Yoko Ono: 'Cut Piece' (Art Drop #14)

60 years after its premiere, what are we to make of this "strange public violation that everyone was cool with?"

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (still), 1964. 16 mm black and white film, sound. 9:10 minutes. Performed by the artist, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, 1965.

In 1964, thirty-one-year-old Yoko Ono premiered a pioneering work of performance art, which she called Cut Piece, at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan. The exhibit began with Ono appearing onstage wearing her best clothes, accompanied only by a pair of scissors. She then invited the audience to come up one by one and cut away pieces of her clothes.

Which they did while she sat passive and unmoving for the duration.

By the end of the performance, Ono was completely naked. And the audience left the venue carrying remnants of the outfit they had just destroyed.

Cut Piece is a landmark of performance art. And it made Ono famous well before her career was overshadowed by her marriage to John Lennon in 1969. Themes of materialism, gender, class, and cultural identity, which were central to Ono’s work, are all present in this extraordinary exhibit.

According to Ono:

Her original intention was to harness the Buddhist mentality (Buddha, born a wealthy prince, achieved enlightenment by giving up everything and sitting under a tree for seven years), with a feminist subtext: women too often need to give up everything. This performance was a demonstration of that reality.

Cut Piece was also the first performance piece to address the potential for sexual violence in public spectacle.

In the longer of the two video versions of Cut Piece below, one viewer said: “It’s like a strange public violation that everyone was cool with."

After the original performance in 1964, Yoko Ono took the exhibit to Tokyo, New York, Paris, and London. She had very little money at the time, and since her instruction required the performer to wear her best clothes, her wardrobe took a big hit after six consecutive performances.

But the most challenging toll was emotional.

In 1966, she said: “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me. Finally, there was only the stone remained of me — [the stone] that was in me, but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.” [sic]

Over the years, there have been many interpretations of Cut Piece. During the Vietnam War, some viewed it as an anti-war statement. Those who felt this way noted that although Yoko Ono is Japanese, she is phenotypically Asian and could be seen as a stand-in victim of the imperialistic violence against Southeast Asians during that terrible conflict.

Ono herself has reinterpreted the meaning of the piece several times. The last time she performed the work in 2003, at age of 70, she said it expressed her hope for world peace.

Yoko Ono, CUT PIECE, 1964/2003. Performed by the artist, Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris, 2003. Photograph: Ken McKay via Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia

Sixty years after its premiere

Cut Piece remains provocative, engaging, disturbing, and relevant. It has spawned other similar performance-art exhibits, such as the work of Serbian artist Marina Abramović.

Ten years after Ono’s Cut Piece, Abramović stood onstage alone next to a table with 72 objects. Such as a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet. Depending upon how the audience used each item, they could bring pleasure or pain.

At first the audience did not do much and was extremely passive.

However, as the realization began to set in that there was no limit to their actions, the piece became brutal. By the end of the performance, her body was stripped, attacked, and devalued into an image that Abramović described as the "Madonna, mother, and whore."

As Abramović described it later: "What I learned was that ... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. ... I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

—Wikipedia

It took courage to stage these pieces

And I admire both women for what they created in these provocative examples of “living art.” And yet, that is nothing compared to what women experience every day in the “real world.” Do I need to remind you of Aleppo, Gaza, October 7th, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Haiti? Do I need to remind you of the insatiable American appetite for TV crime procedurals that begin with the maimed or mutilated body of a murdered woman?

Yoko Ono was a key figure in the international Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 70s, which “encouraged a playful and open-minded approach to art-making, creating a wide range of unconventional works, often using ordinary objects and actions to challenge traditional notions of art and engage audiences in interactive experiences.”

This approach intrigues me.

Because ever since October 7th, I’ve been asking myself, Where is the Guernica of the War in Gaza? Can art respond meaningfully and impactfully to the atrocities we witness every day? In 2019, the Washington Post featured Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece in a story called, “How the Vietnam War Changed Art Forever.” Will this current war produce a similar artistic upheaval?

If you watch either video below,

you will notice a difference in the way women and men cut into Yoko Ono’s clothing. You may also notice a difference in the size of the pieces cut. It’s interesting to see how men, in particular, move into the space around Ono as she sits there passively. To some, the men appear predatory. But at least one woman commenting in the longer video says she would have cut Yoko’s sweater down the back and lifted the entire thing over her head.

What do these comments mean?

That’s open to interpretation, as is the performance piece itself. Psychologists have studied group behavior in settings like this for decades. There was the Asch Conformity Study of 1951. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. And the Bobo Doll Experiments of the 1960s, as well as other investigations like the Bystander Effect. Each of these provides a glimpse into what’s going on in Cut Piece.

What happens to people when they become part of a group?

Why do they sometimes behave in ways that conflict with their values? Why didn’t the members of Yoko Ono’s audience simply refuse to cut away her clothing?

If no one in the audience had participated in the cutting part of the performance, it would still have been performance-art, but the nature and outcome of the performance would have told a different story. After all, they were invited onstage, not forced.

In any case, this refusal to cut has not happened. No one was restrained by the thought, She looks so vulnerable up there, and these are her best clothes.

Instead, the audience has behaved the same way in every city where Cut Piece has been performed. And that includes this newest take during Berlin Art Week 2023, posted on TikTok.

Sixty years after its premiere, Yoko Ono’s pioneering work remains a remarkable inquiry into the confounding nature of humanity.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading.

Watch the short version (9:19 minutes)

Here’s the long version (27 minutes) via The Lonely Palette Podcast