Cut Piece was staged five times by Yoko Ono between 1964 and 1966. These performances were in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York and London. This revised version of Cut Piece was staged in Paris in 2003.
Description of the Performance Cut Piece
Yoko Ono sits in the centre of the stage without any props and under a spotlight. From their seats, the audience enter the stage, to cut her clothing with scissors. Soon the scissors cut even her underwear. The art then is done by the audience who fashions by removing and paring away the clothing that Ono wears. This process takes on the feeling of the act of sculpting.
Ono later says that instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give, the audience is provided with the ability to choose what they take. They cut and take whatever part they want. The process was not a noisy one but a contemplative process much like a sculptor’s thoughtful musings.
Yoko Ono was idiosyncratically positioned as a dual identity. In Japan she was regarded as an artist and in the West a New York avant-garde artist. Ono played an ‘exotic body’ in both settings, and this invited a pivotal position in Ono’s oeuvre expressing the issue of ‘otherness’. Ono was in the position to feed into the respective expectations of differently situated audiences. Rhee claims that each culture was at the time yearning to see the ‘other’ unveiled.
In the opening paragraphs in a paper about Yoko Ono, Rhee refers to and then elaborates on “Cut Piece." When referring to Ono's performance as Performing the Other, Rhee discusses the idea of ‘the artist as 'being-in-the-world," with this being contingent upon an interdependence of viewer and the viewed, thus creating a process of identification. The process, it is suggested, can be powerful enough to merge the roles of the two participants within the art work process.
Some have interpreted the performance as an exploration of the sadomasochistic dichotomy or the similar relationship between violence and victimization. The process has also been interpreted from the point of view of feminist discourse about the female body and the male gaze.
In the paper called Performing the Other, Jieun Rhee has chosen to look at the series of performances as a function of context created by social, cultural, national and ethnic audience response to Ono’s performance. Rhee’s paper reveals that responses differed markedly when Cut Piece was performed in the different cities, characterized by different cultural traditions.
Subject in Relation to Others
Within the paper about Cut Piece, Rhee talks of the subject always being in relationship to others. The central question thrown up by the process is about the location of identity as always being elsewhere.
Cut Piece is all the more complicated, because it is a work that suggests an intricate framing of the abrasion between different cultures, contexts and genders, continues Rhee. Within this piece of work the contract between artist and audience was not intended to be tacit. The relationship between audience and artist was constantly contested and negotiated and renegotiated. Jieun Rhee continues to analyse the performance saying that, one of the key features of performance art is the relationship between the audience and the artist. The artist assuming the position usually reserved for a work of art becomes the art object and the audience becoming an essential interacting part of the art work.
Background Information About Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono was born in 1933. She spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between Japan and the United States. Her father was a high ranking executive of Yokohama Specie Bank. Ono developed ambivalent feelings towards the United States and her precocious awareness of her own otherness.
The Onos returned to Japan in 1941, just before the United States entered the war. According to Rhee, Yoko became perplexed when old friendships turned into enemy status. Ono felt lost in the war-driven Japanese society. Only a few months before the war, she had been happy to love her American friends, and now suddenly they were at war.
Whether referring to sacred prostitution cults of Kumano bikuni, who were nomadic nuns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or to the sexual component of the Western artistic avant garde, Ono’s performance piece highlights the importance of the role that Asian bodies played in the crucial years of the development performance art.
Resource:
- Rhee, Jieun. Performing the Other. Yoko Ono's Cut Piece. Art History, Feb 2005, Vol. 28 Issues, p96
Related Articles:
- The Communication Art of Yoko Ono A good introduction to the nature of the performance art of Yoko Ono and her husband John Lennon.
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