Downtown art audiences received early performances with mixed boredom and arousal

Evidence

The Times employed the same phrase when Ono reprised A Grapefruit in the World of Park for a packed audience at Carnegie Recital Hall in November 1961. The “far-out music” was performed in near total darkness: “Against a taped background of mumbled words and wild laughter a girl spoke earnestly about peeling a grapefruit, squeezing lemons and counting the hairs on a dead child. Musicians in the corner made their instruments go squeep and squawk.” Reviewing for the Voice, Jill Johnston was unimpressed with Ono’s “theater of events,” writing that she was “alternately stupefied and aroused, with longer stretches of stupor.” Arousal was prompted by Yvonne Rainer performing an exercise in “excruciating slow motion”; stupefaction by Ono’s finale, concluding the evening with “amplified sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish [sic] of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1857

Categorization

• SHARE: The Times’ ‘counting the hairs on a dead child’ and the squeep/squawk detail would delight anyone into Ono or the downtown scene.