Yoko Ono, the most famous unknown artist in the world

It happened in March 1945. Yoko Ono was 12 years old when the US army bombed Tokyo, so the future artist was evacuated by her family of wealthy bankers descended from samurai to a farm in the countryside.

With her younger brother, the future artist used to lie on the roof of the house, observe the spectacle of a sky that was not stained by the explosions and project imaginary banquets on the clouds, typical of good times.

“We use our powers of visualization to survive,” Ono once said.

“Maybe it was my first work of art.”

The quote is found at the beginning of the exhibition that the Tate Modern is dedicating this week to the Japanese artist, one of the highlights of the London art season, and conveys a powerful and tempting idea.

She invites us to observe everything that we will see displayed throughout successive rooms—and, by extension, all of Ono's work—as a product of childhood trauma, as if the early experience of atomic destruction in her country had forced her to to endlessly imagine parallel worlds, alternative societies and an art that would be a little useful in the face of all the hecatombs.

As the famous quote about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz goes, could one limit oneself to doing landscaping after the Hiroshima bomb?

The video 'Freedom' (1971), by Yoko Ono, exhibited at the Tate Modern.

What happened with Ono was a

tabula rasa

, an attempt to start from scratch when the previous model (of creation, of society, of civilization) had proven useless.

A decade later, becoming a

chic refugee as a

liberal arts

student

at Sarah Lawrence, she created another work of art in support of that

manifesting

that pseudosciences preach, only much darker than the mental games she invented as a child with her brother: “ Light a match and watch it until it goes out.”

Put simply, it had always seemed like utter stupidity to us until this exhibition: there was the flash and the blackout of a fleeting life, like the trail of a bomb that extinguishes itself in a few seconds.

The piece would be part of his first “concerts of inaudible sounds” such as those he later organized with La Monte Young in his Manhattan loft.

In 1961, Ono obtained his first exhibition at the AG Gallery, nursery of the Fluxus, where he presented his

Instruction paintings

, delicate miniatures with inscriptions written in Japanese, with which he asked the visitor to complete the work in his head. .

“Imagine that the clouds are dripping.

Dig a hole in the garden to collect water,” read one of the most intelligible.

If Fluxus, with which he was never officially associated, replaced objects with sounds and actions, Ono wanted to replace painting with language.

He was only 28 years old, but he had already wanted to tear down some of the pillars of contemporary art.

Shortly after, he staged his famous

Cut Piece

of it at the Sogetsu Center in Tokyo.

Sitting on stage, she invited the audience to undress her with scissors.

The Tate exhibition includes a restored video of the recreation of that work in New York, filmed by the Mayles brothers, which seems to denounce the vulnerability of the female condition, a classic in the repertoire of second wave feminism, but which also foreshadows the public scandal she would undergo upon becoming Mrs. Lennon.

The sample suggests that Ono did not end the Beatles, but rather the other way around: it was the Beatles that ended Yoko Ono

The legend (misogynistic, unfair, unfounded) says that Ono ended the Beatles.

When visiting this exhibition, it comes to mind that perhaps it was the other way around: it was the Beatles who killed Yoko Ono.

As if the honeys of success, the famous

bed-ins

for peace - which, reproduced on a giant screen at the Tate, are quite unbearable: Lennon acts like an absolute idiot and it is known that everything sticks, except beauty - and, especially, the devastating experience of fame would have also annihilated his art.

There is a before and after the meeting with Lennon in the imprecise chronology proposed by the museum.

Almost everything we see later will seem empty and innocuous, with the notable exception of his video

Fly

(1970-71), made with Lennon, where several flies fly over the naked body of a woman, caressing it with her wings. as if they desecrated it.

It is a captivating work: when it comes to these invertebrates, it is not clear whether that body is desirable or putrefied.

'Fly' (1970), by Yoko Ono, another video for which John Lennon composed the soundtrack.

There was already a growing tendency towards the populist in Ono's art, as demonstrated by works from the sixties such as

Shadow Piece

(draw your shadow on a wall) or

Painting to Hammer a Nail

(drive a nail onto a white canvas).

In the final part of a career that we already consider almost finished - Ono will turn 91 tomorrow - this invitation to extreme participation is aggravated.

It is an art for everyone that should not shake almost anyone (hang a wish from a tree and think very strongly about world peace).

Are we exaggerating?

A series of paintings from 1999, also presented in the London exhibition, transforms his radical instructions from the sixties into monochrome paintings that have written verbs that we read in a friendly imperative.

Imagine.

Remember.

Touch

.

Only the final coda makes us change our minds: they are the images of a concert from 10 years ago in which Ono gave herself over to endless emotions in the form of sounds, moans of pleasure, and then screams of pain, and then trances of her own. of dementia.

Precisely, the exhibition is titled

Music of the mind

, like a series of his concerts in the sixties.

“My works are only designed to induce music in our heads,” she explained.

In the first rooms we seem to hear those mental symphonies, undoubtedly twelve-tone, in our own minds and in those of others.

In the latter, no sound is detected.

The exhibition, exceptional in its first section, deflates at the same pace as Ono's art, and the unusual curatorial theses disappear to make way for

family-friendly

installations .

The space dedicated to Ono's music, with headphones hanging in a room that feels like a placeless place, is especially flawed, as is the show's inability to point out his influence on later artists, from Bas Jan Ader to Douglas Gordon. , from Marina Abramovic to Lady Gaga.

On paper, due to its dimensions and the favorable cultural climate that surrounds it, it seemed like one of those monographs that manage to change the public perception of an artist.

We'll keep waiting.

'Yoko Ono.

Music of the Mind'.

Tate Modern.

London.

Until September 1st.

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