Yoko Ono

Music of the Mind

★★★☆☆

On until 1 September 2024

In the kind of Sunday afternoon daze visitors experience when visiting the museum, one may mistakenly queue up to enter Tate’s seemingly permanent installation of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms instead of Yoko Ono’s retrospective two floors below. Either show is as full of punters as it is of signs, one no different from the last, as though they were phantom mirror reproductions. 

Ono’s ‘pieces’, so numerous that they are cramped even in the largest of Tate’s gallery complexes, manifest as sets of instructions, documents, and the odd living object. “Count the number of lights in the city every day”, bids one. Call an apple an apple, rhymes another. Fly. Imagine. Remember.

The museum craves poetry. Trying to rewrite the oversights of art history which failed to credit Ono’s conceptual word salad, Tate accepts her instructions as Apollinarian rain. Grinning with recognition under John and Yoko’s “War is Over” banner, it wants to believe that such banalities might still change the world.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. For all of conceptual art’s enduring populism, the worth of Ono’s practice lies today in an academic argument about her influence on art school undergraduates and performance art divas like Marina Abramović. This show might sell tickets. But it won’t change the weather.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Geumhyung Jeong, Under Construction at ICA ★☆☆☆☆

Geumhyung Jeong

Under Construction

★☆☆☆☆

This tech-optimism might have entertained gallery-goers twenty years ago.

Sosa Joseph, Pennungal at David Zwirner ★★★★★

Sosa Joseph

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

★★★★★

The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

The Otolith Group, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another at greengrassi ★★☆☆☆

The Otolith Group

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another

★★☆☆☆

The exhibition is a private memorial for Etel Adnan accessible only to members of the art world’s inner circle. And that’s a pity.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, It Will End In Tears at Barbican Curve ★★☆☆☆

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

It Will End In Tears

★★☆☆☆

With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.

Celia Hempton, Transplant at Phillida Reid ★★★☆☆

Celia Hempton

Transplant

★★★☆☆

Sense finally returns only outside the gallery.

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