A piece of a broken clay vase by Yoko Ono is part of my art collection. It was given to me by Ono in 2009, after her performance at the Arsenale Theatre at the Venice Bienniale. I was one of the last to leave the theatre when Ono came back on stage with a bag of pieces of a vase that she had smashed and, while handing us the pieces, she promised that we would meet again in 10 years to put it back together.
It's only now, in 2024, in Yoko Ono. Music of the Mind at the Tate Modern, that I found out that the promise is at the heart of the piece. It’s called the Promise Piece and it was performed for the first time by Ono in London in the 1960s. To turn something as immaterial as a promise into a work of art has a beauty, and something hopeful to it.
The Yoko Ono exhibition at the Tate is a great reboot, and don't we all need one at the moment? The poetry, the joyfulness and the generosity of Ono's work can really shine as I have never seen before. From the very beginning of her career, the invitation for the viewer to create and imagine along is central to Ono's art. I took my mum to the exhibition and after slowly progressing, carefully reading and looking, she came up to me to say that she got some ideas of her own.
I have heard reports of other visits. A group of Beatles fans, called Arsalan, Mark and Steven visited the show. Mark made a short video of Arsalan hammering a nail into Painting To Hammer A Nail In. The painting plays an important role when John Lennon met Ono for the first time. It's in London, the year 1966, a day before the opening of her exhibition at Indica Gallery, and Ono refuses Lennon to hammer a nail in the still bank canvas.“Let him hammer a nail in it,” the gallery owner John Dunbar tells the artist. After a little conference Ono decides: “Ok, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings.” And Lennon answers: “Well, I‘ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” It is said that this is the moment when Ono and Lenon locked eyes.
One of my favourite art works in the exhibition is also made of pieces, not of clay, but of glass from a broken bottle. This time, it was not a promise but, equally ephemeral, the morning that was turned into a work of art. The mornings were sold on the rooftop of a gallery building in Tokyo. Each specified a date and a particular period of the morning. It was repeated in New York in 1965, “Mornings for Sales”, on the roof of Ono’s apartment in the West Village.
“I liked that idea that we created something out of a sharp nothing, that's a dangerous thing,” said Yoko Ono. There are three types of morning, in case you want to check it out in your neck of the woods:
A: all morning
B: until dawn
C: after sunrise