Cut Piece
Cut Piece (1964) — Yoko Ono
This infamous, pioneering piece of performance art, performed by artist and visionary Yoko Ono, converses with the monstrous-feminine and forces us to interact with it. In Cut Piece, Ono sits alone on a stage wearing a nice suit, a pair of scissors placed before her. The audience is encouraged to take turns approaching Ono, and using the scissors to cut off parts of her clothing. Ono remains unspeaking, still, throughout the performance. These viewers, then, become participants, some reluctant, timid in their slight cuts, and others enthusiastic, aggressively cutting away huge swaths of fabric. Of the piece, she says, in an interview with MoMA, "We usually give something with a purpose…but I wanted to see what they would take." The artist is present, and yet invisible; passive, and yet engineering the event.
Ono's stillness is not the usual imagery of the monstrous-feminine, but her body, vulnerable, in public, undergoes a metamorphosis without ever moving; the participants impose a process of brutal undoing upon her. The monstrosity lurks not in her body but in the reactions to the gendered body in public. She stakes her flesh as an art piece, and the cultural undressing and destruction of that flesh is made uncomfortably visible, unavoidable. A woman's body shifts into a receptacle for cultural aggression, a location upon which to incite and test out one's monstrous impulses. Yet Ono willingly enters into the agreement of viewer and viewed, is complicit in her own destruction—or is she? Is the violence inevitable, is it ever invited, or is it, as this piece suggests, anxious to arise in a controlled form, very much avoidable? Ono's body locates the abject and pronounces itself the boundary through which viewers can temporarily trespass. Art, as monstrous, particularly in the gendered structures of art, in the accessibility of that mythical quality of genius, art as a constant taking, particularly from the feminine, from women of color, can be read in her work.
