Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind review – huge, moving and full of surprises
It begins with her voice in an early sound piece: gentle, melodic, answering the phone somewhere in the 1960s – “Hello. This is Yoko.” Next, her fingers strike a match, which gradually flares and fades on film in mesmerising slomo. Her left eye, lit like a sun, stares unblinkingly back at you from another screen until the light begins to die, whereupon the eyelid closes. Irreducibly simple, it is a performance of sunset (and perhaps more) in two perfect minutes.
To say that Yoko Ono has the audience in mind, at all times, is the merest understatement. It would be hard to think of an artist more bent on universal public address. Tate Modern’s enormous and absorbing retrospective runs all the way from invitation to instruction to direct involvement, from headphones in sound lounges to beanbags slumped before hypnotic movies, from chunky markers for drawing on the walls to canvases on which to leave memories of our mothers.
Here are the cloth bags into which Ono used to clamber with John Lennon, transforming themselves into everchanging sculptures, no longer to be judged according to sex, face, race (or worldwide fame). Now you can do it too. Here’s a white canvas: add colour; here’s another: hammer it hard with nails. Bring a bare migrant boat ashore on a tide of blue-painted messages of hope. Hang your wishes on a tree. Come together, right now.
Ono, born in Japan in 1933, finds her first freedom with the New York and Tokyo avant gardes of the late 50s and 60s. Grainy old footage of Japanese artists “disrupting superficial happiness” in the postwar boom shows her – entirely ignored – attempting to sell the unsaleable joys of morning to passersby. In Manhattan she invites visitors to walk all over a canvas on the floor, or to fulfil the instructions in her famous 1964 Grapefruit book.
All 150 of its immaculately typed pages appear at Tate Modern, and they carry the full character of her art. Some are just about feasible: “Imagine one thousands suns in the sky at the same time”; “Cut a painting up and let it be lost in the wind”. Others are impossible dreams. “Send the smell of the moon.” This swing between reality and imagination, between the terse and the poetic, is at the core of everything she does.
It is pervasive in the show’s fluid soundtracks, from polite coughing to high ululations and sudden definitive silences. Just as you are thinking of the composer John Cage, perhaps, the man himself appears in photographs of evenings in Ono’s Manhattan loft, along with Marcel Duchamp, La Monte Young and Robert Rauschenberg. She performed with Cage across Japan; audiences were so stunned they called it the John Cage Shock tour.
So much surprises all through this show, especially for anyone who did not know that Ono’s family had to flee the bombing of Tokyo in 1945; that she studied philosophy and classical music; that she had three husbands. One of the works here is titled Half-A-Room (1967), every object in the tableau, from shoe to cupboard to chair to heater, cut in half and painted white; the severance of everyday life in a divorce.
In London, Lennon comes across a white ladder in an art gallery and climbs it to discover a magnifying glass through which he can make out the promising word “Yes” on a slip of paper. It is 1966. The ladder that led to the ballad of John and Yoko is discreetly positioned at the heart of this show. Soon Ono will become, in Lennon’s prescient phrase, “the world’s most famous unknown artist”.
This show is so comprehensive, and so carefully curated, that it is possible to see that there was art before and after Lennon – and that they were not quite the same thing. Ono’s word-based works of the 60s very often resolve into poetry. Her performances are both searing and dreamy. Cut Piece (1964) – in which a gracious yet defiant Ono suffers the clothes to be snipped from her body by strangers, increasingly aggressively – is such a classic of 60s art it is about as familiar to art students as the Beatles themselves.
When she marries Lennon, they send acorns for growing oaks to leaders across the world with a message of peace (Golda Meir’s reply, here, is especially grateful and thus poignant). The gift is purely conceptual, of course, but commuted into active politics by the couple’s international fame. Likewise, their honeymoon Bed-In, in which extremely serious conversations between journalists, politicians and the two artists took place in hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal: performance merging into live campaign.
The film of this bed-in runs well beyond an hour, on the beanbags, at Tate Modern. This survey both needs and deserves slow time. Ono’s mind is steady, firm, never hysterical, always principled. Her aesthetic is delicate, worked out in tiny pen and ink drawings, and almost unreadably small but elegant script.
It is amazing that some ephemera have survived at all – canvases that
were made to be destroyed, photos of New York events in the dark hours after midnight. There may be too many relics for some (the blank reel-to-reel Ono was selling as “the sound of snow falling at dawn” in 1963); but others may want to see John and Yoko’s actual marriage certificate.
The most moving exhibit is the large glass (quoting Duchamp) pierced with a gunshot hole. Go round to the other side, the artist instructs, and you may be able to see through it. How has Ono managed to live all these decades without Lennon? The piece was made in 2009, already 29 years after his murder.
“War Is Over” reads their great joint declaration, on billboards and posters during the Vietnam war – and in much smaller letters below: “If you want it.” There is a tremendous sadness that the main declaration is never likely to be true, and the subtext a qualified whisper. But this is the moment where Ono’s leap of imagination turns into a leap of faith. Right at the end of this show, you are invited to dip your hands into a thicket of steel helmets suspended upside down, conjuring the dead of conflicts everywhere, and take away a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle that might help solve war. Ono, 91 today, is still living and working in a state of hope, still asking us to give peace a chance.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is at Tate Modern, London, until 1 September
Ono’s mind is steady, firm, never hysterical, always principled
almost completely new territory.”
On the wall beside his desk are portraits of some of his other subjects: John Milton, Oscar Wilde (in whose voice he wrote a novel), the Elizabethan occultist John Dee. “You develop an affinity and eventually a sort of companionship, when you get to know them well enough,” he says. “Of course, that’s an illusion. But it’s something which spurs you forward.”
He says there is a fleeting quality to these friendly obsessions that puzzles him, though he doesn’t interrogate it too closely. “Most writers, I presume,” he says, “keep a sort of a memory of events and details of people’s lives when they write a biography. But in my case, it just completely vanishes once the book is done.”
He wouldn’t be much use in a pub quiz?
“It would be embarrassing. The things I wouldn’t be able to remember about Dickens, say [subject of a 1,000-page plus Ackroyd bestseller]. I can now hardly remember who he was married to or the names of any of his children or the order the books came in.”
He likens his methods to “a form of intellectual bulimia: you eat a great deal of knowledge. And you sick it up. And then you start again.”
He once observed that his books were all really one book, and that he was always filling in missing chapters. He gestures towards his laptop screen and the shelves of research material behind it. “I’m doing a book about Auden,” he says. “I did TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. So it feels like a natural progression.”
***
All of this industry takes place these days in the study where we sit in his large mansion flat in a grand block immediately behind the Harrods department store in Kensington (that epic industry has been well rewarded). He has been here for 20 years. It seems a slightly soulless place for a man so steeped in the historical layering of London, giving out as it does on to a row of shops selling £2,000 handbags. “I just happened to be looking for a flat and this one was advertised,” he says. “I didn’t take much time thinking about it. It’s got richer because of the influx of foreign money.”
Until fairly recently he would travel across town to work in a different home in Bloomsbury. He also had a Georgian house in Islington – at the door of which I now remember depositing him by cab – along with a house in Devon. “They’ve all gone. I’ve got a slight disability now,” he says as he pats his left leg, “and I can’t walk very far. So it’s important for me to have a central place.”
One way of understanding the Kensington address is that it is about as far as possible, in Dickensian terms, from the place he grew up: with his single mother in a council house in east
Acton, on an estate “literally overshadowed by the looming walls of Wormwood Scrubs prison”.
“I remember,” he says now, “there would occasionally be sirens, meaning a prisoner had escaped, and we all had to lock our doors.”
I mention that I was walking that area recently, researching a story about the new HS2 terminal that is being built there (and which has optimistically chosen the name Old Oak Common, rather than Wormwood Scrubs). House prices, I suggest, are on the up.
He laughs, rehearsing his theory that some places in London resist all attempts at gentrification – the past always seeps back in. “My memory of the common itself is quite a pleasant one,” he says, “it was a sort of combination of wasteland and swamp. A good place for surreptitiously smoking cigarettes.”
He never knew his father, who upped and left while he was a baby. Ackroyd’s mother worked in personnel at the Metal Box factory; they would come up to the West End on the top floor of the bus and look down at the shoppers in Knightsbridge. Ackroyd’s life changed when he first won a scholarship to the Roman Catholic public school St Bede’s and then a place at Cambridge. His mother lived to be 82. I wonder what she made of what he became?
“What did I become?”
The towering man of letters? He guffaws. “Now you are being funny. She was alive while my books were being published, but I don’t think we ever discussed it. I think both of us would have been too embarrassed to have mentioned it.”
When I last saw him, he talked about having been contacted by his father, Graham, by letter. Did they ever meet?
“No, I never did meet him. He died a few years ago, I believe. But I never wanted to meet him, no curiosity at all. I suppose that’s a weakness or a fault on my part. But I never regretted it.”
A psychologist might develop the theory that Ackroyd has spent a lifetime trying to fill that father-shaped hole by constructing his unending succession of imaginative lives of heroic and formidable men. But he’d have none of that. He has the biographer’s paradoxical dislike of any kind of theorising about his own motivations. Instead you read between the lines of his books, looking for clues to his sympathies.
The current volume, a procession of believers trying to mansplain the universe in earnest ways, has a certain comedy to it, I say. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Whether it’s a farce or a burlesque I don’t know. But there certainly is a comic element in all of these deeply religious people. But I have come to think that everything is absurd, essentially. Including all of my own most socalled precious beliefs.”
One of the things that jumped out of the book, I say, is that he makes a point of noting the date of birth and the date of death of each of his saints and sinners. It’s almost like wandering a graveyard. Does he find himself thinking more about mortality?
“It’s funny you should ask that,” he says, “because I have an idea for a book, called Last Days, which would concern itself with, let’s say, the final acts of Tolstoy or Walt Whitman. And look back upon their earlier reflections on death. I haven’t started, of course, it might be a few years down the line.”
This talk leads to questions about the heart attack Ackroyd had in 1999, a couple of days after he completed his mammoth biography of London; he recovered after a bypass operation. “My health is good now,” he says. “Apart from the fact I have diabetes, which is not a big deal these days. I’m fine.”
He has lived alone for nearly 30 years, since his long-term partner, Brian Kuhn, a dancer at the Ballet Rambert, died of Aids-related illness in 1994. His solitary life has led to an impression of withdrawal from the world, which he insists could not be further from the truth.
“I’m not unsociable at all. I have one or two good friends. We go out to restaurants every night. I think that impression may just arise from the fact that I spend most of my day working and writing.” One casualty of his stopping drinking is that he no longer accepts invitations to book parties or publishing dinners, “hell on earth” he says, even when drunk, and unthinkable sober.
Has the famous working regime changed? He sighs.
“Well, I get up at 6.30. Have my breakfast, inject myself with insulin. And then begin working. Always from say, eight or nine until six every day. And then go out for dinner and that’s it.”
He has talked in the past of having “monkish” inclinations regarding writing, but those do not extend as far as faith. He was raised as an altar boy, but he lost even a sentimental attachment to the church when he was about 14. Has he ever missed God?
“Not at all. Except, of course, in the books where the sort of appetites or the yearning for the spiritual or the transcendent seems to appear – but not in my life.”
In the “soul” book he refers in passing at one point to the church’s apparent ongoing belief that “homosexuality is incompatible with scripture”. That must be a part of the antipathy he feels?
“No, no,” he says. “I honestly don’t think that affected me at all.” He insists that he doesn’t keep up with the embarrassing and shameful debates in which the church finds new ways to express its homophobia. “No, no, no. I don’t follow in the least. I just don’t find it interesting. It’s sort of beside the point of my own interests.” (He once observed that his mother had warned him off strange men; he was pleased to never have taken her advice.)
* * *
Because of his slightly Blimpish exterior, the bristle of a moustache, it has always been tempting to place Ackroyd as an establishment figure, but he rejects that notion out of hand. If he has a creed, he says, it is of fierce independence. In a “letter to my younger self” he wrote not long ago for the Big Issue, he said “there were gangs of boys on the estate [where I grew up], but I never joined any of them… and that is a principle I have maintained. I have never joined a group, whether of protesters, of letter signatories, of writers – because I was acutely aware that I might lose my individuality.” He became literary editor of the Conservative Spectator magazine when he was 23 and was associated with it for many years – did he feel at home there?
“Not particularly no,” he says. “It was just a job. I had no particular affection for the people I worked with or for any of the causes they represented… ” In the current book you sense his prose and his blood quickening when he details the lives of dissenters and nonconformists, the ranters and the lollards.
“The highly individual voice is very attractive to me,” he says. “Blake, of course, is the obvious example. But there’s plenty of others. John Bunyan. Some were constantly hounded, persecuted, beaten up, imprisoned, defamed, but all of them carried on with a sort of burning light, which led them forward. That’s quite a remarkable quality.”
It’s a courage, or single-mindedness that he fears he lacks in himself; he has no sense of conviction. “The reason I used to drink a lot was I wanted to get over my self-consciousness,” he says. “Drink was one way of removing that burden from me. But I’m much better writing about things I am interested in than conversing about them. I generally don’t know if I really have anything to say – but I can write. And that’s the paradox.”
What is he most proud of ? “My novel Hawksmoor,” he says. “The London biography. I remember those. But I don’t take any pride in them as such, because it strikes me as being, in the long term, no achievement at all… All my convictions float. They’re not real to me in some sense. I’ve just been reading a lot of Montaigne’s essays. I read them all the time. His point seems to be that he has no settled feelings about anything, and that is how I feel.”
But, like Montaigne, he has earned the freedom to keep exploring new ways of expressing that?
“I suppose. I don’t know if I’ve earned it, but I certainly use it. I’m not depressive. And I’m certainly not lonely. I’m always sort of eager to go on. I’ve never lost my appetite or interest in what is going to happen next.” And then, with a smile: “But ask me again in another 25 years.”
The English Soul by Peter Ackroyd is published by Reaktion Books (£20) on 1 March. To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply