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Ono:
Very much intentionally calculated?
MacDonald:
Right.
Ono:
It's true.
MacDonald:
You did the sound [for the vocal piece
Fly
] before you did the film. Had you had the idea in mind then?
Ono:
I was always thinking about the idea of fly. Actually, I was always fascinated with the pun "fly" and "fly" in English. There was also a conceptual event about flies and where they fly to.
MacDonald:
The piece you did for the Museum of Modern Art?
Ono:
Yes. Did you see that Museum of Modern Art catalogue? [A 112-page, one foot by one foot cataloguethe title seems to be
Museum of Modern FArt
(Ono is carrying a shopping bag with the letter "F" directly beneath the Museum of Modern Art marquee)which details her concept at length; the catalogue was designed by Ono and produced by Michael Gross.] At the end of that, I talk about how to fly.
MacDonald:
I know the video with the sandwich-board guy in front of the Museum of Modern Art who interviews people about the Yoko Ono show that "isn't there" [
The Museum of Modern Art Show
]. In the text for that piece, you explain how some flies were exposed to your perfume and let loose and that people are following those flies around to see where they land.
Ono:
The catalogue was made for that event; it had all sorts of interesting stuff in it, about how to fly and all that. All the pages are postcards that you could mail, so the catalogue and
Fly
piece could fly all over the place.
MacDonald:
So MoMA had this on sale?
Ono:
No, no, no, no! MoMA would not do it. MoMA was busy saying to people, "There's no Yoko Ono show here." People would come in and ask, is there a Yoko Ono show, and they would say
no
. They were very upset; they didn't know what was going on. I couldn't sell the book anywhere. Nobody bought it, so I have piles of it.
MacDonald:
Earlier, in the mid sixties, you did a number of descriptions of environmental boxes that the viewer would go inside of and images would be projected on the outside.
Eyeblink
was involved in a number of those descriptions, and another was called "Fly." I guess the idea was that a viewer would go inside the box and on all sides you would project images that would create the sensation that the viewer was flying.
Ono:
How do you know about these boxes?
MacDonald:
I found the descriptions in the
Fluxus Codex,
in the Yoko Ono section [See Jon Hendricks,
Fluxus Codex
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), p. 418 for the descriptions]. Was either piece ever built?