RememberingYoko Ono's CutPiece
JuliaBryan-Wilson
The BodyStripped Bare On 20 July1964 Yoko Ono firstperformed Cut Piece, a workin whichthe 1. 'To the WesleyanPeople (Who Attended audiencecuts the clothing from her body piece by piece (Fig. 1). As partof an the Meeting)',in TheStone (New York: Judson of worksbilled as a AmericanAvant-Garde Music in Yoko Ono, evening 'Contemporary Gallery,1966), reprinted Ono sharedthe of Grapefruit(Simon and Schuster:New York, Concert', stage Kyoto'sYamaichi Concert Hall withTony 1970), unpaginated. Cox and Al Wonderlick.She called her concerts'strip-tease shows', saying 2. Ono herselfperformed Cut Piece four times: thatthis referred to the 'strippingof the mind'.1 Works performed that night in Kyoto,Tokyo, New York, and at the included Piece,in whichOno asked the audienceto fromladders Destructionin Art in London. Fly leap Symposium on the and Word MouthPiece, in whichOno a word While the workwas eventuallywritten as a placed stage, of whispered score forothers to perform,and manyhave, I intothe ear of an audiencemember, who thenturned to her neighbourand deal here with own Ono's performances,all of repeatedthe word, thus inauguratinga chain of whispersthat eventually whichtook place in the years1964-6. Detailing snaked theentire concert hall. These set the the eventsin Kyotois not meantto claim that through Conceptualpieces stage thisfirst performance is the 'ideal' toward forCut Piece, as theydemanded a highdegree of audienceparticipation and whichall otherrepetitions strive, but to played on viewers' fantasies,interactions, and imaginations.As in every underscorethat the workoriginated in Japan. iterationof CutPiece, Ono knelton a stageand placed a largepair of scissors in frontof her.2 She asked audience members to comeup, one byone, cutoff her clothes,and take the scrapswith them. After these verbal instructions, she remainedsilent for the duration of the piece. Her posture,with her legs folded underneathso thather body rested on hershins, replicated the polite Japanese sittingposition seiza, assumed in formalor respectableenvironments (Fig. 2). Significantpauses elapsed between each hesitant cut, and the piece ended when theaudience stopped cutting-long stretches punctuated by thequiet sounds
Fig 1. Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964, YamaichiConcert Hall, Kyoto.(Photograph: Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive,New York.)
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Fg. 2. YokoOno, Cut Piece, 1964, SogetsuArt Center, Tokyo. (Photograph: Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York.)
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of scissorsslicing through cloth. Ono's own silencewas throwninto relief by the anxioustitters of audiencelaughter. As her bodywas eventuallybared, viewersdescended 3. ThomasCrow, TheRise of the Sixties: American the stagesteps clutching the remnantsof her dressand and EuropeanArt in theEra ofDissent (Abrams: underclothes. New York, 133. Another that 1996), p. reading This essayasserts that Cut Piece, seen in withOno's otherworks turnson questionsof the gaze and voyeurismis dialogue KathyO'Dell's 'Fluxus Feminas',TDR: The and situatedwithin the contextof the internationalFluxus art movement, DramaReview, no. 47, Spring1997, pp. 43-65. activelygenerates feminist political readings. I specifythe ways in whichCut 4. 'MotherLaughed: The Bad Girls' Avant- Piececites the visual culture of atomicwar in orderto confrontthe influence in MarciaTucker Bad Girls Garde', (ed.), (MIT of the bombingsof Hiroshimaand Nagasakion post-warJapanese art. By Press: Cambridge,1994), p. 65. integratingOno's art into a broadlyunderstood feminism, one thatdirects 5. MarthaSchwendener, 'Yoko Ono', Artforum, itselftoward the circulationof the female within this January2001, p. 139. body globalpolitics, considersCut Piece's uses of a not but formed 6. Ono wrotethree versions of the one essay body onlygendered, by score, and Arthistorians have lookedat Cut of whichincludes the provisothat 'the nation,race, history. rightly Pieceas a performerneed not be a woman'. I take this prototypefor feminist performance art. However,this feminism is oftenof a statementto referto Ono's humanism,not to limited and it turnsOno's intoa literalisationof as dismissthe feminist of the scope, piece 'undressing' implications piece. violenceto the female as ThomasCrow thiswork For a readingthat elucidates the historyof body; writes, 'acutely feministresponses, but feelsthey have confined pinpoints(at the verypoint when modern feminist activism was emerging) the receptionof the work,see Kevin the of women's as mediated Concannon's'Yoko Ono's CutPiece: Critical politicalquestion physicalvulnerability by of vision'.3In this Receptions',presented at the ThirdAnnual regimes reading,Ono's bodyrepresents all femalebodies, PerformanceStudies Conference, Georgia and she as femaleart object represents all femalesas objects.In thecatalogue TechnicalUniversity, 1997,
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How can we rethinkCut Piece in a way that does not circle back to the scandal of exposed femaleflesh, with the strippedfemale body readingonly as art withina a 'universal' signifierof female victimisation?Looking at Ono's 7. 'To the WesleyanPeople', in Grapefruit, nationalcontext does not mean reducingart-historical interpretation to issues unpaginated.For a comprehensivebiography of no, Jonathon of identity. Never transparently 'Eastern' or 'Western', Ono's own shifting see Douglas Kirk,'In Tokyo', in 'J~ s. J~~ ~Cottand ChristineDoudna (eds), TheBallad of notions of identification complicate the reception of Cut Piece by forging a space johnand Yoko(Rolling Stone Press: New York, been where race cannot be understood nakedly, but rather as a dialogic production 1982),pp. 14-29. Her biographyhas also of and The does not disclose a stable ummarisedinrecent works such as Alexandra performance reception. piece's stripping Munroe'soverview essay in YesYoko Ono (Japan in restless body under these costumes, but instead refuses stability its Society:New York, 2000), pp. 10-37. and its mutable reliance on the viewer. repetitions 8. Ono, Grapefruit,unpaginated.
Threatsand Gifts Ono has embedded her work in her own personal history,writing that its origins'go back to the time of the Second World War when we had no food to eat, and my brotherand I exchangedmenus in the air'.7 To situateher work in thisdevastating moment requires a briefbiography. Ono was born in 1933 to a wealthy banking family in Tokyo, and spent many of her earliest years Francisco. Her travellingback and forthbetween Japanand New York or San familywas economicallyruined at the beginningof the war. Ono lived in Japan after throughoutWorld War Two, escapingwith her familyto the countryside the incendiarybombings of Tokyo. She was twelve yearsold when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshimaand Nagasaki. At this time, because they could not affordto eat, she and her brotherwould order food froman imaginary futureto sustainthem. moment Though Ono's 'intentions'cannot be circumscribedto one single or experience,I invokeher memoryof wartimehunger in order to put Ono's ocular performancesinto a feministcontext thatconcerns itself not only with terror,but with the widely experienced deprivationsand atrocitiesof war. Understandingthe war's impact on Ono's own body helps resituateher art within a more internationalfeminism, as it circulates the female body emphaticallywithin the body politic. Concentratingonly on the audience's sadismshifts this piece into the terrainof personalbodily injury and away from the rubric of historicalviolence. But Ono's work of the 1960s is framedby World War Two on one side and Vietnam on the other; the war of the past and the war of the present combined to create an intense anxietyabout the statusof the future,one that she worked throughobsessively in her art. Her anxietiesmanifest themselves in materialtraces and mementoes. Many of Ono's worksare concernedwith the disruptionof memoryand the obsolescence of history.In 1962 she made the instructionpainting Conversation Piece: 'Bandage any part of your body. If people ask about it, make a storyand tell. If people do not ask about it, draw theirattention to it and tell. If people forgetabout it, remindthem of it and keep telling.Do not talk about anything else.'8 These instructionswere activelyembodied in Fog Piece,as the audience, in an inversionof the disrobingof Cut Piece,wrapped Ono in white bandages while a fog machine bellowed out smoke to obscure her further.And in Sky PieceforJesusChrist (Fig. 3) from 1965, Ono wrapped the entireFluxorchestra in gauze. The playerswere ultimatelyso bound togetherthat they had to cease playing, and silence descended over the concert hall as the orchestra sat wrapped up as if in a twisted hospital ward. Bandages and gauze became vehiclesfor her insistentretellings of some unnamedinjury. Thus Ono's art of the 1960s can be seen as an attemptto 'not talk about anythingelse', to keep reminding,to keep fromforgetting.
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Fluxus events and Body art are oftenunderstood throughthe discourse of catastrophe,specifically as a response to the possibilityof global annihilation 9. Gino DiMaggio, 'Fluxusas a PrivateForm of and the inventionof mechaniseddeath machines. For some, Fluxus employs Subversion', in Ubi Fluxus ibi motus(Mazzotta: the absurd to escape from the numbingtruths of war; as one Italian critic Milan, 41. AlexandraMunroe echoes 1990), p. writes, 'Fluxus arises as the rejection of a that has left behind it the this in her on Fluxus, that reality essay Tokyo stating of Auschwitz and Hiroshima to look at the even more their existential jokes took place 'in the shadow systemic carnage of Auschwitzand Hiroshima'.In 'A Box of sophisticatedcarnage of Vietnam'.9 For others,the use of the individualbody in Munroe Scream the Smile', (ed.), Against Sky: with its expressiveor emotivegestures in art is viewed as a redemptivereturn JapaneseArt After 1945 (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1994), p. 215. to subjectivity.Kristine Stiles, an art historianwho has writtenon traumaand art, statesthat 'the as materialin art after1950 was 10. KristineStiles, 'Uncorrupted Joy: performance body deeply InternationalArt Actions' in Paul Schimmel tied to the need to assert the primacy of human subjects over inanimate (ed.), Out of Actions:Between Performance and the objects, and was a to the threatened conditionof lifeitself 1949-1979 and Hudson: Los response ontological Object, (Thames in the aftermathof the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic Angeles,1998), p. 228. age'.10 As Andreas Huyssen writes, 'the ultimate Fluxus event of the 50s, one performed millions of times over, but never by a Fluxus artist, was of schoolchildrenlined up, arms covering their heads, in nuclear war drills'."1 For Huyssen, Fluxus embodies an aestheticof apocalypse, yet Fluxus art pales beside the random surreality of governmental daily drills. Chance and happenstance-the hallmarks of Fluxus manifestos-lead not to liberation fromreality but to an inevitable,uncontrollable, nuclear explosion. Huyssen views the actual tenuousnessof the nuclear age as upstagingany prank Fluxus artistsmight pull. He does not attemptto trace the ways in which individual
Fig.3. YokoOno, Sky Piece for Jesus Christ, first performed with the Fluxorchestra, 1965, CarnegieRecital Hall, New York; this version performed in Brooklyn,New York, 1991. (Photograph:Karla Merrifield/Yoko Ono. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.)
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JuliaBryan-Wilson artists or artworks might subtly negotiate the repeated threat that these nuclear war drills stage. Ono and her Fluxus art practice can be more as a to the threatof atomic annihilationif CutPiece and pointedlyread response 11. Andreas Huyssen, TwilightMemories: Marking the body strippedbare are returnedto post-warJapan. Time in a Cultureof Amnesia(Routledge: New York, 1995), p. 205. Cut Pieceinvolves three interlinkinggestures: the invitation,the sacrifice, and the souvenir. These are terms: others write about Ono's 12. The voluminousdocumentation of CutPiece my passivity, includes MinoruNiizuma and the of the and the shock of her in its nakedness. Other photosby John brutality slicing, body Prosseras well as a 16mmfilm by Albertand characterisationsof the work overlook the productive components of this David Maysles,1965, shownin Outof Actions: that Ono the and that the audience takes BetweenPerformance and the Object, 1949-1979, piece-namely, requests cutting Museumof Art: Los with them. also elide the momentsthat occur Contemporary Angeles, away something They pregnant 1998; Global Conceptualism:Points of Origin, around the cutting which were captured by the photographers and 1950s-1980s,Queens Museumof Art,New York, 1999; and YesYoko Ono, filmmakerswho documented the piece.12 Taking the stage along with JapanSociety, New York, 2000. The film'saudio elementis Ono, these cameramen-the was recorded in each of its piece visually perhapsits mostinteresting aspect, for in it one instances circled around Ono and introduceda thirdterm to the traditional can hear quite clearlythe nervous,ambient noisesof the audienceas viewer/objectdyad. The eye of the camera, with its reassuringpresence, not theymurmur, shift, and clamberto the stage. only acted as an extra witness to the audience participation,but also 13. Ono's writtenscores were nevermeant to authorised the actions on With the on film, Ono stage. piece captured functionas definitive;as mentionedearlier, ensured that the live event could be strungtogether later in a series of shots thereare threedifferent scores for Cut Piece, or watched in its entirety,thus replayed again and again. The compulsive includinga versionin whichthe audiencecuts each other'sclothes off (never, to rehearsinggives the work a ritualisticflavour, as if the scene itselfdemanded my knowledge,performed). Ono followsJohn incessant And Ono not this herself reworking. only repeated performance Cage's lead, as Liz Kotz pointsout, by usingthe several times, but facilitatedendless recurrencesby writingit as an open textas bothwriting and performanceto be score.13 endlesslyreiterated: Kotz, 'Post-Cagean Aestheticsand the "Event" Score', October95, To start: the dressed is seen on the with the fully body stage scissors; Winter2001, pp. 55-89. remnantsfrom stilllitter the This occasionally, previousperformances ground. 14. Ono has statedthat Cut Piece was inspired briefmoment precedes the invitation,where verbalinstructions are issued that by a Buddhistallegory: 'according to legend, the audience should come to cut the clothes. The solicitationis dual, forit Buddharenounced his privilegedposition to go up out into the world and to whateverwas offersnot the to cut but also the of what one give only opportunity ownership requestedof him. . . . The relationshipbetween removes. From that invitation follows the sacrifice. While some critics the Buddha'sgiving and the artist'sgiving understandthe audience's as the violence of the the intriguedOno'. BarbaraHaskell and John cutting enacting gaze, G. Yoko Ono: and Arias of the sacrifice thatthis is not a violation. Hanhardt, Objects vocabulary proposes cutting wholly (WhitneyMuseum of AmericanArt: New York, Ono says she alwayswore her best outfitto performCut Piece so thatit would 1991), p. 91. reallybe an offering.14In thisoffering, Ono submittedto the piece, but always retainedthe abilityto stand up and stop the slicing; the score states that the piece ends 'at the performer'soption'. Withinthe confinesof the script,one which requires equal measures of passivity and exhibitionism,Ono also controlled her level of nudity, deciding to display herself selectively. The audience's willingnessto denude Ono varied: sometimes the cuttingwould stop withher clotheshanging like rags. At the 1966 London performance,she was lefttotally naked, but huggedher arms to her chest; at the1965 Carnegie Hall performance,Ono also shielded her breasts at the moment they were being uncovered (Figs. 4 and 5). The moment an audience member ascends the stage, the piece activatesa set of interactionsin which vision bleeds into physical movement. In this circuit of visibilityand action, looking is transformedinto doing, and who exactlyis looking at whom becomes unsettledas the 'viewers' in the audience abjure theirspectatorial remove. Her metaphoricgiving does not dismissthe functionof threat in Cut Piece, but stresses its dis-equivalence with actual violence. For the violence inherentin the situationis latent-a concealed threatonly rarelymade visible. On at least one occasion, this threaterupted suddenly out of the piece's sombre theatre. Ono relates that in the first performanceof Cut Piece,a man 'came on the stage. . . . He took the pair of scissorsand made a motion to stab me. He raised his hand, withthe scissorsin
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it, and I thoughthe was goingto stabme. Butthe hand was just raisedthere andwas totallystill. He was standingstill . . . withthe scissors . . . threatening me. ''5 15. Haskell,Yoko Ono, p. 91. The stillnessthat Ono 16. Quoted in KristineStiles, 'The Destruction recountshas a specifictenor-one of a prolonged, in Art Symposium:The RadicalCultural Project tautmenace, a momentarrested in time.Perhaps this man does not misread of Event-StructuredLive Art' (Doctoral the menaceof CutPiece, but it its tools- Dissertation: of fullyoccupies by directlyaltering University California-Berkeley, fromtailor's shears to knife.What kind of tense is this? 1987), p. 610. potential pantomime At a later of CutPiece, one of Ono's friendsfeared that 'some 17. KRAB audio archive,Sonarchy website, performance
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Julia Bryan-Wilson an event that had been suppressed. (This mass unleashingof visual evidence afterthe fact-and Ono's own performancesome twentyyears later-echoes of the deferralof to the psychicconstruction Nachtrdglichkeit, response trauma, 22. ArataOsada (ed.), Childrenof Hiroshima the trace of which is later energisedinto active awareness.) (PublishingCommittee for the Childrenof Hiroshima:London, n.d.), p. 204. Like the army photos, drawings by some of the hibakushaalso depict shredded clothing,as in Sadako Kimura's drawing,which shows a small girl with her hair blown up by the fierce atomic breeze (Fig. 8). The clothing destroyedby the atom bomb and the repeated accounts of childrenwandering the streetswith school uniformshanging off them, burned and torn, submit themselvesas visual precedents for the tattersof Cut Piece. An account by a twelve-year-oldchild living in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, describes the momentsafter the blast: 'It wasn't until I ran into a cart leading to the Mitaki Riverthat I regainedmy sense. This was the firsttime I noticedhow I looked. I was bare fromthe waist up and all that was left of the trousersI had been wearingwere the elastic bands around my waist and ankles. I was strippedto my underpantsby the bomb.'22 Those too close to the blast died, but those who were near had theirclothes ripped off.These images inflectCut Piece with
Fig.4. YokoOno, Cut Piece, 1965, CarnegieRecital Hall, New York. (Photograph: Minoru Niizuma. CourtesyLenono Photo Archive, New York.)
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the conceitof the performingbody as witness,silently but soberlygiving testimony.As in Japan,such photos were largely withheld from United States audiencesin the afterthe but were laterreleased en 23. See, especially,Michel Foucault, Discipline yearsdirectly bombing, and Punish,trans. Alan Sheridan(Vintage: New masse.Most photos for the US audiencein thedecades following Hiroshima/ York, 1979). Nagasakiwere evacuatedof humansuffering, featuring instead bird's-eye viewsand mushroomclouds taken from great distances. Later, the hibakusha were studiedby the US Armyand extensivelyphotographed. The pictures were necessaryto illustratethe sufferingof the enemy,to documentand scientificallymeasure the bomb's consequences. As theseimages show, clothes were oftenphotographed removed from bodies, hanging empty as theyare shornof theirwearers. The peopledepicted are fragmented,have their backs turned,or are shownin disfiguringclose-up. In contrast,Kimura's drawing featuresa fullfigure with a strange,small smile on herface as herragged white dressflutters around her. By tropingthe body of the victim,but renderingit whole,breathing, and facingher audience,Ono makeslegible what Michel Foucaulthas termed the 'effectsof truth' of the mutilatedbody.23 Photographic evidence
Fig. 5. Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1966, AfricaCenter, London. (Photograph:John Prosser. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive,New York.)
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Fig. 6. Survivorof Hiroshimabombing, 1945. (Photograph:US Army,National Archives, Washington, DC.)
Fig.7. Tatteredclothing recovered from bomb victims after the Hiroshima explosion, 1945. (Photograph:US Army,National Archives, Washington, DC.)
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consolidatedAmerican regimes of power over the naked'truth' of Japanese flesh in pain. In Cut Piece, Ono offersher body in dialogue with these which were as 24. 'To the WesleyanPeople', in Grapefruit, photos, deployed visible proof of the destructionof unpaginated. Hiroshimaand Nagasaki. In these stilled photos, historybecomes an 25. Ono enacteda similarpiece, MendPiecefor unrepeatableinstance that is documentedand frozenin time. Cut Piece's theWorld, on 30 October 2001 at New York's us and hence those MemorialChurch in the of multipleperformances give repetition change, vivifying Judson aftermath the The of dress is thus a a souvenirof the 11 Septemberattack. She brieflyinvoked World images. scrap livingreminder, War Two and thenasked the smallaudience to lasting,lingering radioactive effects. assisther in a piecingtogether largetable of For thereis, crucially,the remainder of the dress still in theviewer's hand. shatteredpottery, saying, 'Keep wishingas you mend'. How do thesescraps of dress, these little mementoes, function? What kind of souveniris theaudience In a lecture in 1966, Ono saidthat her 26. Stewart, On Longing: Narrativesof the taking? given Miniature,the Gigantic,the Souvenir,the Collection events'are an extricationfrom the various sensory perceptions . . . theclosest (The JohnsHopkins Press: Baltimoreand wordfor it maybe a wishor hope'.24Hence her work is also fullof a kindof London, 1984), 135. p. metaphysicaloptimism-a prayer for the future. Ono enactsmemorialisations 27. On 138. Stewart, Longing,p. in otherpieces by offering to theaudience a seriesof fragments, residues, and 28. Kyo Macleardiscusses the importanceof remainders.In PromisePiece, first performed in 1966, she smasheda vase, photographic witnessing in Beclouded Visions: handedout its to the audienceand to meetback in ten Hiroshima-Nagasakiand the Art of Witness(State fragments promised Universityof New York Press: Albany,1999). yearsto reassembleit (Fig. 9).25 Andin MorningPiece (1964), she sold little, smoothshards of bottle withdates attached to somefrom the 29. Haskell, YokoOno, p. 91. glass them, past and some fromthe future.Here are past morningsand futuremornings to pressinto the viewer's hand and sendoff. These nervousamulets, with their invocations of futurememories, are meant to act as commemorativeobjects. They are mementoesof a performanceto be takenhome, tactilescraps that incorporate the viewer withinthe historyof the event. As Susan Stewartwrites in her book On Longing:Narratives ofthe Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 'the souveniris an object arisingout of the necessarilyinsatiable demands of nostalgia.The souvenirgenerates a narrativewhich reaches only "behind", spirallingin a continuallyinward movement rather than outward toward the future'.26While most souvenirs are aids in nostalgia, helping one to look backward, Ono turnsdates fromthe futureinto souvenirsfrom the past: that i, is, she sends souvenirsinto the futureas a ritualto make tomorrow happen. f; the of the souveniris to 'move into ^ Although tendency history privatetime',27 . ..';' Lk displacingattention into the past, CutPiece and PromisePiece use the souvenirto '! '~~~~~~~~~tforce the audience to take historyhome for the future.The vase is broken in order to be disseminatedso that its shards can inhabit someone's life as a
?. b X _ . .. tangiblememory. After ten yearsof rememberingthe vase as whole, it will be lovinglyset rightand glued back together. As Ono performs,she gives out material guarantees in order to secure the future. But this optimism is undercut with violence, for the past informsthe always provisional future. And even when the scrapshave all been cut away and the shardsof potterylost in pockets and desk drawers, we still have the photos as another type of reminder.It is withinthis agitated relationship to evidence thatthe abundance of picturesof CutPiece takes on new meaning.The photos formanother kind of iJ ,-, record stemmingfrom an urgentneed to preservean ephemeralevent.28 With ?..?. rxmr .. .-?.?z "'" I iril'l its almost excessive which is a and "I' documentation, by necessity fragmented incomplete archive of the live event, Cut Piecebespeaks a deep worry about preservationand the eventual degradationof memory. 8. Sadako A coloured Fig. Kimura, Girl, pencil Since Ono's art is as propelled toward the futureas much as it is influenced on paper, 1977. (FromUnforgettable Fire: the it is more accurate to referto these residues as Picturesby Atomic Bomb Survivors,ed. The by past, perhaps particular kindsof ratherthan as souvenirs.Ono herselfhas to the of Cut JapanBroadcasting Association. c 1977 gifts pointed gift NHK.Used by permission of Pantheon Books, Piece in a brief, evocative allegory of Buddha's offering.29Jacques Derrida, a divisionof Random House, Inc.) pickingup on Marcel Mauss and his theories of the gift,writes of the gift's
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30. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money,trans. Peggy Kamuf (University of .....* ChicagoPress: Chicago, 1992), p. 41. I use the word 'gift'with an acknowledgementthat it is a iffere.nce...tweecontested term.Starting with Marcel Mauss, ?giv*.....s' es. ,.:~'t,,~.9~... 'e~ ?...... : twho theorisedit withincommodity exchange, |:? ? ? ?y.:.?;~;:.?: ?? :? ? -:?:::?:;.???-: ??the gifthas been muchdebated in recent .t : fcriticism;;.:ime, and : :;as souv . a| t Derrida'sre-reading of Mauss is significantlyinfluenced by PierreBourdieu, who claimsthat it is the temporalnature of the gift ges;ur.11,,7' _3_of reaan ithat removesit fromcommodity exchange. 31. This connectionis also statedin Kristine situates*iy it?self ..... a te or Stiles' essayin Munroeand Hendricks(eds), Yes ?~~;*... ,...... 1X. :~i':':.i!:. . _ YokoOno, pp. 168-70. viewert..o.wrg32. assist. in 'The Crossroads:The End of World War Sev;era oe wk b On II, The AtomicBomb, and the Originsof the Hiroshex p,S a:~ and~owiewcwseCold Nga;f War', in PhilipNobile (ed.), Judgementat :,along? ? .~~~.:wi%, ~~~~~.. _theSmithsonian (Marlowe & Co.: New York, 1995), p. 101. 33. Osada, in his prefaceto Childrenof Hiroshima,unpaginated. Fg. 9. Yoko Ono, PromisePiece, 1966, re-enactedby Ono at EversonMuseum, 1971. (Photograph: Taka limura.Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive,New York.) temporal nature: 'the gift only gives to the extent that it gives time. The differencebetween a giftand everyother operation of exchangeis thatthe gift gives time . . . the thingmust not be restitutedimmediately and rightaway, there must be time in between, it must last-there must be waiting,without forgetting.'30All of these fragments-the brokenvase, the engravedglass, and the scrap of clothing,the photo-function both as giftsthat necessitate future time, and as souvenirs,as tokens of remembrance. Cut Piece,Promise Piece, and MorningPiece present themselves as 'gifts'to us, and in exchange,we give back the promiseto wait and to remember.This vital emphasison memoryand the giftenables the audience's participationto be a gesture of reparation, in which the viewer plays a critical role in forging memory. Derrida's notion of the gift, with its pressure on memory, obligation,and mutual exchange, gives us a new lens to see how Ono's Cut Piece is an active aid in historicalunderstanding. In this, the work not only situatesitself as a trace or image-memoryof bombed bodies, but also asks the viewer to assist in the work of remembering. Several other works by Ono nominate themselves as afterimagesof Hiroshima and Nagasaki; for example, ShadowPiece, which was performed along with Cut Pieceat the Destructionin Art Symposiumin 1966. In Shadow Piece(Fig. 10), Ono began to collect shadows of people by tracingthem on to long pieces of cloth. Like naked bodies and shreds of clothing,the shadow is anotherkey motifin post-bombphotographs, as the brightnessand intensityof the impact leftimprints of victims' shadows like blackened smudges on stone paths and streets (Fig. 11).31 The flash of light of the detonation etched shadows into 'walls, steps,buildings, and even standsof bamboo in Hiroshima and Nagasaki'.32 Shadows, like the one burned on the fortresswall, became emblematicof the physicaltraces left by the bomb's destruction.Ono's desire to store them up or hoard them in one place reflectsthe fearof forgetting,as even 'the dark silhouette ingrained on the steps of the Osaka bank are graduallydisappearing and, as time passes, memories of that tragictime will gradually be forgotten'.33By re-creatingremainders such as shadows and
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Remembering Yoko Ono's Cut Piece
34. Quoted in Munroe,Scream Against the Sky,- " _F L; p. 189. In recentyears, Ono has more explicitly - - s . statedthe ongoingpsychic impact of the atomic i. atu y- - - bombs; see the linernotes forher 1995 album '- Rising(Capitol Records),and the songsshe - composedfor Ron Destro's 1994 off-Broadway . e play Hiroshima. . -i: :2 . .
ripped dresses,and thenrepeating them under the watchfuleye of the camera, Ono wants to ensure that they will nut vanishforever. The visual parallel between the images of tatteredclothing and Cut Piece feeds a necessaryunderstanding of this art as having an historicalawareness
as a convenient marker to designate, in shorthand, the later twentieth century, is much more strongly understood in Japan as signifying a time period completely dominated by the aftermath of the Second World War. .^^^^^^^ i^ - ... Post-war art, then, like Cut Piece, is weighted with a national, historical specificity. Having grown up during World War Two, those of Ono's generation are known in Japan as 'MacArthur's children', after General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the US occupation of Japan 7'iJW"immediately?BH ^ following the atomic bombings. Critic Tono Yoskiake describes S'them'g. .0. asYo theOo, post-Hiroshima generation, in which 'the rubble, the smell of ipdeathand the social confusion of the postwar era had constituted their - i'ij:Th Bl*^ everyday environment.The ruins were their playground and this state of
absolute void became necessarily the foundation for their art.'34 This is not to claim asthat ll art from post-war Japan is somehow a reworking, or repression, of the atomic era, but to account for the gravityof the war's enormous visual impact on a generation.
Futures In 1964, the same year as the Kyoto performanceof Cut Piece,Hi Red Center, a collaboration among Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jiro generTakamatsu(other 'MacArthur'schildren' who were informallyassociated with Fluxus) performedShelter Plan in Japan(Fig. 12). For this piece, theyinvited Fig. 1. NagasaiFortress Command, 3.5 various artists,including Yoko no, up to a room in the Imperial Hotel in kilometersfrom the hposenter, 1945. Tokyo where they conducted a strip search, took down exacting individual
Matsumoto.) executed othertests in order to build personalbomb shelters.They catalogued
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and photographedthe examinedbodies and drew up blueprintsof the personal shelters.Hi Red Centerpresents the body quantifiedand regulated,not onlyin relationto sex, but also by its relationto catastrophe,disaster, and survival,a 35. In Hans Beckerand Wolf Vostell, body so fragilethat it needs officialprotection to proceed into the future.The Happenings,Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme: Eine moment of its unveiling is medical and precise, and the work is charged with Documentation(Rowohlt: Hamburg, 1965), p. 444. My translation. the syntax of preparation and immanence. Shelter Plan's staged clinical 444. My translation. 36. Quotedin Stiles,'The Destruction in ArtAr procedures point out the inadequacy of government-enforced routines that The Derun in r1~~ ~~~~~r1~~~~~~~~~i~~ j o ~Symposium', p. 611. were advertisedas protectionfrom atom bombs, like the images of childrenin nuclear drills holding their hands over their heads to ward off mushroom clouds. Anotherexample of an artistwith an apprehensiverelationship to the future is Korean-born Nam June Paik-who was also a participantin Hi Red Center's 1964 ShelterPlan. That same year,he wrote a briefautobiography for a Fluxus art book. In it, he simplystates:
In1933 I was one yearold. In 1934 I was twoyears old. In1935 I was threeyears old. In 1936 I was fouryears old. [...] In1964 I am thirty-two. In1965 I willbe 33 ifthere is nowar. In1966 I willbe 34 ifthere is no war. In1967 I willbe 35 ifthere is nowar. In1968 I willbe 36 ifthere is no war ....35
And so on until the year 2000-Paik spins line afterline of this contingent futurefor himself, distressed and tenuous. His lifeis recountedas confinedto the binarycondition of war or no war: 'war' is writtenas the single event or possibilityin his life as he conceives it in 1964. 1964 was the year of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolutionand increasingUnited Statesgovernment intervention in Vietnam, and the year that Buddhistmonks immolatedthemselves to protest this intervention.And for Paik and Ono-expatriates dividing their time between Asia, Europe, and the US-in 1964 each year was threatenedby war which hung overhead like a knife.In this context, then, the scissors-wielding man at the Kyoto concert reads the performativecircumstances of Cut Piece correctly, as he transformsthe piece into a meditation on threat and destructivepotentiality. The strategyof enactingartistic threat for a socially pointed purpose was widely employed during the late 1960s. One early attempt to perform violence in the realm of the artisticoccurred in 1966, when Gustav Metzger organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, an art event explicitlyaligned with cultural protest and leftistpolitics. The symposium aimed to explode the categories of fine art and political art; invited artists burned canvases, smashed objects, and instigated other high-profile, provocative acts. On the final evening of this event in 1966, Ono again staged CutPiece. It was widely seen as one of the highlightsof the symposium, and an ideal work for inclusionin a context thatfocused on the dark edge of art. As Metzger commented, 'It was better than I expected. Stronger.And very disturbing.'36 Much of the art featuredin the symposium,including Cut Piece'selegant intervention,was seen by critics as a grotesque display of meaningless violence. One Lifejournalist responded to the premise of the Destruction Symposiumwith dismay: 'I mustbe missingthe message. I know the world is a mess. I know about the Bomb. I know about violence in the streetsof New
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York. But why does art have to be as bad as life?I just don't see how thiskind 37 of thinghelps.' He turnsthe art into a dismal replayof dailycatastrophe with 37. BarryFarrell, 'The Other Culture:An no redemptivevalue. Ugliness in art just replicatesugliness in life, forminga Explorer of the Worldwide Underground of Art closed circuitthat has no broader social significance. Behind its and Finds, Orgiastic Happenings However, another account from 1966, Brenda Jordanfor the Brutalities, a Wild Dream', by English Utopian L/fe, takes the at its word that it is a to 17 February 1967, p. 90. Resurgence, symposium response global battles. She that'the destructiveartist who crushesa withhis boot 38. 'DIAS', Resurgence,November/December reports frog 1966, p. 19. is relatingthat action to the absurdityof Vietnam and the injustices of the 39. Barbara Tischler, 'Counterculture and draft'.38Hindsight has more forcefullypushed antiwar activism and Ono's Over-the-Counter Culture', in D. Michael work together; for instance, in 1990 Barbara Tischler wrote: 'Yoko Ono's Shafer The The VietnamWar in the (ed.), Legacy: was cut to shreds audience members, in a enactmentof American (Beacon Press: Boston, clothing by symbolic Imagination the violationof an innocentVietnam.'39 Tischler slides from Cut Piece 1990), p. 286. quickly to the violationof an entirecountry, and what was formerlyread as innuendo and avant-gardeoutrageousness has suddenlybecome protestart. Ono enacts the 'violation' of Vietnamwith her gesture,and the audience is the complicit army. Because of the piece's context within the Destruction in Art Symposium, a critical interpretativeframework of protest is created. To Tischler, Ono's body is more than a tool of political resistance:her Japanese
mm
Fig.12. Onoparticipating inHi Red Center's Shelter Plan, 1964, ImperialHotel, Tokyo. (Selected stills by Motoharu Jonouchi, video transferred from 16mm film.Courtesy The Nagoya CityArt Museum.)
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JuliaBryan-Wilson body actually substitutes for Vietnam in a troubling elision of Asian difference-and never mind that Ono's invitationto cut is hardly'innocent'. In an of articulatedart CutPiece becomes a atmosphere activism,then, pointed, 40. Robyn Brentano, Outside the Frame: if still enigmatic, wartime intervention. This viewpoint has also been Performanceand the Object (Cleveland Center for in a recent of art that statesthat 'in of ContemporaryArt: Cleveland,1994), pp. 42 pronounced history performance light and 162. the Vietnam war, [Cut Piece]had a What ongoing strongpolitical message'.40 41. 'What is the Betweenthe this be unelaborated.These comments to the Relationship message might goes point ways Artistand the World?', writtenfor the Cannes in which CutPiece has been recontextualisedand read not only as an assaulton Film Festival,1971, reprintedin Haskell,Yoko 109. the individualbody, but as a potent metaphorfor the generalised,submissive, Ono, p. besieged Asian body. 42. 'The Educationof the Un-ArtistI', in J. (ed.), Allan on the By 1969, the dreaded futurehad arrivedand the previoushope of a future Kelley Kaprow: Essays Blurringof Art and Life of California 'if there is no war' in the US and marriedto (University disintegrated.Ono, living John Press: Berkeley,1993), pp. 97-8. had Cut Piece. she and Lennon started Lennon, stopped performing Instead, 43. A DifferentWar: Vietnamin Art (Whatcom staging media spectacles, including their seven-day peace-protest news Museumof Historyand Art: Seattle,1990), 37. conference, Bed-In, and their worldwide billboard campaign War is Over! p. (Fig. 13), in whichthey rented billboards in major cities across the world with 44. FrazerWard, 'GrayZone: WatchingShoot', October95, Winter2001, pp. 115-30. a holiday message for peace. Ono wrote of this time, and of the growing criticalsense that art was insufficientas a formof protest againstVietnam:
Artiststhemselves are beginningto lose theirconfidence. I have wondered myself about this. Whyam I stillan artist?Why am I notjoining the violent revolutionaries? Then I realizedthat destructionis not my game. I liketo fightthe establishment by using methods that are so far removedfrom establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn't know how to fight back.For instance, they can't stamp out John and Yoko events Two Virgins, Bed Peace,Acorn Peace,War is Over.41
Ono clearly viewed this work as protest, however unconventional,for it operated on a level so removed fromnormal discourses of protestthat no one could constrainit. She revelled in its distance fromrecognised stricturesof activism;for her, its very creativitygave it subversivepower. Other artistsduring this time were less sanguineabout artisticsubversion; they complained that the televised war had grown so overwhelmingthat it eclipsed all attempts at more ambiguous gestures. The aestheticisationof violence had escalated to such a degree thatthe desired 'blurringbetween life and art' seemed to have been accomplishedin the serviceof grossimperialism. The phrase is Allan Kaprow's; in 1969 he wrote: '[S]ophistication of consciousnessin the artstoday is so greatthat it is hard not to assertas matters of factthe vapor trailsleft by rockettests-motionless, rainbow-colored,sky- fillingscribbles-are unequaled by artistsexploring gaseous mediums; the SoutheastAsian theaterof war in Vietnam . . . while indefensible,is better theater than any play'.42 The growing anxiety about the inabilityof art to interveneor even to compete with this 'theaterof war' led to the promotion of other types of spectacle such as the Bed-In media event. Perhapsparalysed by the incessant flow of distressingtelevisual images, artistsescalated their attemptsto circulatein the mainstreamspotlight. Lucy Lippard suggeststhat 1960s Body art was obliquely concerned with Vietnam,and thatsome of the more torturousactivities of such artistsas Vito Acconci and Chris Burden-often seen as solipsisticmasochism-also carried a more historical,social meaning,namely an element of guilt about the fact that 'many otheryoung men were puttingtheir bodies on the line in a war'.43 Thus the use of their injured bodies becomes a kind of displaced survivor syndrome.A more compellingargument is articulatedby Frazer Ward, who statesthat the Vietnamcontext for a work such as Burden's Shoot(1971) rests on the audience's 'fascinationwith violence'.44 He contendsthat Burden set up
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Remembering Yoko Ono's Cut Piece
45. GAAG:The Guerilla Art Action Group, 1969- 1976 (PrintedMatter: New York, 1978), E .I unpaginated. k o l 46. In an interviewon 19 March 1999,. . . r' Hendrickssaid thatGAAG's rippingoff of i clotheswas inspired,in part,by accountsof Ono's performanceof CutPiece at the. '. m= Destructionin ArtSymposium. GAAG's use of rape' as a substitutionfor the environmental and bodilydevastation caused by napalmpoints to waysin whichgeopolitical violation is often gendered.
i g G t f c r in membeig;rs of
"i
Fig. 13. Yoko Ono and JohnLennon, War is Over!,1969, billboardinstalled in Times Square, New York.(Photograph: Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive,New York.)
a kind of ethical laboratory of public space in which the audience was implicatedin the spectacle with their passivity.(Cut Piece, by contrast,relied on a renunciationof the spectators'passivity.) As theygained media attention for their assaults on order, Burden and Acconci actually sought to control violence, to manage and engineeraggression toward the male body in order to defuse it. These masculine assertionsof danger and survivalwere a far cry fromthe peaceful wishes of Ono and Lennon and did not necessarilyconnote an antiwarpolitic. Even more overtin its addressingof the social implicationsof attackson the body was the GuerrillaArt Action Group, co-foundedby JeanToche and Jon Hendricks. (Hendricks today acts as Ono's archivist.) In 1969 several membersof GAAG tore offeach other'sclothes while screaming 'Rape!' in the lobby of New York's Museum of Modern Art to protest the art institution'scollusion with the military-industrialcomplex (Figs. 14 and 15). They wore drab, respectablesuits into the buildingand thenbegan to rip each other's outfitsin order to mimicthe effectsof the defoliantnapalm. Lyinghalf- nude and drippingwith burst packets of blood they had smuggled in under their clothes, the members of GAAG distributed flyers calling for the immediate resignationof the Rockefellersfrom MoMA's board of trustees because of their capital investmentsin chemical corporationsthat manufacturednapalm.45 Only spectacular,bloody events,GAAG insisted, could visiblyimpact a culturesaturated with images of death. GAAG's strippingof clotheswas inspiredby CutPiece, but its politicalundercurrents were turnedup to a moreaudible register.46 By 1969 Ono herselfwas no longerperforming the restrainedCut Piece, seekinginstead to translateher fame into global peace activism.But GAAG's BloodBath was, in a sense,another interpretation of the score of CutPiece, albeitperformed under radically different conditions from those of the first performanceat theYamaichi Concert Hall. Of all thereadings of CutPiece that havebeen launched, GAAG's is one of themost compelling, for it allowswar and protestto emergeas criticalnodes in the work. GAAG's hyperbolic
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Julia Bryan-Wilson productionof 'normalcy'as it disintegratesinto madnesstransforms the rippingof clothesinto an act of resistance.
Present In recentyears Cut Piece has become centralto Ono's oeuvre. It has been obsessivelypositioned as the vitalheart of her work,which itself belongs to severalartistic movements. No longerat riskof slippinginto obscurity,as
Fig.14. GuerrillaArt Action Group, A Callfor the Immediate Resignation of All Rockefellers from the Boardof Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art (Blood Bath), 1969. (Photograph:Ka KwongHui.)
? .;
Fig.15. GuerrillaArt Action Group, A Callfor the Immediate Resignation of All Rockefellers from the Boardof Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art (Blood Bath), 1969. (Photograph:Ka KwongHui.)
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manyof her otherworks have, it has been circulatedwith such frequencythat it now threatensto become a banally familiarset piece of performanceart. Documentation of Cut Piece has been exhibited in a broad of 47. Sexual Politics:Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party' in widely range FeministArt History,The Armand Hammer contexts: Ono's solo shows, Fluxus group exhibitions, performance art Museumof Artand CulturalCenter, 1996. the 1999 Museum of Art Global and in an Here CutPiece is foundunder the surveys, Queens Conceptualismshow, heading exhibition the and influenceof TheDinner 'Violence,Abuse, Autobiography',suggesting detailing importance JudyChicago's thatits violenceleads onlytoward, rather than Party.47It has been a source of inspirationfor women artists:several videos out from,the self.This is a typicalreading of have reconstructedit as a of Ono's These diverse the violenceof the work,and of other way acknowledging legacy.48 many have it alive and but it has been made to femaleperformance artists, which insists that retellings kept visible, increasingly theirmasochism is highlyindividual, or even bear the burden of being Ono's most critically lauded work, the one personallytherapeutic. summonedto rescue her fromdecades of jokes made at her expense. The full- 48. Two are Cut examples LynnHershmann, blown apotheosis (which this essay is certainlyimplicated in) reached its Piece: A Video to Yoko Ono Lar Homage (Mia unfortunate in a 30 December 2000 New YorkTimes article in which a Houlbergin associationwith Arte ZDF/LA, apex 1993) and Cecilia Dougherty,Grapefruit (Video photo of Cut Piecewas placed next to Nude Womanin theCountry by Renoir to Data In Hershmann's three Bank, 1989). work, illustratethe concept of the 'masterpiece'.49While the juxtapositionmeans to women are cut out of shinyblue promdresses measure the distancebetween the works, the also serves to locate the by an audienceof increasinglythreatening men. pairing The violenceof the audienceis made literalas 'masterpiece' directlyon to the bared flesh of the female body. Oxford's the men wield theirscissors in ever more Museum of Modern Art 1997 exhibitionHave You Seen the HorizonLately, hostile In her Grapefruit, ways. queer parody curated ChrissieIles, and the current YesYoko Ono, curated Doughertyrenders the Beatlesas dragkings, by retrospective by and CutPiece becomes emblematicof Ono's Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks,doubtless remind scholarsof a range kookymasochism. The instructionsfor the work of Ono's art besides Cut Piece, but it is a mark of its are a blond woman: 'You surely productive dreamilyspoken by its almost of that Cut Piece may come and cut pieces fromme', which ambiguity, promiscuous generation meaning, moves CutPiece's cutting of clothesinto an continuesto circulateas the iconic foundationof Ono's work. invitationfor actual dismemberment. Despite the attentionit has received, Cut Piece has implicationsfor the 49. EdwardRothstein, 'Dissecting a mutualityof race and gender thathave gone under-theorised.What does this To Find Out How it New "Masterpiece" Ticks', about art and the need for closure, the wish to clean a YorkTimes, 30 December 2000, p. B9, 11. suggest history up body that its own and unclearlimits? Does CutPiece, with its dual 50. MarthaBari commentsthat 'for mightspeak messy faces of and a collective about the Westerners,Ono's kneeling,seated posture on passivity exhibitionism,exemplify fantasy stagegives off complicated sexual signals contradictorystatus of the silent but signifyingJapanese female artist?50It is the of the submissive involving fantasy Japanese to in mind how Ono's (in)famous has come to Geisha'. 'Yoko Ono's Art: Problemsin important keep body signify female' in and often brutal One must look at Research',(Unpublished seminar paper: 'Japanese very specific ways. Universityof Maryland,1994), p. 26. Ono's identy as complex and multi-sitedwithin and through notions of 51. Haskell,Yoko Ono, p. 5. 'Japanese-ness'. She herselfhas both claimed and renounced this identity; to understandwhen it is and when it is cast is a 52. AnthonyCox, 'Yoko Ono and Conceptual consequently, employed away Art: InstructiveAuto-Destruction', Art and significantcritical problem. Ono, widely known in Japanas the daughterof a Artists1, 1966, 16-19. August pp. prominentbanker, self-consciouslyembraced a more transnationalstance by advertisingthe 1964 Kyoto concertas an eveningof Americancomposers. The poster forthe event depicts the other artistsin profile,while only the back of Ono's head is shown in a move to dislocate her physiognomicallyAsian face fromthe vaunted 'American-ness'of the event (Fig. 16). In Japan she positioned herselfas an expatriateno longer comfortableat home, while in New York she often summoned her Japanese identity. Especially during the beginning years of Fluxus, Ono self-consciously promoted herselfas associated with the Japanese avant-garde,writing that her music was 'more a Zen practice or gyo than music'.51 A 1966 article on Yoko Ono, writtenby her then-husbandTony Cox in Artand Artists,spends a full paragraphdiscussing the Japanese practice of wrapping one's lunch in intricatepackaging, implying that Ono's work continuedthis obscure 'Eastern tradition': 'this approach is referredto as "wabi and sabi" and is considered that no clear translationshould be available'.52 Cox suggeststhat Ono is an artistwho does not translateclearly, and that the enigmaticaspects of her work should be seen as a delicate part of a foreignculture. Much of Ono's work has inspired Zen-influencedinterpretations, ones that she herselfhas
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JuliaBryan-Wilson condonedor produced,and that,furthermore, have inflected readings of Cut Piece.53Ono createda posterto publiciseher events at theDestruction in Art whichlisted a seriesof Buddhist-influenced Symposium, specifically quotes, 53. See the paraphraseof Ono's own Buddhist includingthose callingher 'a fey Zen Variant' and 'a new Zen type explanationfrom Haskell, YokoOno, p. 91. 4 invention'. 54. Quotes fromthe HeraldTribune and Time, Aroundthe timeof CutPiece, Japan served in the US popularpress as a reprintedon a posterfor Ono's DIAS events,in Munroe, YesYoko Ono, p. 169. sourceof scandal, and Japanese artists in particularwere repeatedly invoked as 55. 'The Other Culture:An the ofthe Fromthe mid-1950s to thelate 1960s, Farrell, Explorer vanguard 'underground'. Life of the WorldwideUnderground of Art . . . ', magazineshot numerous photo-essays on theGutai Group and otherJapanese p. 92. in a titillatedtone that performanceensembles, reporting 'Japanesehappeners 56. Day-Lewis,'Music', 29 September1966, are knownthroughout the world Underground for their unblinking attention p. 80. to pornography.This is true of Japaneseliving abroad as well as thoseat 57. MichaelBenedikt, 'Yoko Notes', Artand home-it is somethingthat stays with them in all climates.'55Maybe this Artists,January 1972, pp. 26-30. 'unblinking'use of nudityis what led one reporterfor the LondonDaily 58. For example,in the 'Bagism' series,Ono and Postto state that 'Miss Ono sat and Lennongave a pressinterview together Telegraph Morning lookinginscrutably fromwithin a cloth because wantedto is whilemembers of theaudience took turns bag they Japanese(she actuallyJapanese) be heardas one personrather than seen as of to cut offher clotheswith a pair of scissors'.56 Ono is Japanese,but two differentraces and genders. 'inscrutably'so, and hence her nationalidentity must be parenthetically 59. Igarashi,Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War authenticatedby the Londonjournalist wielding orientalist tropes. in PostwarJapanese Culture, 1945-1970 Ono's invocationof her Asian as a markerof distinction was (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton,2000), identity always p. 21. temperedby her desireto be seen as an internationalartist; wary of being categorisedduring these years, Ono vacillatedbetween presenting her work as that of an 'AmericanAvant-Garde Composer' and assertingherself as Japanese.Implicit in thisbi-national categorisation is an unsettlingof the exclusivebinaries of Asianand American.She nevercomfortably claimed to inhabitfully an identityas either'Eastern' or 'Western',especially after her marriageto Lennonand theracist attacks on heras a Japanesewoman. While criticscontinued to writethat her work 'involves an economyof vision which appearsspecifically Japanese',57 she began espousingan eccentrichumanist politicsin whichshe exhortedpeople to disregardmarkers of race and sex.58 Methodologically,taking Ono's biographyinto account requires theorising an identitythat is not singular,or whollyself-determined, but fluid and flexible, particularlypressing upon the mutualities of Japan and America. As Yoshikuni Igarashistates regarding the US andJapan in thisperiod, 'each country defined the other's image in their postwar relations'.9 Perhaps the work's collaborationwith its viewersinsists that the bodyis not reducibleto itself, butis shapedby the condition of its reception; thus Cut Piece both disavows and reclaimscorporeal identities as it makesevident how thesevocabularies are genderedand raced. CutPiece centres on the as a siteof it offersto theaudience a body memory; :AmericanAvantGarde . Msic . C: ert nsoun gift,a means of commemoration.This gift,however, is undercutwith * uncertaintyand ongoingthreats, the hoveringfear of violence. Unlike *f..' . Burden's shot in the Ono's work ratherthan getting arm, metaphorises .s. IID..::StX: ,ffPsar1' embodiesviolence, with only one segmentof the tripartite structure involving an actualinstance of destruction. In thiscomplex play, theinvolvement of self dismantledso muchas it is into The rhetoricof and otheris not put balance. AmericanAvant-Garde Music Concert: Insound thegift or wishin Ono's workstill circulates through Bed-In and Waris Over!: thereis an invitationinto a bedroom,a hopefulbut absurdmessage that the war is over,if you wantit to be. Butthese wishes are suddenlybroadcast loudly to theworld in a waythat sit withart historians so intent the dramaof may uncomfortably upon personal and Instructure',with Tony Cox and Al theindividual art work. Indeed, the reception of Yoko Ono uneasilystraddles Wonderlick,1964, YamaichiConcert Hall, a spectrumof responses,from the currentvalorisation of CutPiece to the Kyoto.(? 2002 YokoOno.)
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ongoingdismissal of Bed-In,which was mocked in 1969 and is stillregarded as a puzzling,if not foolish,attempt to create world peace. A 1998 advertisement 60. Carlo McCormick,'Yoko Ono Solo', forHilton Hotels featuringBed-In demonstrates how Ono and her later actions Artforum,February 1989, p. 121. have been relegatedto the statusof culturalkitsch: the full-pagespread sets an 61. KristineStiles' 'UnbosomingLennon: the archival photo of Lennon and Ono performingBed-In alongside recent Politicsof Yoko Ono's Art Experience', luminariessuch as LarryKing and Naomi Campbell, all with the 'It Criticism,vol. no. 21-52 tagline, 7, 2, 1992, pp. at the Hilton'. This is one in a of commentsextensively on the 'thinlydisguised happens only image long history demoting specterof Westernracism' that formed Ono's Ono's serious artworksinto dated artefacts.Critics continue to stall over the 'dragonlady' image. Ono herselfdiscusses this discontinuitiesin Ono's oeuvre. In order to make sense of these in Kathleen and disjunctures, MelodySumner, Burch, both in and the have focused on her MichaelSumner (eds), TheGuests Go IntoSupper responses, Japan West, relentlessly (BurningBooks: Oakland, 1986), p. 177. celebrity,particularly emphasising her marriageto one of the most famous on the As one writer 'under critical 62. ChandraTalpade Mohanty,Ann Russo, and people planet. astutelyputs it, dissection, LourdesTorres (eds), ThirdWorld Women and the the anatomyof her work evaporates. Left empty-handedin its grasp of Ono, Politicsof Feminism Indiana (Bloomington: her public has compensated by cruder, more University,1991). substituting manageable of her'.60 And the cruder have, indeed, 63. Faces: Women representations representations JenniferTurpin, 'Many Her turns her and becomes an ConfrontingWar', in Lois Ann Lorentizenand proliferated. 'Japanese-ness',especially, against JenniferTurpin (eds), Womenand WarReader epithet. Afterher marriageto John Lennon, she became the embodimentof York Press: New (New University York, 1998), the 'yellow peril' itself,a controllingAsian dragon lady, depicted in the most p. 4. racist termsimaginable.61 Againstthese citationsof the damaginginsistence on Ono's essential,and limiting,Asian-ness, I want to negotiate the dislocationsof Ono's art of in terms of their complex moves through time and space. The work itself engenders complex thoughtsabout identityand dislocation that weave into notions of the transnational.Cut Piecespeaks manythings, and one of them is an emphasis on the tension between the body and the nation (as in the insistencethat Ono 'becomes' the raped countryof Vietnamwith her actions). Cut Piece was repeatedly performed between 1964-6 and then abruptly stopped. Perhaps its quiet ambivalenceand its generativeroom for multiple readingswere seen by 1966 as ineffectiveand weak in the face of more strident political resistance. (Or did Ono stop performingCut Piece soon after her marriageto Lennon because it was too invasiveand too intimatefor someone thrustinto the glaringeye of the media and constantlyscrutinised?) Cut Pieceis a pivotal point in Ono's early art, a crucial link between the diminishingvisible evidence of the Second World War and the flamboyant interventionsduring the Vietnam War. The current readings of Cut Piece restrict feminism to the resistance of scopic objectificationthrough the assertionof femaleagency. This constrictsthe possibilitiesof artisticfeminism concerned with otherforms of the oppressionof women. The editorsof Third WorldWomen and the Politicsof Feminismcall for a 'politics of location' that accounts for specificityin space and time in order to understandhow women are subjected materiallyacross the globe.62Feminism is an especiallyrelevant and productivelens fortheorising atomic damage duringWorld War Two, for these bombings 'ended the distinctionbetween combatantsand civiliansas targetsof war. Women and children constitutedthe vast majorityof these civiliancasualties.'63 Ono's gender is vital to my argumentsfor it insiststhat we acknowledge the impact of war on women. Women were particularly affectedby the non-militarytargeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, a distinctivefactor of atomic warfareis the highnumber of femalecivilian, non- soldier deaths, which leads to an increased 'feminisation'of war. Ono's art presentsnot the female survivoras injured, but the survivoras witness-not the body as an authenticsource of pain and experience, but as mediatedby historyand its effects.To theoriseand historicisethis art requires looking withoutflinching at years thatstill bear the shadow imprintsof those
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This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions JuliaBryan-Wilson who turnedto ash in the blast of the bomb. It requires understandingOno as an artistwho saw towns she used to visitreduced to photographsof obliterated scenery. Seeing Cut Piecewithin this shiftingnational frameworkallows for a criticalunderstanding of how art and the dislocatedbody are implicatedin the process of memory.Ono offerstwo kindsof evidence: a tangiblescrap of cloth and a photographicreminder of the event. In doing this,she understandsthat the interactionbetween the body and the viewer performsthe work of commemoration.Today the photographsare all we have to remember this event; and although they are flat relics, they are by no means mute. To conclude, I leave you with these images (Fig. 17), these memories, and say we'll meet back in ten years to discuss them, if there is no war, if thereis no war, if there is no war.
Thispaper was presented at the1999 BerkeleySymposium: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Visual Culture,and at the NorthwesternUniversity Department of Art History Collaboration/CollisionSymposium. It has benefittedfromthefeedback given by those listenersas well asfromthe commentsof thefollowingincisive, patient readers: Tim Clark,Christina Hanhardt, Jon Raymond, Mike Rogin, Amber Straus, and, especially, AnneWagner. Doryun Chong, Karla Merrifield, andJon Hendricks helped tremendously withsecuring images. I dedicatethis essay to thememory of Mike Rogin; his generosity and intelligencewere gifts to all whoknew him.
122 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003
This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:40:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Remembering Yoko Ono's Cut Piece
Fig.17. YokoOno, Cut Piece, 1964, YamaichiConcert Hall, Kyoto. (Photograph: Courtesy Lenono PhotoArchive, New York.)
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