APRIL 9 PARTICIPATION PARTICIPATION Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964/5)
[In the Kyoto performance] “It was very, very difficult for people to come up. So there would be very long silences and then you would hear the scissors cutting. There were quiet and beautiful silences – quiet and beautiful moments.”
Yoko Ono - Quoted in the Rhee article, p. 104
The meanings of Cut Piece are supposed to be engendered in each viewer- participant’s mind through the negotiation of his or her role within the performance during his or her visual and physical interactions with the artist – alternatively, viewers make an emotional acknowledgement of passivity. However, audience members are not free simply to make up their own individual interpretations of this performance. The dynamics of each performance is heavily indebted to the cultural context of its audience. In terms of Ono’s endeavour to position herself both in the Japanese and the Western art worlds, Cut Piece played a crucial role. By playing the ‘other’ on each stage, she sought to enthrall the gaze of her audiences.
-Rhee, 114.
John Cage, 4’33” (1952) John Cage, 4’33” (1952) Robert Rauschenberg, Erased DeKooning Drawing (1953) Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (Seven Panels) (1951)
Fluxus (1962-1978, and beyond)
George Maciunas (1931-1978) Philip Corner, Piano Activities (Weisbaden, 1962)
Fluxus Manifesto (1963) Event Scores by George Brecht (1962ish)
FluxKit (1961-3) & FluxShop (1964-5) George Maciunas Fluxwedding & Billie Hutching (February 25, 1978) Alison Knowles, #2 restaged (Tate, 2008) Proposition (Make A Salad) (1962) Nam June Paik, Fluxfilm 01: Zen for Film (1964) Allan Kaprow I am put off by museums in general; they reek of a holy death which offends my sense of reality. Moreover, apart from my personal view, most advanced art of the last half-dozen years is, in my view, inappropriate for museum display. It is an art of the world: enormous scale, environmental scope, mixed media, spectator participation, technology, themes drawn from the daily milieu, and so forth. Museums do more than isolate such work from life, they subtly sanctify it and thus kill it.
-Allan Kaprow, 1967 1959 Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in Six Parts (1959) Allan Kaprow, Spring Happening (1961) Allan Kaprow, Spring Happening (1961)
Allan Kaprow, on “Happenings”
• “…appropriated the real environment and not the studio, garbage and not from paints and marble. They incorporated technologies that hadn’t been used in art. They incorporated behavior, the weather, ecology, and political issues.
• In short, the dialogue moved from knowing more and more about what art was to wondering about what life was, the meaning of life.” Allan Kaprow, Yard (1961) Allan Kaprow, Household (1964) Allan Kaprow, Household (Women Licking Jam off of a Car) (Cornell University, 1964) Allan Kaprow, Household (men working on the tower) (1964) Allan Kaprow, Fluids (1967) Allan Kaprow, Fluids (1967)
Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0 (1974) Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973)
Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Bed Peace (1969) Link
2003 re-performance
Re-performance by Peaches (2013)
“Backstage, Peaches casually said she didn’t have any problem getting totally naked. When she was finally on the stage, I realized what she meant. She sat quietly but her body was expressing a universe…What I discovered in Peaches was the new-age performance artists and how they are. They are not scared of being beautiful and showing it. Whereas we, the past feminists, thought it was important to look like soldiers if we wanted to be taken seriously. No more.” - Yoko Ono Yoko Ono, W Magazine re-creation (2015)
On model: Current/Elliott shirt, $198, currentelliott.com; Araks bra, $84, araks.com; A.P.C. jeans, $200, apc.fr; Falke socks, $28, the Sock Hop, New York, 212.625.3105; Strange Matter sneakers, $360, barneys.com.