In Tokyo, in 1964, the 31-year-old conceptual artist Yoko Ono organized a happening in which she screened a Hollywood film and gave the audience a simple instruction: Do not look at Rock Hudson, look only at Doris Day.
Like most of the countercultural riddles that appear in Grapefruit,Ono’s book from the same year, the instruction — titled Film Script 5 — was at once facile and mischievously impossible. (Other variations on the piece include asking the audience not to look at any round objects in a film, or to see only red.) It was also, in its way, autobiographical: As one of the few women associated with New York’s avant-garde music scene and the “neo-Dada” Fluxus movement, Ono was by then used to being overshadowed by the more powerful and self-serious men around her. (“I wonder why men can get serious at all,” she mused in Grapefruit. “They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will.”) The year she first staged Film Script 5, she’d already extricated herself from one failed marriage and her second was unraveling. She was still two years away from meeting the man with whom she would realize her dream of a completely egalitarian partnership — to symbolize this, they both wore white during their wedding ceremony — but the rest of the world wouldn’t see it that way. They would, of course, see only the towering, superior Him — what could he have possibly seen inHer?
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