YOKO ONO GRAPEFRUIT CODE

Allow the rest of the students to argue amongst themselves. Listen to that other student who has a crush on either of them defend him/her accordingly. Listen to that other student who dislikes him/her reply sharply. 'A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.' 'This is the greatest book Ive ever. 'Burn this book after youve read it.' Yoko. Listen to that one student get mad and ask if this means that anything can be art. Back in print for the first time in nearly thirty years, here is Yoko Onos whimsical, delightful, subversive, startling book of instructions for art and for life. Take your class outside and perform “Sun Piece” for them. Give the more practical ones as homework assignments. Take Ono’s impossible-to-execute instructions as imaginative prompts, and get your students to write their own. People teaching poetry workshops: Use Grapefruit as a pedagogical tool.

The combination of Dadaist jokes, koans, and minimalist sketches will send you into an absurdist meditative state that you didn’t even know you needed. Treat it less as a book and more as a prescription for artistic malaise. After only a few entries, you’ll find yourself grinning, chuckling, or introspecting-in any case, you’ll find it a bit easier to get over your damn self. Even as you hold the book in your hands-a cheerfully yellow, diminutive square-you’ll feel your attitude toward the written word recalibrate. Poets: Read Ono’s instructions during those times when poetry is making you feel dull and anxious and shabby, and you need something to refresh your palate (and isn’t it convenient that grapefruit season is at its best in February, just when the post-holiday blues set in?). When another room is needed, obtain anotherĪnd who knew that Ono had predicted the invention of the Internet in 1963? When a room is needed, obtain a person instead I can’t help but read “Room Piece” as a wry analog for modern dating:

YOKO ONO GRAPEFRUIT CODE

The designation above the UPC code is “poetry,” and for a book whose accumulated contents were written over 50 years ago, it feels astonishingly contemporary, even timeless. In 2000, Simon & Schuster rereleased her Grapefruit: A Book of Instruction an d Drawings in hardcover, first published on Ono’s own Wunternaum Press in 1964. Here, she discusses her big love for Yoko On o’s Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings.įriends, I don’t think we talk nearly enough about how damn funny Yoko Ono is (I initially typed “Yolo Ono,” which proves that my fingers are much cooler than I am). In The Octopus Game, Beer’ s shape-shifting cephalopods visit the reader in films, dreamlike carnivals, and all the mysteriou s depths of o u r imaginations. Beer is the author of two poetry collections, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010), both p ublished by Carnegie Mellon. In celebration of Ono's 80th birthday in 2013, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt organized a major traveling retrospective.Today’s con tributor to our Big Loves column is Nicky Beer.

Ono's groundbreaking work greatly influenced the international development of Conceptual art, performance art and experimental film and music. It is an exacting replica of Grapefruit as Ono first envisioned it.īorn in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono moved to New York in the mid-1950s and became a critical link between the American and Japanese avant-gardes. This slipcased paperback is produced from the copy of the 1964 book in The Museum of Modern Art Library. The Museum of Modern Art has now produced a facsimile of that first edition, making it available again in its original form. Today first-edition copies are nearly impossible to find. Since the initial publication of Grapefruit, numerous expanded editions have been produced in many different languages. These works-conceptual instructions-are the culmination of a process that dispensed with the physical and arrived at the idea. Her artist's book Grapefruit, first published in 1964 in Tokyo by Wunternaum Press in an edition of 500 copies, contains more than 150 works divided into five sections: MUSIC, PAINTING, EVENT, POETRY, OBJECT. Yoko Ono is a seminal figure in the development of Conceptual art, performance and Fluxus, as well as film and new music.

Yoko ono grapefruit