Yoko Ono's Radical Lesson for This Time of War

What remains of an artist when you take away the story that precedes her? At the Gropius Bau in Berlin , the exhibition Music of the Mind , created in collaboration with the Tate Modern, tries to answer this question by looking at over seventy years of work by Yoko Ono , a pioneer of participatory art.

Born in Tokyo in 1933 into a cultured and wealthy family, Yoko Ono lived through the twentieth century with the double gaze of someone who lives between East and West. Having moved to the United States in the 1950s, she was one of the first Asian women to establish herself in the New York avant-garde scene, becoming a key figure in the Fluxus movement, which rejected art as an object and privileged gesture, idea, and participation. Today, at 91, she continues to question our relationship with power, peace, and collective care.

Ono has crossed and anticipated many of the most radical currents of the second half of the twentieth century: from Fluxus, precisely, to the relational practices of the 90s and 2000s. For many she is still only "John Lennon's wife" or "the person responsible for the breakup of the Beatles" , at most an accessory icon: labels that vanish in front of the evidence of her works.

Among the first to theorize an art that does not produce objects but collective experiences, her work crosses installations, performances , videos, short texts, instructions to follow or imagine. Always with one intent: to transform the spectator into a protagonist, an architect in his turn. Many elements familiar today in contemporary art - audience participation, call to action, absence of a "finished" work - pass through her.

From the first two installations, the visitor is in fact called to deal with the present, the community and responsibility. A poster stands out in the atrium of the Gropius Bau: PEACE is POWER . Below, small but symbolic, the Wish Tree for Berlin , active since 1996, invites you to hang handwritten wishes. Two key elements emerge: collective creation, the desire for peace and justice. Together, we create the work, like the world. The same spirit animates the historic campaign War is Over! (If You Want It) , which Ono created with Lennon in 1969: white posters, wishes in black. Peace is possible, but it must be wanted.

The exhibition does not seek denials or revenge: there is only the artist, with her work. An uncompromising retrospective , which restores Ono in her entirety: before her husband, beyond her husband, even with her husband. When John Lennon met her in 1966 at an exhibition, he was struck by a work that invited him to climb a ladder and look into a suspended lens. At the top was the word YES . That yes, poetic and simple, seduced him. Everything in her is reversal and an invitation to action.

The exhibition is made of silences and clamor. Of minimal details that demand attention, and of performances that are impossible to ignore . The Instructions for Paintings are true instructions, to be activated, lived, performed. Some dot the walls of the exhibition with simple and imaginative messages: “Draw a map to get lost”, “Listen to a heartbeat”, “Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky”.

Short sentences that stimulate thought. Ono’s art is relationship: with the public, with herself, with the environment. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist – among the first to systematically collect her instructions – defined her work as a radical “art of the possible.” A space in which the public stops looking and starts doing.

The feeling of displacement and density is found in the Blue Room Event (1966). An apparently empty room, filled with imaginative exercises . The invitation is to stay until the “blue room event”, that is, until the room becomes blue. It is this room that, after the atrium, opens the exhibition path: consistently with the artist's logic of reversal, the floor becomes the ceiling and vice versa. The installation, curated by Juliet Bingham and Stephanie Rosenthal , follows a thematic rather than chronological logic, restoring coherence and continuity to Ono's work. Each room is a space to be activated, rather than observed.

Whether the room actually turns blue is of little importance: what matters is imagining it, wishing for it. One of the microscopic captions reads: “This line is part of a very large circle” . A tiny piece of evidence that encapsulates the meaning of the exhibition: what you have known so far is only a fragment of the circle that is Yoko Ono.

The body, like words, is for Ono a space of meaning: fragile, exposed, collective. It becomes even more so in movement. In Film No. 4 (Bottoms) from 1966, the buttocks of dozens of people walk by. The message? To restore the body to its natural dignity . Even more disconcerting is Cut Piece , where the audience is invited to cut pieces of fabric from the artist's dress. A gesture that denounces the passivity of the spectator, the selfishness of the creators, and becomes a political, almost humanitarian act. Even more intense is Freedom (1970), where Ono tries several times to take off her bra, with anger and frustration: a struggle to free herself from a system that imprisons bodies and minds.

Beyond art and participation, there is the will to liberate others too. This is the meaning of one of the strongest works: Add Colour (Refugee Boat) . A white hull occupies the centre of a room now completely covered with blue writings, left by visitors. Because participating, here, means taking a stand . What remains is a chaotic heap that resembles a collective prayer. Blue like the sea and sadness.

The exhibition closes with a secular altar to motherhood : My Mommy is Beautiful , a white room covered with post-it notes dedicated to mothers, biological or symbolic.

Misunderstood, ridiculed for decades by the press, Ono has resisted with firmness and irony, anticipating languages ​​that only today find full recognition. The catalogue also collects some of her rarest “instructions” and reflections on her profound influence on entire generations.

Seventy years after her first instructions, Yoko Ono does not ask for answers, but gestures. Not solutions, but imagination , participation , responsibility . Take a piece of Berlin sky (as in pieces of sky ) and take it away. Reclaim one fragment at a time. Everything is line, in an immense circle.