Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park

(Yoko Ono)

This work of performance art was the first musical piece written by Yoko Ono, which was premiered during the avant-garde movement known as Fluxus in the 1960s and ’70s when experimental visual art and sound, sometimes termed conceptual art, were presented.

It was premiered in 1961 at the Village Gate where a range of performers such as John Cage, Lamar Alsop, David Tudor and La Monte Young played and soon after at Carnegie Hall. Inaudible speech. laughter and atonal music and a toilet flushing were performed while Yoko Ono narrated the text of work. The cellist Charlotte Moorman played the cello during the performance at Carnegie Hall. In the same show AOS was a piece included as part of Of A Grapefruit in the World of Park which was done in total silence in the dark with two people having empty cans and bottles attached to gauze they are wrapped in. They had to walk across the stage silently.

It was staged again at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, Japan and then several years later in 1966 when she staged her “Music of the Mind” show at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in London.

In 1971 it was performed during the opening of the This Is Not Here exhibit by Yoko Ono, John Lennon and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas on the series Free Time on New York City’s WNET.

Sources:

Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park

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