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
. 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.
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.
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.
How do you know about these boxes?
I found the descriptions in the
in the Yoko Ono section [See Jon Hendricks,
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), p. 418 for the descriptions]. Was either piece ever built?
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They were never built. I haven't seen these ideas since I did them. Whenever I had an idea, I sent it to George Maciunas. He probably kept them. I don't even have the originals for those. I'll have to get this book. You know, I have this thing about reading about me. When something about me is in a book, I mostly don't want to know about it.
One of the interesting things about watching the film
is that one's sense of what the body we're seeing is about, and what the film is about, is constantly changing.
A cartoon in a newspaper gave me the idea. There's this woman with a low-cut dress, and a guy is looking at her, and the guy's wife says, 'What are you looking at!' and the guy says, 'Oh, I'm looking at a fly on her.' I wanted the film to be an experience where you're always wondering, am I following the movement of fly or am I looking at the body? I think that life is full of that kind of thing. We're always sort of deceiving ourselves about what we're really seeing.
Do you know the Willard Maas film,
? It's all close-ups of bodies, framed so that you can't quite tell what body part you're looking atbut they all look erotic.
is a little like that, and
is full of that effect. If you go close enough, every part of the body looks the same, and they're all equally erotic.
Oh, there's an incredible film instruction that has to do with that close-up idea. It's a travelogue ['Film No. 13 (Travelogue)']. You have a travelogue to Japan or somewhere, and you say, 'Well, now I'm on Mount Fuji,' and there's an incredible close-up of stones; and then, 'We bathed in a mixed bath,' and you see just steamyou get it? and then, 'We ate noodles,' and you see an incredible close-up of noodles . . . so in effect you can make a travelogue of any country without going out of your apartment! ''Then we saw geisha girls,' and you see an incredible close-up of hair [laughter]. I wanted to make that, but I just never got around to it.
[1970], the little one-minute film of you trying to take your bra off, was made the same year as
.
Yeah, isn't that a great little film?
It's so paradoxical. You show freedom as the ability to try to break free, which implies that you're never really free.
Right, exactly.
You mentioned earlier that you didn't think
worked as well as
(
). I thought it was interesting to see that people's one leg is very different from their other leg.
The best thing about that film is the title, I think. My first vision for that film was like going up all the legs, up, up, up, to eternity ['Film No. 12 (Esstacy)'the misspelling of 'ecstasy' is left as it was in the original film script, at Ono's request]. But in making it, that vision got
