Yoko Ono and the Violence of the Body (Cut Piece)
Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!
Today's post comes again with a small twist. I do hope that most of you recognise the name you see in the title. Today we'll be discussing about Yoko Ono! To some of you might be a familiar name as she used to be the second wife of the late lead singer of the Beatles, John Lenon.
However, many of you might not be familiar with the fact that Yoko Ono not only was married to an artist but she was an artist herself. Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist. And although I'd love to give you a detailed arration of her life, I would like to focus more on a specific art performance she gave in the earlier years of her career.
At 20 July of 1964, Ono created "Cut Piece" as a piece of performance art and participatory work that took place at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan. It is one of the earliest and most significant works of the feminist art movement and Fluxus.
The artist presented herself and a pair of scissors to an audience of viewers. Ono knelt on the floor in front of the audience, wearing her best suit, and invited members of the audience to approach her and use the scissors to cut and take a small piece of her clothing. While many viewers snipped only a small piece of fabric the hem of the artist's clothing, others took bolder, more aggresive actions, slicing away large patches of her clothing or snipping her bra straps.
By inviting viewers to participate in the performance, Ono challenged the perceived neutrality of the interaction between viewer and art object, implicating the viewer in the potentially violent act of undressing her body. While the work was not created to explicitly address sexual assault or gendered violence, the work tacitly referenced the historic objectification of the female nude in art, and related issues of voyerism, gender subordination, and the violation of women's personal space and boundaries.
Ono has performed the work a total of 6 times. Cut Piece is understood to address materialism, gender, class, memory and cultural identity and has become regarded as an iconic proto-feminist work of performance art, but also has an underlying anti-war message and inspiration found in Zena and Shinto Buddhism. In addition to Ono's six performances, Cut Piece has been staged by numerous other artists and has inspired feminist and anti-war artists and collectives since it was first performed in 1964.
Yoko Ono pretty much pioneered into art performance, creating new spaces and messages that would become symbols later used and known in the art world. The violence it takes to perform in a helpless body, leaving all freedom to use it however someone prefers, is a resounding message itself.
As always thank you for reading and I will see you in a next post!
xoxoxo
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