Item #6658 Museum of Modern [F]art: Yoko Ono-- One Woman Show [Signed by Yoko Ono and John Lennon to Jonas Mekas with self-portraits in the hand of Ono and Lennon]. Yoko Ono., Iain McMillan, Michael Gross.
Museum of Modern [F]art: Yoko Ono-- One Woman Show [Signed by Yoko Ono and John Lennon to Jonas Mekas with self-portraits in the hand of Ono and Lennon]

Museum of Modern [F]art: Yoko Ono-- One Woman Show [Signed by Yoko Ono and John Lennon to Jonas Mekas with self-portraits in the hand of Ono and Lennon]

New York: Yoko Ono, 1971. Offset. Saddlestapled. Unpaginated [112pp]. 12 x 12 in. Very good, wraps toned, upper right corner of front wrap dogeared and chipped, signature on front wrap slightly smeared. Signed and inscribed, “To Jonas, Peace & Love, Yoko + John 1972 [with self-portraits of the couple in the hand of Ono and Lennon].”. Item #6658

Yoko Ono’s exhibition catalog for an exhibition that never existed, or only existed as a conceptual work in and of itself, signed and inscribed by Ono and John Lennon to Jonas Mekas.

Ono took out ads in the Village Voice and New York Times announcing a one-woman show at the MoMA, running December 1-15, 1971. She produced this exhibition catalog to further publicize the exhibition, which features collaged images of Ono in MoMA’s sculpture garden with a massive glass jar filled with flies, which she released into the city before documenting their movements. The exhibition catalog features photographs of various locations in New York where the flies traveled (including on a sleeping John Lennon), fly tracking charts and lists, instructions to readers to perform tasks and thought exercises related to the respective circulations of flies and the book’s postcards, and vignettes and thought exercises defamiliarizing the concept of ownership.

Ono staged the show without MoMA’s knowledge. She pasted a sign describing the release of flies into the city and a handwritten note to the museum’s ticket booth that read, “This is Not Here,” a phrase that reoccurs in Ono’s work. Ono gravitated towards using flies in her work frequently throughout the early 1970s, releasing a film titled “Fly” the year prior to this performance and an album titled “Fly” in the same year.

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