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Performance photographs and the un(clothed) body: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece

This working paper was presented in a Visual Culture Symposium at Watershed Media Centre, 10 December 2013. It offers a new interpretation of Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece, which the artist performed four times in the 1960s and once again in 2003. Each time Ono sat kneeling on the stage floor as audience members were invited to walk on to the stage, one at a time, and cut a piece of cloth from Ono’s body. The paper considers the relationship between performance and photography in Cut Piece, both at the time of the event and since, and asks how this dynamic has framed an understanding of the work’s significance. Johnson argues that the photographs have shaped the discussion of this work around the dominance of the visual in particular ways, for example, scopic and bodily violence in the act of cutting or watching others cut. This paper repositions Cut Piece by considering other aspects of the work that have received less attention such as its existence as an ongoing event, the generosity of giving and the imagined second lives of the fragments of cloth cut from Ono’s body. In particular, it critically repositions the work by arguing that there is no clear separation between performance and photography in Cut Piece. It contends that the division between these categories is inadequate to describe the continual live-ness of Ono’s work as it endures through time.

This working paper has been published on the UWE repository: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/22036/ and on the Visual Culture website: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/sca/research/vcrg/. A revised version will be published in issue 2 (February 2014) of Clothing Cultures, an inter-disciplinary journal focusing on embodiment, textiles and the production and consumption of clothing. It brings critical attention of a neglected aspect of Ono’s work to an audience whose primary concern is with material culture.