Though most of her work is explicitly pacifist, some pieces disturb: in “Cut Piece,” a performance she did at Carnegie Hall in 1965, she passively allowed audience members to cut her clothing into shreds. She was also well known for her startling 1969 film, “Rape,” which depicts a woman as she is chased by men bearing movie cameras, her hysteria mounting as they follow her into her apartment. These had much appeal in corners of the avant-garde crazy about the East. She made sculpture, drawings, and music, and a number of pieces influenced by Zen Buddhism that prodded viewers to perform acts like imagining a painting in their heads. Soon after she arrived in New York in the late fifties-already groomed for public life having grown up among the Japanese aristocracy-she was embraced by the art world. She never considered herself a member of Fluxus, or any movement. Ono chuckles at the memory-that was George’s art, she says, referring to George Maciunas, the passionate founder of the group. Lennon climbed a ladder to read a tiny piece of text on the ceiling, the word “yes.”) Pre-Lennon, Ono was one of few women-and even fewer non-Western artists-active in the Fluxus movement in New York. (She met him when he visited her exhibition at Indica Gallery, in London, in 1966. “Acorn” is a sort of sequel to “Grapefruit,” Ono’s influential first book, which was published in 1964, before she became involved with John Lennon. The new book started as an online project in 1996: she gave an instruction every day, for a hundred days. She was about to walk into a party celebrating her new book, “ Acorn,” a hundred haiku-like instructions (“Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.”) accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page. ![]() Lennon, on the back cover, adds his own response to this directive: John Lennon’s response in the back cover A description in Grapefruit of a performance by Ono in 1964.On a recent summer evening, on the second-floor suite of the Refinery Hotel, in midtown, Yoko Ono, who is eighty but looks sixteen, was perched on the edge of a couch wearing very dark black sunglasses, a military-style black denim jacket, and a fedora jauntily cocked to one side. The front cover of Grapefruit features the first piece of instruction from Yoko Ono: burn this book. Grapefruit consists of short poems, directives to the audience, sketches, and descriptions of her various performance pieces. All photos in this post are of the Fales Library copy of Grapefruit, printed in 1970 with the Lennon introduction. Lennon contributed an introduction to the new printing. ![]() ![]() In 1970, after Ono had begun to gain notoriety in the world outside of the art world with her marriage to John Lennon, Simon and Schuster decided to publish another run of Grapefruit. Grapefruit is now considered a seminal work of conceptual art, despite a lukewarm reception in 1964. Ono published the first run of 500 copies herself. The book is a compilation of small instructions, poems, notes, and sketches that Ono had been creating for years. Yoko Ono’s first artist book, Grapefruit, was originally published in 1964. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
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