Instructions for talking to Yoko Ono: Don’t ask her any personal questions.

Unlike Ono’s explicit yet poetic works “Instructions for Films” or “Instructions for Paintings,” there were no instructions articulated at all when the celebrated artist/musician/Beatle wife rolled into her press conference at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the day before the opening of the new traveling overview exhibit of her career, YES YOKO ONO.

Instead, she was quietly ushered to a table on stage, a petite figure in a black sweater and trousers and black-and-white sneakers, with a streak of light, blonde-auburn hair skimming the top of her spiky crop. The 69-year-old provocateur was a half hour behind schedule because of a delayed flight, and she looked slightly breathless. A bit of laughter fluttered at the edges of her words.

Ono was willing to be personal up to a point. After all she once invited audience members to come up on stage and snip off her clothing in the name of art. But considering how much glee the press and public has taken in stripping her bare and sniping at her, no wonder she hesitates at revealing anything personal beyond the work.

I gave it the college try anyway. “Since you say that art is inspired by something as mundane as the drop of an apple, what would you say your everyday life is like?” I asked.

“Oh, very ordinary,” she said with that crisp little laugh. “I’m a workaholic and I have so much to do. I’m very busy.”

Top: John Lennon (left) and Yoko Ono, Bed-In for Peace, 1969, Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam. Photo by Ruud Hoff. Middle: Yoko Ono, 1965, performance at Carnegie Recital Hall. Photo by Minori Niizuma. Bottom: Yoko Ono, 1997, wood chess tables, wood chairs, wood chess sets, all painted white. Photo by Miguel Angel Valero.

“It doesn’t have to be eating chocolate or something special like going to [a] party, but just look at the sky,” she added. “The sky is very beautiful and that should make your heart dance. And the fact that they are polluting it and things are going badly, and maybe the sky is going to be gray and black with bombs — still now, look at the sky. Whether it’s cloudy or beautiful blue, it just makes you feel good.”

YES YOKO ONO is another everyday yet extraordinary thing that will make your heart dance. Since its initial run in New York City in 2000, the show has been going a long way in revealing the breezy intelligence and poetic wit behind the so-called “horrible Oriental woman who broke up the Beatles,” as an old newspaper man recently reminded me. At the time, Ono was the Asian “other,” the fabulous freak that whisked beloved Beatle John Lennon away from the pop mainstream and planted him squarely in the realm of political activism, avant-garde films and performance art. She was the bizarre performer who keened like a banshee, howled like a she-wolf and rattled the nerves of an American Bandstand that just wanted to twist and shout their worries away.

The media circus that followed Ono and Lennon around in the ’60s and into the ’80s continues to trail after Ono. There were more journalists at the museum press conference where Ono held court than I have seen turn out for a visual artist in ages. And she deserves the attention. A boundary smasher from the start, Ono merged the musical ideas of John Cage with conceptual artwork associated with the Fluxus Group, and blended the mainstream rock of the Plastic Ono Band with avant-garde performance.

The media hordes followed her through the retrospective, which makes its only West Coast appearance at S.F. MOMA before wrapping up its U.S. engagements in Miami. Unlike the other stops, this exhibit includes the “War Is Over!/If You Want It/Love and Peace from John & Yoko” billboard by Ono and Lennon, installed at New Montgomery and Howard, near S.F. MOMA as it once was in New York’s Times Square in December 1969.

She gave an interview before TV cameras, near the all-white, truncated furniture of “Half-A-Room” (1967), then made her way past screening areas for her films, including the hilarious No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966), which features the artist friends’ strangely animated buttocks and their disembodied conversations. She passed her “Water Piece (Painting to Be Watered)” (1962/1966), a Duchamp-like conceptual art work that consists of a sponge and a dropper in an inkwell, and “AMAZE” (1971), a mind-altering, see-through Plexiglas maze that involves an inevitable stumble into a wall and a witty final destination, a toilet.

Start with earlier works such as “Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting)” (1966), which first enticed Lennon in a London gallery. He climbed the ladder and peered with a magnifying glass at the word “yes,” giving him his first taste of Ono’s sensibility.

Progress to Albert and David Maysles’ 1965 film of Ono’s performance art work, “Cut Piece,” which powerfully explores the audience and performer relationship, the gazer and the gazed upon, “the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scopic desires, victim and assailant” as curator Alexandra Munroe and longtime Ono archivist and Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks writes in the exhibit’s dazzling catalog, which includes an essay on Lennon and Ono by Jann Wenner, and a CD of songs from Ono’s 2000 CD A Blueprint for the Sunrise.

“It’s a very powerful and strong feminist statement,” Hendricks said earlier that day, walking through the galleries. “If you can imagine an artist, a woman artist, in 1964 anywhere in the world, but in Japan, sitting on stage with scissors in front of her and inviting the audience to cut off her clothes — it’s amazing, an amazingly powerful work. It remains so.”

The 1981 “Walking on Thin Ice” video is a revelation, positioned near a wishing tree that entreats viewers to participate, as so many of her works do; participants can write a wish on a tag and tie it to the living ficus for Ono to read later — an act that reminds me of the almost magical animism of Japan. But in the end, I stopped in front of the film of the Ono-Lennon wedding-turned-performance art work, “Bed-In for Peace,” unreeling on a small screen. It’s truly mind-boggling to see it in the context of Ono’s work rather than the universally disparaging light it has been presented in, from high-minded Beatles documentaries on down.

While I finished up the exhibit, Ono walked behind me to do yet another TV interview, and I couldn’t help but compare today’s Yoko and yesteryear’s Yoko, in a groovy white minidress, hat and go-go boots, climbing on a plane and then jumping into a bed with Lennon and daughter Kyoko, from a previous marriage.

Can anyone imagine Brad and Jennifer, Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, or even Madonna and Guy Richie parlaying their nuptials into performance art, let alone a political statement about the happy, peace-promoting, ever-lovin’ meeting of East and West? Well, maybe if it was on pay-per-view.

YES YOKO ONO runs through Sept. 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St. Events include video screenings of an Ono interview and performance on July 13 and 26, and Aug. 1, a lecture by Clara Kim on Ono’s work on July 18, and a performance of Ono’s instruction poems and scores on Aug. 6. For hours and more information, call 415-357-4000 or visit www.sfmoma.org.