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Presented at:
the Third Annual Performance Studies Conference, Atlanta, April 11, 1997

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After nearly two decades of art historical neglect, Yoko Ono's 1989 exhibition at the Whitney Museum (her first solo exhibition in 17 years) prompted a considerable stream of articles and criticism in the art press that continues today. And the work that is becoming most closely associated with her oeuvre is a performance piece first presented in 1964 in Kyoto, Japan, Cut Piece.

In this first and several subsequent performances, Ono herself sat kneeling on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing, with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her. Members of the audience were invited to approach the stage, one at a time, and cut a bit of her clothes off which they were allowed to keep.

The script for Cut Piece appears, along with those for several other works, in a document from the spring of 1966, called Strip Tease Show.

*Cut Piece

First version for single performer:

Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage one at a time to cut a small piece of the performer's clothing to take with them.

Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer's option.

Second version for audience: It is announced that members of the audience may cut each others clothing.

The audience may cut as long as they wish*

In the 1971 paperback edition of her book, Grapefruit, Ono included not so much a score, as a description, concluding with the statement that, "the performer, however, does not have to be a woman."

In 1992, artist Lynn Hershman was commissioned to re-document Cut Piece for European television. Working from photos and texts, as well as a first-hand account of one of Ono's performances that one of Hershman's colleagues had seen, she created a 15-minute video documentation of a 1993 performance staged with actors for this purpose. Her attempts to interview Ono for the project were unsuccessful. Cut Piece: A Video Homage to Yoko Ono concludes with a discussion between art historians Moira Roth and Whitney Chadwick; the tape had been produced with the classroom in mind, Hershman told an interviewer in 1993. If I may call your attention to the monitor at this point, I'll show two brief clips from that tape back to back.

[HERSHMAN CLIPS]

One of the most obvious ways in which the video seems to deviate from the original performance score is in it's splicing together of three performances by three different women. Hershman saw Cut Piece in terms of feminism, violence, and riskand recreated it with the idea of video cutting as a type of violence as well. When asked why she chose to present performances by three women, Hershman replied: "I think she represented everywoman, not just one." The scene with the threatening man is based on written accounts of a similar event that is said to have occurred during the first performance in Kyoto.

While some of the earlier accounts of Cut Piece performances refer to the audience's behavior as sexually aggressive, it is not until Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt's 1991 book, Yoko Ono: Objects and Arias, that Cut Piece is given a specifically feminist reading and a somewhat qualified feminist reading at that:

*Running through much of Ono's work is a bold commentary on women. Yet far from being strident feminist tracts on the subordination and victimization of women, her pieces achieve power because of their ambiguity; their willingness to forfeit the illusion of politically proper thinking throws responsibility for judgment upon the viewer. *

In Marcia Tanner's catalogue essay for the 1994 Bad Girls exhibition, however, the author calls Cut Piece "fiercely feminist in content" and explains:

*Ono's inspiration for Cut Piece was the legend of the Buddha, who had renounced his life of privilege to wander the world, giving whatever was asked of him. His soul achieved supreme enlightenment when he allowed a tiger to devour his body, and Ono saw parallels between the Buddha's selfless giving and the artist's. When addressing serious issues in this case voyeurism, sexual aggression, gender subordination, violation of a woman's personal space, violence against women, Ono invariably found means to combine dangerous confrontation with poetry, spirituality, personal vulnerability, and edgy laughter. *

Thomas Crow, in his 1996 book, The Rise of the Sixties, says this about Cut Piece:

*It is difficult to think of an earlier work of art that so acutely pinpoints (at the very point when modern feminist activism was just emerging) the political question of women's physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision. *

And in the current issue of TDR, Kathy O'Dell states that:

*Throughout most of the piece she sat completely still, training an icy stare on the audience, past those who took her up on her offer. By ironically replicating stereotypically male practices of voyeurism, as well as stereotypically female states of passivity, she competed with traditions of voyeurism and demonstrated another form of mastery over visual space. *

Within five years, Haskell and Hanhardt's rather tentative feminist reading had become dominant, cropping up regularly in the popular press as well. In a 1996 article in the pop music magazine The Wire, for example, author Joy Press described Cut Piece as a flaunting of the female body. Exploring notions of voyeurism, violence, and victimization, it's one of her earliest and most powerful feminist statements. And O'Dell, in her statement, "By ironically replicating....", makes a giant leap forward in the critical interpretation of Cut Piece, imputing to Ono a feminist intention. And as we will soon see, at least in the 1965 performance, the "completely still...icy stare...past those who took her up on her offer" description offered up in support of this particular feminist reading are not at all supported by the film documentation.

Cut Piece wasn't always a feminist statement, however. While Ono clearly has no objections to the feminist readings that currently prevail, her recent comments also suggest that she understands that hindsight is twenty-twenty and that the regimes of vision rose to power after she had performed Cut Piece for the last time. In 1994, interviewer Robert Enright asked her, while discussing one of her films, "did you think of yourself as a proto-feminist?" She responded: "I didn't have any notion of feminism. When I went to London and got together with John that was the biggest macho scene imaginable. That's when I made the statement 'Woman is the Nigger of the World.'" It was 1969 when she made that statement to Nova, a British women's magazine. [And here I show you a picture sleeve of the 1972 record, based on that comment.]

Two years earlier, after she had met Lennon, but before she had gotten together with him, she directed a performance of Cut Piece as part of a happening. The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream Extravaganza at Alexandra Palace in April 1967 was the epitome of swinging London and the epitome of the macho scene to which Ono referred. Lennon was in the audience that night and Pink Floyd was also on the bill. I have a brief film clip to show, from a Pink Floyd video. Ono is not visible in the clip. Her then-husband, Tony Cox, however, can be seen immediately to the right of the persons cutting, apparently encouraging the cutters for the camera. He's dressed as he is here in this publicity shot for Ono's 1966 Film No. 4, or Bottoms.

[Pink Floyd video]

Photographs of this event were used in subsequent publicity posters [note on this one that Bottoms will be screened in the Men's Room] for other Ono performances, so it would seem that she indeed accepted authorship of this version of Cut Piece. And one would be hard-pressed, I think, to put this performance into evidence of Ono's "fiercely feminist content."

Now lest you think that I'm contesting a feminist reading or even an element of feminist intention on Ono's part, let me say here that I do not dispute a feminist reading of the work, but simply believe that such a framing seems to be eclipsing other readings and interpretations foregrounded by the artist herself as well as those of critics writing at the time of its initial performances. The two key presentations of Cut Piece designed for classroom use Crow's Rise of the Sixties and Hershman's video re-documentation, both place Cut Piece firmly within feminist discourse. And, as these works are geared to the classroom, it would seem that such a reading will only become further entrenched.

To turn now to the questions of intention and initial critical reception, I'll quote briefly from a 1966 article, written by Ono's then-husband Tony Cox, for publication in the journal Art and Artists. It was certainly intended to introduce Ono to London audiences, appearing as it did the month before her arrival there in September to participate in the Destruction in Art Symposium. The journal was closely aligned with the symposium. The article is titled "Instructive Auto-Destruction," and is headlined: "Yoko Ono leads in a direction that might be called Concept Art." In a boxed section about Cut Piece, Cox writes: Yoko Ono performs her work CUT PIECE at Carnegie Hall"

*Concept-art, where you can be an Artist, goes further and involves the audience as in Ono's CUT PIECE, where each member of the audience is asked to come up on the stage one at a time and remove the performer's clothing with a large pair of tailor's shears. .... In contrast to the rest of the concert, which is usually filled with restlessness in the audience, this piece always takes place in complete silence, with periods of several minutes elapsing before the next performer (member of the audience) gets enough courage to come up on the stage. Usually, only one third of the audience performs while the rest apparently consider the prospect. *

And I draw your attention here to the idea that the audience members are involved as performers themselves as well as the suggestion that their courage is required to participate. This latter statement, it seems to me, ennobles the very thing that a feminist reading inherently criticizes. The importance of audience participation has been a key element of Ono's conceptual art "or con-art" as she calls it since her first New York gallery show in 1961. Jon Hendricks' description of that show mentions that "when a visitor came to the gallery, Yoko Ono would take the person around to each work and describe the action that was to take place or how the person could participate in the work. For instance, 'Smoke Painting'; the visitor was invited to burn the canvas with a cigarette as much as they wanted and watch the smoke. The painting ended when all the canvas was gone."

In her 1962 show at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, Ono went further still, exhibiting only instructions. Here I show "Painting to be Constructed in Your Head I." It translates as: Painting to be Constructed in Your Head

Go on transforming a square canvas in your head until it becomes a circle. Pick out any shape in the process and pin up or place on the canvas an object, a smell, a sound, or a colour that came to your mind in association with the shape.

Cut Piece, I believe, evolves out of these clearly conceptual works. As Alexandra Monroe has pointed out:

*Although Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965) which presented the dictionary definition of "chair" alongside a real chair and a photograph of a chair is recognized as one of the earliest works in the history of conceptual art, in fact it was Yoko Ono who first announced that language, by itself on a gallery wall, is a justifiable form of art. *

As Ono's critical fortunes escalate within the discourse of feminist art history, however, she continues to be marginalized within the discourse of Conceptualism. Monroe was writing about the Japanese avant-garde; most major publications dealing with Conceptual art continue to exclude her from that history or marginalize her within it.

It's clear from the record that Ono's critical reception has been significantly affected by sexism and racism. Even before she became the so-called dragon-lady who destroyed the Beatles, she endured a particular type of "gaze" reserved for women of color. In what was ostensibly an account of a London performance of Cut Piece, the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post related that "Miss Ono sat looking inscrutably Japanese (she is actually Japanese)"[the author tells us parenthetically] "while members of the audience took it in turns to cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors." Esquire Magazine's December 1970 feature ("John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie....") on Ono was perhaps the most outrageous of many other examples, Brenda Jordans account in the November/December 1966 issue of Resurgence offered this:

*The destructive artist who crushes a frog with his boot is relating that action to the absurdity of Vietnam and the injustices of the draft. At the same time he is acknowledging the violence which is within himself, the vast potential of destruction which is within each of us, which we manifest in so many ways of socially acceptable violence. When the audience had finished cutting bits off Yoko Ono she held up a poster with the words "My body is the scar of my mind." Her statement explains, "People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me, finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me, but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it's like in the stone" .*

I'll return to the Vietnam comment in a moment, but first a brief digression about the stone. The Stone was the name of a March 1966 show at the Judson Gallery that featured Ono's "Bagwear." Visitors were invited to climb into the sacks which, enveloping a still body on the ground, resembled stones. A few years later, she and John Lennon began appearing in public in bags. They spoke often about the idea that the bags allowed "total communication" in that the other party had to listen to what you said without regard to what you looked like. One of the bags apparently was the subject of a 1967 Life Magazine story, albeit without mention of their creator, expressing much the same ideas. Ono's "Statement" might thus be considered in this context of "total communication," something Ono and Lennon often invoked in their comments on "Bagism" and it's relationship to peace through better understanding.

And the bags were actually used in one performance of Cut Piece. Seen here on the cover of the Village Voice , the performance took place in Central Park on September 9, 1966, as part of the Fourth Annual Avant-Garde Fertival organized by Charlotte Moorman. [Ono had been scheduled to perform Cut Piece, but left suddenly for London and the Destruction in Art Symposium; Moorman, facing problems with nudity and her parks permit, devised the "men in bags' solution. The two men were clothed under the bags, and only the bags were cut off; other males performers have done it in the more customary manner.]

The pacifist element of "Cut Piece" consider its presentation within the context of a Destruction in Art Symposium prefigures Ono and Lennon's peace activism in events such as the 1969 Bed-In and War Is Over poster campaign. And she showed the first version of her all-white chess set in a 1966 exhibition, immediately following DIAS. As all the pieces are the same color, opponents quickly lose track of the enemy. Long before Ono's politics were feminist, she subscribed to the politics of peace.

Before seamlessly jumping to "serious issues," in this case voyeurism, sexual aggression, gender subordination, violation of a woman's personal space, violence against women, Bad Girls author Marcia Tanner offered an often told explanation of Cut Piece's inspiration, the Buddha story related above. Ono elaborated on this story in a number of different interviews. In 1992, for example, she told Ina Blom that :

*Cut Piece is about freeing yourself from yourself. Like all artists, I have the tendency to give what I want to give. And I am defying that, in that piece. And it is a frightening piece to perform. Very tense. And because it was such an incredibly important piece for me, I took care of the details. In those days clothes were very important to me because I had so few. But when I performed Cut Piece I always made sure to wear my best suit. It was the total offering, you know, so that you wanted to wear your best suit for it. I lost my best suit every time I performed the piece.* If audience members or participants are to complete her pieces in their minds, then any numbers of readings are possible and valid. As it turns out, while Ono's staff had unknowingly informed Hershman otherwise, there is a film of the 1965 Carnegie Recital Hall performance of Cut Piece made by Albert and David Maysles. I'd like to conclude by showing a brief clip from it and inviting you to consider Cut Piece with fresh eyes.

[Show Maysles clip]

Thank you.