Yoko Ono: To the Light, Serpentine Gallery - review

Going far beyond Beatlemania, Ono proves she's a genuinely original and enduringly significant artist
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25 June 2012

Prejudices against Yoko Ono run deep. As I stood outside the Serpentine Gallery last night looking at her huge all-white chess set Play It by Trust (1966/2012), amid the verdant lushness of Kensington Gardens, two young guys asked who it was by. When I told them it was Ono’s work, one said: “I thought she just split up the Beatles.”

But Ono’s relationship with John Lennon did far more harm to her than it did to the Fab Four. As this, her first show in a London public institution for more than a decade, proves, she was a radical artist: a pioneer of performance art, video art, conceptual art and installation, a core member of the Fluxus movement, with links to the great avant garde figures of her time, such as John Cage. Yet ever since she met Lennon in 1966, she has been viewed through the prism of their relationship.

The Beatle knew as much when he quipped that she was “the world’s most famous unknown artist”. But things have begun to change over the past decade, and the Serpentine’s thoroughly absorbing and beautifully staged show takes another step towards an accurate acknowledgement of her achievements.

The show begins solemnly, with a room of recent and old work dominated by the theme of war, accompanied by the looped sound of a screeching hawk. This is the dark antechamber for an otherwise light-filled show, dominated by Ono’s groundbreaking early work.

Among a cluster of mid-Sixties conceptual sculptures is Ceiling Painting (1966), a ladder which leads to a framed sheet of paper on the ceiling, with a dangling magnifying glass, allowing you to read the word “yes”, typed in tiny letters on the paper. Alas, health and safety forbids us from doing so here.

Amaze (1971/2012) is a Perspex labyrinth leading to a hollow black box filled with water with a mirrored base — a journey into the self. The installation is a play of reflections, mirroring us as well as the videos filling a nearby wall, like Fly (1970), in which the eponymous insect slowly and rather beautifully traces the contours of a naked body, and an utterly infectious slow-motion film of Lennon breaking into a smile.

Much here continues to extol hippie-ish peace-and-love messages, occasionally rather too sentimentally, but Ono’s tougher side provides the real highlight. In Cut Piece (1964), she sits centre stage, mute and largely expressionless, as audience members cut away at her clothing with scissors. I have seen the video of this performance on numerous occasions, and it never loses its power and magnetism — Ono is vulnerable yet defiant, the audience tender at times, cocksure at others. Stark and simple, it is provocative both as social commentary and as a radical artistic gesture. A recent re-performance is shown opposite this original film, but the mood is different, and the audience’s reverence makes the cutting almost more excruciating.

Cut Piece is Ono’s masterpiece but there is plenty more here that proves she is a genuinely original and enduringly significant artist.

Yoko Ono: to the light runs from tomorrow until Sept 9 (020 7402 6075, serpentinegallery.org).

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