This Yoko Ono Book Channels Dadaism and Buddhism

The instructions were printed in a simple manner: on square pages, on a typewriter. But the words, written and published by artist and musician Yoko Ono in 1964, shimmer with possibilities and range from the mystical to cryptic to absurd.

Consider “Fly Piece,” which states, “Fly.” Or “Touch Poem for Group of People,” which suggests that the group “Touch each other.” Some have several steps, such as “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.

Containing over 150 directives total and published in the spring of 1964, these pages formed the whimsical book Grapefruit.

The Getty Research Institute holds several different editions of the influential work and is hosting a special guided viewing of Ono materials from the Institute’s collections on September 30, from 12 to 4 pm. Attendees will join Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at the Broad Museum, to explore Ono’s groundbreaking experimental practice and enduring influence on generations of artists.

While it’s certain that Grapefruit, on view at the event, captured the idealism of the ’60s—a whimsical sense that anything was possible—what’s equally as impressive is how the work continues to speak to us 62 years later.

Bittersweet beginnings

Grapefruits are believed to have been created by accident in 18th-century Barbados, when a sweet orange cross-pollinated with a pomelo after being planted nearby. This combination of halves inspired the name of Ono’s book. The artist grew up in Tokyo during World War II, and the fruit represented East and West, the two defining cultures of her life.

When the war escalated, Ono and her siblings evacuated to the countryside to evade bombings. Food was scarce, and Ono and her brother would lie on their backs on the floor of their home and stare through an opening in the roof. She would ask him to imagine the dinner he wanted—he envisioned ice cream—and the thoughts alone seemed to improve his mood. Later, Ono referred to this exercise as “maybe my first piece of art.”

In 1952 she became the first female student of philosophy at Tokyo’s Gakushūin University, where she explored pacifist ideas, as well as existentialism and Marxism. A year later she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, to study poetry and musical composition. In 1953, she created her first “event score,” a text-based set of instructions. An example of an early score is “Lighting Piece,” created in 1955, which directed: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.”

These kinds of invitations—designed to ignite creative possibilities—meshed with Ono’s abilities and worldview.

The influence of Fluxus’s “event scores”

Founded by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus (Latin for “flow”) was an international group of visual artists, composers, poets, and designers who challenged the definition of art. Its purpose, stated by Maciunas: “to promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art.” Many artists in the 1960s took part in Fluxus, notably Benjamin Patterson, George Brecht, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Ono.

Fluxus “event scores” consisted of ideas and actions. Evoking the spirit of reading sheet music, the minimalist, poem-like scores were intended to prompt interpretations and performances. For example, Fluxus founding member Alison Knowles, in her #2—Proposition (1962), offered simply: “Make a salad.” She performed the score the same year at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, physically constructing a large salad—iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and all—with her assistants.

While Ono’s work shared a spirit with other works of the group, it also carried an ethos all its own.

Yoko Ono’s unique signature

In Ono’s prompts, much happens within the imagination. In fact, many Grapefruit instructions are impossible to physically perform. For example, in the Dada humor–inflected “Cloud Piece,” she tells the reader to dig a hole and fill it with dripping clouds. Some directions read like haikus or Buddhist koans, such as “Water Piece,” which commands the reader to “steal a moon on the water with a bucket” and “keep stealing until no moon is seen on the water.” At times, the works invite the viewer to perform actions that might heighten awareness of our planet and shared humanity.

Even more famously, Lennon has publicly acknowledged that Grapefruit inspired the seminal Lennon song “Imagine.” Lennon admired Grapefruit so much that he wrote the book’s introduction when Simon & Schuster released a new edition of it in 1970, stating simply: “Hi! My name is John Lennon/I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono.” “Imagine” came out in 1971, and one can easily consider the lyrics akin to the instructions in Grapefruit: “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can.”

Later in 1980, BBC Radio interviewed Lennon and Ono. Of “Imagine,” Lennon said it should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song, since much of it came from Ono, right out of Grapefruit.

Contemporary responses

New readings and imaginings of Ono’s Grapefruit continue to take place today. Last year at the Gropius Bau exhibition space in Berlin, students from Berlin University of the Arts performed interpretations from Grapefruit during a live event. Also in 2025, the Great Learning Orchestra, a Stockholm-based music collective, released an album containing 20 sonic tracks inspired by the book. And Billy-Ray Belcourt, Canadian author, poet, and member of the Indigenous Driftpile Cree Nation, has interpreted Grapefruit through the lens of decolonization in his poetry. A stanza he wrote for a Contemporary Calgary panel in 2021 reads: “DECOLONIAL LOVE PIECE III/Construct a bed using love poems. Do not sleep anywhere else.”

Beyond Grapefruit, if you consider Ono’s more general conceptual framework, interpretations abound. In 2012 she wrote a new instruction piece for Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, “Search for the Fountain,” inviting 20 international artists to create responses. The resulting submissions showcased paper, video, and mixed-media works from artists like Simone Forti.

The Broad’s Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind continues a beloved exhibition from London’s Tate Modern. In one of its rooms, the work Add Colour (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016) invites participants to reflect on the refugee crisis and leave their own message in blue ink. Eventually, the formerly white space is engulfed by a communal sea of meaning.

And the singer Olivia Rodrigo recently performed at the Daisy Chain Fields music festival in Irvine, California, where the grounds featured Ono’s Wish Tree. Attendees scribbled their hopes on paper and tied them to the branches and leaves.

How the work resonates today

On September 8, Loyer met with members of the Research Institute to select artworks for the September 30 viewing. When the subject of Grapefruit and how it has endured arose, Zanna Gilbert, a senior research specialist in the curatorial department, said, “Grapefruit is particular to its time and the [conceptual art] movement, but it’s also totally fresh.”

Of its original time and movement, particularly in relation to her instructions asking people to touch each other, Ono has said, “But also, at the time, I really wanted people to touch each other physically because we never did that, you know, in those days, or even now.” She continued, “It’s a pity. I mean, we’re getting not closer, but more distant to each other.” In our post-COVID, always-online era, that sentiment resonates in new ways.

In 1971, Lennon said of Grapefruit: “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.” During the recent Getty viewing, Loyer echoed this sentiment: “I think it’s really a work about unlocking the mind. You can keep it in your bag, flip to any page, and receive an exercise of thinking differently.”

The official viewing at the Research Institute will also include drop-in art-making stations inspired by Ono’s artist’s books in the Getty collection. Get your tickets here.