Grapefruit
Yoko Ono Calling
A lot of it—the lyric and the concept—came from Yoko, but those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit, her book, there’s a whole pile of pieces about imagine this and imagine that and I have given her credit now long overdue.—John Lennon, on his song “Imagine”
Imagine this. You are walking through the Theater Gallery in the Berkeley Art Museum and pass by a telephone installed amidst the art. The phone rings, and you notice that the wall label instructs you to answer it. Imagine that on the other end of the line is Yoko Ono, calling to talk to you. It could happen. Telephone Piece for Berkeley is just one of the works in the exhibition Grapefruit that invite viewer participation. Occasionally throughout the course of the show, the artist will call and talk to whoever picks up the phone. The telephone is a vintage 1966 white wall phone, commemorating the year that John Lennon and Yoko Ono met, forty years ago this November.
The heart of the exhibition is a group of wall texts drawn from the book Grapefruit—a collection of poetic and witty writings that Ono called “instruction paintings”—including all the works from the book that contain the word “imagine.” These too are participatory by nature, in that they require the viewer’s imagination to make them complete.
Yoko Ono has generously donated IMAGINE PEACE buttons to be distributed free to viewers throughout the course of the exhibition. Special thanks for her support of the exhibition, and for permission to reproduce her texts.
Stephanie Cannizzo
Curatorial Associate
