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Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind review – wild shrieks, audacious instructions and bare bottoms

Shake hands with a stranger, write about your mum, colour in, step on, get up close and interact with Ono’s art at this crowd-pleasing retrospective

Photograph: Musacchio/© Yoko Ono ©Musacchio, Ianniello & PasqualiniWe can’t hang about here all day worrying because there’s a queue building up and a lot of interacting to be done in the rooms ahead: paintings to be stepped on, walls to be defaced, messages of one’s own to be written, ladders to be climbed. As well as early films of Ono smiling and blinking, and performing Cut Piece, here she is in bed with John Lennon, surrounded by newspapermen (they all seem to be men) and photographers, and conducting impromptu conversations with the hostile and bewildered journos. When it hasn’t been derided, Ono’s voice has been compared to that of Meredith Monk and Diamanda Galás, and her vocalisations in the film Fly reminded me of listening to a Sámi performer imitating the infuriating noise of a mosquito and the cries of the wolf.

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