On Sunday myself and The Concepts In My Art went to Tate Modern to see the big Yoko Ono exhibition. It was AMAZING.
It started off brilliantly in the entrance area with the sound of a phone ringing, being picked up, and then Yoko saying "It's Yoko" (or sometimes the same but in Japanese). Personally I think "It's Yoko" would have been a better title than "Music Of The Mind", which is what it was actually called, because the whole rest of the exhibition was basically her saying "It's Yoko!" in the form of ART.
As we stepped into the first room we found lots of people looking Serious because it was Serious Conceptual Art, but as we went along from room to room everyone's faces very gradually changed as it became abundantly clear that Yoko is VERY FUNNY INDEED. I don't mean that in a disrespectful way at all - the more you saw the more it became clear that she has a COLOSSAL sense of humour and was inviting us all to join in.
She was ALSO inviting us to join in with lots of the exhibits too, and so we did. I had a go in one of the bags, we shook hands through "Painting To Shake Hands", hammered in nails, outlined shadows and so on and so forth, up to and including taking a piece of SKY near the end. It was BEAUTIFUL throughout, bouncing with ideas that were a) LOVELY and b) INCLUSIVE. So often when we go to these here conceptual art exhibitions the entire point seems to be for the ARTISTE to put out how much cleverer they are than we mere plebs who can't possibly understand the Serious Political Points they are making. Yoko was very much inviting everyone in to join her and it was ACE.
My favourite parts were the section about the exhibition she did at the Museum of Modern Art, which a) she didn't tell them about and b) she called "Museum of Modern (F)art", and the instruction for "Painting for a Broken Sewing Machine" which said "Place a broken sewing-machine into a glass tank ten or twenty times larger than the machine. Once a year on a snowy evening, place the tank in the town square and have every one throw stones at it." It made I LARF!
Weirdly, for me at least, the bits with AN ACTUAL BEATLE in were some of the least fun, especially the pictures of the Plastic Ono Band playing live, as you could FEEL the other musicians being grumpy. This was, I guess, partly understandable as she WAS someone from a whole other world stepping in as an equal with the person they all looked up to, but a lot of the coverage did demonstrate that the main thing was that she was a WOMAN and a FOREIGN one at that.
Some of that attitude still seems to be about - one of the main disappointments of Craig Brown's Beatles book of a few years ago was that it seemed to fully buy into the idea that Yoko was a laughable posho "artist" who broke up the Beatles - so it was wonderful to see her being appreciated this way, both by virtue of it being a HUGE exhibition in our biggest modern art museum and ALSO by the faces of the other people who were clearly DELIGHTED by it all. It was GRATE!
