There are five entrances to the Yoko Ono exhibition at Musac in León, but only three lead to rooms: we can pass through a series of blue beaded curtains, slide down a steep slide and then crawl through a small opening, or pass sideways through a very narrow corridor full of mirrors. The entrances that have the appearance of a normal corridor bring us back to the starting point.
The message is clear: if we want to enter the exhibition we must accept the conditions. With Yoko Ono, intellectual contempt and irony are useless; The artist asks us to go unarmed, without prejudice or snobbish complacency. Only then will we be able to digest the posters that Musac has put up all over the city, inside and outside the museum, with messages like “Dream” or “Breathe” in bold capital letters, and only then will we be able to access the artist’s work.
Once past the entrance, the large rooms of the museum, with their very high ceilings and the proportions of a cathedral – the stained glass windows that cover the entire facade are intended to refer to those of the cathedral of León – reveal a large number of works together. The result is an elegant mix of pieces that take shape as we get closer, although we always avoid talking about a retrospective, despite the fact that more than 80 works are presented, many of which are famous and representative of the artist, with a chronology that goes from the 1960s to 2013. It would make more sense to talk about an anthology, in the manner of the “greatest hits”, without a defined path. For Yoko Ono studio director Connor Monahan, the exhibition seeks to recreate the linguistic character of her artistic practice, as well as her reclamation of imagination, freedom to wander, or autonomous composition.
With his work, irony or intellectual contempt are useless: he demands to be disarmed, without prejudice or snobbishness.
This arrangement fits a way of thinking about art based on “education.” Ono’s art, conceptual and performativeit is in many cases an idea, a premise or an instruction manual that the museum, gallery or citizen who wishes can implement it. In Orthodox terms, the exhibition could have been a collection of short texts, occasional sound pieces and videos, although, of course, Musac did not take the risk and produced expressly on these indications a series of works are born, without however forgetting where they come from: the papers that constitute the first edition of Grapefruit (grapefruit), the 1964 book in which Yoko Ono compiles more than 200 instructions appears at the beginning.
Soon, however, we forget those instructions when faced with the magniloquence of works that sound familiar to us somewhere: there are the Stairs to heaven (1968), which we can scale; the labyrinth of mirrors and plastic walls that leads to a toilet which can be accessed (amaze1971), and some of the historical jewels of participatory art, such as Part to be repaired (1966). In this last piece the visitor is invited to sit around a table to arrange, as he sees fit, a terracotta jug. There are threads, scissors, tape, glue… In another piece, Box to draw a circle (1964), blank canvases are waiting for someone to take one of the available markers and draw their own circle. At the time of their conception, the playful character of these works had an anti-institutional, idealistic and critical sense. Today it borders dangerously on the interactive and immersive.
The exhibition alternates these works with others of a more contemplative and monumental nature, such as the large-format installation that unites morning rays (1997) e river bed (1996). The stretched threads that emulate the sun’s rays meet on the ground with the stone path of a dry river in an image of poetic strength. There are also pieces, like Doors (2011), which have a marked objectual character, further extraneous to the instructions, and others which constitute milestones of worship, such as the elements that compose Nutopia (1973), that micronation created by John Lennon and the artist in the purest hippie style, with its embassy plaque and its declaration of independence addressed to the UN: “Nutopia “It has no land, borders or passports: only people.”
The eight films by Yoko Ono present in the exhibition are perhaps the key elements to delve deeper into a presentation that at times confuses the popular and the populist. His greatest film production occurred between the 1960s and 1970s, in many cases in collaboration with Lennon. The result is spectacular and can well illustrate an entire era. Snuff (1968) explains, through the anguish of a stranger followed for days and days by a cameraman, the persecution experienced by the Ono-Lennon couple and the condition of women in the Western context, located at the crossroads between sexual liberation and patriarchal oppression. AND Funds (1967), in the opposite tone, shows us 365 asses in an act of erotic and communal rebellion that makes us think of Andy Warhol: in Taylor Mead’s ass (1964), a single donkey is filmed for hours. Each of the films completes and contextualizes the rest of the works, as it provides a history to the whole and allows us to understand the commitment of a very tormented artist at the time. John Lennon smiles slightly for 25 minutes Smile (1968). In Fly (1970), the insect hits the motionless body of a naked woman. Kindness and rawness are constantly interrupted, in the same way that installations find respite in cinematic works.
Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, recently renewed as director of the museum for another four years, knows how to arouse the interest of visitors, as he did last year with Ai Weiwei. In this exhibition, while accusing an aesthetic of successthere is a greater analysis and in-depth gap in one of the most famous (and current) artists of the last 70 years.
‘Yoko Ono. Insound and Structure. Musac. Lion. Until May 17, 2026.
