, Yoko Ono moved to New York City at the age of 23, eloping with composer and pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi. In late 1960, she began renting a loft at 112 Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Ono and composer La Monte Young put on concerts and events there, including their own, providing a forum for artists, musicians, dancers and poets. She also presented her first Instruction Paintings there.
In July 1961, Ono’s first solo exhibition opened at AG Gallery in Manhattan. Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono included more than 15 Instruction Paintings, which were realised through the participation of the artist, visitors or the environment. A few paintings had written instructions, but Ono communicated most by word of mouth.
AG Gallery was owned by architect and designer George Maciunas, who later founded the art movement Fluxus. An international network of artists and composers, Fluxus was committed to a fluid transition between art and life, promoting “living art” to be grasped by everyone. Ono played an active role in the formation of this loose collective and participated in many Fluxus performances and events.
Ono returned to Tokyo in March 1962 for two and a half years. It was a busy and generative time she spent working on exhibitions, events and concerts, and preparing her artist book Grapefruit for publication. During this period, she developed ideas for numerous new artworks and created some of her most important performances.
In 1962, Ono presented more than 30 Instructions for Paintings as part of an evening of performances titled Sogetsu Contemporary Series 15: Works of Yoko Ono at Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo. As a further development of her earlier Instruction Paintings, this time her words were displayed without accompanying canvases. This marked a decisive conceptual shift in her work and the history of idea-based art: canvas was replaced by language and the viewer completed the work, either physically or simply in their mind. The idea itself became the artwork.
Towards the end of her time in Japan, Ono developed various performances. As part of Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure in Kyoto, she performed Cut Piece – one of her most famous performances – for the first time in 1964. Documentation of this work is on display.
Before returning to New York in September 1964, Ono held a farewell concert at Sogetsu Art Center entitled Strip Tease Show. Three of the performances she presented there explored the relationship between viewer and performer: while Cut Piece emphasised the artist’s vulnerability, Bag Piece and Strip Tease for Three were based on the concealment or complete absence of the body. Through this reversal, Ono deliberately played with the spectators’ voyeuristic expectations – which were heightened not least by the event’s title – while simultaneously shifting the focus from the stage to the audience.
For Bag Piece, the performers are instructed to take off their shoes and get inside a bag, alone or together. Through the movements and actions of the performers – such as removing their clothes and putting them back on again or simply taking a nap – a shifting sculpture emerges. The people inside the bag can peek through the fabric at the audience, while the audience can only guess what is happening inside. Similarly, Strip Tease for Three leaves the viewers’ expectations unfulfilled: the three chairs on stage remained empty throughout the performance.
For Ono, to strip doesn’t mean revealing oneself to others, but discovering something hidden inside and a “stripping of the mind”. The idea of exploring one’s self unites many of the pieces Ono presented at her concerts in Japan.
During her time in Japan, Yoko Ono continued creating instructions and performed some of them in public. In 1964, she self-published the book Grapefruit, which includes more than 200 instructions written between 1953 and 1964. They are divided into five sections: Music, Painting, Event, Poetry and Object.
Ono’s instructions can be completed by anyone, some physically, some only in the mind. Ono performed them many times internationally throughout her career and let others present their own variations.
Between 1962 and 1964, Ono connected with many artists in Japan, such as the filmmaker Yōji Kuri or the group Hi Red Center, with whom she participated in their Shelter Plan performance. Ono was part of an artistic community challenging mainstream culture and critically questioning attitudes of post-war society.
Ono’s critique was often subtly and playfully embedded in her works. At the event Morning Piece, she sold shards of broken glass labelled with future dates. In Ono’s Sales List, finalised after her stay in Japan, she offered both physical and purely conceptual works for sale – a take on the ever-expanding consumer culture.
In September 1966, Yoko Ono was invited to take part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. She presented several works there and realised Shadow Piece for the first time as a performance. In a talk at the symposium, Ono outlined the fundamentals of her participatory art: event-based, engaged with the everyday, personal, partial or presented as unfinished. She spoke of art as a catalyst to creative transformation and the power of imagination.
In November 1966, Ono opened a solo exhibition at Indica Gallery in London where she presented mostly white and transparent objects that were listed as “unfinished”. Visitors were encouraged to participate and either physically or conceptually complete the works. At this exhibition, she met John Lennon, her future husband and long-term artistic partner. When he asked her if it was alright to hammer an imaginary nail into her Painting to Hammer a Nail, Ono remembers, “I thought, so I met a guy who plays the same game I played.”
Ono’s close relation to other artists, musicians and writers from London becomes apparent in FILM NO. 4 (“BOTTOMS”). It lines up footage of around 200 buttocks. For Ono, they represented “the London scene today”. Her film score for the work instructed: “String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.”
The 1960s were a time of upheaval in the USA: the struggles surrounding the civil rights movement, feminist activism and growing opposition to the American war in Vietnam shaped public discourse within the country and around the world. Against this backdrop, Yoko Ono’s campaigning work gained mainstream interest. Working in collaboration with John Lennon, Ono used her art and global media platform to advocate for world peace. In the late 1960s, they created the billboard campaign WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT and staged Bed-In events. Their message of nonviolence resounded in their song Give Peace a Chance, which became a hymn of the international peace movement.
Ono began using her voice as an instrument during a series of performances and started to compose soundtracks for films in the early 1960s. She released her first album in 1968 and her musical output has been prolific ever since.
Through her music, Ono explores personal experiences as well as social and political issues. In this room, you can listen to a number of Ono’s songs, many of which are directly connected to her artworks and reflect her activist priorities. Her feminist anthems from the early 1970s on, including Sisters, O Sisters, Woman Power and Rising, seek to empower women to “have courage, have rage” and to “build a new world”. This commitment also extends to her films Freedom and FLY, which advocate the liberation of women from societal constraints.
Yoko Ono is deeply critical of violence. She believes that the world can start to heal if we collectively stand against any form of oppression. Much of her work is an invitation to view the present from another perspective.
White Chess Set invites us to engage in a game of chess using only white pieces on a white board – quickly losing track of who is on which side. A HOLE follows this shift in perspective even more literally. A pane of glass shot by a bullet reads: “Go to the other side of the glass and see through the hole.” In Helmets (Pieces of Sky), German army helmets contain blue puzzle pieces. Only when assembled do these pieces form a complete image of the sky, which Ono considers a symbol of the boundless power of imagination.
Ono herself has been affected by the consequences of war, and her works often address the loss and violence associated with displacement and exile. She counters the logic of division with the power of collective action. Her participatory work Add Colour (Refugee Boat) invites you to contribute your hopes and thoughts. Ono created the installation in 2016 as a direct response to global media reports about hundreds of thousands of displaced people risking their lives to flee to Europe by sea. It reflects Ono’s belief that “we are sharing this world” and sharing our responsibility for it.
The final rooms of the exhibition bring together a selection of Yoko Ono’s later works. These pieces explore themes such as motherhood and the passage of time. They draw from memories and personal experiences that simultaneously look to the past and what is still to come. Beginning with her 2003 performance of Cut Piece – which she had first presented in 1964 – this section also reflects on the vulnerability of the aging body.
In this room, My Mommy is Beautiful examines our relationship to our mothers. Ono invites you to leave memories and photographs of your mother on the wall, embracing a concept of motherhood that extends beyond the biological. A second work of the same title, which was created earlier, is displayed on the ceiling at the exhibition exit, featuring photographs of breasts and vulvas. Ono chose this placement deliberately. She explains, “one has to look up at the vagina and the breasts on the ceiling – rather like looking up at your mom’s body when you are a baby.”
The exhibition concludes with the sound piece Will I. Accompanied by the steady beat of a metronome, Ono poses existential questions that simultaneously reflect on the future and the past: “Will I miss the sky? Will I miss the ocean? Will I miss touch? Will I miss love? Will I?”