Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind review – huge, moving and full of surprises

Tate Modern, London
Inviting you to draw on the walls, hammer in nails and climb into cloth bags like the ones she shared with John Lennon, this painstaking retrospective of the artist’s hopeful work over seven decades is as inclusive as it is instructive

It begins with her voice in an early sound piece: gentle, melodic, answering the phone somewhere in the 1960s – “Hello. This is Yoko.” Next, her fingers strike a match, which gradually flares and fades on film in mesmerising slo-mo. Her left eye, lit like a sun, stares unblinkingly back at you from another screen until the light begins to die, whereupon the eyelid closes. Irreducibly simple, it is a performance of sunset (and perhaps more) in two perfect minutes.

To say that Yoko Ono has the audience in mind, at all times, is the merest understatement. It would be hard to think of an artist more bent on universal public address. Tate Modern’s enormous and absorbing retrospective runs all the way from invitation to instruction to direct involvement, from headphones in sound lounges to beanbags slumped before hypnotic movies, from chunky markers for drawing on the walls to canvases on which to leave memories of our mothers.