In collaboration with the Tate Modern, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is presenting the innovative and influential work of artist and activist Yoko Ono (*1933, Tokyo) in a comprehensive solo exhibition on Friday, 27 September 2024. Ono is a pioneer of conceptual and participatory art, film and performance, a celebrated musician and an outstanding activist for world peace. YOKO ONO. MUSIC OF THE MIND traces seven decades of the artist’s powerful multidisciplinary practice, from the mid-1950s to the present day, tracing the development of her innovative work and its lasting influence on contemporary culture. The exhibition at K20 presents more than 200 works, including instructions and scores, installations, films, music and photographs, highlighting Ono’s radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to resonate today. Ono’s practice occupies a pioneering position within conceptual art and Fluxus and therefore resonates particularly well in Düsseldorf – a city with a rich history of these two international art movements.
Image above:Yoko Ono mit Glass Hammer, 1967, bei HALF-A-WIND SHOW, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Foto © Clay Perry
At the centre of Ono’s art are ideas, which she often expresses in poetic, humorous and profound ways. The exhibition begins with an examination of her key role in the experimental avant-garde circles in New York and Tokyo, including the development of her ‘instructions’ – written directions that ask readers to imagine, experience or complete a work. Some of these instructions consist of a single word such as FLY (FLIEGE[N]) or TOUCH (BERÜHRE). Others range from short phrases like Listen to a Heartbeat or Step in all the puddles in the city to tasks that stimulate the imagination like Painting to Be Constructed in Your Head. Every word, every sentence is designed to stimulate and expand the reader’s mind. Previously unpublished photographs show Ono’s first Instruction Paintings in her loft studio at 112 Chambers Street in New York, where she organised experimental concerts and events together with the composer La Monte Young, and in her first solo exhibition at the AG Gallery in 1961.
The typewritten templates for Ono’s groundbreaking, self-published artist’s book Grapefruit (1964), in which she bundled the instructions she wrote between 1953 and 1964, will be exhibited in their entirety. Visitors are also invited to activate Ono’s instructions: They can shake hands with strangers in Painting to Shake Hands (1961), hide in a bag in the interactive work Bag Piece (1964) (first performed by Ono in Kyoto together with her iconic work Cut Piece [Schneide-Stück, 1964]) – or bring their shadows together in Shadow Piece (1963).
In 1966, Yoko Ono moved to London, where she eventually lived for five years. Here she became part of a counter-cultural network of female artists, musicians and writers and met her future husband and long-term artistic partner John Lennon (1940-1980). The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is showing key works from Ono’s influential exhibitions at the Indica and Lisson galleries, including Apple (1966) and Half-A-Room (1967), an impressive installation of household objects cut in half. Ono’s temporarily censored FILM NO. 4 (‘BOTTOMS’) (FILM NO. 4 [‘HINTERN’], 1966-67), which she conceived as a ‘petition for peace’, will be shown together with material relating to her influential lecture at the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’. There she described the fundamental aspects of her participatory art: the event-based, the everyday, the personal, the fragmentary. She sees her art as a catalyst for creative transformation, located in the realm of the imagination. Visitors can play with the White Chess Set – a chess set with only white pieces and white squares, with the instructions: ‘Play as long as you can remember where all your pieces are’. This work was first realised in 1966 and illustrates Ono’s anti-war stance.
Untersucht werden zentrale Themen, die in Onos Werk über Jahrzehnte und künstlerische Medien hinweg wiederkehren. Dazu gehört der ,Himmel‘, der immer wieder als Metapher für Frieden, Freiheit und Grenzenlosigkeit auftaucht. Als Kind, das während des Zweiten Weltkriegs aus Tokio fliehen musste, fand Ono Trost und Zuflucht in der ständigen Präsenz des Himmels. Er taucht in der Anleitung Painting to See the Skies (Gemälde, um Himmel zu sehen, 1961) und in der Installation SKY TV (Himmels-Fernsehen) von 1966 auf, die eine Live-Videoübertragung des Himmels über dem K20 zeigt. Das Engagement der Künstlerin für den Feminismus wird durch die Dokumentation der Performance Cut Piece sowie durch wichtige Filme veranschaulicht, wie FLY (FLIEGE[N], 1970–71), in dem sich eine Fliege, begleitet von Onos Gesang, über den Körper einer nackten Frau bewegt, und Freedom (Freiheit, 1970), in dem Ono vergeblich versucht, sich aus ihrem BH zu befreien. In dem Teil der Ausstellung, der ihrer Musik gewidmet ist, ermutigen feministische Hymnen wie Sisters O Sisters (Schwestern, oh Schwestern, 1972), Woman Power (Frauenpower, 1973) und Rising (Aufstand, 1995) Frauen, eine neue Welt aufzubauen, „mutig“ und „wütend“ zu sein, und verstärken damit die Botschaft von Onos Werken, die Gewalt gegen Frauen anprangern.
Yoko Ono increasingly campaigned for peace and humanitarian campaigns through her art and her global media platform, initially in collaboration with John Lennon. The poster campaign WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT (1969) used the language of advertising to spread a message of peace.
The film BED PEACE (1969) documents the couple’s second ‘bed-in’ in Amsterdam and Montreal, where they discussed with representatives of the international media to promote world peace during the Vietnam War. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is also showing Ono’s current project Add Colour (Refugee Boat), which was activated for the first time in 2016 and invites visitors to paint the gallery walls and a white boat with blue paint and reflect on pressing issues such as crises and displacement.
The title of the exhibition goes back to the artist’s desire to stimulate the imagination. Ono remarks: ‘The only sound that exists for me is the sound of the mind. My works are only there to give people a music of the mind. […] In the world of the mind, things expand and reach beyond time.’ The exhibition itself also follows this expansive logic.
As part of the exhibition, works by Ono will be presented throughout the K20. Visitors are invited to leave their wishes for peace on a Wish Tree (1996) near the entrance to the exhibition.
Ono’s instruction Painting to Be Constructed in Your Head (1961) will be on display in the recently reopened collection presentation. PEACE is POWER (FRIEDEN ist STÄRKE, 2017) will spread across both the façade of the museum and the windows of Salon20, from where it will direct the view from inside the museum to Düsseldorf’s bustling Grabbeplatz. Throughout October, a new activation of Yoko Ono’s THINK PEACE, ACT PEACE, SPREAD PEACE, IMAGINE PEACE – PEACE is POWER (FRIEDEN DENKEN, FRIEDEN STIFTEN, FRIEDEN VERBREITEN, FRIEDEN VORSTELLEN – FRIEDEN ist STÄRKE, 2024) will be on display at the Köbogen. This work will carry Yoko Ono’s contemporary call for peace far beyond the museum.
YOKO ONO. MUSIC OF THE MIND was organised by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
The exhibition was curated by Patrizia Dander, former Head of Curatorial Department, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Juliet Bingham, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, with Ursula Pokorny and Catherine Frèrejean, Curatorial Assistants, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.
Exhibition catalogue: Yoko Ono. Music of the Mind
Edited by: Juliet Bingham, Jon Hendricks, Connor Monahan, Susanne Gaensheimer, Patrizia Dander
Contributions by: Sanford Biggers, Juliet Bingham, Patrizia Dander, Catherine Lord, Helen Molesworth, Yasufumi Nakamori, Yoko Ono, Barbara Rose, Naoko Seki, David Toop, Kira Wainstein, Andrew Wilson Deutsch
March 2024, 304 pages, 256 illustrations.
3-sided hardcover
240 mm x 172 mm 42,- EUR
WHEN?
Vernissage: Friday, 27 September 2024, 7 pm, admission free
Exhibition period: Saturday, 28 September 2024 – Sunday, 16 March 2025
WHERE?
K20
Grabbeplatz 5
40213 Düsseldorf
