How is Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’—in which the audience cut off her clothing—art?

Our art series demystifies the artworks we love—or love to hate. This time, we tackle a pioneering piece that went on to define feminist performance art

Imagine being so open to vulnerability, that you would voluntarily sit on stage dressed in your best outfit and invite audience members to come on stage and cut out pieces of your clothing. On July 20,1964, then-31-year-old Japanese artist Yoko Ono did exactly this in Kyoto’s Yamaichi Concert Hall as part of her performance art piece Cut Piece.

At once intimate and provocative in nature, subtle and bold in gesture, the work is considered to be a shining example of performance art and, at that time, it pushed the boundaries of art by making the audience integral to the work, both in terms of those viewing the art and those performing the discomfiting act of cutting clothing off her body.

Some viewers, especially the first few, made small snips revealing minimal skin in more acceptable parts of the body such as her wrists or forearms, while others made more drastic moves such as cutting her bra straps, prompting the artist to change her meditative pose and hold her bra up to prevent it from falling off.

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Programme for Yoko Ono’s performance at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, “Norman J. Seaman Presents: Works of Yoko Ono” (Photo: courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

Above Programme for Yoko Ono’s performance at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, “Norman J. Seaman Presents: Works of Yoko Ono” (Photo: courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

While some audience members made demure cuts, others made bolder snips, exposing opposing latent tendencies in human nature. The act plays on the contradicting emotions of humility and aggression, shame and perversion—invoking the eternal question: are we inherently good or bad? It also spotlights the raw tension between the consumer and the artist, by giving the former control over shaping the artwork—thereby pushing the boundaries of performance art even further.

Ono was born in Japan in 1933, but in the wake of World War II, her family fled to the US in 1952, where she attended Sarah Lawrence University and in 1961 she joined the Fluxus art movement. Founded by Lithuanian American artist George Maciunas in 1960 in New York, this movement was inspired by the earlier Dada art movement and was rooted in experimentation. Fluxus artists often staged art performances which challenged conventional notions of art—such as painting, sculpture—and instead highlighted the actions of the human body on the artwork. They also pushed to lower the barriers between art and real life by bringing art beyond galleries and museums.

The movement flourished through the ’60s, bolstered by the anti-war sentiments of the time. Ono herself was well known for her peace advocacy—and her rejection of “opposing” sides, especially given the contractionary tendencies in each human being, that was powerfully demonstrated in Cut Piece as well.

Above Footage of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” performance art from 1965

Since its debut in 1964, Cut Piece has been performed many times by different artists across the world, with Ono herself performing it at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1965, and again in Paris in 2003. By then, Ono had already reached celebrity status, adding a further nuance to the performance—how far will the public go to feed their curiosity into a celebrity’s private life?

While we can’t go back in time and watch Ono’s live performance, there’s plenty of documentation of it, as well as of Ono’s prolific body of work, which is currently on view at Japan Society, New York, as a part of the exhibition Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus (on view until January 21, 2024). The show highlights four pioneering Japanese female artists—Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), Takako Saito (b. 1929), Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) and Ono—all of whom were previously less celebrated than their male and Western counterparts. The exhibition sheds new light on their contribution to the Fluxus movement and the feminist cause—though some of them contributed to the latter cause almost unintentionally at times. Kubota’s provocative Vagina Painting (1965), for instance, was a blatant allusion to the female womb as the source of all creation. She did this by performing a literal “birth” of a painting—by attaching the paintbrush to her underwear and sometimes by inserting it into her vagina.

Vagina Painting, performed during Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, New York, July 4, 1965. Gelatin silver print; image: 14 x 14" (35.6 x 35.5 cm), sheet: 19 3/4 x 15 7/8" (50.2 x 40.4 cm). Photographed by George Maciunas. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008.

Above Shigeko Kubota performing “Vagina Painting” at Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, New York, in 1965 (Photo: George Maciunas, courtesy of Japan Society)

More than 100 works, including Cut Piece, are on view at the exhibition, including documentaries and archival materials around them. While the Cut Piece’s feminist references are more subtle than Kubota’s (in fact early on Ono often denied her work was feminist, but rather about human nature in general), it does highlight—whether intentionally or not—the way women are objectified.

Indeed Ono’s celebrity, the result of her association with Beatles member John Lennon, simultaneously overshadowed her own art practice especially while the late singer was alive, but it also made her artistic influence more prominent in the mainstream. In recent times, Ono has been credited for her contribution in shaping Lennon’s music, while her own work—both in art and music—has influenced the likes of contemporary celebrity artists such as Lady Gaga.

Well-known performances artists like Marina Abrahamovic and Rirkrit Tiravanija are also influenced by Fluxus artists, and Cut Piece certainly foreshadowed some of Abrahamovic’s well-known performance pieces, which incorporated similar aspects of audience participation. The Cut Piece’s ground-breaking nature, viscerally evocative and discomfiting reaction, and its influence on multiple generations of artists across various disciplines is what makes it art.

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Piece of work: How is Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’—in which the audience cut off her clothing—art?