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. They are divided into five sections: Music, Painting, Event, Poetry and Object. 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. It also seems likely that it is a playful allusion to Brecht's Water Yam, itself a pun on Brecht and Watt's Yam Festival, which, culminating in a series of events and performances in May 1963, had been derived from "May" backwards. The name Grapefruit was chosen as title because Ono believed the grapefruit to be a hybrid of an orange and a lemon, and thus a reflection of herself as "a spiritual hybrid" (in reality, the grapefruit originated as an accidental cross of the sweet orange and the pomelo). 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, as part of his series of Fluxkits (see Water Yam), 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. 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. Often considered a Fluxus artwork, in fact the work was originally published by Ono's own imprint, Wunternaum Press, in Tokyo in an edition of 500. Like a musical score, Event Scores can be realized by artists other than the original creator and are open to variation and interpretation. The idea of the score suggests musicality. Event Scores are texts that can be seen as proposal pieces or instructions for actions. Both Cage and Brecht were deeply influenced by "Oriental thinking", and Ono found that her Buddhist-inspired work was, almost accidentally, fêted by the emerging New York counterculture as avant-garde.Įvent Scores, involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontexualized as performance. Invention of the event score is usually credited to George Brecht, but La Monte Young and Yoko Ono are also cited as amongst the first to experiment with the form. Other members of this group included David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Richard Maxfield and Merce Cunningham. Whilst Ono did not attend these informal lessons, her husband at the time, Ichiyanagi Toshi (an experimental musician), did and Toshi and Ono became regulars of Cage's circle of friends by 1959. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |