50. YOKO ONO: A SPACE BETWEEN MAXIMUM SILENCE.

YOKO ONO: Music of the Mind - Tate Modern - LONDON.

Yoko Ono, Sky TV, 1966. Photo Cathy Carver. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum.

A typewriter - embossing without a ribbon.

A call for response where no reply is needed.

'Hello this is Yoko'

A harmonious gloom of shadows cast from a caste of chairs requires no impression.

Paintings of unfinished shadows, of water droplets - of whispered - imagined instructions and collected skies.

'A frame of mind, an attitude, determination, and imagination that springs naturally out of the necessity of the situation.’ Y.O.

John Cage and Yoko Ono performing ‘Music Walk’, Tokyo 1962. Image courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation.

Cut pieces away - while I watch you - while you watch me and while we never make eye contact. To hold these scissors and to practice an invited assault while an instinct is over-ridden - while my heart beats faster. Take whatever you want to take not what I want to give.

To slice through a life with a katana precision, as to reek the domestic - ridiculous, unliveable - when viewed in surprised retrospection - with an understanding of maximum silence.

To soak hands in this stillness and stare out - through the fourth wall, looking for the collaborator, the other half of a puzzle never to be solved or completed. These pieces await and yet it is the space between which is more present, more painful than these creamy-coated souvenir souvenirs - these severed props which began as a comedy and conclude as a tragedy.

An invisible city built in perspex, audacious in adolescence - now chipped with the wounds of removal and the evidence of provenance.

This distilled metropolis, whose light-less structures cast an impression, not a shadow. 

Atop this rooftop penthouse - rests an apple totem - perpetual in life - symbolic in renewal.

The iconography of the implausible, of egoless empire - of tart temptation - a readygrown - readymade, whose skin will never wrinkle and whose flesh will never feed.

Installation view of Apple 1966 from Yoko Ono One Woman Show, 1960-1971, MoMA, NYC, 2015. Photo © Thomas Griesel.

​From these imagined constructs - a view can be felt, a horizonless landscape sustained, as a scudding of daydreams fill forever blue, where 'you can eat all the clouds in the sky' and where the sunsets last for days - and yet an internal starless darkness persists - as molecules of ink - circulate as a pointillist's insistence, in a tapping which collectively leaves a tattooing trace and a jarring humm in this silence - to freckle a skin of touches.

'Molecules are always at the verge of half disappearing and half emerging...to wear different hats as our heartbeat is always one.' Y.O.

YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND - Tate Modern - Until 1st September 2024.

Special Thanks Anna Overment and Kyung Hwa Shon.