Why must I smoke my pubic hair? My wild day following Yoko Ono’s avant-garde orders
We crave instruction. We always have, however mundane or obvious. “If it is not right,” wrote Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, “do not do it.” He is still revered to this day. More recently, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life begins with this advice: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” It has sold more than 10m copies.
No matter how comically banal the instruction, it seems people will give it credence if they believe it will lead to enlightenment and advancement. This was recognised by avant garde artist Yoko Ono in her 1964 book Grapefruit. It contains 200 sets of instructions, composed between 1953 and 1964. They are, in her words, incomplete works of art. The aim is to inspire readers to “finish” them – by complying, or by somehow responding to them in their mind. There’s a whole wall full of her instructions at the recently opened Ono exhibition at London’s Tate Modern.
Their language is disarmingly straightforward. Yet what reads like the instructions off the side of a ready meal often contain complex and even nonsensical demands. A work called Painting to Exist Only When It’s Copied or Photographed bids you: “Let people copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the originals.” The non-sequiturs and surreal imagery, meanwhile, can be laugh-out-loud funny. Back Piece I instructs: “Put the light out. Stand behind a person for four hours.” Smell Piece suggests: “Use a name card without a name. Put an address and a smell instead.”
I worry that I’m not quite understanding it all, but help is at hand. In 1971, Ono gave this clue: “To understand the pieces, you must do them. Even doing them in your mind is making a step part of the way along the road to better communication with yourself.” So, 60 years after Grapefruit’s publication, I decide to do exactly that – and in New York, too, where it was written.
Plane Piece
My first, called Plane Piece, begins at JFK airport. “Hire a plane,” it demands. “Invite everybody. Ask them to write a will to you before boarding.” I decide to first seek legal advice.
“I don’t know any real lawyers who would do this,” says the lawyer, preferring to remain anonymous. “Most of them don’t have a sense of humour. Perhaps you can find a barred lawyer who can make documents – but doing this is illegal.”Fortunately, I find just such a lawyer, bedbound with Covid and willing to humour me. He writes a contract that essentially declares: “Should I die while flying from JFK airport, I bequeath all my property to Oobah Butler. Should I survive this flight, this bequest shall be null and void.”
Now I just need to persuade somebody to sign this will and potentially hand all their belongings over to me. Standing in line for an Etihad Airways flight, I meet Fahad, who is accompanied by his daughter. He’s flying business class to Abu Dhabi for work. As a businessman, he’s probably used to desperate pitches, so I give him my best.
“Sure,” he laughs. “Why not?” Before I know it, Fahad has agreed to sign away, in the event of his death, everything that is inside his suitcase: designer clothes, laptop, smart shoes.
Today could be a successful – if tragic – day. We shake on our deal and, before I leave the airport, I calculate his sizes and make a note of his flight number.
Conversation Piece
This one is a bit longer. “Talk about the death of an imaginary person,” it begins. “If somebody is interested, bring out a black framed photograph of the deceased and show. If friends invite you, excuse yourself by explaining about the death of the person.”
I mull this one over, walking over to Tompkins Square park in the winter sun, fearing this may not be a nice thing to do. I’ve come straight from the art supplies shop, armed with a new black frame. A few hours earlier, I’d put these words into an AI image generator: “Show the funeral booklet of a sympathetic person who has died too young.” The result is a picture with accompanying words, but every one of them is gibberish – apart from something that could just about be a name: Eabi.
“Can I take a seat next to you?” I say to a man on a bench holding an acoustic guitar. He stares up at me. “Yeah sure.” He shifts over slightly and tells me his name is Jacob. I sit and, slowly and silently, try to generate enough courage to interrupt the silence. “You know,” I say, “I lost a friend recently.” I produce the frame. Jacob makes a sympathetic noise and stares. “My friend Eabi.”
“I’m sorry,” he says and I nod, staying silent. “He looks so young. Do you mind me asking what he passed away from?” I swallow. I hadn’t planned for this. “I do mind, actually,” I say, then pause. “A disease. A bad disease.” Jacob stares at the frame, and the cogs in his mind begin to turn. He’s noticing the indecipherable text, isn’t he? He’s going to call me out!
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” says Jacob and gives another wholesome nod. The exchange ends, and I decide to go, wishing him well. I’m pouring with sweat. I head back to my flat.
Fog Piece II
Enough interaction, I think. It’s time to look within. Fog Piece II seems perfect: “Polish an orange.” I pick up a piece of fruit and start furiously polishing. There’s not a whole lot to it, so I decide to reflect on what I’m doing today. I feel like a marionette having its strings tugged. When writing her instructions, Ono presumably had an expectation of what people will do – and where they’ll draw the line. I’ve been playing right into her hands, I realise. It’s time to get a step ahead, to do something she wouldn’t expect, to liberate myself from this avant garde puppet master.
Smoke Piece
“Smoke everything you can,” this one instructs. “Including your pubic hair.” I step out on to my fire escape, holding an apple bong fashioned via WikiHow. I load it with pinches of freshly snipped pubic hair, take out a lighter and set the mound ablaze. Immediately, the smoke hits the back of my throat and burns. I cough and feel about to retch. Smoke billows out of my mouth – smoke from my pubic hair! The reality of what I’ve actually just done hits me hard. The joke is on me, isn’t it?
I’m nearing the end of my Grapefruit journey, but I’m not feeling any closer to enlightenment. In fact, I feel as if I’ve taken rather a lot of dangerously regressive steps, each one of which could be called: “The moment it all went wrong.” With expectations low, I leave the flat, preparing for my final prompt.
Painting to Shake Hands (Painting for Cowards)
I’m standing at the top of the stairs at the Union Square Park subway station, holding a canvas. I’m ready. Fire away, Yoko. “Drill a hole in a canvas,” this one commands, “and put your hand out from behind. Receive your guests in that position. Shake hands and converse with hands.”
As the crowds climb up the stairs and pass me, I punch a hole in the canvas, push my forearm through and extend my hand. Somebody grabs it! And shakes it! Then another! I lower the canvas and notice a woman is documenting all this with her phone, smiling. Then I’m approached by a middleaged man in a baseball cap. He wants to talk.
“What a powerful image,” he says, excitedly. “Art is controlled by foundations and the bourgeoisie. Your handshakes create alliances against corrupt art. Powerful image, powerful image.” He walks off.
Dropping the canvas, I realise I finally have what I hadn’t known I was looking for: an interpretation, a meaning of sorts. Later, I pull a page from Grapefruit: a postcard created by Ono on which she instructs me simply to draw a circle. But this time, I decide not to obey. Instead, I write down the words spoken to me by the man in the baseball cap.
Then I take it to the post office and send it to nowhere.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is at Tate Modern, London, until 1 September
ical reasoning, diagnostic categories, prognoses and therapeutic recommendations dependent on these theories are ill-advised at best, and dangerous at worst.” She adds, however, that she sought to only translate advice that “a modern western physician might reasonably give, or at least, with which she would not disagree (most of the time)”.
Promising!
Ask elders what they think is wrong with me
In order to become a better person, Galen says, the first thing you need to do is figure out what’s wrong with you.
“Whoever wants to become a fine and good person, let him bear in mind that one is necessarily unaware of many of one’s own errors,” he writes. Many of us, he argues, are simply too in love with ourselves to see all of the ways in which we’re falling short.
In order to determine our unique set of flaws, Galen suggests soliciting feedback from others. Specifically: “older men who have lived the best sort of lives”.
As a woman on the internet, I have been the lucky recipient of older men’s unsolicited feedback for years. And as grateful as I am for that, I cannot be sure that they have lived “the best sort of lives” – no offense.
So I turn to the highest concentration of older men in my life – plus some women, per Van Schaik’s suggestion: my parents’ weekly Zoom call with their friends from college.
After much back and forth, the group settles on one main issue. “You’re too into astrology,” my father reports.
I endeavor to improve myself as these older Capricorn, Cancer and Pisces men have suggested. For the next week, I refrain from checking my three astrology apps in the morning. When I wish a former colleague a happy birthday, I don’t call him an “Aquarian king”. I do slip up one day and look up Truman Capote’s star chart (he was a Libra), but otherwise I remain steadfast.
Practice exercise with the small ball
Galen believed that exercise was an essential part of one’s health, but not all forms of it. For example, Galen disapproved of running because he believed it “has a tendency to thin the condition of the body and provides no training for courage”, which is great because I find it boring.
The ideal exercise, according to Galen, is “the exercise with the small ball”. He calls this activity “convenient”, “accessible” and “comprehensive”, and argues that it “sharpens the mind”.
But Galen never gives instructions for how to do it. He says that one throws the ball, and – alarmingly – that there are “many neck grabs and many wrestling holds”.
I ask Van Schaik if she can elaborate. “It’s a fun puzzle,” she says. “We’re not entirely sure what it looked like or what the rules were.”
She does offer that the game involved multiple people and a tennissized sphere, and that it probably had elements of keep away. “Like a highoctane capture the flag, except you’re throwing it,” she says.
Sadly, I can’t find a big group of people whose necks I can grab. I settle on playing a catch/keep away hybrid with my boyfriend. I throw him a tennis ball and he holds it away from me while I scramble ineffectively to grab it, and my dog races around us barking.
Though I never succeed in reclaiming the ball, this activity is extremely tiring, and it takes me a few minutes to regain my breath. I feel certain that if I did this on a regular basis, I would sustain terrible injuries.
Determine my balance of the four humors
Central to Galen’s concept of health was each individual’s balance of what were considered at the time to be the four bodily fluids, also known as the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Humorism, as this principle of medicine was known, posited that each person’s unique mixture of these fluids was different; a preponderance of one humor or another determined a person’s temperament. Imbalance of these fluids, it was believed, could lead to disease.
Humorism was a pillar of western medicine until the 19th century, when germ theory emerged as the leading explanation for disease. But I’m committed to Galen’s advice, so I embrace this defunct theory. Still, I need some help.
Angela He, a rare books librarian at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis who has written about the four humors, outlines the humoral temperaments for me. Those with an abundance of blood were “sanguine”, thought to have cheerful personalities and rosy cheeks. “Cholerics” had an abundance of yellow bile, which supposedly made them quicktempered. The creative and depressed were known as “melancholic”, and believed to have an excess of black bile, while “phlegmatics” were supposed to be lazy.
I tell He that I am cheerful and my cheeks are frustratingly rosy, so I’m probably sanguine. But I worry that’s what everyone thinks they are, like saying you’re the Carrie Bradshaw of your friend group.
She asks a series of follow-up questions. Do I like spicy food? Yes. Do I sweat a lot? Unfortunately, also yes. She agrees I sound sanguine. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, “blood equals sweatiness”.
I wonder if this is why natural deodorant has never worked for me.
Eat according to my humoral balance
According to Galen, food could help rectify imbalances in a person’s humoral mixture. Each bodily fluid was believed to have certain fundamental qualities – for example, blood was thought to be hot and wet; yellow bile, hot and dry – and so were foods. So a sanguine person, who had an excess of hot, wet blood, was thought to benefit from eating cold, dry foods.
“You might want to add stuff into your diet like mushrooms, lentils and tea,” says He – foods that were considered cold and wet. Beef was seen as a cold, dry food that could balance my sanguine temperament. But I am to avoid foods like lamb, veal, turnips and anything spicy.
“So either wet, kind of flavorless foods, or beef, I suppose,” He concludes.
Over the next few days, I bravely adhere to my diet by going out to restaurants and ordering oysters and steak tartare. This feels amazing. Neither my finances nor my cholesterol would allow me to eat this way all the time, but I wonder if old Galen was on to something.
Conclusion
Did Galen’s health advice make me feel better? Of course not. Humorism was long ago disproven, exercise with the small ball was confusing, and I hated taking older men’s advice.
Still, Van Schaik says she has a tremendous amount of respect for Galen.
“He trained as any MD/PhD student would in the United States,” she says. “He had such a long time devoted to his medical education, and I respect that as a clinician myself.”
Galen’s confident writing also serves as a reminder to modern-day physicians to temper their expertise with some humility, Van Schaik says. “Galen was so sure he was right, and he was wrong in so many ways,” she says. “It’s important for us as physicians today to not be like that. To be more reflective in thinking through, what are we doing wrong? What could we do better?”
An important reminder for all. I think I’m right about astrology being fun though.
I worry that’s what everyone thinks they are sanguine, like saying you’re the Carrie Bradshaw of your friend group