Yoko Ono sits on a stage. She is dressed in black; her hair is neatly tied back [I]. She kneels with her feet tucked underneath her and allows her body to rest on her shins; Ono is replicating a polite Japanese sitting position, seiza, which is typically assumed in formal or respectable environments [ii]. This is Ono undergoing one of her six renditions of Cut Piece, a performance artwork wherein the audience interacts with Ono her clothing off of her body and keeping it as a souvenir [iii]. Ono performed this event score—or “instructional work”—six times between 1964 and 2003. Over the course of its life, Cut Piece has been performed in a variety of contexts and by many different individuals.
Cut Piece’s productive components, such as its nod to enlightened giving, have been overlooked by its audiences. Audience attention has routinely been fixated on Ono’s gendered and racialized presence. Swept away in their fetishized fascination with her Asian body, audience members often violated Ono by deliberately undressing her and exposing her most sexualized parts. The audience’s role as performers in Cut Piece and their subsequent defiant nature exposes the degree to which Japanese female performers were stereotyped—and the way that such stereotypes were internalized—by Western onlookers in the 1960s. To understand the implications of Cut Piece, one must analyze the performance through an intersectional lens, taking into consideration not only feminist interpretations but readings that account for race as well.
A variety of audience participation behaviour was exemplified in Albert and David Maysles’ short film documenting Ono’s 1965 performance of Cut Piece at New York’s Carnegie Hall. There, university students were Ono’s participants and viewers [vi]. During the 1960s, higher-education was dominated by white men, and this particular audience largely consisted of that demographic [vii]. The reel displays a female audience member choosing to cut a small piece from an unthreatening area on Ono’s arm [viii]. Next, a man walks on stage for his second or third turn at Ono’s blouse. The man states playfully to the audience, “very delicate, this might take some time… not too long, all right, well I don’t want to cut her”[ix]. Unlike the previous participants, this man cuts slowly around Ono’s breasts, eventually slicing the straps of her brassiere (Fig. 3, 4). At first, the audience eggs the man on. The reel picks up laughter from female and male voices [x]. However, the audience soon registers Ono’s violated reaction as she begins blinking rapidly and reaches to cover her chest with her arms [xi]. The audiences’ mood shifts as they begin heckling the male cutter and calling him a “freak”[xii]. The audience’s oscillating mood reveals their simultaneous anxiety and desire to bolster their own subjectivity and power at the expense of Ono’s vulnerability and objectification. Ono’s violated reaction indicates that she was unaware of the extent to which this audience’s demographic would inflict harm upon her.
To audience members, the performance of cutting clothes from Ono’s body seemed indistinguishable from the act of stripping [xiii]. This association stimulated the audience’s voyeuristic gaze, thereby framing Ono within a specific social type, placing her under the subordination of the male gaze [xiv]. The stereotype that Ono, as an Asian woman, was “passive” under the hands of the white male participant was constructed by the spectators [xv]. According to James Moy in his study Marginal Gaze the “empowering gaze,” or the white voyeuristic gaze, produced by the audience subordinates Asians to stereotypical representations [xvi]. Therefore, the stereotyping thrust upon Ono was beyond her control. Such stereotypes hinged entirely on the anxiety entrenched within white, American viewers.
Many scholars have theorized that the stereotype of the Asian woman as passive exists to bolster the power of the Western gaze and to credit such a concentrated gaze with the ability to deem themselves superior to (and ultimately different from) the “other.” For instance, according to Laura Mulvey, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, the pleasure in looking [is] split between active/male and passive/female” [xvii]. In other words, women are constructed as passive material for the active male gaze’s consumption. Moreover, Moy postulates that the Asian “object” in America is “fetishized” or “sexless, and therefore harmless,” under the masterful, masculine and white gaze of the spectator [xviii]. Mulvey’s “passive/female” paradigm, coupled with Moy’s conceptualization of the Asian “object,” allows one to understand the root of the audience’s application of such stereotypes to Ono’s performance, and onto Ono herself, as the Asian female performer.
Articles regarding Ono’s feminist influence have often deemed Cut Piece to be a symbol lof discursive and material violence faced by all women. For example, artist Lynn Hershman read Cut Piece in terms of “feminism, violence, and risk” [xix]. In reference to the brutality that Ono faced, Hermshan noted that “I think she represented everywoman, not just one”[xx]. Moreover, Thomas Crow wrote in 1966: “it is difficult to think of an earlier work of art that so acutely pinpoints (at the very point when feminist activism was emerging) the political question of women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision”[xxi]. In these readings, Ono’s body represents all female bodies, and her subjectivity as a Japanese woman is left devoid of recognition.
Not only should one analyze Cut Piece in terms of feminism and the violation done to the female body, but one must also examine this work through the lens of nationality and its Japanese historical context. In 1964, images of nudity and tattered clothing in Kyoto had other implications besides their appeal to the male gaze [xxii]. Due to the Hiroshima bombing, other historically specific associations with the naked body, torn outfits, and stripping prevailed in Japan (Fig. 5, 6)[xxiii]. In American occupied Japan, pictures of the bombing’s aftermath were banned from circulation after the blasts [xxiv]. Nearly a decade later, after the prohibition on bombing images was lifted, an outpouring of artistic testimony, photographs, first-person narratives, and paintings began filling the void of the historical record [xxv]. Ono’s performance, which took place for the first time around twenty-years later, echoes the psychological trauma instilled from this censorship [xxvi]. Photos depicting children wandering the streets with school uniforms hanging off their bodies, burned and torn, should be considered as real-life visual precedents for Cut Piece.
To understand the implications of Cut Piece, one must dissect all elements of the work through an intersectional lens, illuminating Ono’s multi-faceted identity and the specific violence Ono endured as an Asian female performer. The artist-audience relationship inspired feminist scholarship regarding the performance, as the audiences’ actions spoke to the simultaneous power and anxiety held by the white male gaze. It is not only vital to examine the implications of Ono’s Asian identity within America but to understand the Japanese historical context that may have inspired Ono’s construction of Cut Piece. We must recognize the accounts of women across the globe as their experiences inform their work and how they, as women, are subsequently received elsewhere. The power of Cut Piece lies within Ono’s intersectional identity as she claims her strength and defiance in the face of audiences that seek to both materially and discursively strip her of her subjectivity.
Bella Silverman is a double major in history and art history at McGill University. Bella’s academic goal is to uncover histories that are normally concealed due to patriarchal structures and the systematic canonization of history.
Works Cited:
- [i] V. Mackie, “Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono,” in Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono, 2012. 496.
- [ii] Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003), 101.
- [iii] Carolyn S. Stevens, “Yoko Ono: A Transgressive Diva,” in Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History, eds. Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 123.
- [iv] Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 30, no. 3 (2008), 81.
- [v] Concannon. 81.
- [vi] Amy Herzog, “Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability,” Feminism Media Histories, vol. 1 no. 3, (2015), 70.
- [vii] Sisian Grigorian, “Art based in performance case studies in contemporary art,” (California: Ph.D. diss., California State University, 2019), 13.
- [viii] Sisian. 13.
- [ix] Amy Herzog, “Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability,” Feminism Media Histories, vol. 1 no. 3, (2015), 70.
- [x] A. Dublon, “Sound, Violence, Photography: Ono, Ortega, Owens,” University of Toronto Art Journals, v. 3, (2010), 19.
- [xi] Amy Herzog, “Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability,” Feminism Media Histories, vol. 1 no. 3, (2015), 70.
- [xii] Herzog, 70.
- [xiii] James Martin Harding, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece and the Unmaking of Collage,” in Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 113.
- [xiv] Martin. 113.
- [xv] Martin 113.
- [xvii] Josephine D. Lee, “The Asian American Spectator and the Politics of Realism,” in Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). 37.
- [xviii] Lee. 40.
- [xix] Concannon. 85.
- [xx] Concannon. 85.
- [xxi] Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003), 103.
- [xxii] Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003), 107.
- [xxiii] Bryan-Wilson. 107.
- [xxiv] Bryan-Wilson. 108.
- [xxv] Bryan-Wilson. 109.
- [xxvi] Bryan-Wilson. 109.
Feature photo credit to Rinaldi on Flickr
