Grapefruit (book)
Her approach to art was only made acceptable when [people] like Kosuth and Weiner came in and did virtually the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collectible.Event scores were developed by a number of artists attending John Cage's experimental music composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Other members of this group included David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Richard Maxfield and Merce Cunningham.
Invention of the event score is usually credited to George Brecht,[2] but La Monte Young and Yoko Ono are also cited as amongst the first to experiment with the form.
[3] Both Cage and Brecht were deeply influenced by "Oriental thinking",[4] and Ono found that her Buddhist-inspired work was, almost accidentally, fêted by the emerging New York counterculture as avant-garde.
Event Scores, involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontexualized as performance.
[5]Often considered a Fluxus artwork, the work was originally published by Ono's own imprint, Wunternaum Press, in Tokyo in an edition of 500.
After leaving New York in 1962 – where she had exhibited at Maciunas' AG Gallery, amongst others – her then-husband Anthony Cox suggested she collect her scores together.
George Maciunas, the central personality in Fluxus, had apparently been trying to reach her in Tokyo with the aim of printing a similar book in New York,[6] as part of his series of Fluxkits (see Water Yam),[7] but his letters had not reached her; she sent some of the scores and a prepublication advertisement to be published in his Fluxus newspaper in February 1964 when contact was finally established.
The first edition that was published in 1964 in Japan by Wunternaum Press created by Yoko Ono, contains over 150 "instruction works"; virtually all are in English, with about a third translated into Japanese.
The instructions are preceded by dedications to figures including John Cage, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Isamu Noguchi and Peggy Guggenheim, and also includes documentation relating to Ono's recent exhibitions and performances.
Tokyo, Japan (Paperback) The second edition was published in 1970 by Simon & Schuster in New York, Peter Owen Ltd in London, and Bärmeier & Nikel in Frankfurt.
[9] Paperback editions were issued by Sphere and Touchstone around the same time, and a reprint by Simon & Schuster in 2000.
The Sphere edition has a memorable sleeve, conflating the title with Yoko Ono's film Bottoms, (or no.
Ono stated that it would contain 150 new pieces not featured in Grapefruit, including her "touch poems".
In July 2013, Ono released Grapefruit's sequel, called Acorn, another book of "instructional poems".
