Remembering Yoko Ono's Cut Piece
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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.) ( OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 99-123 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 Fg. 2. YokoOno, Cut Piece, 1964, SogetsuArt Center, Tokyo. (Photograph: Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York.) 102 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 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, <http:// for the exhibitionBad Girls,wherein Ono is celebratedas one of the webcast.gatech.edu/papers/arch/ Concannon.html> 'foremothers'of bad-girlism, Marcia Tanner lists the 'seriousissues' that Ono is confrontingin Cut Piece: 'voyeurism,sexual aggression,gender subordination,violation of a woman's personal space, violence against women'.4 In such instances,Ono's body is taken as a body stripped, scrutinised,and violatedby theaudience's gaze, and thework is describedas 'reallyquite gruesome-morelike a rape thanan art performance'.5These statements,motored by theoriesof femininesubmission and masculine domination,implicate the audience in a series of escalatingtransactions, from voyeurism to physical harm, and present the audience as menacing, terroristic, and compassionless. There is little possibility in these interpretationsthat the invitation Ono proffersmight be positive-no space for Cut Piece to be a gift, a gesture of reparation, or a ritual of remembrance. For CutPiece does not simplyaccuse the audience fortaking up the scissors, and it does not unmaskthe audience as merely sadistic. Indeed, the viewer's participationis vital to the piece's reciprocal ballet. By accentuatingthe violence of the situation,these readingselide the more complex dynamicof simultaneousdestruction and memorialisation.Although such readings have been productivefor feminist understandings of Ono and her earlywork, they do not elucidate Cut Piece's uncomfortable intersection between sex, nationality,and physicality.6Rather than tidily offeringthe body up to be assigned a single meaning, Cut Piece stages its unease with the interaction between the performingbody and the interpretingaudience. The nudityin Cut Pieceis not so much the index of its maker's status as a woman as it is the vehicle for the work's key metaphor. Nudity, with its implications of vulnerabilityand danger, was deployed by Ono in its relation to wartime afterimages.By using strategiesof commemorationand the souvenir, Ono's art worked to counteractatomic amnesia. In Cut Piece,the body announces itselfnot only as a recipientof risksand threats,but also as a source of gifts. This dualism of aggressionand generosityhas complex implicationsfor the audiences of this work, whetherthese audiences are viewers with scissorsin hand or art historianssome fortyyears later. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 103 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 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