Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

In 1945, as the spring air of the Japanese countryside poured in through the unfinished roof of their house, twelve-year-old Yoko Ono and her little brother, Keisuke, scions of the fabulously powerful Yasuda family, stared into the blue sky and starved. Their money was worthless, and their rural neighbors had little pity for the city children driven to their Nagano house by war. Their mother, Isoko, had sent them and their baby sister, Setsuko, away from Tokyo after the US dropped 1,665 pounds of incendiary bombs on the capital on March 9 of that year. That night Isoko gathered her two youngest and fled into their garden bunker. Yoko was sick, too febrile to move, and was left in her room as the smell of burning flesh smothered the city.

Ono’s childhood was somber at the best of times. When she fell, her mother instructed her staff of nannies not to lift her up so that she would learn to help herself; in a 1974 essay in Bungei Shunju, she remembered “several women in kimono staring at me without offering a hand while I was trying to get up from the ground.” She saw her bank executive father by appointment. But at twelve years old she rose to the challenge of caring for her little siblings in Nagano, bartering antiques and jewels for rice and begging for food. In his intimate, generous new biography, Yoko, the journalist David Sheff relates that she saw her brother looking despondent and decided that they would imagine a menu together. He quotes an interview she gave in the late 1990s: “Lying on our backs, looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof, we exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive.”

A neglected heiress who watched her city and her family’s wealth collapse in less than a year, a child for whom no thing or person was reliable, turned to her imagination not to escape her reality but to soften it. The power and permanence of the material world was, she could already see, greatly overstated. “There maybe a dream that two dream together,” she writes in her indispensable “To the Wesleyan People,” what she called a “footnote” to a performance and lecture she gave at Wesleyan College in 1966. “But there is no chair that two see together.”

When Sheff interviewed Ono’s brother about that day in Nagano, Kei described it as her first work of conceptual art. “Eat this imaginary apple,” he remembered her saying. “It will fill you up.” And “it did fill her up,” he told Sheff. “She was good at imagining—but those words didn’t fill me up.” The question was how to share the dream.

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Even before the war Ono moved often: from Japan to San Francisco in 1935, back to Japan in 1937, to New York state in 1940, and again to Japan in 1941, a year before the US began forcing its Japanese citizens into internment camps. Her father’s bank then transferred him to Hanoi, where he became a prisoner of war. The rest of the Ono family were on their own for four years before Isoko sent the three children to Nagano. Although their mother soon joined the children in the countryside, she often returned to Tokyo to bring back more valuables to barter, and Yoko quickly took on burdens beyond her years. When Isoko deemed it safe to move back to Tokyo in late 1945, Sheff writes, the socialite lacked the wherewithal to rent a truck and hire a driver, tasks which fell to her eldest daughter.

After the war, the loneliness Ono felt and the tragedy she had witnessed bore down on her. She was very sensitive to sound and would cover her ears with sanitary pads to barricade against the noise of the world. Later, to quiet her head, she would spend hours in the dark lighting matches and watching them burn out. These were practical experiments in living; she attempted suicide for the first time during these years. Her musical training was exceptional and extensive, and she wanted to become a composer, but was discouraged by her father, a former pianist who believed composing was too difficult for women. Instead, in 1952 she became the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at the elite Gakushuin University. Her family, meanwhile, moved back to Scarsdale, New York.

She rebelled against the intellectual conservatism at Gakushuin, and after two semesters she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, a fifteen-minute drive from her parents. Sarah Lawrence was far more liberal, with no grades or set curriculum. Classmates described Ono to Sheff as an intense, serious student, but even at Sarah Lawrence she felt constricted. After discovering Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone works, she spent hours in the library studying them and composing her own. Her professor, remarking that her work was starting to get “far out,” told her that there was a group of musicians in the city who she might find interesting. A whole new education began to unfurl on the weekends, during which she hung out in cafés, watched Genet and Beckett plays, and met her first husband, the soon-to-be-acclaimed composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.

She dropped out of Sarah Lawrence, too, but not before creating the first of the “instruction” pieces that would scaffold her lifelong art practice and remain some of her most exhibited works. Scrawled in her notes in 1953, Secret Piece reads: “Decide on one note you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m to 8 a.m. in summer.” Although she didn’t exhibit any art for several more years, works like Secret Piece privately anticipated the “event scores” that in the 1960s came to be the predominant medium of Fluxus, an art movement meant to, in the words of its founder George Maciunas, “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art.”¹ Picking up the torch from Dada, the Fluxus artists rejected the art world’s commodity fetishism and strove to fuse art with life by relying on ephemeral and immaterial methods, often in the mode of performances or events. In 1955 Ono wrote Lighting Piece, instructions for anyone else looking to quiet the noise in their head: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.”

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On the top floor of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in a windowless, L-shaped white room just off the first gallery, handwritten koan-like sentences line the walls at eye level. At the entrance, the first two inscriptions read: “The Blue Room Event y.o. 1966” and “This room is bright blue.”

This room is the best point of entry into “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to show in the US to date. On a warm Saturday, like the day I visited, the show does brisk business, but some visitors won’t give The Blue Room Event more than a moment, skimming on to pieces more sensible (literally) or less literal (ostensibly). But those who are curious or simply patient may sit with the statement and hold the note of blue in their mind. Maybe the imagined blue lingers, like the immersive blue of the ocean or the sky or a 404 page. Or maybe it just flashes across the mind, gently suggesting that the room could, somehow, be otherwise. Ono doesn’t impose, she invites; she doesn’t restrict (it’s “blue,” not cyan or indigo or cobalt), she offers. This is how she plays the music of the mind.

The instructions continue inside:

The statements are variously abstract, challenging, and playful. “This is the floor” is printed on the ceiling; “this is the ceiling” is on the floor. “This line is part of a very large circle” appears underneath a perfectly straight yet clearly hand-drawn charcoal line, smudged as if viewers had reached out to assure themselves of something. “This room moves at the same speed as the clouds” is delightful in Chicago, of which my first impression, gormlessly looking up at the clouds whipping by its towers, was of a floating city whisking through the sky. “This room glows in the dark while we are asleep” takes us out of time; “Stay until the room is blue” deposits us firmly in it. 

Imagine things were otherwise. Imagine you were not in a plain sunless room; imagine you had an apple. After all, Blue Room is an “event,” not a sculpture. Walls shrinking and expanding or simply evaporating—there is a sense of being in a shapeshifting, unmoored space. A person could think their way into this open terrain at any time, but prompting helps. Somewhere between a dozen and a thousand times a day I walk past a wall telling me to do something: a porny AI-slop ad for Skechers or sidewalk chalk imploring me to love myself. This room dials down the noise and sets the terms for tuning in—pay the time and attention, and together we will make art by first principles. Stay until the room is blue.

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The Blue Room is an amuse-bouche. To enter the main galleries (and to leave them) you have to pass through a throat-like room where two of Ono’s earliest works play on a loop. A hidden speaker overhead plays Telephone Piece (1964), a recording of several rings followed by Ono’s voice as she picks up: “Hello?” (In some earlier exhibitions of Telephone Piece, a phone installed in the gallery would periodically ring, and any visitor who picked up would find Ono live on the line.) Projected on the wall is Eyeblink (1966), a four-and-a-half-minute film of one of Ono’s eyes. The museum insists: Yoko Ono is in the room.

In most of her early art showings, Yoko Ono really was in the room. In 1960 she rented a huge loft with no hot water or electricity on Chambers Street and, along with La Monte Young and other avant-garde artists and organizers, used it as an exhibition and performance space. The Chicago galleries begin with Painting to be Stepped On, a small sumi-ink-blacked canvas from 1961 placed, with a title-bearing placard, on the floor. During the Chambers Street parties, the canvas would get scuffed and marked as guests walked around. At the MCA a helpful plaque on the wall assures conscientious visitors they are indeed allowed to step on the painting, which must have been newly prepared for this show and is lightly marked by ginger footfalls.

Painting to be Stepped On was among the works Ono included in her first solo show, at Maciunas’s AG Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1961. “The works on display all had some function,” Ono wrote in a 2008 reminiscence. Smoke Painting, for example, required a canvas to be lit with a cigarette, and was complete only when it had burned to ash. Waterdrop Painting (Version 1) called for a water bottle, pinpricked for water to slowly drip out, to hang above a canvas. (Later versions allow for wine, ink, and blood instead of water, and for a stone instead of a canvas: “The painting ends when a hole is drilled in the stone with the drops.”) The audience had to be prepared: “Whenever they came,” she remembered, “I started to explain what the function of each painting was. And I thought, well, I can’t do that.”

So she pared back the art-objects into written instructions: the “Instructions for Paintings” series, which featured no paint. The artist tried to extricate herself as much as possible: she did not own a typewriter, so to “avoid the emotion of her own handwriting,” as the wall text puts it, she asked Ichiyanagi to write out nearly two dozen of her instruction-poems in neatly penned Japanese. Painting for the Burial reads:

On the night of the full moon, place
a canvas in the garden from 1 a.m. till
dawn.
When the canvas is dyed thoroughly in
rose with the morning light, dismember
or fold it and bury.

The ways of burial: 1) Bury it in the
garden and place a marker with a number on it.
2) Sell it to the rag man.
3) Throw it in the garbage.

Now the work was realized, at least in part, by being seen. The instructions tighten the knot of artist, art, and audience into an almost claustrophobic intimacy: Ono is speaking to you directly; only you can play Secret Piece, and when you do, even in your head, the circuit is closed and the art is made whole. The texts, crisp and light, reveal enough of themselves to resist total abstraction, but they still showcase a luminous restraint. 

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Not far from the “Instructions for Paintings,” on the facing wall, hang all 151 original typescript pages of Grapefruit, published in 1964, which collects instruction-poems from throughout her burgeoning career in a five-and-a-half-square-inch book, opening with Secret Piece. (There’s some repetition. Painting for the Burial is reproduced almost exactly, among others.) It’s an art object and a poetry collection and a talisman at once. Cyndi Lauper opened her 2012 memoir with an account of leaving home at seventeen with just “a toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple, and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit.”² The book works differently affixed to a wall than it does on the page, somewhat daunting in its scale and simultaneity, the way a novel published as a codex wouldn’t quite be the same written in one line on a milelong scroll. At Chicago it’s supplemented by a vitrine of ephemera from around its release (including a “Birth Announcement” that debuted both Grapefruit and Ono’s daughter with her second husband), which adds to the sense that the curators, realizing it was impossible to capture the book’s full effect in a museum setting, instead decided to treat it as an artifact of its time.

In between the “Instructions” and Grapefruit is a film the Maysles brothers shot of a 1965 performance of Cut Piece, in which Ono sits, straight-backed, and invites the audience to come onstage and cut off scraps of her clothing to keep. She performed it at least five times between 1964 and 1966 in Kyoto, New York, London, and Tokyo. The film, shot at the New York performance, captures her stoic forward gaze and the participants’ respect and ritual solemnity, at least until a group of men begin returning over and over with clear ill intent, grinning to one another and infusing the atmosphere with menace. Decades later Eleanor Antin recalled Carolee Schneemann going up to one of them and slapping him in the face, “which didn’t faze him one bit. He was after Yoko—the offered sacrifice.” When one of them moved to cut her bra strap, she subtly signaled to the wings, and the curtain fell.

Cut Piece has largely been received as a feminist gesture, but Ono conceived of it as an act of profound generosity. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give, the artist gives what the audience chooses to take,” she wrote in 1974. “I went onto the stage wearing the best suit I had. To think that it would be OK to use the cheapest clothes because it was going to be cut anyway would be wrong.” It was, ironically, the fact that a fraction of the audience responded to the piece with malice that transformed Cut Piece into an undeniably feminist work.

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In 1966, after years of disdain from the art establishment and at times her own audiences, Ono’s career finally started to take off. She had performed an experimental blend of art and music four years earlier in Tokyo to poor reviews; by contrast, when John Cage toured Japan with his similarly cerebral and dissonant work, he stirred up a level of adoration that became known as “John Cage shock.” But in the summer of 1966 she was invited to London for the Destruction in Art Symposium and, discovering greater interest in her work there than she’d found in New York or Tokyo, she stayed for two years.

She was setting up before a show of “unfinished paintings and objects” at Indica Gallery, in St. James’s, when the owner let in a curious celebrity. Ono was, by all accounts, relatively unfamiliar with the Beatles, and was affronted when the most famous man in the world asked to hammer a nail into Painting to Hammer a Nail before the rest of the public had the chance. The gallerist urged her to let him; she reluctantly offered to sell him a nail for five shillings. John Lennon, in response, offered her five imaginary coins in exchange for an imaginary nail. Ono had met someone “who played the same game I played.”

Just as Ono was soon in the Beatles’ studio (at Lennon’s insistence—Sheff hazards that Lennon would have left the Beatles long before if Ono hadn’t been there “literally holding his hand”), Lennon became very present in hers. Half-A-Room is a bedroom of white-painted furniture sawed in half to literalize both heartbreak and a world that at the molecular level is “always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging.” Lennon’s contribution was a row of empty jars labeled to indicate that they contain the missing halves.

Ono had been composing and performing experimental music since her time at Sarah Lawrence, but her output increased dramatically after she met Lennon. (Her reputation received another fateful boost when Ornette Coleman not only performed with her but played her own score at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968.) The couple formed the Plastic Ono Band and produced pioneering avant-garde music with a maverick proto-punk sound. Criticism abounded. Lester Bangs infamously wrote that “Yoko Ono couldn’t carry a tune in a briefcase”; considering her lifelong classical training, it’s clear she had greater ambitions than carrying a tune. On “Why,” the first song on Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, she stretches and warps her voice into something nearly geometric, sometimes overshadowing the sizzling guitar, at other times hard to distinguish from it. With austere, repetitive lyrics, her voice itself sounds like an instrument—less Cocteau Twins and more qawwali.³ Musicians ranging from Laurie Anderson to Thurston Moore to David Byrne have named her as an inspiration; and, of course, Ono was the driving creative force—uncredited for years—behind the most successful song of Lennon’s solo career.⁴

All this while Ono was met with staggering racism and sexism. Beatles fans would camp outside the couple’s New York apartment and scream slurs. Esquire magazine gave a stunningly bigoted headline to its 1970 feature. It was common for fans, friends, and other Beatles to complain that, essentially, Yoko Ono was not a demure blonde woman who disappeared into the background.⁵ Even today car bumpers sport “STILL PISSED AT YOKO” stickers, not to mention what’s going on in the YouTube comments.

Ono’s reputation was swallowed by the black-hole celebrity of her third husband. At the same time, her second husband had taken their young daughter and gone off the grid, disappearing into a cult from which her daughter didn’t emerge for years. On “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow),” a 1969 B-side, Ono’s voice ripples with supple power over a lush guitar ensemble from Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton; when the track reappeared two years later on her LP Fly, the title’s three repeated words would come to sound like a wild expression of grief over her missing child. Meanwhile, having earlier fought heroin addiction, Ono and Lennon now spent months overcoming a dependency on methadone. But they ultimately managed to marshal their (near-infinite) resources to eke out a kind of domestic bliss: Lennon became a stay-at-home dad to their son, Sean, who was born in 1975, while Ono continued making her art and took over the business affairs of ex-Beatledom.

Then Lennon was shot, and the ballad was over.

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Lennon’s murder is not foregrounded in the exhibition, but grief is alive in every room. It animates works made even before his death, illuminating the project that thrums underneath all Ono’s art: living on in an incomprehensible, bitterly lonely world. Shadow Piece (1963) directs us, “Put your shadows together until they become one.” A large blank canvas is sharply illuminated, such that one person can cast a shadow and another can trace it in soft pencil, accumulating a thousand ghostly silhouettes. It’s one of the few audience-made objects delicate and haunting enough to live beyond its instruction, and one of the few you can’t take part in alone. In SKY TV (1966), one of the first-ever works of video art, a cathode-ray TV, hooked up to a closed-circuit camera on the roof of the museum, streams a live view of the sky.

As the show advances into Ono’s later work, the coverage thins. There are some notable absences—none of her later bronzes, which immortalize her ephemeral work of the 1960s, for instance, made it into the show—but they are rarely unwelcome.⁶ (Some responses to the commercialism of the 1980s feel, now as then, indistinguishable from the commercialism of the 1980s.) Several omissions in particular are merciful: I spotted neither the song “Woman is the N[—] of the World” nor the film Rape (1969), in which Ono enlists two men with a camera to follow a random woman around the city as she first walks away, then gets increasingly anxious, and finally collapses in terror when cornered in her apartment.

Add Colour (Refugee Boat) (2016) reimagines her Add Colour pieces from the 1960s. It could conceivably also be called The Blue Room Event: visitors enter a large, once-white room with a once-white boat in the center and a handful of markers in various blues. Here they need no encouragement, and the boat and walls are drowned in missives ranging from “Simon + Marjan Best Love Story Ever ♥️♥️♥️” to countless iterations of FREE PALESTINE and FUCK ICE.

Grapefruit is also brought into the present, every half hour or so on select afternoons, by a troupe that performs its instructions one at a time. I watched as a performer interpreting Sweep Piece—instruction: “Sweep”—maneuvered a broom around a roughly twenty-foot-wide circle subtly demarcated as a stage by a textured floor tape, the sweeping beginning to feel like a kind of invisible drawing once the minimal dust and debris had been cleared: the shhhp, shhhp of the twig broom’s bristles scraping across the floor, the fwwwip at the end of a long stroke. Listening to the sound of the small wooden plank in Wood Piece—which directs the performer to “make different sounds” with a piece of wood “by using different angles of your hand in hitting it” and “hitting different parts of it”—as it oscillated between hesitant taps and booming clatters that surprised the performer as much as the museumgoers two floors down, I was reminded how much of living is exploratory touch.

The simplicity and humor of Ono’s work come alive easily in willing hands. In Laundry Piece—“In entertaining your guests, bring out your laundry of the day and explain to them about each item. How and when it became dirty and why, etc.”—a performer dumps out her laundry bag: “This isn’t soiled at all. I took it out of the package this morning. It smells like chemicals. It’s soiled by virtue of how it’s made.” In a reprise a few hours later: “Who wants to talk with me about my own dirty underwear? That’s not something sixty-year-old women do. It’s not sexy.” And: “These are the ugliest bras I’ve ever seen. They’re the undergarments that make me feel most like myself.”

There is pleasure in the sound of broom bristles and the airing of small embarrassments. The instructions make of simple acts what a prism makes of sunlight. Also in “To the Wesleyan People”:

The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone and the history is forever increasing its volume. The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all—to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem.

Wood Piece is marvelous because it all but promises single-note boredom, even during the first minute or so of watching it performed, but if you dutifully pin your mind on the spare sounds of wood knocked around, you may feel your attention fracture and skitter about. This sound resembles a hesitant knock on a half-open door, that one a hand slamming angrily on a dining table, this one a listless caress of a scratched-up school desk. Banish your mind and search for the vacuum; still, each sound has its own note and timbre, every touch and noise a something instead of a nothing, the event steadily increasing in complexity until there is a symphony to consider. Maybe attempting Body Piece (“stand in the evening light until you become transparent or until you fall asleep”) would unspool the cacophony further and bring you closer to complete relaxation, that stillness surely lurking near the wild heart of life. Or maybe night would come and you’d fall asleep. That’s your problem.

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The show takes its name from a pearl of a piece playing quietly on loop in the performance gallery, a short film documenting Ono’s 1967 show “Music of the Mind” in Liverpool, where she orchestrated a performance called Fly Piece. On stage, Ono introduces a ladder: “Anyone who is interested is welcome to come onto the stage and try to fly off.” Several climb and jump, to laughter and applause. The audience is smiling, looking at the camera, laughing, looking at and whispering with one another. Are they delighted? Uncomfortable? Thrilled? Polite? Are they friends, strangers, art critics? The atmosphere is genial; this is a joke, and it’s also life.⁷

Music of the Mind is worth the five-minute watch, not least because it’s a snapshot of Ono’s artistic reception before it was polluted by fame and slander. Although she has continued to make work at a furious pace well into her nineties, it took decades for the art world again to take notice. Her work was critically reconsidered in the early 2000s by scholars like Alexandra Munroe, who staged her first American retrospective, Yes Yoko Ono, at the Japan Society in 2000 with the scholar Jon Hendricks. A decade ago she had her first official show at MoMA, where in 1971 she had staged a guerilla show called Museum of Modern (F)art.

Now, over fifty years after Ono changed the trajectory of conceptual art, she has her laurels: a Golden Lion, two Grammys, career-spanning retrospectives across the globe, and the closest thing we’ll get to an authorized biography in her lifetime. Sheff opens Yoko with a confession of his partiality: he and Ono were friends for decades, starting when he was assigned, as a young reporter, to follow her and Lennon around for more than two weeks in 1980 for Playboy, Lennon’s last major interview. Despite the rosy cast of friendship, Sheff is an old pro: he carried out rigorous research and writes with an even hand, not omitting unsavory details. But Yoko is ultimately meant, at least in large part, to redress decades of borderline libelous writing about Ono’s life. Its appearance is only the latest sign that her reputation has emerged from the casket of celebrity widowhood; in 2023 the artist David Horvitz made a viral T-shirt reading “JOHN LENNON BROKE UP FLUXUS.” It’s a reparative taunt for many Ono fans, although one that Yoko herself didn’t welcome—she has spent more than half her life working to preserve the legacy of her late love. Horvitz’s next T-shirt featured the cease-and-desist letter sent by lawyers representing Ono and the estate of John Lennon.

But even her own celebrity burdens her work, which remains challenging and elusive, an easy punchline for a lazy onlooker. It seems pat to express optimism about surging interest in an oeuvre that asks for but doesn’t demand sustained, humble attention, that essential prayer-like thing of which we’ve been stripped. But one can nonetheless hope that this show, which takes pains to open her work up to everyone from Midwestern children to well-versed admirers, relieves the art of the unspoken edict to redeem its maker, to both raise her above her malignment and justify her eminence. Sheff writes that Ono has often been accused of naiveté, and quotes her son’s response: “Her naiveté is hard won.” So, too, is the pleasure of the music of the mind.