ipl-logo

Yoko Ono's Cut Piece

463 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Art analysis

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist who was an influential practitioner of conceptual and performance art in the 1960s. She became internationally known when she married famous singer John Lennon of The Beatles. Ono was one of the strongest feminist voices to emerge from the art world in the 60s. Her breakout performance “Cut Piece”, was the first for feminist art performance. It brought the audience into close contact with the artist, which was a new concept and crossed the traditional boundaries between artist and audience.
In 1965 Yoko Ono did a performance called “Cut Piece”. In this piece, Ono sat on the floor of a stage wearing a black dress with a pair of scissors laid beside her. She then invited viewers to participate by cutting her dress. As seen in the YouTube video, …show more content…

She presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body. She herself was the medium of the piece of the audience became the artist. While giving the audience power she lost her power of will and become vulnerable. Throughout this piece Ono addresses gender directly by objectifying herself. She becomes the sexual object for those to see. She does not talk or move much throughout “Cut Piece,” causing her to become an object rather than a human with a voice to express what is happening to her. “Cut Piece” is showing Ono as a female sexual object rather than a person. Through her facial expressions near the end of the YouTube clip, it is evident that she became uncomfortable with how sexually aggressive people have become with her body and her clothing, especially the men. By permitting participants to act on her as if she was an object rather than a human being, she depicts a woman’s social place and power as lower than that of a man’s, especially since the person who went so far as to cut her bra straps was a

Show More
Related
1028 Words | 5 Pages

This suggests that the woman’s body is very weak, like a dying flower, and also conveys the writer’s love for her – he believes she is beautiful, like a delicate flower. The theme of isolation is explored in an effective way when the writer speaks of a distance of pain “neither she nor (he) can cross”. The word “nor” isolates the words “she”

Read More
1329 Words | 6 Pages

The context of the text was to support women’s rights by encouraging women to better themselves as wives by valuing intelligence and culture over beauty. The audience that this speech is targeted towards is women. She specifies women as the audience by tailoring her speech towards women and appealing to their emotions, situations, and circumstances. For example, she says, “I could not believe that God gad created so many homely women, and suffered all to lose their beauty in the very maturity of their powers, and yet made it our duty

Read More
734 Words | 3 Pages

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a story is told to exemplify how war can change a person. It expresses the humane side of war, the struggle to overcome grief and how difficult it is to deal with death. The book releases strong emotions and allows the reader to really connect with the characters involved. Tim O’Brien enables the audience to feel the emotions emerging from the book by writing it as fiction. With O'Brien's decision to write his novel as fiction allows him to more accurately convey emotion behind each story he has to tell.

Read More
514 Words | 3 Pages

Georgia O’ Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Her artwork is very distinct and detailed. Without her, modern art would not be what it is today. She is well known for her paintings of landscapes and images of bones against the desert sky. She was born on November 15, 1887 and was the second child out of seven children.

Read More
1809 Words | 8 Pages

The different key features also plays an important role for example the tone that is being formed by the lyrical voice that can be seen as a nephew or niece. This specific poem is also seen as an exposition of what Judith Butler will call a ‘gender trouble’ and it consist of an ABBA rhyming pattern that makes the reading of the poem better to understand. The poem emphasizes feminist, gender and queer theories that explains the life of the past and modern women and how they are made to see the world they are supposed to live in. The main theories that will be discussed in this poem will be described while analyzing the poem and this will make the poem and the theories clear to the reader. Different principals of the Feminist Theory.

Read More
839 Words | 4 Pages

Perhaps it also creates a mental picture of him for the audience. However, the “peculiar screeching of strings” and the “fiddling with emotion” causes the reader to see the confusion his mind is struggling with in order to decipher his surroundings (21-22). This all leads to the image of his significant other standing in the doorway as he has to decide “who this woman is, this old, white-haired woman” (27). Trying hard to recall this person, he presses on determined to make sense of his new world.

Read More
459 Words | 2 Pages

This becomes evident in a lack of information about the type of society, and the reader therefore lacks a complete understanding of how the women are oppressed. As a whole, this poem sets forth the idea that female gender is fluid, and asks its readers to questions what it means to be a woman in a male dominant

Read More
993 Words | 4 Pages

The idea of traditional heterosexual relations and gender roles are contorted in this song to subvert the listener’s expectations of a typical song, especially when considering this type of behavior and performance was looked down upon at the

Read More
802 Words | 4 Pages

For example, the first stanza creates the image of a little girl playing with the usual toys, like the baby born dolls (the dolls that did pee-pee), mini GE stoves, and makeup. Female readers can easily relate to playing with these toys as children. They are the typical toys given to girls at a young age, which is the point of presenting this information. It shows the girl was brought up like usual, which makes it seem like the ending of the poem could also become commonplace. It also gives a good visual representation of her body at the funeral when the speaker says she has a “turned up putty nose”, which makes the girl seem both perfect and fake.

Read More
934 Words | 4 Pages

In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema.

Read More
1438 Words | 6 Pages

The Reformation of the Catholic Church was a major turning point in the history of the Catholic Church. The Reformation means “to change”. In the 16th Century the Catholic Church was the dominating religion in the world. The Reformation was the changing or alteration of specific practices of the Catholic Church. It was also called the Protestant Reformation because of how the Protestant Churches emerged as a result of the Reformation.

Read More
1767 Words | 8 Pages

The argument of the essay is trying to persuade the audience to realize how inappropriate it is for a man, transgender or not, to define women. The style of argument is similar to that of a persuasive writing. The author tries to appeal to the more logical side of her audience by stating the facts regarding a woman’s physical anatomy that men will never be able to experience, let alone understand. However, the author relies more on pathos and ethos to persuade her audience rather than with facts. The author’s message primarily regards what women are thought of as being.

Read More
794 Words | 4 Pages

It’s detailed like a memory and provides the audience of just one incidence the narrator was able to recollect. The poem’s main focus is to take a little look into the disparity between traditional feminine

Read More
1521 Words | 7 Pages

The construction of a self-conscious female gaze is the prime objective of feminist theatres everywhere. British feminist theatre practice as elsewhere is an attempt made by women to claim their rightful space in the creative realm of theatre that was deliberately denied to them by patriarchy. The public gaze on women was always the male gaze, one that always wished to see women as objects. It was an ideological position that patriarchy sanctioned as the normal way of looking at women. Women were always the secondary sexual objects for the gratification of male sexual fantasies.

Read More
955 Words | 4 Pages

The first stanza of the poem personifies Africa as a woman of her beauty. The second stanza shows the history of Africa crippled of her powers. The third stanza shows Africa is rising from the suffering of her past. First, the poem personifies Africa as a woman to define the continent’s beauty. The poet uses the earthly method to compare Africa to a woman.

Read More

More about Yoko Ono's Cut Piece

Related Topics

Open Document