It opens with a phone call. Eventually the artist picks up. “Hello! This is Yoko”, she says, then puts the phone down. It’s an old call, from the days before we had answering machines. The recording is also the last track on Ono’s 1971 album Fly, and it is the first thing you hear as you enter her Tate exhibition Music of the Mind. Music? Sometimes it is a bore, sometimes it is silent and sometimes a mindfuck. Use your imagination. But before we get to Ono’s repeated roars and screams and keening, fluttering cries, there’s the noise of a toilet flushing and a disembodied recording of Ono coughing, intermittently, for 30 minutes and 18 seconds. There goes that damn phone again, and this time the artist answers in Japanese. We’re still barely at the entrance, and I’m pondering a little stencilled statement, in the artist’s handwriting, stuck to the wall and telling me that the room moves at the same speed as the clouds. Good to know – but doesn’t it depend which way the wind is blowing in relation to the Earth’s rotation and its orbit of the sun? Is this an exam?
