How to Do What Yoko Wants You To: Grapefruit, 51 Years Later

At the press preview for MoMA’s “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show,� the show’s co-curator, Klaus Biesenbach, quoted one of Ono’s poetic directives from her famous typewritten book full of them, Grapefruit: “Throw a stone into the sky high enough so it will not come back.� Maybe he was worried that this show might come crashing down on his (and the museum’s) head, like the Björk exhibit he did earlier this spring, to much critical stone-casting. But the Ono show opened May 18, to pretty great reviews, and has helped reclaim both Biesenbach’s and, for that matter, Ono’s reputations. (Christophe Cherix co-curated the show.)

One of its many artifactual pleasures is the wall of framed typescripts from Grapefruit — 151 in all, often dated in pen. Ono had self-published 500 copies of the book version of it in 1964, four years before she and John Lennon got together, catapulting her to a great deal of fame (not to mention Beatles-busting-up blame). Lennon later credited its whimsy for helping inspire the song “Imagine.� After it was reissued by Simon & Schuster, with an introduction by Lennon, in 1970, the book became something of a hippie-era home-décor cliché. MoMA has again reissued it; you can buy it for $150. But its Dadaish optimism is, decades later, easier to see. We’ve excerpted it here.