Yoko Ono

First-edition artist book from Yoko Ono's intervention at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• Yoko Ono (Japanese).
• New York: n. p, 1971.
•  [112] pages.
• Square quarto.
• Bound in white illustrated wrappers.

In 1971, "Yoko Ono staged an 'intervention' at MoMA without the museum’s permission, to which she gave the puckish title of 'Yoko Ono — One Woman Show'... Ms. Ono’s guerrilla contribution to MoMA’s program that year took the form of revealing (falsely) that she had released an army of flies around the museum, as a kind of Fluxus fifth column. For the card announcing her fictional show, she retouched a photo of the museum’s signage to insert a naughty letter “f” before its final word, thus creating the 'Museum of Modern (f)Art.' 'I did a conceptual show and that was it, for me,' said Ms. Ono, never expecting her fictional solo exhibition to become reality..." (Gopkin, Blake, "Yoko Ono and MoMA, Together at Last," NY Times, May 6, 2015). MoMA did eventually create a Yoko Ono exhibition, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 (May 17 – September 7, 2015).

The book takes the form of Fluxus score as well as mail art piece, in the tradition of the New York Correspondence school. The reader is instructed to cut out and mail the postcards with images of flies on them and mail them, marking their recipients on an included map, and to write their own essays about the process, before finally treating the book as a piece of sculpture. Second only to Grapefruit in Ono provocations.