Based on one of her event scores, a set of instructions for a performance, Ono sat down on the stage, laid a pair of scissors in front of her and invited the audience to cut pieces of her clothing off.
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 Zen and Shinto Buddhism.
The souvenir lies in the audience being asked to keep the piece of fabric or as in the 2003 performance, to send it to a loved one, an act of sharing and continuing remembrance.
Cut Piece is unique in that this agreement is constantly negotiated because of the intense level of audience participation and direct interaction with the performer required and there is always the threat that one party can overstep the agreed upon boundaries.
Ono is eliciting a specific performance from the audience members through her instructions, the atmosphere and context she has constructed for the event to take place in.
As Clare Johnson notes, many of the photos of the event depict a calmly seated Ono while an audience member snips a small piece of her clothing away.
She creates a space of possibility and the camera was an integral part of it, serving not only to document but as a mediator between the artist and audience in the present of the performances.
[5] Jieun Rhee questions if this rage was directed toward Ono as a woman or as an American during a time of Japanese ambivalence toward the US due to post war politics.
[4] Additionally, in an interview she gave shortly before leaving Japan, Ono opined that "what a human really wants to express is a striptease, and this is also the apogee of the arts".
Women tend to take more care and cut small pieces from discrete areas, such as the edges of sleeves or back of the neckline.
You can see that some of the participants, men, feel entitled to work on the cutting for a long time or stand ominously above her, clearly ogling her or perhaps relishing in their power over her.
[9] The fourth and fifth iterations of Cut Piece were performed over two evenings as part of the Destruction of Art Symposium on September 9 and 10, 1966 at the Africa Centre in London.
This performance included the additional instructions of sending a postcard sized cloth fragment to a loved one as a sign of reconciliation.
This new gesture signifies an ongoing temporality, extending the performance beyond its container and into the future, as the potentially violent act of cutting becomes about mending.
[6] This iteration of the performance brings the anti-war message and the emphasis on the creation of future memory through commemoration of the past more clearly into focus.
[5] In the story, the Buddha gave to the world anything that was asked of him, even to the point of allowing a female tiger to consume his body so that she could produce milk for her cubs.
[5] In a 2000 interview she adds that Cut Piece reflected how she felt after the brutal criticism she received about a Tokyo exhibition of her work.
[12] In the context of Shinto Buddhism, which was an inspiration to Ono that Japanese viewers would have been familiar with, exists the intertwining of the sexual and spiritual.
[4] This same seated position in the New York and London performances might have played into the Western fetishization of a silent and submissive Asian woman,[4] further twisting and complicating the power dynamics present in the work.
Clare Johnson observes that Ono gave the audience the opportunity to enact the power dynamic implicit in this fantasy, in a way performing "the objectification of the Asian other".
In the short 8 minute film, there were multiple moments of near hostility, to the point where some viewers have felt they are witnessing a possible assault.
[9] Jieun Rhee posits that in her performances of Cut Piece in Japan, Ono had a "strategy for the West", one that would allow her to shift from her identity as an "American avant-garde musician" into that of a "traditional Japanese artist", using her dual and fluid identities to create context and an adversarial or othered relationship between the artist/performer and the audience in both cases,[5] noting that the work is a well thought framing of the friction between Japanese and American culture, the post war context, and gender.
[4] In this context the work addresses voyeurism, sexual aggression, gender subordination, violation of personal space, violence against women.
Contained within the performance space is the potential for violence where the audience is the male aggressor and Ono is playing the role of female victim.
[4] Her actions in Cut Piece differ from later feminist works, albeit inspired by Cut Piece, such as Marina Abromovic's Rhythm 0 (1974), where the artist fully surrendered to the audience's whims and desires during a six hour long event where audience members had a choice of 72 objects including nails, lipstick, matches and a gun.
[6] Calling back to the idea of a woman giving a piece of her soul, or allowing it to be taken via the cutting of clothing also relates to feminist theory and expectations put upon women to sacrifice everything in service of the caretaking duties of motherhood.
Cut Piece can be examined in the context of the massive devastation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its aftermath as well as the impending violence of the Vietnam War which would soon dominate global consciousness.
After the bombings, the US military documented the devastation and the effects on survivors, which included many photos of people whose clothing had been partially tattered by the explosion.
This was accompanied by an outpouring of personal accounts and artwork made by hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of atomic war, much of which depicted torn clothing.
Thomas E. Crow commended in 1966, "it is difficult to think of an earlier work of art that so acutely pinpoints the political question of women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision[15]".