Carry That Weight: Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece,” Womanhood, and Power
Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece” (1965). Performance art. Carnegie Hall, New York. Photos: Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Quick: what is the first, and maybe only fact you know about Yoko Ono?
The art historian in me would love to think that it’s about her performance art, her feminist eye, the experimental music, and the resilience to ground herself in the art world for more than half a century. But I’m not optimistic. Because almost everyone thinks of her as the person – no, the groupie girlfriend – who broke up the Beatles.
This is not the place to relitigate that narrative, or to even dignify it. So let’s be art historians not focusing on what she was famous for not doing – that is being the weird artist girlfriend who broke up the most famous band in the world. Instead, let’s focus on what she did do, and maybe in doing so, make her rightly famous for her transformative and powerful art.
Because Yoko Ono was a known Fluxus artist before that famous musician ever walked into her life, by means of walking in her own show (she claimed to have never heard of him). The Fluxus movement was a precursor to 1960s and 70s Conceptual Art, a movement that intended to be interdisciplinary and free-associative; the word Fluxus itself meaning to be in flux, to flow. It was one of those democratic, nebulous, and unfortunate movements that believed its ethos to have no ethos, and because it was so staunchly undefinable, it never quite gained a foothold in art history. They instead defined themselves by what they weren’t: not beholden to traditional painting or sculpture, not confined to the walls of a museum, and not the producers of anything that could be bought or sold. Most importantly, they didn’t want to stay in the realm of creators, or viewers, with art degrees. Art was everywhere, they argued. In Fluxus, every image can be art. Every sound can be music.
That said, one thing that we can for sure identify with the Fluxus movement is the “happening.” Happenings were essentially art performances: an interdisciplinary art staging, often that mirrored the trappings of a theatrical performance (a stage, props), but which actively solicited audience participation. Fluxus was committed to interactions between artist and viewer, to breaking down the barriers between the two. The experience of feeling that barriers disintegrate, of challenging a viewer’s preconceived notion of what they were seeing in real time: this was the art. The entirety of the art existed in the experience of being present at one of these happenings, and by definition could not exist beyond the fleeting moment of performance. It’s the definitive “you had to be there.” There can be photos and videos of the event, but they’re documentation only. The art itself has come and gone.
And Ono – and her happenings – were seminal to this movement. Her most famous was a performance called “Cut Piece,” first performed in Kyoto in 1964 and then at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1965. And while we’ve already established that describing the art after the fact is far less powerful than experiencing it in real time, here’s what the audience would have seen: Ono, thirty-one years old, dressed in a black suit, sits down in the middle of an otherwise empty stage. This signifies the start of the performance. She’s kneeling, sitting back on her heels, expressionless. A pair of scissors is placed in front of her. Audience members are then invited to come up on stage, one at a time, and cut off pieces of her clothing. As much or as little as they want, and they can keep the cloth. She sits there, reactionless. The performance goes until she decides that it’s over.
Of course, this is the literal description. None of it captures the nervous, twitchy energy of the audience, the tension in the room, her heart thundering in her chest. The recording of the piece shows the audience queuing up, women in 1960s blocky heels, modestly holding their knees together as they kneel down in their skirts, apologetically cutting away as little as possible. A young man swaggers up, drunk on his own bravado, and cuts away the chest of her shirt, exposing her bra. That one gets a slight eye roll from Ono. But otherwise, she’s passive. She says nothing; she does nothing. “When I do the Cut Piece,” she said, “I get into a trance…so I don’t feel too frightened… We usually give something with a purpose…but I wanted to see what they would take.”
Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece” (1965). Performance art. Carnegie Hall, New York. Photos: Museum of Modern Art, NY.
It’s a complex arrangement, Ono creating a space where she is then subjugated, while at the same time inviting her audience to revel in such extreme discomfort: complicity, arousal, shame. “Cut Piece” is ostensibly about revealing Ono, piece by piece, but really, it’s about revealing her audience. And it plays so keenly with the idea of power itself. Who actually has the power here? Ono is asking people to cut off her clothes, which gives her the power. But then people actually do it, which renders her powerless. But then she decides when it’s over, which is once again empowering. She tantalizes with the promise of her nakedness, yet sits passively accepting her forced vulnerability. Is this piece pro-feminist or anti-feminist? Is she a lesser woman, but a better artist, for sacrificing her body to this greater awareness of how women have been objectified in art, and in the larger world?
“Cut Piece” offers nothing in the way of definitive answers. Instead it presents a deceptively simple, intensely profound statement on the conflict of womanhood, and of the giving and taking of power. And though the piece was staged two years before Yoko Ono ever met John Lennon, the irony isn’t lost that she remained fascinated by what it meant to hold and lose control, as her own control over her reputation was quickly taken from her. So much of her art was tossed aside with the bathwater of the groupie who broke up the most famous band in the world; so much of her musical artistic experimentation was dismissed as noise when compared to her impossibly famous hitmaker husband.
And it’s particularly ironic that it was the mass popularity of the Beatles that stole away her artistic identity, when so much of it was about democratizing the artistic experience, and awakening the artist in everyone. Every sound can be music. Even kneeling on that stage, silently and implicitly asking the same questions that we ask today about what it means to be a woman, and artist, a woman artist, and the object of the gaze – how much we are expected to give; how much others will take – Yoko Ono was particularly enchanted by the sound. “There was a long silence between one person coming up and the next person coming up. And it’s fantastic, beautiful music, you know? Ba-ba-ba, cut! Ba-ba-ba-ba, cut!” The sound of her incredibly potent, powerful art, that she, all by herself, transformed into music.
Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece” (1965). Performance art. Carnegie Hall, New York. Photos: Museum of Modern Art, NY.