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Yoko Ono's Cut Piece

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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

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