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:

Esteban Jefferson, May 25th, 2020 at Goldsmiths CCA ★★★☆☆

Esteban Jefferson

May 25th, 2020

★★★☆☆

This exhibition is a warning to would-be propagandists: trust art at your peril.

Aziza Kadyri, the Uzbekistan pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Aziza Kadyri

Don't Miss the Cue

★★★★☆

This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.

Justin Fitzpatrick, Ballotta at Seventeen ★★★★★

Justin Fitzpatrick

Ballotta

★★★★★

The reward for taking part in this experiment of life is ascension to the holy orders. 

Aleksandar Denić, The Serbian pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Aleksandar Denić

Exposition Coloniale

★★★☆☆

Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke.

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Aria Dean, Abattoir at ICA ★★★☆☆

Aria Dean

Abattoir

★★★☆☆

Visuals of her own making overpower the artist.

×