Artist and activist, pioneer of conceptual and participatory art, performance art and experimental music and film, famous widow of Beatles founder John Lennon and committed campaigner for world peace, Yoko Ono is the subject of a major retrospective at London's Tate Modern. From her Instructions Paintings, in which the work of art becomes a work in progress, to her Wish Tree, her "unfinished objects" and her Sky TV, some 200 works by the artist born in Tokyo in 1933 are on show.

"Listen to your heartbeat", "Walk through all the city's waterways", "TOUCH", "VOLER"... These written instructions for visitors, usually confined to the role of "viewer", are a strange kind of injunction. Transgressing the rules of the museum game, these "instructions pieces" devised by Yoko Ono in the mid-1950s transformed the viewer into an actor. Tasked with experimenting, imagining, even realizing or completing the work, the viewer could be led to "build a painting in [his] head" or to
hammer nails into a painting...

In 1961, at her first solo show in New York, she invited visitors to walk on her canvas (Peinture à piétiner) or to look at it in the dark... These famous Instructions paintings completely redefine the work of art: no longer a finished object to be contemplated, but a participative work in progress, a modulable process, a work in progress...: like a score, the instructions given by the artist are open to all interpretations. "This allows the work to exist under infi nite variations that the artist herself cannot foresee", explains Yoko Ono, for whom art, less than a creation, must be an experimentation and a sharing.

Totally revolutionary in its time, this conception of the work of art opened up new perspectives which, far from having been exhausted, are still being exploited today. A radical work if ever there was one, even more radical than those of the most iconoclastic of the Fluxus group (to which she is generally associated), Yoko Ono's protean art was, in fact, in the vanguard of the avant-garde. It is to this innovative art that Tate Modern pays tribute today.

PIONEERING WORK

Among the key works on show was Cut Piece in 1964: kneeling on stage in the traditional impassive posture of the Japanese woman, the artist invited spectators to come and cut off pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors. Staging the vulnerability of the body, outraged intimacy, exhibitionism, voyeurism and the relationships of domination and violence in human relations, this performance had a huge impact on the art world. In 1966, his Apple, placed on a pedestal and doomed to decompose until its possible rebirth by seeds, caused a stir.

The same goes for his Bottoms fi lm, which was censored the same year: consisting of a succession of moving naked buttocks "in place of signatures on a petition for peace", it is a clear indication of the humor found in many of his works. It's a humor that's always imbued with a poetic undertone that hints at a certain gravity. Such as the halved objects in his Half-A-Room (1967), his all-white Chess Game or his Sky TV (1966), which broadcasts a live fi lm sky in real time...

"YOKO ONO - MUSIC OF THE MIND"
TATE MODERN
BANKSIDE, LONDON (ENGLAND)
FEBRUARY 15 TO SEPTEMBER 1, 2024
TATE.ORG.UK