kaisholmes blog

Visual Analysis: Cut Piece (1964)

Reading time: 4m

Cut Piece (1964) is a conceptual performance artwork by Yoko Ono. A video documentation of the performance showed Ono sitting silently on the stage wearing a fine outfit, with a pair of scissors placed in front of her, allowing the audience members to go up and cut a piece of her clothing away at their will. Throughout the performance, different audience members would choose to cut the clothing in different ways. We see audiences cutting small pieces of the sleeves away, many also going for the collar or the chest area. One particular male audience went up to the stage and cut away the entire front section of Ono’s clothing. There was often laughter in the audience when someone goes up to cut away the clothes, yet Yoko Ono stayed silent, still, and nonchalant throughout the entire performance.

Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to New York City with her family during her college years. Many of Ono’s artworks are related to the feminist movement and were made with the intent to secure the future and promote world peace (this is especially prominent after her marriage with famous musician John Lennon). Throughout her career, she involved herself in both the Japanese and the Western art world. The first performance of Cut Piece happened in Kyoto, but Ono has performed it in various other cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris. The performance art was received by different audiences in different cities, and each group of audiences had different responses. The audiences in London were bold and left Ono bare with no clothes on her when the show ended whereas the audiences in Japan were mostly met with confusion since many were under the impression that the tickets they bought were for a music-related show. Most audiences were gentle, but there was one occasion where a man jokingly raised the scissors in a threatening posture like he was going to stab Ono.

Cut Piece as a performance art can be read in many different ways when the audience considers the artist’s background in being a Japanese woman. In an essay written by Julia Bryan-Wilson, the author takes into consideration the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—an event that happened when Yoko Ono was twelve years old—and how this cultural context ties into Cut Piece. While the majority of modern Western audiences know about the bombings as images of mushroom clouds, older Japanese citizens and bombing survivors remember the event in small details—one of them being that people’s clothes were torn from the impact. A volunteer that witnessed the aftermath of the bombings recounted:

Being the height of summer, more women than usual were wearing dresses rather than the traditional work pants…scores of people were seen lying half naked on the streets or inside buildings, with their clothes ripped off by the blast.

The image of summer dresses and ripped-off clothes parallel Ono’s appearance in her Cut Piece performances, where at the end, the artist’s supposed best outfit became shredded into pieces like a rag.

Another idea that Julia Bryan-Wilson pointed out in their article was Ono’s postures in her performances. With her legs crossed and sitting on top of her feet, the posture can be seen as a casual version of seiza (正座) (can be directly translated into “sitting correctly”). Seiza is a practice prominent in Japanese culture, in which an individual would sit with their legs folded and tucked while maintaining a straight spine. It is most often seen in tea ceremonies or in the 19-20th century when an individual is addressing an important figure like the shogun. It can also be seen to be used in Buddhist/Buddhism-inspired practices such as meditation. In Cut Piece, Yoko Ono is in the position of submission, a concept often linked to Asian women whether with good or bad intent. In this performance, Ono is willingly ‘giving’ herself to the audience. She commented:

It is a form of giving that has a lot to do with Buddhism…That's a form of total giving as opposed to reasonable giving like ‘logically you deserve this’ or ‘I think this is good, therefore I am giving this to you.’

The mention of Buddhism further connects Cut Piece with Japanese culture, as Buddhism is and has been a prominent religion in Japan. From knowing about seiza and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, Cut Piece can be read as an artwork Yoko Ono utilises to express her culture in different parts of the world.

What initially drew me to Cut Piece is when I saw a photograph of Yoko Ono sitting on stage, which reminded me much of Asian mannerisms and Bijin-ga (can be directly translated to “art of beautiful people”) from the Edo and Meiji eras in Japan. Ono poses on stage in a way that almost heightens her femininity (whether or not it relates to submission or the feminist commentary the performance carries), a look that Bijin-ga artists try to achieve in their subjects. After watching the video documentation of the performance, I felt uncomfortable due to the nature of the action of stripping a woman of her clothes. One of my first reactions was to blame it on the audiences that cut the clothes away, although I knew that they were invited to do it. What furthered the feeling of discomfort is hearing the audiences laugh while watching Ono be stripped of clothing. After thinking about it, the audience may be using laughter to dissolve the same feeling of discomfort that I felt. There is a sense of guilt watching the performance take place—as I wonder what I would have done if I was one of the audience who were invited to cut her clothes. Cut Piece both challenged me as a viewer and connected with me as a person who grew up with East Asian culture.

Yoko Ono and Cut Piece (1964) are widely known for their impact on the feminist movement and the promotion of world peace, however, it can also be seen through a different lens. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were significant events in which their impact are still felt in Japanese society today—for it to happen in Ono’s lifetime means that it would be carried into her art, whether consciously or subconsciously. The same can be said about more casual Japanese culture such as seiza and Buddhist beliefs. From learning about Yoko Ono’s culture, Cut Piece reveals itself to be an artwork that is intrinsically Japanese.

References:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600448
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30135150
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yoko-Ono
https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964/
https://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/english/hiroshima/h01-00068-4e.html
https://library.artstor.org/asset/SS35436_35436_19181112
http://yabai.com/p/2761
https://youtu.be/zbQBD06N0Hs