Step on a painting, climb a ladder, watch a match burn. Much of Yoko Ono's new retrospective at the Tate Modern is "an invitation to collaborate", asking viewers to use their "imaginations, to unlock our minds as to what art – and life – could be", said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard.
"Music of the Mind" contains more than 200 works spanning the remarkable life of the 91-year-old artist and singer. One featured piece is the typescript draft of her conceptual art book "Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings", published in 1964. It stretches across one of the walls and instructs readers to follow her directions, such as hide in her interactive artwork "Bag Piece" or bring their shadows together in "Shadow Piece". Much of the show, said Luke, "is like a conversation with us".
Although she is best known as the wife of John Lennon, her exhibition "is a tautly structured argument for Ono's place as a major figure in conceptual and performance art".
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The curators are careful to "not let Lennon take centre stage", said Juliet Jacques in Frieze. Only one room is dedicated to the couple, showing a video of journalists cross-examining the pair over their collaborative 1969 "Bed Peace", a sit-in protest against the Vietnam War. But even here the spotlight is on Ono's "fearlessness of ridicule".
"Music of the Mind" liberates Ono from simply being "Mrs. Lennon", said Jacques. It follows her artistic journey from the avant-garde scene in Tokyo to her peripheral engagement with the Fluxus movement in 1960s New York all the way to the present day.
Her banned film "Bottoms" (1966), which celebrated various derrières of the art world, may have a "touching innocence" about it now, said Mark Hudson in The Independent, but she is "still addressing the issues of the moment". "Add Colour" (2019), for instance, prompts us to write our "hopes and beliefs" on a blank refugee boat. You might say this is all a bit "hokey and obvious", said Adrian Searle in The Guardian, "but somehow it still touched me".
Despite this, Ono's art, seeped in a hippy hangover mantra to make love, not war, can be "exasperatingly silly and trite", said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Some of Ono's creations, such as the film "FLY" (1970-71), which follows a "sinister black housefly scuttling across a naked woman's body", are simultaneously "absurdist and powerful". Her conceptual paintings can likewise possess a certain "gossamer beauty". But much of it "wouldn't pass muster at a first-year art-school crit". In the end, this mixed bag proves "unsatisfying", said Sooke.
Although the exhibition may turn "a bit whispery woo-woo", said Laura Freeman in The Times, you shouldn't discount it. Freeman admitted to being sceptical at first, but the show "took me by surprise". If there was one thing Ono was always well aware of it was that haters are going to hate. So "don't set out to see this show hostile", said Freeman. "Abandon yourself to the absurd". With a little imagination you can almost send yourself back to New York to join the hipster generation: "It's Sixties, it's twitchy, it's crazily cool."
Tate Modern, until 1 September 2024; tate.org.uk
