The Art of Nakedness: Yoko Ono’s classic cut-piece performance
It is a peculiar fact in life that the arts are disproportionately filled with people who had itinerant upbringings. Yoko Ono might have been born in Tokyo in 1933, but she rarely stayed home in the city. Her father was a former classical pianist, but when Ono arrived, his job as a banker meant that she was often hot-footing between America and her homeland as a child. This lifestyle meant that she found herself thrown into a wild world of cultures, but mostly she was an observer on the fringes of them rather than at the centre.
This outsider status soon came to the fore, even more so when World War II thrust her life into turmoil. Towards the end of the war, her father was working in Hanoi and soon became a prisoner of war. This meant that Ono and her family had to trade goods for food in Tokyo, where starvation was rampant. During this dystopian urban existence, Ono claimed her “aggressive” attitude and understanding of her “outsider” status began to truly take shape.
By 1946, Ono was able to continue her creative studies. She later became the first woman ever to enter the philosophy program at Gakushuin University. However, few things lasted long in Ono’s early life, and soon enough, she had left university and was heading towards the bohemian utopia of New York City.
Therein, her life took its own avant-garde form when she was introduced to the works of her heroes Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and the realisation that you empower your pariah status through art landed like a nonconformist bomb. “I was just fascinated with what they could do,” she once said. “I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into [an] area that my teacher felt was really a bit off track, and….. he said, ‘Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do, and they’re called avant-garde.’”
This dawning reality came with the surprising notion that she had pretty much self-discovered her own avant-garde status. It’s not like she was wandering into the woods of art and came across a settlement. It was, in fact, the other way around. She was merely exploring her own self-expression and her peers said, ‘You live in the woods of this world, Ono’. It was this moment that imbued in her the ideology that “you change the world by being yourself”.
This radicalised her artistic view, and soon she launched her revolutionary Cut Piece exhibition. During this performance, she sat on stage alone, dressed in her finest suit, with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience then approached her to use the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which remained theirs to keep. “When I do the Cut Piece, I get into a trance, and so I don’t feel too frightened.… We usually give something with a purpose… but I wanted to see what they would take…. There was a long silence between one person coming up and the next person coming up. And I said it’s fantastic, beautiful music, you know? Ba-ba-ba-ba, cut! Ba-ba-ba-ba, cut! Beautiful poetry, actually,” she said.
She told Kevin Concannon that the purpose of the performance was to present a bold “form of giving, giving and taking. It was a kind of criticism against artists, who are always giving what they want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted to, so it was very important to say you can cut wherever you want to. It is a form of giving that has a lot to do with Buddhism.…A form of total giving as opposed to reasonable giving….”
It was also a form of exposed vulnerability. Ono put trust in others and bore her nakedness as a statement that she was her art, and art is an engagement rather than objectified scrutiny.
