THE NEW YORKER ON YOKO ONO'S GRAPEFRUIT

Any collective as puckish and as taken with impermanence as Fluxus naturally flirts with the loss of primary-source documentation. It’s precisely this inevitable erasure that makes moma’s decision to devote an entire gallery to a single Ono book—“Grapefruit,” her 1964 compendium of conceptual-art instructions—feel so crucial and rewarding.

Seeing the original edition is rare enough: copies of the first printing have been scarce for decades. (At the exhibit, all the pages from an early copy are posted around the perimeter of a large gallery). But something remarkable happens when Ono’s manuscript is placed alongside her paintings and sculptures: at last, we have a chance to see the continuum of Fluxus-era artistic practice in full, incorporating everything from an initial idea to the provisional executions of that same thought. We don’t have to lament the loss of “hard” objects such as paintings or sculptures—those are in the next room over. The viewer is asked to hold both the notional sketch and the “finished product” in mind, without choosing one over the other. This gets to the heart of what Ono and some members of the Fluxus movement were up to.