First things first, before you hear about the new exhibit “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a story: In late 1971 Ono took out an ad in the Village Voice for her upcoming “one-woman show” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show would run two weeks. The exhibition catalogs cost $1. What was unusual about this was that, as far as MOMA was concerned, there was no Yoko Ono show. Ono had never exhibited work at MOMA and was not being asked to exhibit now.
But on Dec. 1, on the opening date of her “show,” Ono had a man wearing a sandwich board parade in front of the museum, explaining: Ono released thousands of flies in MOMA, each one scented with a perfume worn by the artist; a photographer has also been tasked with documenting the path of the flies. This was not a prank. Ono had indeed released a jug of flies at MOMA, albeit outside, in the sculpture garden out back.
MOMA, forced to respond, taped a copy of the ad in its ticket window with a note:
“This is NOT here.”
Except, of course, it was.
Ono had, without being invited, shown her work at MOMA. There’s a lovely, hilarious short film at the MCA’s “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” documenting the responses of MOMA visitors to this elaborate unofficial exhibit. They come across like a chorus of how people have always responded to Ono. A child gets it right away. A woman says she loves Ono’s husband, John Lennon, but doesn’t know how she feels about Ono. One man admires Ono’s audacity: “The entire world can be a show,” he says. And an older British woman says, well, this is all “a bit bonkers,” wouldn’t you say?
But she smiles in a way that suggests, bonkers or not, I am smiling.
Yoko Ono is 92. By the time the MCA’s exhibit closes in late February, she’ll be 93. She made a long life of ignoring what you wanted. She was a classically trained singer in Japan, and studied opera, but became better known for atonal wailing. She was, she is, a cultural punchline, but spent seven decades creating a body of work so original and challenging, and eventually touching and influential, the joke is really on the know-nothings (who never will know). Fittingly, this new Ono retrospective that just opened is epic but intimate, impossibly earnest but funny and full of irony, without a single wink.
It upends assumptions — just admit, you have them.
And yet, though it never indulges in defensiveness, feel free to read it as a reply — 50 years too late — to every crack directed at Ono since 1969, when she married Lennon. You walk out wanting to punch anyone who said Yoko Ono broke up their favorite band.
You’ll give peace a chance, later.
Which, yeah, is an idiotic response to a thoughtful exhibit of a body of work seeking global unity. But then “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” if nothing else, commands an unvarnished response — that was how Lennon initially reacted to Ono’s art. He was impulsive. At an exhibit of her work, she put a green apple on a pedestal. Lennon, living up to his irreverent John Lennon self, plucked it off the stand and promptly took a bite.
Ono was not happy.
“Some exhibits are participatory and some are not,” said Jamillah James, the senior curator at the MCA who adapted the show from its origin at London’s Tate Modern. “That apple was one of Ono’s first readymade works. I understand her being perturbed.”
At the same time, so much of “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” so much of her practice requires the audience to become a part of its creation. Gallery after gallery, work by work, you receive instructions. Her remarkable “Instructions for Paintings,” lined up along a gallery wall, don’t offer traditional paintings but, yes, instructions for them, often reading like Zen koans: “Cut a painting up and let the pieces be lost in the wind…” A white full-sized rowboat in a white room — conceived in the early 1960s, but only realized in 2016 after Ono saw news accounts of migrants risking their lives to reach European shores — asks viewers to pick up a nearby blue marker and help paint the boat (and room) a solid ocean blue. “Bag Piece” offers you one of several large black sacks hanging on a wall: Climb inside, pose, create an abstract sculpture. (If you’re hesitant or worried about being embarrassed, just know that John Lennon once climbed into a bag, enthusiastically.)
The very first work, “Painting to Be Stepped On,” indeed, asks you to step on it. (As legend has it, Marcel Duchamp, the pioneering conceptual artist, visited one of Ono’s early solo shows and walked right past this, much to her disappointment.) One piece asks you to stick your arm through a canvas and shake hands with anyone on the other side. Another offers you a hammer and a bucket of nails to pound into its blank canvas.
And yes, you can do this.
I repeat the point because, here and there, some works do not want your grubby hands on them. For instance, a ladder Ono once placed in a gallery and invited viewers to climb, then use a magnifying glass to read a word on the ceiling; the word was “YES.” The ladder at the MCA is the same one that Lennon climbed when he visited Ono’s work before they were married. He was smitten with the positivity and humor in it. (Do not climb this ladder.) The apple is there, too — or rather, a new apple. (Do not eat this apple.)
“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” is a history lesson wrapped inside of a study of a conceptual legacy, fleshed out with artifacts that place Ono in larger cultural and art-world contexts. Her audio narration of a short animated film. Footage of her classic “Cut Piece” — an art-school staple, in which Ono invited viewers to snip away bits of her clothing — is projected on a wall. There’s a room (with beanbags) playing a loop of her more ambient recordings. There are photos and recordings of work with John Cage and Ornette Coleman and the influential cadre of experimental artists known as Fluxus. Near the end, Ono and Lennon’s “WAR IS OVER” period is thoroughly documented.
But for the first half of “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” there is not a Beatle in sight.
“A lot of people bring a lot of preconceived notions,” said James, “but it was imperative that we establish here that Yoko Ono was a fully-formed artist before she even met Lennon.”
By the 1960s, Ono had survived the fire bombing of Tokyo in 1945, and the starvation that followed, then she found a way to stand out as a feminist artist in an occupation dominated by men. Imagination itself became one of the themes of her career, but always paired with a preoccupation toward shattered objects and relationships and the hope for something like a repair. Ono would often say her first artwork was staring into the sky with her brother after Tokyo’s destruction and imagining a brighter future. That’s echoed poetically in an installation of World War II German military helmets filled with pieces of a puzzle of a blue sky. Sort of on the nose, sure. But viewers are encouraged to take home a piece of the puzzle, with the knowledge that somewhere out there, if everyone with a piece could come together, they might have a large colorful horizon.
There’s also a room of tables covered with the shattered chunks of ceramic cups and dishes. Ono provides tape and string and asks you to repair them. It’s not so different from the time, during a performance, she smashed a vase and asked the audience to bring home one shard each — but only if they agreed to meet back in a decade and try to repair the vase. Try is the key word there.
At the end of the exhibit, there’s a work that stops you short: a tall sheet of glass splintered by a single bullet. Again, very on the nose. And yet, she made it almost 30 years after Lennon was assassinated. Ono is not delusional, only earnest. She understands that what’s shattered is never entirely fixed. She asks for the impossible, but she also means it.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com