Music of the Mind Yoko Ono

 Yoko Ono ‘Music of the Mind’ 2024

This book accompanied the exhibition at Tate Modern.  Feb to Sept 2024,

‘Music of the Mind’ has contributions by various writers who give their own takes on Yoko Ono’s art and it includes pieces she wrote  and some of her lyrics. There are photographs, many including Yoko as a young artist, and the emphasis is on telling her early life and her most famous works from the sixties and seventies.
Her pages of the words ‘Peace is Power’ in various languages printed on turquoise blue paper form one section.

I attended an extensive exhibition by Yoko Ono  at The Baltic in 2008 which included much of the same work but I could not find it mentioned in this book.

I have also read about her life before but there are new pieces of information here such as her early interest in drama at school , that she was treated in a mental hospital in Japan for a month 1962, and that she and John Lennon performed with jazz musicians in Cambridge 1969.

There is some emphasis on her feminist views with thought provoking quotations such as,
‘If you keep hammering anti-abortion
We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men
Every day you’re killing living sperms , in billions
So how do you feel about that, brother.’

I would have liked more about  her more recent work, which has continued and goes on into her nineties.

What a phenomena she is. She seems to have been able to join the art scene in New York with ease, coming from a wealthy Japanese background but wanting to be anti establishment and fitting in with the exciting times, experimenting with sound and ideas and then being brave in exploiting her increased fame when working with John Lennon.
She found music a great help in coping with grief after her beloved John was murdered and she has kept going with various projects, always trying to involve the audience and take a positive attitude directed to the cause of peace and personal awareness.

If you like Yoko Ono or are intrigued by her you will enjoy this new book.