Yoko Ono instructs viewers at the Broad

TAKING DIRECTION

Yoko Ono amid her installation Half-a-Room at London's Lisson Gallery in 1967. (Clay Perry / Yoko Ono)

Imagine the clouds dripping. … Collect sounds in your mind that you have overheard throughout the week. … Tape the sound of your child combing.

It’s a sunny Thursday morning, and Yoko Ono is telling me what to do. Figuratively, of course. Ono, who is now 93, no longer travels or gives interviews. But on one wall of the Broad museum, you will find 151 typewritten cards with instructions devised by the artist, such as:

Scream.
1. against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky

A different card directs us to, “Whisper all your secret thoughts to a Pachinko ball.” Yet another demands the impossible: “Think of what the next person is thinking.”

These “instruction pieces,” produced in the early ‘60s, consist of short texts that serve as scores for actions (later collected in her 1964 artist book Grapefruit). They are part of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Southern California, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, which originated at the Tate Modern in London in 2024, and is now on view at the Broad. The show is funny and wry; it also confronts violence and grief. Most importantly, it elucidates the full arc of Ono’s remarkable career — one that was fully formed by 1966, when she met a shaggy-haired bloke who sang with the Beatles.

Typescripts for Grapefruit (c. 1963-64) consists of a series of instructions.
(Joshua White / jwpictures.com / The Broad)

To understand Ono’s work, it is helpful to know a little bit about her trajectory. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she received musical training as a child and hoped to become a composer. When her father told her there were no great female composers, she studied philosophy instead. Music, however, remained present throughout her life: her first husband was composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and together, they were linked to important avant-garde scenes in the US and Japan. In New York, in 1960, she and musician La Monte Young organized a series of events at her downtown loft that brought together experimental poetry, dance, and music, featuring appearances by the likes of dancer Simone Forti and musician Joseph Byrd. In 1962, she and Ichiyanagi performed with John Cage on Cage’s wildly influential tour of Japan.

But music was just one part of a practice that embodied many forms. In the early ‘60s, Ono became associated with Fluxus, led by George Maciunas, an anti-capitalist group whose aim was to create art in which anyone could participate. The work featured visual elements, but also aspects of performance and theater, and could veer from poignant to playful. On view at the Broad is a video of Ono’s groundbreaking performance Cut Piece (1964), in which an audience was invited to snip off her clothes with scissors. At first, participants are reticent, but as the event progresses, they grow bolder (disconcertingly so). And even those who don’t directly participate become witnesses to a woman being slowly denuded — as do we. Watching the video made me grit my teeth.

Other works are more lighthearted in nature — like the all-white chess set that you can play “as long as you can remember where all your pieces are,” she writes in her instruction. A show about taking action, however small, is about more than just looking at what’s in the galleries. As Ono once stated, she saw her instruction pieces as “paintings to be constructed in your head.”

Cut Piece, 1964, as filmed by David and Albert Maysles at Carnegie Recital Hall. (Yoko Ono)

The exhibition will extend beyond the galleries. The Broad’s programming director, Ed Patuto, has organized a slew of related events that will include a participatory Fluxus-inspired ball game designed by artist Gabriel Fontana (landing on four days in late June) and a special musical tribute to Ono featuring Yo La Tengo with Nels Cline, Sleater-Kinney, Yuka Honda, Rufus Wainwright, and others (to be held on August 8th). “We’re trying,” he says, “to give Los Angeles audiences as full a picture of Yoko’s creative practice as possible.”

Patuto has spent months dwelling on Ono’s work, and I was curious to know: For a show about instruction, what are his instructions for seeing the show? He gave me three:

1. “Try Everything. Do Everything.”
Part of absorbing Ono’s work is being willing to engage. After the press preview, I followed the instruction for Ono’s Lighting Piece (1955): “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” The exhibition features a black-and-white video of a match sparking to life, then slowly extinguishing itself. At home, I got to see this combustion in full color: the flame was, in turns, orange, blue, and red. I thought of the fires on which we cook, and the ones that have incinerated California. Ono's instructions are simply poetic ways of asking us to pay attention.

2. “Perform.”
Ono’s Bag Piece (1964) invites viewers to climb into a large black bag and do whatever they want. “By being in the bag, you show the other side of you, which is nothing to do with race, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with, you know, age, actually,” she once said. “You become just a spirit or a soul.” To climb in is to let go of our public profile, of embarrassment, to confront fear. At the Broad, I found myself riveted by the sight of a woman in a black bag moving about the space like a ghost. The piece finds power in vulnerability.

Bag Piece, 1964. (Joshua White / jwpictures.com / The Broad)

3. “Open your mind to change.”
The show features an animation by filmmaker Yōji Kuri titled Aos (1964) that includes a score by Ono. The film plays like a surreal dream, with bodies contained by structures that seem to entrap them. Ono’s score is composed of grunts, groans, and breaths. Days later, it had me mulling the sounds around me — the whir of the printer, a helicopter circling, my dog snoring. This is the soundtrack to my daily life, sounds generally consigned to that category known as “background noise.” But in the wake of Ono’s show, I am finding these ordinary sonic landscapes rather extraordinary. You’ll hear it if you’re paying attention.

👂👂👂

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is on view at the Broad through October 11th; thebroad.org. A listing of the show’s related programming can be found at thebroad.org/events.

TAKING DIRECTION

Yoko Ono amid her installation Half-a-Room at London's Lisson Gallery in 1967. (Clay Perry / Yoko Ono)

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