Burn this story after you’ve read it.
By Madeline Bocaro ©
© Madeline Bocaro, 2019. No part of this site may be reproduced in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.
This is an excerpt from my Yoko Ono biography…
An all-embracing look at Yoko Ono’s life and work, in stunning detail.
Read all about it, see the reviews and
Order here:
Yoko Ono had her first brilliant idea at age four. It was her very first art piece. She recalls standing in the garden with her mother.
“When I was about 4 years old, I had all these ideas…Why don’t you just take one seed from a fruit and another seed from another fruit, and halve it and put it together and bury it? It might grow something really strange.” Yoko asked her playmate to write down this idea “and that’s the kind of thing that was going on, from the beginning: I had decided that whenever I get an idea I have to show it to the world.”
– Yoko Ono interview, MoMA 2015
Yoko titled her book Grapefruit, a hybrid of lemon and orange. She thought of herself as a hybrid – feeling the cultural differences of being born and raised in Japan, and having lived in the USA. In 1961, Ono had presented a performance at Carnegie Recital Hall called A Grapefruit in The World of Park: A Piece for Strawberries and Violin.
Pre-dating her concise, profound and sometimes cryptically bizarre revelations on Twitter (on which she now has millions of followers) Yoko wrote her ‘instructional’ book – evocative of haiku – Grapefruit in 1952 at age nineteen. It was originally self-published in Japan in an edition of 500 copies on July 4, 1964 under the imprint of Wunternaum Press (which was resurrected in 2003 for Ono’s book Spare Room).
“Idea” is what the artist gives, like a stone thrown into the water for ripples to be made. Idea is the air or sun, anybody can use it and fill themselves according to their own size and shape of his body…. Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond the existing concept of time and space. And then sometimes later, the instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.” – Y.O.
Yoko decided upon July 4th as Grapefruit’s publication date,
as the book was her personal Declaration of Independence
from the narrow definition of an artist at the time.
The cover was white, with the title simply handwritten by Yoko on the front. When Yoko received copies of Grapefruit from the printer, she and her then husband Tony Cox sold the book on the streets of Tokyo out of fruit crates. She ended up giving away most of them. Each instruction piece is dated with the year and season in which it was written. Yoko felt that evoking the season ‘goes with the poetry of the piece.’
The book has five sections; Music, Painting, Event, Poetry and Object.
There are dedications to Yoko’s colleagues including John Cage, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Isamu Noguchi and Peggy Guggenheim and documentation regarding Ono’s recent exhibitions and performances. There is also a sales list of Yoko’s objects (although some are intangible).
The music section includes instruction to simply listen; to a heartbeat, to the sound of the earth turning, to the sound of the underground water, or to talk every day into a telephone that echoes back your own voice.
Yoko Ono is an artist who rarely uses actual paint. Yoko paints with nature, with parts of herself and mostly with her mind. Grapefruit consists of wise and whimsical thoughts for others to imagine or enact. Instead of creating art on canvas, most of Ono’s work is suggestive, taking place in the imagination.
“I have always believed in unfinished work.
I got that from Schubert, you know, the ‘Unfinished Symphony’.” – y.o.
Yoko offers simple suggestions, (some perplexing, some possible, some impossible) evoking different images and emotions in each reader’s mind. Her succinct writings are inspired by Haiku poetry.
Her imaginings come from a traumatic event in her life.
“I remember, when we were evacuated from Tokyo during the war (WWII), my brother was really unhappy and depressed and really hungry because we did not have very much food. So I said, ‘OK, let’s make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?’ And, he said, ‘Ice-cream.’ So, I said, ‘Good, let’s imagine our ice-cream dinner.’ And, we did, and he started to look happy. So, I realized even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner and this is maybe my first piece of art.”
– ‘I feel that I am starting a new life at 80′ | The Observer June 1, 2013
Greatly misunderstood, in every medium she had tried to date, Yoko wrote Grapefruit on the verge of going insane.
At Sarah Lawrence I was often very desperate and many of the Grapefruit pieces were written for my sake, to save me. They were my therapy in a way.
– y.o. Vogue Dec. 1971
Grapefruit was like a cure for myself without knowing it.
It was like saying, ‘Please accept me, I am mad.’
Those instructions are like that –
a real need to do something to act out your madness.
As long as you are behaving properly, you don’t realize your madness and you go crazy.”
– To Jonathan Cott, Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,
Rolling Stone March 18, 1971
In many of the pieces, Yoko asks us to give of ourselves entirely, as she does.
BLOOD PIECE
Use your blood to paint.
Keep painting until you faint. (a)
Keep painting until you die. (b)
1960 spring
LINE PIECE
Draw a line with yourself.
Go on drawing until you disappear.
1964 spring
This is the actual copy (original first printing – 500 copies) of Grapefruit that Yoko sent to John Lennon in September 1967. John kept it on his night table. He was alternately exasperated or delighted by Grapefruit. Yoko’s inscription includes a drawn astrological chart (born dragon year, water sign). See John’s funny note to Yoko in response.
Upon the book’s reprinting in 1971, John wrote an introduction. (“Hi! My name is John Lennon. I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono…”). Yoko wrote a brief foreword instructing us to burn after reading, (because it’s going against nature to go back) and John also wrote the afterword.
Yoko: Burn this book after you’ve read it
John: This is the greatest book I’ve ever burned.
“I think this is an important book to help people act out their madness. If you do some of the things in it, you stop going crazy in a way. This Yoko book has changed some people’s lives…”
– John Lennon to Allan Smith, NME July 31, 1971
Grapefruit is a book of doing things. It’s not adjective or noun, but verb. That’s why it’s better than the Bible. To understand the pieces, you must do them. Even doing them in your mind is making a step part of the way along the road to better communication with yourself. Grapefruit is a book for your experience, not mine I have given instructions, now the experience part of it is down to the reader. That’s why I said, ‘read it and burn it’, because if you read and do there will be no reason to go back to the book. You will know and understand.
– Yoko Ono, International Times 1971
John joined Yoko for a book signing in London. An instruction from Grapefruit inspired his song ‘Imagine’ (1971). In 2017 Yoko was awarded credit as co-writer of ‘Imagine’ based upon audio tapes of John saying that she inspired it.
“Actually, that should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it—the lyric and the concept—came from Yoko. But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book. There’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine’ that’…”
– John Lennon
CLOUD PIECE
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.
1963 Spring
Painting To Be Stepped On instructs placement of a canvas or painting on the ground. This has a dual meaning. It is Yoko opposing the idea of ‘high art’, but it also represents Fumie, a ‘stepping painting’ used to identify Christians vs. non-Christians in 15th Century Japan. (Most Christians were steadfast and did not step on the portrait of Christ although they would certainly be crucified).
This piece illustrates Yoko’s disdain for the containment of art in museums:
COLLECTING PIECE II
Break a contemporary museum into pieces
with the means you have chosen. Collect
the pieces and put them together again
with glue.
1963 autumn
EVENT pieces include instructions to fly, draw a map to get lost, to watch the sun until it becomes square, and to take on a mannerism from a different animal each day and make it your own. There are sky events which involve watching the sky.
The interactivity in Grapefruit goes much deeper in Yoko’s seven instructions titled Card Piece. She encourages us to connect with our inner world, our own Weltinnenraum – a German word. (Welt means world, innen translates as within or inner, and raum means space). The word (also used by the mystical poet Rilke who similarly dealt with problems of solitude, anxiety and communication) translates as “the inner space of the world.”
In Card Piece, Yoko enlightens us to a conceptual reality within our own limitless consciousness – that our thoughts are free to travel and are not imprisoned by our bodies. This is probably what she refers to in her song ‘Mrs. Lennon’ when she says (about herself and John), ‘They’ve lost their bodies.’
By asking us to play a conceptual card game, Yoko playfully assigns properties to our inner space. Giving our thoughts a physicality and a locale enables our Weltinnenraum to interact with other people by handing our inner world to strangers on cards. We can “play for money,” “play solitaire,” or “play for death.” Shuffling them, cutting a hole in them or exchanging them suggests that our inner thoughts can be held in one’s hand. She makes us aware that we can control and circulate them. Our Weltinnenraum is also designated as a place where we should “walk to the center.” There is a playfulness about Card Piece, as if it is a game of extracting old thoughts to make space for new ones to come in. She instructs us to open a window in a house in our Weltinnenraum and let the wind come in. Yoko has previously told us to leave our minds empty so that a wind can pass through.
After giving a card to a stranger, she tells us to, “ask them to forget about it”. As important as our thoughts may be, they are transient – only important for a moment once they have escaped the mind and have been ‘seen’. The main objective is to release them from your mind.
The POETRY section features her Touch Poems.
Elements of nature are prevalent in Grapefruit, especially the sun and moon,
wind, air and water…
TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE
Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt
into the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.
1964 spring
WATER PIECE
Steal a moon on the water with a bucket.
Keep stealing until no moon is seen on
the water.
1964 spring
There are ‘paintings’ for the wind, to see the skies (by drilling holes into a canvas) and for evening light to go through. Some of Yoko’s instructions became performance pieces, such as Cut Piece and Painting to Hammer a Nail which was shown at her Indica gallery exhibit in 1966 where she met John, who did not carry any cash.
Do you still have the imaginary five shillings that John gave you to hammer the nail in?
Yoko: Yes it’s still sitting in my mind, without having ever been used.
– Y.O. – Twitter Q&A February 2014
In a letter to Ivan Karp, Yoko asks him to “Imagine the ‘nail painting’ hanging in the Museum of Modern Art…” (which it actually did in the future – summer 2015 – during Yoko Ono – One Woman Show)!
One of the conceptual objects on Yoko’s 1965 Architectural Works Sales List is underwear to make you high – for women. Another is a house made of light – “A house constructed of light from prisms, which exists in accordance with the changes in the day.” At the start of their relationship, John Lennon asked her to build one in his garden. Yoko explained that it was purely conceptual, but said, “I’m convinced that one day, it could be built, but I don’t know how to do it.” The light house became a reality in 2007 as Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, a tribute to John.
“You see, with Yoko’s and my album[s], we’re both looking at the same thing from different sides of the table. Mine is literate, hers is revolutionary.”
– John Lennon to Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone 1971
“I made it into instructions because I did not have a way to make some of the big things in it… Plus, it’s important to be mischievous. I think ‘Grapefruit’ is very much a mischievous book for now. The age of the Internet, the age of fast-forward thinking. You can use that, too, as an artist. People often talk about that in a negative way — oh, I have no concentration to read a big book now. But it is not all bad. When I was doing ‘Grapefruit,’ I wanted it to read so there is no way to get bored with it. It’s short but it says it all. I wanted it to do that so I made it short but full.”
– Yoko, ‘I feel that I am starting a new life at 80′ | The Observer, June 1, 2013
TAPE PIECE III
Snow Piece
Take a tape of the sound of the snow
falling.
This should be done in the evening.
Do not listen to the tape.
Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with.
Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using
the same process with a phonosheet
1963 autumn
Another Snow Piece from summer 1963 is the basis for Yoko’s song ‘Snow is Falling All the Time’ which became ‘Listen the Snow is Falling’ (the B-side of ‘Give Peace a Chance’).
“I think doing all the instructions in Grapefruit is better than thumbing through all those ancient books like I Ching. If you want to prove our find out something, do it in the things around you like the air and the water and things like that. You can get off on Grapefruit equally as well as the I Ching or the Bible”
– John Lennon, International Times 1971
One of my favorite pieces presciently mentions East and West, predicting John and Yoko’s meeting and their eternal union…
DRINKING PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA
Imagine letting a goldfish swim across
the sky.
Let it swim from the West to the East
Drink a liter of water
Imagine letting a goldfish swim across
the sky.
Let it swim from the East to the West
1963 spring
Secret Piece (written in 1953 at age 19 just before moving to New York) is perhaps most important of all. It became the basis of her work. Yoko’s text version of the score was written above the musical notation soon afterwards, and included in Grapefruit.
Birdsong was Yoko’s first inspiration. As a young child, one of her school assignments was to translate the sounds of a symphony of birds into musical notation. She realized that it was impossible. At first, Yoko thought it was her own shortcoming. She soon determined that there was a limitation in the way that we scored music – which lost its intricate beauty. This is the frustration behind all of Yoko’s work: the material world cannot replicate the purity of an idea. To solve this problem, Yoko’s scores combine musical notation with instructions. The score of Secret Piece has the handwritten instruction,
“with the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn.”
“I loved listening to the birds singing in the morning. Beautiful complicated sounds a bird can make which you can’t copy – it seemed so perfect and I thought, ‘Why try to do something like that when a bird can do it effortlessly? So I began to compose music which wasn’t complete – with instructions like: This should be played with birds singing in the garden’. From there I began to question the whole thing of composition and instruction.”
– Yoko, Vogue December 1971
There are also six imaginary FILM scripts and a 13-Days Do-It-Yourself Dance Festival. Recaps of 13 of Yoko’s performances, include Cut Piece in which she invited the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing.
There are now several Grapefruit editions. The second was published by Simon & Schuster (1970) with eighty more instruction pieces and two additional sections, Film and Dance. The book ends with a collection of writings including To the Wesleyan People…, 1966. Paperback versions were printed by Sphere and Touchstone. The cover graphic on the Sphere edition (which Yoko did not particularly like) refers to Yoko’s Film No. 4 (Bottoms) starring 365 naked bottoms. The book was published in London and in Frankfurt. Peter Owen Limited published the first British Commonwealth edition in 1970.
Grapefruit was out of print for thirty years. The book was later reprinted by Simon & Schuster in 2000.
Pomelo, the Spanish edition of Grapefruit was published by Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires, Argentina. All 5,000 first-edition copies quickly sold out. Pomelo was reprinted in a limited edition of 1,000 copies in 2016 to coincide with Yoko’s exhibition Dream Come True at MALBA in Buenos Aires. There was a third printing in December 2020 in Mexico by Alias with a list price of $300.
Grapefruit II was planned for 1966. It was to contain 150 new pieces including “touch poems”. However, a sequel to Grapefruit was not published until July 2013. It was another book of instructional poems (this time accompanied by of her drawings) called Acorn. While promoting Acorn in the summer of 2013.
Yoko explained,
“It’s a kind of reading material for the future, because you don’t have to read ten paragraphs. The book explains the universe in a few short lines.”
“It’s nearly 50 years ago that my book of conceptual instructions Grapefruit was first published. In these pages I’m picking up where I left off. After each day of sharing the instructions you should feel free to question, discuss and/or report what your mind tells you. I’m just planting the seeds. Have fun.”
—Yoko Ono, from the introduction to Acorn
In 2015 to coincide with Yoko Ono – One Woman Show, New York’s Museum of Modern Art published an exact replica of the 1964 first edition of Grapefruit in a slipcase (550 copies. 500 unsigned, unnumbered and 50 copies signed and numbered by the artist).
As a main feature of the exhibition, MoMA displayed Yoko’s original typed pages from Grapefruit (some with handwritten notes) around the perimeter of the gallery. This gave us the true feeling of being immersed in a book!
Another instruction painting from Grapefruit, Voice Piece for Soprano (1961) was performed live by Yoko at MoMA as well in the summer of 2010. A microphone connected to high volume speakers was left for participants to recreate the piece intermittently.
VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO
Scream.
- against the wind
- against the wall
- against the sky
1961 autumn
Yoko’s original 1964 Grapefruit manuscript sold for $485,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2015. It is housed in a stainless steel box. There are 151 white Japanese “Apollo” postcards with Yoko’s hand-written additions and annotations in ink, along with a title card with an Ono-penned note to the publisher that reads: “There are more pieces of this period that I can send you by next mail which I would like to include in the book.” The publisher was George Maciunas.
In 2009 the original Grapefruit manuscript was exhibited for the first time, at the Stendahl Gallery in Chelsea, London.
Read more about the sale here:
© Madeline Bocaro 2019. No part of these materials may be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated, re-blogged or reduced to any electronic medium or machine-readable form, in whole or in part, without prior written consent of Madeline Bocaro. Any other reproduction in any form without permission is prohibited. All of the text written by Madeline Bocaro on this site is protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without prior written permission of Madeline Bocaro.
madelinex.com is a non-profit blog created for educational and research purposes.
Any content that may violate copyright or free usage laws will be removed immediately upon request.
This story is an excerpt from my Yoko Ono biography
In Your Mind – The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono
An all-embracing look at Yoko Ono’s life, music and art – in stunning detail.
Order here:
Contact: conceptualbooks@icloud.com
From the collection of MoMA NYC:
Watch Yoko reading from Grapefruit:
Directions in reverse!
Yoko wrote a letter to Nicholas Logsdail, owner of the new Lisson Gallery which had just opened in Sept. 1967. She proposed a meeting, giving him directions to her apartment, in reverse. The letter was later published in the second printing of Grapefruit.
“Someone introduced me to Yoko Ono. She said, ‘You’re the guy who just opened a gallery. Can I come have a look?’ and I said, ‘Of course you can,’ and she said, ‘Maybe you should look at what I’m doing first.’ Then I got this letter, which was reproduced in her book Grapefruit. I literally did follow her instructions and, with a little bit of difficulty, found my way there, but I got lost and was 15 minutes late. Everything was painted white, it was rather grand.”
– Nicholas Logsdail, October 5, 2017 – artnet.com
https://news.artnet.com/market/nicholas-logsdail-reflects-on-50-years-lisson-gallery-1103981
Yoko & Tony Cox Selling Grapefruit in Ginza, Tokyo Japan 1964
Film still from “ある若者たち Aru Wakamono-tachi (Some youngsters)”
directed by Chiaki Nagano.
Also see my story about Yoko’s Lisson gallery exhibition
YOKO ONO: HALF-A-WIND (YOKO PLUS ME)
POMELO
(Spanish version of Grapefruit)
By Madeline Bocaro ©
Pomelo, is the Spanish edition of Grapefruit (1964) was first published in 1970 by Argentine publisher De La Flor. All 5,000 first edition copies sold out.
To celebrate Yoko’s exhibition Dream Come True at MALBA in Buenos Aires (June – October 2016) Pomelo was re-printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies with its bold and colorful cover.
The artist Oscar Smoje (Palais de Glace director) depicts Yoko within Japan’s rising sun. True to her name (ocean child) Yoko’s image merges at the horizon with Hokusai’s The Great Wave Of Kanagawa – the ultimate, most iconic artistic representation of Japan – produced between 1929 and 1833 (one hundred years before Yoko’s birth). The back cover – as on the yellow Simon & Schuster version of Grapefruit– replicates same image and text as the front cover, printed in reverse.
The fascinating story of Grapefruit’s translator Susana Piri Lugones:
When Yoko learned about the extraordinarily tumultuous life of her book’s translator, she was so moved that she granted the rights to publish a new edition of Grapefruit (Pomelo) in 2016.
Here is the incredible history of the translator and her infamous family. Writer, journalist, editor Susana “Piri” Lugones was born in Argentina. (Born in Buenos Aires, April 30, 1925 – died February 17, 1978). At age 52, on December 20, 1977 she was kidnapped by “task forces” of Argentina’s final military dictatorship.
Piri’s mother was Carmen Aguirre, daughter of renowned pianist and composer Julián Aguirre. He was one of the most valued Argentinian composers of his time.
Piri’s paternal grandfather was Leopoldo Lugones Sr., a famous writer and poet. On February 18, 1938 (Yoko Ono’s 5th birthday) the despairing and disillusioned Lugones committed suicide by mixing whisky and cyanide. Political frustration along with unrequited love were cited causes of his suicide.
Piri’s father Leopoldo Lugones Jr. (known as Polo Lugones) is famous for having developed the high voltage electric prod during the de facto government of General José Félix Uriburu. Therefore, Pirí Lugones was known as ‘granddaughter of the poet, daughter of the torturer’.She hated her father, who was presumably shocked and prodded during his illegal confinement with the same element of torture he had created: the picana (prodding iron) when he was accused of torturing and raping teenagers as director of a minors’ reformatory. He also committed suicide, in 1971.
Piri worked as a teacher. Later, she studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Susana Piri Lugones was the lover of famous journalist / author Rodolfo Walsh (considered to be the founder of investigative journalism). After supporting a coup to overthrow Juan Peron’s democratic government in 1955, he went to Cuba. He allegedly decrypted a CIA telex about the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion and helped Castro prepare for America’s ‘secret’ operation.
In 1957 Walsh finished Operation Massacre, an investigative work on the illegal execution of Peron’s sympathizers during an ill-fated attempt at restoring Peronism to power in June 1956. Operación Masacre is now considered by scholars as the first historical non-fiction novel, preceding Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
On March 25, 1977, Walsh was murdered in a shoot-out with a special military group that ambushed him. His body and his writings were never seen again. Walsh is remembered as a desaparecido and a victim of state-sponsored terrorism.
Susana Piri Lugones was the partner in crime of Manuel Puig (who modeled the character of Gladys after her in the film The Buenos Aires Affaire). She had had a son who committed suicide before his 20th birthday.
In the 1970s Piri joined the Armed Forces and the radical Montonera guerilla group along with her husband. Her missions consisted mainly of intelligence, press and charity work. She befriended other militants. Shortly after her son’s death, Piri (a Peron supporter) was kidnapped by Armed Forces commandos who tortured and ‘disappeared’ her in December 1977. It is highly possible that the instrument of torture used on her was also the electric cattle prod, conceived by her father.
Although the exact date of her murder was never known, it is estimated to be on February 17, 1978 (or could it have been the next day, on Yoko’s birthday?)
6 thoughts on “YOKO ONO’S STRANGE FRUIT – GRAPEFRUIT”