Our art series demystifies the artworks we love—or love to hate. This time, we tackle a pioneering piece that went on to define feminist performance art
Imagine being so open to vulnerability, that you would voluntarily sit on stage dressed in your best outfit and invite audience members to come on stage and cut out pieces of your clothing. On July 20,1964, then-31-year-old Japanese artist Yoko Ono did exactly this in Kyoto’s Yamaichi Concert Hall as part of her performance art piece Cut Piece.
At once intimate and provocative in nature, subtle and bold in gesture, the work is considered to be a shining example of performance art and, at that time, it pushed the boundaries of art by making the audience integral to the work, both in terms of those viewing the art and those performing the discomfiting act of cutting clothing off her body.
Some viewers, especially the first few, made small snips revealing minimal skin in more acceptable parts of the body such as her wrists or forearms, while others made more drastic moves such as cutting her bra straps, prompting the artist to change her meditative pose and hold her bra up to prevent it from falling off.
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While some audience members made demure cuts, others made bolder snips, exposing opposing latent tendencies in human nature. The act plays on the contradicting emotions of humility and aggression, shame and perversion—invoking the eternal question: are we inherently good or bad? It also spotlights the raw tension between the consumer and the artist, by giving the former control over shaping the artwork—thereby pushing the boundaries of performance art even further.
Ono was born in Japan in 1933, but in the wake of World War II, her family fled to the US in 1952, where she attended Sarah Lawrence University and in 1961 she joined the Fluxus art movement. Founded by Lithuanian American artist George Maciunas in 1960 in New York, this movement was inspired by the earlier Dada art movement and was rooted in experimentation. Fluxus artists often staged art performances which challenged conventional notions of art—such as painting, sculpture—and instead highlighted the actions of the human body on the artwork. They also pushed to lower the barriers between art and real life by bringing art beyond galleries and museums.
The movement flourished through the ’60s, bolstered by the anti-war sentiments of the time. Ono herself was well known for her peace advocacy—and her rejection of “opposing” sides, especially given the contractionary tendencies in each human being, that was powerfully demonstrated in Cut Piece as well.