At K20

Yoko Ono​ has always understood the art – and the absurdity – of playing the long game. In 1989, she told Film Quarterly: ‘Do you know the statement I wrote about taking any film and burying it underground for fifty years? It’s like wine. Any film, any cheap film, if you put it underground for fifty years, becomes a masterpiece. After fifty years it’s interesting. You just take a shot of people walking, and that’s enough.’ Ono had slightly misremembered her original statement, which appears in Grapefruit, a book of instruction pieces (short text scores, somewhere between performance directions and poetry) published in 1964 and updated in 1970 to include commentary on her films. In ‘On Film No. 5 and Two Virgins’, from 1968, she writes: ‘This year, I started off thinking of making films that were meant to be shown in a hundred years’ time: i.e. taking different city views, hoping that most of the buildings in them would be demolished by the time the film was released; shooting an ordinary woman with her full gear – knowing that in a hundred years’ time she’d look extraordinary.’ Ono was a young child when Tokyo was firebombed by American forces in 1945; she knows all too well what a demolished city looks like. She goes on: ‘This, in practice, would mean that as a filmmaker you don’t really have to make a film any more but just put your name (that is, if so you wish) on any film and store it. Storing would then become the main endeavour of a filmmaker.’

When John Lennon was killed in 1980, Ono became the guardian of his work and set about retrieving items that had belonged to him. (Gillon Aitken wrote about bidding on behalf of Ono for Lennon’s tie in the LRB of 25 July 1991.) She saw at first-hand the growth of the postwar counterculture industry, which produced not only records, reels, paintings and photographs, but also letters, flyers and other ephemera recast as talismans for fans, investments for collectors or objects to be displayed in a museum or gallery. The liberating conceptual shift proposed by the Fluxus movement, which made a flushing toilet or a struck match a performance, is not unrelated to the process that puts an audiotape in a vitrine or transforms a dead musician’s clothes into an auction lot. Ono, now 92, has observed it all, from the dismantling of the traditional art object and the explosion of pop culture to its co-opting by contemporary art and the historicisation of the 20th century’s avant-gardes. An insistence on the power of the speculative and a feeling for the way material things accrue meaning coexist in her work without too much friction.

Music of the Mind, Ono’s largest retrospective to date, was shown at Tate Modern last year and is currently on display at K20 in Düsseldorf (until 16 March) before travelling to Berlin. It contains more than two hundred pieces, many of them records of or prompts towards actions: documentation of performances, photographs of destroyed paintings, instructions to draw a map to get lost or to send a smell to the moon. There are framed pages from the original typescript of Grapefruit, each marked with a letter to indicate whether the text was meant as a score for painting, poetry, objects, events or music, although these categories may also be a provocation in themselves (if you’re burying a cloud in the garden, is it an event or a poem?).

‘FILM NO. 4’ (1966-67).

Ono’s own subversive gestures have been recuperated by the institutions at which they were directed. In the winter of 1971, she placed adverts in the New York Times and the Village Voice announcing her solo exhibition at MoMA. The ads carried a photograph of the museum’s entrance, its sign doctored to create an extra space before the word ‘art’. On the pavement, directly below the space, Ono walks past carrying a shopping bag imprinted with the letter ‘F’. When people turned up for the show they were met by a man wearing a sandwich board, who explained that Ono had captured some flies in a jar, along with the scent of her favourite perfume, and released them into ‘the exact centre of the museum’. Visitors were invited to find the scented flies and follow them around the city. Forty-four years later, MoMA put on an official retrospective of Ono’s works from 1960 to 1971. Klaus Biesenbach wrote in the catalogue: ‘Looking back on her conceptual 1971 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, we see that she knew long ago that her groundbreaking practice warranted a solo exhibition there.’ As Ono said, ‘after fifty years it’s interesting.’

Ono also produced a catalogue for her imaginary exhibition, The Museum of Modern (F)Art. It opens with a photomontage of her standing next to an oversized jar in the MoMA sculpture garden. Photographs of corridors, galleries and street scenes are overlaid with arrows pointing to invisible flies. The catalogue and an accompanying short film are easy to overlook at Music of the Mind in favour of the better-known FLY (1970-71), in which a fly is shown in close-up as it crawls over a woman’s naked body: painted toenails and dusty soles, then a nipple, a lip, an eyelid. You’re watching the fly but you’re also watching the body become a landscape. The fly rubs its feet together. On the soundtrack, Ono’s voice scuttles to its limits and stays there, chattering, sighing, squeezing out tight-throated screams.

FLY and the imaginary MoMA show were created soon after Ono returned from London to New York, where she had lived briefly as a child and again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (This period, in which she became friends with John Cage, David Tudor and La Monte Young as well as George Maciunas and other Fluxus-affiliated artists, and became something of a conduit between New York and Tokyo’s experimental music and art scenes, is carefully surveyed in the exhibition.) The works of the early 1970s are wilful and a little feral, an exhalation of relief after the intense scrutiny Ono came under when she and Lennon began their relationship. She couldn’t not be a celebrity again, but New York seems to have been the easier city. It was around this time, too, that she began making records in earnest, both with Lennon and as a solo artist – the soundtrack for FLY, released on a 1971 album of the same name, was composed and recorded before the film was made.

David Toop writes in the catalogue that it is through Ono’s early albums that ‘the struggles of conceptual versus visceral are resolved into a locomotive ferocity.’ But Ono’s recorded music occupies an awkward position in the exhibition, as though the curators aren’t sure what to do with it. In the ‘listening space’ you can play a selection of Ono’s albums, but little attempt is made to contextualise the work, aside from references to the feminist themes articulated in some of her songs (Ono’s voice, which says more about gender liberation than her lyrics, isn’t discussed). Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. The Yoko Ono who makes prickly, sprawling rock albums can seem an altogether different artist from the one whose text scores – with their concise invitations to creativity contained in neat squares – circulate so smoothly on Instagram.

‘FLY’ (1970-71).

The exhibition’s title is taken from a concert Ono put on in London in 1966, and refers to music created in the imagination of the listener – music which, to Ono, is every bit as significant as its audible counterpart. Hence the inclusion of Tape Piece III: Snow Piece, which is labelled: ‘Tape of the snow falling at dawn – play any speed.’ Visitors can read the label but can’t play the tape, so are left to imagine what, if anything, it sounds like. In the early 1960s Ono became interested in what she called ‘insound’, a Cagean notion referring to the inclusion of concrete sound in or as music, and ‘instructure’, a mode of instruction in which commands are never fully executed. This allows her practice to be ‘a continual process of transmission’, as she puts it in a programme note, ‘like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling’. Most rooms at the exhibition include a piece that invites visitor participation, whether in the form of stepping on a fragment of canvas stuck to the floor (Painting to Be Stepped On, from 1961) or climbing into a large cloth bag (Bag Piece, from 1964).

One of the liveliest sections of the show is devoted to Ono’s activities in London around the time she met Lennon. The white stepladder in Ceiling Painting (1966) draws the eye up to a canvas suspended from the ceiling. Visitors to Ono’s Unfinished Paintings and Objects exhibition at the Indica gallery in 1966 could climb the ladder and peer through a magnifying glass at the word YES written in tiny letters. Exhibition-goers aren’t encouraged up ladders any more, but you can play a chess game in which all the pieces are white (White Chess Set, also known as Play It by Trust). A recording of Ono’s speech at the Destruction in Art Symposium convened by Gustav Metzger in 1966 is punctuated by the sound of visitors bashing nails into an already bristling canvas – a new realisation of Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961). I tried to decipher Ono’s words – something about ‘destruction that brings about newer creations’ – before another nail went in. BANG! ‘What if there was a shouting competition?’ BANG! As a gallery assistant enjoined me to pick up a hammer, I could hear Ono’s voice saying: ‘What if people had to take their pants off before a fight?’ Her version of destruction is often deflating; I think she would enjoy the bursts of noise drowning out her manifesto. Another work of playful deflation, FILM NO. 4 (1966-67), subtitled ‘BOTTOMS’, shows a succession of bare buttocks rising and falling as their owners walk to a slow tempo (Ono had them pace around a turntable). The bottoms fill the screen so completely that you begin to forget what they are and start to perceive them as pure structure: four squares divided by intersecting lines, like a hot cross bun. It’s not at all erotic, but nevertheless Ono had to get a special licence to screen the film at a private cinema after the BBFC banned it from general release.

Bed Peace (1969), an hour-long film of Ono and Lennon’s staging of a ‘bed-in’ in a Montreal hotel, which was edited and directed by Ono, is screened here in its entirety. You watch the couple and Ono’s young daughter, Kyoko, travel between airports and hotels and conference rooms, all those non-places where extremely famous people spend their time, and share Ono’s point of view as a scrum of journalists surrounds the bed, thrusting mics and cameras at her family. Lennon expounds on the redundancy of political activism: peace needs to be sold, ‘like soap’ – ‘you’ve got to sell and sell until the housewife thinks, oh, there’s peace and war, that’s the two products.’ Ono chimes in: ‘If you don’t extend your hand to the establishment, how do you expect the establishment to extend their hand to you?’ This is the first intimation in the exhibition of how easily Ono’s ‘continual process of transmission’ would lend itself to commodification. In another Ono and Lennon collaboration from 1969, Acorn Peace, they sent acorns to leaders around the world with a request that they plant them ‘for peace’ (the responses they received are displayed). When carried out so literally and conclusively, an action is a dead end.

The exhibition concludes with two works that encourage participation in the form of material production: My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004), in which visitors contribute thoughts of their mothers to an ever growing wall of handwritten recollections, tributes and recriminations, and Add Colour (Refugee Boat) from 2016. Add Colour features a boat in the middle of an otherwise empty room: it was once white, but, like the walls and the floor, has been written and drawn on in blue paint by visitors, text on top of text, swashes and tangles of blue, until the room vibrates with colour and pattern. At the Tate iteration, people drew eyes, cats, mushroom clouds and flowers, and wrote ‘Love is the highest vibration,’ ‘Free Palestine’, ‘Ceasefire Now’. I took some pictures: it looks great on a phone, like street art does. Afterwards I passed Helmets (Pieces of Sky), from 2001, an installation of soldiers’ helmets suspended upside down from the ceiling and filled with jigsaw pieces showing a fragment of blue sky. Visitors can choose a piece and take it away, perhaps while considering, as the wall text prompts, the sky as ‘a hopeful symbol of limitless imagination’. I picked out a piece, then put it back.