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Chapter Three The Body in Pain: Yoko Onos Cut Piece (1964) Cut Piece First Version for single performer: Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors placed in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stageone at a timeto cut a small piece of the performers clothing to take with them. Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performers option. 1 On July 20, 1964, Yoko Ono performed Cut Piece for the first time at the Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, held at Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto. For the piece, Ono wore her best dress, sat on stage with a pair of scissors in front of her and invited members from the audience to come up on stage one by one, cut a piece of Onos dress and take it with them as a gift. Thus far, Ono has performed Cut Piece five timesonce each in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris. In instruction (cited above in the epigraph of this essay) and description, the piece, like many of Onos events, seems quite simple. Yet the piece has been deeply resonant for many scholars and other viewers, and in the past decade or so Cut Piece has received more critical attention than any other of Onos works.

1. Alexandra Munroe, Jon Hendricks, Yes: Yoko Ono (New York: Abrams, 2000), 277, 279.

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All of Onos performances of Cut Piece took place, except for its revival (and last, to date) performance in Paris in 1993, before I was born. Much has been written in the field of performance studies on what it means to write about a performance based on its documentation. While such a discussion is outside the scope of this essay, I do feel it necessary to note that I was not present at any of the Cut Piece performances and hence can only access the events as so many texts. The object of my analysis is thus not the ephemeral live event, but the discourse and cultural representations that have brought this performance piece into being and keep it in circulation. In particular, Albert and David Maysles documentation of Cut Piece, as it was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1965, has been my primary visual object of analysis in the current essay. In so far as a performance is a work of representation, I take seriously the claim that being at a performance does not guarantee any direct access, unmediated by ideology, to the work. I therefore do not privilege presence at the moment of performance. Neither will I, as some critics have done in a deconstructive manner, privilege documentation over presence at the performance. Perhaps this is a commonplace, but it seems quite clear to me that there are elements one would miss out on at a live performance, which one would notice through close scrutiny of a document, just as there are things, such as smell or tension in the air, for example, that simply cannot be adequately expressed in a written text or a still or motion picture. Cut Piece is today widely considered a landmark of feminist performance art. In regard to it, art historian Thomas Crow wrote in The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, it is difficult to think of an earlier work of art that so acutely pinpoints (at the very point when modern feminist activism was just emerging)

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the political question of womens physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision. 2 This question of women, or to better address the psychoanalytical context of the matter, of the feminine in relation to vision, has been addressed most productively to date in feminist film theory. Laura Mulveys classic and oft-cited essay Narrative Pleasure in Visual Cinema in particular introduced the use of psychoanalytic tools to analyze the gendered positions produced in traditional narrative cinema. For Mulvey, in narrative cinema, the position of the subject in control of itself, the omniscient viewer, is presented as masculine while its opposite, the position of the seen object, or what she termed to-be-looked-at-ness, is coded as feminine. The feminist reading of Cut Piece is premised, as suggested by the passage from Crow, by way of Mulvey, on the understanding of vision as both modeled on and producing gender difference. This type of reading sees Cut Piece as exposing and literalizing the latent violence of the masculine gaze and its victimization of women; it might be described in much the same way as experimental filmmaker, and one of Yoko Onos most reliable biographers, Taka Iimuras characterization of Onos film Rape (1969): [Ono] watches the woman with a males eyes. She exposes the tyranny of males gaze. 3 (Sic) Though referring to different works, the similarities between the analyses, both of which are arguably colored by Onos later identification with the feminist movement in the 1970s, are striking. Iimuras interpretation also points, however, in a way that Crows does not, to the problems that have plagued the popular interpretations of both Mulveys classic essay and Onos Cut Piece. Put simply, both assume that gender and
2. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 133. 3. Takahiko Iimura, Yoko Onos Movies, in Yoko Ono: Fumie (Tokyo: Sogetsukai, 1990), 45.

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viewing positions are fixed in themselves and in relation to each othermen look as subjects and women are looked at as objects. Just as the meanings of images cannot be fixed, however, identifications with subject and viewing positions are never determined in advance or for good. Taking up these positions is always an incomplete project that must be repeated incessantly to create an illusion of stability. As has frequently been pointed out, Mulveys essay offered no alternative in narrative cinema for women viewers. For her, the only possibility of difference was to be sought outside narrative film, in experimental cinema. Iimuras gloss on Rape exposes the problems inherent in too fixed an analysis of subject positions in the visual realm. If the tyranny of the males gaze is equivalent to seeing with a males eyes, and if women can only identify with the passive position in relation to vision, how does a woman artist watch another woman with the males gaze? Onos original score for Cut Piece, which employs the masculine pronoun to refer to the performerperformer sits on stage with a pair of scissors placed in front of him 4 shows that Cut Piece is much less straightforward about its gender politics than recent critics have allowed. Moreover, the appropriateness of identifying viewers as male (rather than masculine) and viewed as female (rather than feminine) in Cut Piece is questionable, if only because of the simple fact that audience members, who ostensibly representing the violence of the masculine gaze, took the stage and cut Onos dress, included both men and women. My aim, I want to make clear, is not to negate the validity of feminist readings of Cut Piece, without which the current essay would not exist. Still, as critic Kevin
4. Emphasis is mine. While it would have been normal to use him as an universal pronoun in 1964, given that Cut Piece has predominantly been read as a proto-feminist work, it seems remarkable that the score is written in this manner.

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Cocannon, who has written extensively on Cut Piece, has argued, dominant readings tend to foreclose the possibility of other lines of thought and their dominance needs to be challenged to keep a work open for analysis. And, as Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued in her very insightful piece Remembering Yoko Onos Cut Piece, the popular, simplistically feminist reading of Cut Piece insists on reading Onos body only as a universal figure of female victimization. The racist and sexist reception of Onos personage and work, especially, but not exclusively, after her marriage to ex-Beatle John Lennon, indicates that the understanding of Ono as a universal figure is ludicrous. To give just one example, consider the title of Esquire magazines December 1970 feature, John Rennons Excrusive Gloupie. The transposition of Ls and Rs in the title is employed to connote Japaneseness, indicating that at least in the U.S., Ono could never be a universal female figure and that she was always seen as a raced and foreign body. Moreover, the narrative of Ono-as-all-women-as-victims does not adequately explain the roles played by the artist and her audience members in terms of activity and passivity. After all, Ono was the one who wrote the piece and asked the audience members to come up on stage. And, just as Ono begins the piece, the piece ends at the performers option. Like Cocannon and Bryan-Wilson, I believe that the analysis of Cut Piece can and ought to be expanded and more nuanced. Questions of agency, activity and passivity in Cut Piece remain ripe for investigation. In his essay Yoko Onos Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again, Cocannon emphasizes that Onos performance was presented as a piece of composed music and thus the instructions for the piece should more properly be called a score. An important aspect of the score, he points out, is the indeterminacy regarding the

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performer. A score can be performed by anyone. For Cocannon, this suggests that the text of the score should be prioritized over any single performance: there is no sense of an original performanceor any sense of priority for the artists own performances even after the fact. The texts are not so much documents of a singular performance as the performances are realizations of the score. 5 While arguing on one hand that the many contradicting interpretations of Cut Piece, as feminist, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, Buddhist, Christian and even as a stripteaseare all valid, he qualifies this significantly (or contradicts himself entirely) by insisting, reformulations of Cut Piece have arguably contributed to a distortion of the work, more so than an illumination of it. 6 So as valid as they may be, they are in the end distorting, untrue. It is not the idea of the original that Cocannon is contesting so much as the original performance. There is, for him, an original text from which subsequent discourse about the work has strayed. Contrary to this notion of fidelity, or faithfulness to an original text, Cut Piece produces profound doubt regarding the possibilities of communication. One of the innovative characteristics of Onos early works is precisely their presentation of written text (or instructions) as art work. Paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, and criticizing media analysis as elitist, Ono claimed that in her work, the message is the medium. Early in her career, she became aware that her ideas and imagination could become art via language. 7 Although Cut Piece too is based on a textual score, it ultimately stages an experiment in the failure of communication. On one level, both Ono and her cutters remain silent throughout the piece. By remaining silent throughout the process of being
5. Cocannon, Yoko Onos Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again, PAJ, 90 (2008): 82. 6. Cocannon, Yoko Onos, 92. 7. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 80.

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denuded in the piece, Ono engages with that which cannot be spoken. What is being communicated through the process of cutting is unclear. For me, such contradiction and ambivalence, not consistency or originality, are the defining characteristics of Cut Piece. Its most significant aspect, in my view, is its refusal of clear distinctions. This is precisely what keeps the piece compelling and resonant more than 40 years after its initial performance. In The Language of PsychoAnalysis, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis define ambivalence as the simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies especially the coexistence of love and hate. 8 Ono has described her motivations for Cut Piece in almost identical terms. In 1993, when she performed it for the first time in nearly three decades in Paris, she made the following statement to the press: When I first performed this piece in 1964, I did it out of rage and anger. This time, I do it for you with love for the world. 9 The idea of Cut Piece having come out of anger was itself created retroactively, a fact that further emphasizes the sense of ambivalence Ono holds for the work. Previously, Ono had explained the piece in terms of giving, which Bryan-Wilson argues is the productive element of the work that has tended to be elided by critical focus on the themes of violence and victimization. In Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects, Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt note that at the Kyoto performance, Latent violence nearly erupted. As Ono described it, one person came up on stage He took the pair of scissors and made a motion to stab

8. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1973), 26. 9. Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Bijutsu Techo, 55:841, November 2003: 523.

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me He was standing still with the scissors threatening me. 10 This potential for violence presumably explains the anger behind the piece. But this description is quickly contradicted in the next paragraph, which situates the pieces origin in a story about Buddha that Ono heard often as a child. 11 In this story, Buddha achieved supreme awareness at the moment when he gave his own body up to feed a tiger. With this story, a very different narrative about the performance in Kyoto is given. Quoting Ono, the authors now assert, At the first performance in Japan, a mood of reverence prevailed. It was very very difficult for people to come up. So there would be very long silences and then you would hear the scissors cutting. 12 I dont necessarily doubt that the audience, since it comprises multiple people, could have been both reverent and violent in Kyoto, but there is a clear tension between the reverence which supports the Buddhist genealogy of the piece and the violence against Ono which supports the anger explanation, and this tension further contradicts any notion of a stable origin of the piece. When I first began working on Cut Piece, I felt that the shift from anger to love was a sign of Ono losing her critical edge. I had tried to make sense of this contradiction in terms of temporal development. I assumed that as she grew older, her politics had shifted from a fierce feminist (angry) one to a softer, more new age (loving) one. I believe now that both characterizations have always been present in the piece and to best address the multivalent quality of the work, I look at Cut Piece, borrowing Roland Barthes words, as, a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
10. Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt. Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects (Salt Lake City: Peregrine , 1991), 91. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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them original, blend and crash. 13 Of particular import for me is this notion that the text is an active space, an arena for action where meanings are contested. Cut Piece, I believe, is a site of contestation, both in the content of its performance and as a discursive product. The act of cutting and the function of the shears are also ambivalent as they have the potential to be both destructive and productive. Had the man in Kyoto realized his threat, the sheers would have completed its transformation into weapon. While the potential for such a transformation is always there in the piece, it is the incompleteness of this shift that keeps Cut Piece from being a simple work about victimization. The fluctuation between tool and weapon depends on the surface upon which it is used. Thus in Cut Piece, there is incredible tension created by the possibility that the shears will cut past Onos dress and make contact with her skin to cut a sentient object. As long as the shears are a tool, however, cutting is an act of making. The cutter makes a gift for herself or himself. The cutter can, as one man can be seen doing in the Maysles documentation, even cut a piece of ones own clothing and give it to Ono as a gift. When the scissors are turned into a weapon, however, the cutter unmakes the artist and her dress. Cut Pieces strategically ambivalent structure and its refusal of distinct oppositional terms are most clearly evinced in the inter-subjective relations the work produces, and Cut Piece makes space a central element in these inter-subjective relations. The inextricable relation between space and subjectivity is also suggested by Onos Shadow

13. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146.

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Piece (1966). In this piece, which was performed in public, but had absolutely no audience, according to Iimura, Ono drew outlines around peoples shadows as they passed through the city. While Bryan-Wilson cites this piece as an example of the impulse for memorialization, particularly in relation to the thermonuclear assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 14 Iimura uses the same work to show that Ono would perform actions that had no formal audience and left no lasting trace. He notes that Ono was completely unconcerned with the fate of this work. 15 The traces of the shadow may be not only an attempt at memorialization but also an assertion that the subject always comes into being in space. Space produces subjectivity, and without space, a shadow cannot be cast. In Japanese idiom, to have a faint shadow is to lack presence as a person, reminding us in a different linguistic context that to leave an impression is already a spatial metaphor. In this regard, Onos work displays an understanding of Marxist spatial theorist Henri Lefebvres claim that, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur. 16 Although much has already been written on Cut Piece, the role of space articulated in the work has received surprisingly little critical attention. The politics of space are not independent of, but rather complimentary and even integral to those of vision. Even an analysis of Cut Piece in terms of visuality and gender requires a better consideration of space. As feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane has noted, in the production of masculinity and femininity in relation to the visual, there is an important binary opposition at work in addition to that of passivity and activity. This opposition, which
14. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Remembering Yoko Onos Cut Piece, Oxford Art Journal, 26.1 (2003): 112. 15. Takahiko Iimura, Ono Yoko aruiwa Eikyutekina Orugasumus, Eiga Hyouron, Jan. 1970. vol.27, no.1.: 37. 16. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 73.

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Doane explains is perhaps more important [than that of passivity and activity] is the one between proximity and distance in relation to the image. It is in this sense that the very logic behind the structure of the gaze demands sexual division 17 The introduction of distance makes the structure of the gaze, and sexual difference, not only a visual, but also, perhaps more importantly a spatial problem. And it is through this distancing that the look gains its power. In this scenario, distance from an image is masculine and proximity to it is feminine. This describes the setup of Cut Piece in the moment prior to the performer giving instructions to the audience. Sitting on stage, Ono is turned into a picture and placed (or places herself) in a feminine position, while the audience, at least initially, keeps its distance from the image on the stage by occupying the auditorium. When in the Maysles film of Cut Piece, the first cutter shown stands up to exit stage left, we see Ono for the first time. There is a spotlight on Ono. She sits in the position known in Japanese as onna-zuwari or womans way of sitting. Her knees are bent, but she sits a little to the left of them so that her legs stick out a bit to the right, her feet diagonally behind her. Its a position that doesnt allow you to stand up with any speed, suggesting Onos vulnerability to any sudden attacks. Inviting the audience members to come onto the stage, Ono does not dispense with the visual, but collapses the distance through which visuality creates power, a prehension of the subject placed under the gaze. Vision and space were tied in relation to power for Emmanuel Levinas as well. For him, ideas of access, domination, containment, comprehension, and encompassing in relation to others are synonymous.

17. Mary Anne Doane, Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator, in Feminism & Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 422.

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Violence, Cut Piece suggests, is not inherent in vision, but rather a product of the combination of vision and distance. It is at a distance that one observes others, only to consume them as objects of knowledge. To take this distance into account, the space in which vision unfolds needs to be considered. Space was one of Onos major concerns in the 1960s. Building Piece (Winter 1963), for example, directs its reader as follows: Move from one room to another, opening and closing doors. Do not make a sound. Walk from the basement to the roof of a building. This piece implies a relative fluidity in regard to spatial movement as it suggests that it would be possible for one to move silently from room to room. Wall Piece (Winter 1962), however, suggests that space can be constricting and that its boundaries can at times be turned into weapons used against its inhabitants. The instruction for the piece simply states, bash your head against a wall. 18 The most innovative aspect of Cut Piece in regards to spatial use is the fact that the members of the audience are invited to come on stage, to cross a boundarybetween the stage and auditoriumthat at times has been almost as difficult as passing through a wall. Despite the surrealist artist and theorist Antonin Artauds call in 1938 to abolish the stage and to produce, in its stead, a space without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of action, 19 the boundary between stage and auditorium in action-based arts had survived with a vengeance. In fact, even five years after the initial performance of Cut Piece, in 1969, in the slightly different context of rock music (which Ono would later occupy), riotous, murderous violence was triggered by the

18. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Hoei, 1982), 18. 19. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 96.

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violation of this boundary between performer and audience. So zealously guarded was this threshold by members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club at the infamous free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway that year that the Angels kicked a man in the face, simply because he tried to squeeze by the front stage. 20 Invited by the performer to take the stage, the viewer-turned-cutters of Cut Piece were not, obviously, kicked in the face or otherwise punished in a physically violent way for making their spatial transgression. They did, however, pay a price of a different sort. When the viewers of the concert took the stage to make their cut, not only did they abjure their spectatorial remove, as Bryan-Wilson has noted, transforming vision into physical movement, 21 but also the particular cutter (viewers ascend the stage one at a time) became a picture-object, became himself or herself the spectacle on stage. In this performance, one cannot simultaneously perceive and inhabit the spectacle. As soon as one takes part in the spectacle, one becomes objectified. The cutter puts himself or herself in proximity to an image, hence in a feminine, passive position in the visual register, despite taking an active position in terms of the cutting. In regard to the cutter, then, notions of activity and passivity are radically indeterminate. In Three Essays on Sexuality, Sigmund Freud notes that the most remarkable feature of sadism/masochism and scopophilia/exhibitionism is that their active and passive forms are habitually found to occur together in the same individual. 22 If these forms, active
20. Damien Cave, Matt Diehl, Gavin Edwards, Jenny Eliscu, et al. Rolling Stone. Jun 24, 2004. 21. Bryan-Wilson, Remembering, 106. 22. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 159.

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and passive, are associated with gender identity, by crossing the boundary between stage and auditorium, the viewer is unmoored from his or her gendered position in the visual realm. The shift and ambiguity between active and passive positions in relation to vision is also addressed in Onos Piece for Orchestra (Summer 1962), which states: First Movement: Denude; Second Movement: Peep; Third Movement: Undress. 23 Once on stage and under the spotlight, the viewer-turned-cutter is made self-consciously aware of being an object for the gaze, which he or she can no longer locate as a look in the audience, obscured as it is from the cutters sight by the strong contrast in lighting between the stage and the auditorium. The August 8, 1964 evening edition of the Tokyo Shimbun reported that Onos latest concert, to be held on the 11th, would be a strip show. Ono was quoted as saying, Stripping is the ultimate form of human and artistic expression. 24 And later that same month in Shukan Shincho: Art has come to a point where there is noting to do but to reveal ones most intimate parts. 25 The idea that one becomes a picture, an object for visual consumption on stage was probably obvious to Kai Harumi, who performed the first strip show in Japan in April 1947, when she struck three poses nude while carrying a large picture frame, taken from the props department of the theater, around her body. Could this have been why Ono titled the program in which Cut Piece was performed, Strip Tease Show? It may also have been because audience participation was more accepted in the world of stripping than in the fine arts. Already in the early 1950s, stripping in urban areas of Japan began to shift from solo shows to what became known
23. Ono, Grapefruit, 17. 24. Sutorippu wa Geijutsu no Kyukyokuyo, Tokyo Shimbun Evening Edition 8 Aug. 1964: 5. 25. Zenei Ongakuka no Kimyou Kiterestsu na Show; Kore ga Geijutsu Deshouka, Shukan Shincho Aug. 31, 1964: 17.

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as akuto or acts that involved the audience. The degree and kind of involvement varied greatly, from the relatively quainta dancer serving sake to the audienceto (what sounds to me) terrifyingaudience members being provided with sticks with tampons attached to them, which they aimed and poked at the dancers vagina. 26 In most of these acts, however, the audience members did not actually take the stage. Such crossings were likely avoided because, as Cut Piece demonstrates, by transgressing the threshold of the proscenium, one loses the power enabled by distanced viewing. Perhaps taking the title of Onos program, Strip Tease Show, too literally, the British magazine Tab announced the upcoming performance of Cut Piece in this manner: Guys who used to sit back and yell Take it off! now have the golden opportunity to take it off for her. 27 Cut Piece, however, was no ordinary strip show and the author of this text in Tab magazine failed to see, unlike Ono, that the distance between the woman being yelled at and the guy sitting back in his chair is precisely what empowers the guys to yell take it off! To collapse that distance is to give up ones autonomy and to open oneself up to vulnerability and contagion. When the physical distance between oneself and another is closed, ones primary sense shifts from the visual, in which one gains power through distance, to one of touch, in which one must open oneself up and make oneself vulnerable to this other. That is, while one can see without being seen, one cannot touch without also being simultaneously touched. In approaching an other, where the other is from the first under my responsibility, Levinas argues, something has overflowed my freely taken decisions, has slipped into me unbeknownst to me, thus
26. Hiroo Minowa, Nippon Sutorippu 50nenshi (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1999), 2024. 27. Hippiest Artistic Happening: Set Up and Strip Me Nude. TAB. 18, 2 (June 1968): 6568, quoted in Cocannon, Yoko Onos, 90.

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alienating my identity. 28 In other words, the responsibility for an other is a type of contagion. It seeps in, against our will, and undermines our sense of autonomy and identity. The other becomes a presence inside us. And this condition of being opened is the basis of subjectivity. Does not subjectivity signify, Levinas asks rhetorically, precisely by its incapacity to shut itself up from the outside? 29 For Levinas, this transformation, from perception to touch, is also at once the birth of an ethical relation to another. To approach, he writes, is to touch the neighbor, beyond the data apprehended at a distance in cognition This turning of the given into a neighbor and of representation into contact, of knowledge into ethics, is the human face and skin. 30 This sense of an ethical vulnerability is attributed reciprocally in Cut Piece. As a striptease stripped of dance and props, Onos awkwardness, to quote what Roland Barthes has written about striptease, gives to the gestures of unveiling an unexpected importance, denying the woman the alibi of an art and the refuge of being an object. 31 What is unveiled, however, is not an essence, a truth, but the vulnerability of a skin exposed, in wounds and outrage, beyond all that can show itself 32 In her autobiography, Tada no watashi [Just Me!], published in 1990, Ono wrote the following: Conventional art works have the artists ego in them. The artists ego is pushed onto the viewer of the work. I wanted to make work from an egoless place. In pushing this motif to its end, I ended up with Cut Piece. Its the
28. Levinas, No Identity, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Boston: Hingham, 1987), 145. 29. Ibid. 30. Emmanuel Levinas, Language and Proximity, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Hingham, 1987), 125. 31. Roland Barthes, Striptease, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 86. 32. Levinas, No Identity, 146.

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mentality of saying, here you are, take anything you want, any part you want, rather than pushing something you chose on someone else. 33 This sense of selfless giving, however, is slightly misleading in its implication that the cutter would be acting out of free will without constraint. There is a risk involved for the cutter. The cutter also gives up his or her alibi, previously sustained by physical distance from the performer. Just as the audience member who comes up on stage opens her or himself up to vulnerability, the performer of Cut Piece opens her or himself up to the audience. In doing so, the performer demonstrates, despite Onos explanation, a model of subjectivity that is not self-contained or willed. Cut Piece suggests that the process of subject-formation may happen against ones will, as a seeping in or as a contamination that occurs as a breach of spatial division/distance. Cut Piece shows that subjectivity is based on a sensibility, prior to all will, action, declaration, all taking up of positions, [of] vulnerability itself. 34 Examining her previous works, we can see that for Ono, as for Levinas, this move away from the ego entailed a concurrent de-emphasis of vision. She promoted the privileging of non-visual senses in many of her works in the 1960s. Consider, for example, Onos Grapefruit in a World of Park, staged in 1961 at the Carnegie Recital Hall, where she would perform Cut Piece three years later. Grapefruit in a World of Park was a play performed in the dark as a theater piece in which audience members had to sense the actors presence and rely on their non-visual senses. And in Bag Piece, which Ono performed with Tony Cox, at Paradox, an East Village macrobiotic restaurant, where she worked as a waitress, two people spent time in a bag so as to deliberately disable
33. Yoko Ono, Tada no Watashi, ed. Takahiko Iimura (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1990), 37. 34. Levinas, No Identity, 146.

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their vision and communicate through other means. Furthermore, a 1966 text suggests that she understood vision to impair intellectual capacity. In it Ono recommended unblocking ones mind, by dispensing with [the] visual Even later on, her Play It By Trust (1966), a chess set in which all the pieces are white, questions the efficacy of vision as a basis for knowledge. As Peggy Phelan has argued, Cut Piece is thus a part of the history of feminist art works that have examined the epistemological contours of touch and placed the sentient body at the center of knowing. 35 To be sentient in regard to others is, according to philosopher Alphonso Lingis, not only to catch on to their sense, but to be susceptible and vulnerable with regard to them, sensitive and subject to them. 36 Thus in being sentient, one loses control over the contours of ones own body as one is made susceptible to and subjected to an other. And in this state of being opened to an other, one no longer simply grasps or apprehends the other as one would in vision; sensing the element is not a prise, a taking hold of it. It would rather be a being taken, being held, or being taken in by it. 37 Like the cutter who becomes a part of the speactacle for the rest of the audience, and the performer who is performed upon, there is an oscillation from active to passive positions, producing a condition under which there can no longer be a mastery of vision. This loss, or eroding, of ones contours necessarily involves a kind of unraveling of the ego-bound subject. About three minutes into the Maysles documentation of Cut Piece, the camera zooms in to show an extreme close-up of Onos face. She looks
35. Peggy Phelan, The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances, 196080, in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, org. Cornelia Butler, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 3478. 36. Alphonso Lingis, Sensations, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 42, no.2 (Dec. 1981): 164. 37. Lingis, Sensations, 166.

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nervous. Her eyes blink very rapidly then dart to the left to catch a glimpse of the new cutter, whom we initially cannot see. When the camera pulls back, we see that is a young white man in a white button-down shirt. He pulls Onos cardigan, exactly where here nipple would be. The fabric is stretched like a tent as he cuts with the other hand, not with one go, but after three attempts. As soon as the cut is made, the cardigan snaps back to Onos breast, and the camera lingers for a second on the diagonally oval cut now visible (her white brassiere shows through it) against what registers on film as the seamless black surface of the cardigan, and gives the appearance that Ono has been shot through the heart. The camera tilts up from the cut to the face of the cutter. His crisp shirt, which appears in strong contrast to Onos cut-up cardigan, and the manner in which it is worn opened to the third button, displaying his own chest intentionally, unlike Onos, which will be made visible at the hand of her cutters, along with his gait and posture, exude an off-putting masculine self-assurance and sense of privilege reserved for young white men. The camera follows him off the stage, from which he gracefully jumps down. In the entire film, this man is the only cutter that the camera follows off the stage. Upon multiple viewings, it becomes clear that the film is edited in a manner that marks this young man as unique, already anticipating his return. He is the only cutter who appears twice, and his second appearance is probably the most noted performance in the history of Cut Piece after Onos. Taking the stage, he turns to the audience and says, very delicate. This might take some time. Although inaudible, it seems that someone off stage tells him to hurry it up, for the man replies, Not too long, alright, well I don't wanna cut her. One can imagine that to Ono, this sounded like a threat,

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particularly in light of the man in Kyoto who had made motions to stab her. A bearded man walks across the stage and photographs Ono and the cutter in the middle of a cut. He keeps walking toward stage right and the man in the white shirt continues to cut Onos slip in half. He cuts between her breasts. Ono understandably looks very uncomfortable. The left half of her slip falls off. She bites her lip and closes her eyes. When the cutter moves on to cut the left part of her bra, which has now been revealed, Ono inadvertently moves her arm for a second, as if to stop him and also moves her head down to look at what he is doing. In the soundtrack, we hear a voice that is much closer to the microphone than any weve heard before. We hear a woman laughing, as if the most hilarious thing in the world was occurring before her, and a man joins her saying, the expression on her face, while also laughing. A moment later, though, the woman seems to have changed her mind, saying, Hes getting carried away. Its a striking, if also frightening moment and one that has been addressed in various ways. Phelan wrote that for her, this moment is precisely where live performance gains its power; unscripted and momentary, Onos work exposes the aggression that marks sexual difference and the laborious efforts women make not to be undone by it. 38 This flicker as Phelan calls it, has been understood as both strength and weakness for the piece. Long after the Carnegie Hall performance, Ono remarked in her autobiography that she was criticized for moving her arm to cover her breasts when the brassier was cut. Afterwards, a number of people told me, she wrote, as long as you keep covering your breasts the piece will lack integrity. 39 For these critics, such

38. Phelan, The Returns of Touch, 352. 39. Ono, Tada no Watashi, 38.

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displays of self-consciousness undermine the effect of the piece. The comment, though, can also be read as a gripe for not getting what they paid for. After all, the piece was included in a program called Strip Tease Show. Her inadvertent loss of composure shows her vulnerability, the central theme of the work. While by lacking integrity, these critics presumably meant the work will lose its professional standards, if we consider that integrity can also mean being undivided or undamaged, we can see that being divided and damaged are precisely the conditions of subjectivity that the work proposes. Onos eyes dart around and she looks down at where the man is cutting on several occasions. The man and the womans voices are still laughing. The cutter is also smiling. Ono is not. Someone yells, Make a piece for Playboy with it. The camera zooms into Onos face and a woman in the audience finally says, Hey, for gods sake, stop being such a freak! The cutter responds, Okay, all right and raises both of his hands to gesture that he is accepting defeat. People are hissing. Others yell something at him, but its impossible to make out exactly what is being said. A man calls him a cornball. Ono is now holding her bra up with her hands, which are crossed and placed on each breast. A man is now cutting at her skirt and the camera tilts down below the stage and the film ends. I think that labeling this man in the white shirt a villain, one who most closely embodies the violent masculine gaze, is most peoples first response to the film. Although it was mine as well, such a response is not very productive, for it makes a scapegoat out of this particular cutter. If anything, Cut Piece and the film documentation of it show that gender is no guarantee of how gentle or violent, how long or short, a particular cut will be. Cut Piece tells us not only about peoples capacity for violence, but

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also the range of actions that one can take in relation to others and the contingent nature of relations that result from them. That is, if this man is being a freak and the rest of the audience wanted him to stop, moments earlier they were laughing along with him. It is not only the revelation of Onos vulnerability, but also the audiences vulnerability, and more importantly its responsibility for Ono, that the piece brings to the fore. At some point during this mans turn, something occurred that made the audience intervene. This something is the visualization of the sense of vulnerability. By making her vulnerability visible to the audience, she turns Cut Piece into a call for action, in a sense commanding the audience to respond. Levinas argues that proximity to the other creates non-indifference and response-ability. The film uses close-ups of Onos face precisely to evoke proximity and thereby conjure this sense of responsibility for another. To register, as viewers, Onos expressions, communicating as they do, nervousness, fear, and uncertainty, which cr[y] out for justice is to posit oneself as responsible 40 In this sense, the film beckons its viewers as Ono beckoned her audience in performing Cut Piece. Cut Piece is hence a model of the process through which we become subjects, not for oneself, but for another. There is a divergency between the ego and the self, an impossible recurrence, an impossible identity. No one can remain in himself: the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for the others, an extreme vulnerability. 41 Levinas suggests that it is impossible to maintain ones integrity as a subject when faced by an other.

40. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1969), 215. 41. Levinas, No Identity, 149.

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By giving the audience members options on how to conduct themselves in relation to an other, Cut Piece teaches us something about ethics, not by example or instruction, but by experimentation. In the relative openness that Ono gives to her audience members, they have the chance to stand in proximity to another being. In this way, the audience members, who are architecturally positioned to sit next to, but not face one another, are invited to take up a position of vulnerability facing Ono on stage. As a person marginalized by ethnicity and gender, Ono, I think, understood that a space without barrier of any kind, as Artaud called for, would be impossible. The very possibility of any space is produced through the construction of partitions. With Cut Piece, Ono calls attention to the proscenium, rather than trying to eradicate it, to emphasize its ideological function as a boundary. The theatrical border is interrogated in Cut Piece as a metaphor for other identity-producing ones. If we look at Onos life as a part of her oeuvre, we see that her relations to two major identity-producing technologies, nationality and the family, were ones of restlessness, unbelonging, and fragmentation. The concert title Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert suggests that when Ono, a Japanese national, presented this piece in Japan, she presented herself as an outsider in her home country. That her relation to her home country was ambivalent at best is corroborated in the entertainment section of the August 8, 1964 edition of the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. Just below a gossip piece about Hatsue Tonooka, an actress dating Sascha Distel, an ex-boyfriend of Brigitte Bardots, is a story on Ono entitled Stripping is the Ultimate Art: Yoko Ono unable to adjust to Japan and escaping to U.S. The story concludes with this statement from Ono: In my line

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of work, there are people who understand what I do and others who are uninterested, whether in New York or in Tokyo. So its not that its much easier to work over there, but I cant get used to Tokyo, half of me just wants to escape. 42 Having come back to Japan after a decade in the U.S., Ono clearly felt out of place both at home and at work. In a May 1962 article in the Shukan Yomiuri, she explained, Im not welcome at home. Ive been told to not do anything too weird [by my family] because it will interfere with my younger brothers career and my younger sisters marriage opportunities. 43 To make matters worse, reviews of the work Ono performed in Japan were not positive. The most vitriolic criticism of Onos work came from Donald Richie, an American who obviously felt very at home in Japan. She lacked even a shred of originality, Richie barked, All her ideas are borrowed from the New York scene, particularly from John Cage. 44 Ono in fact, could hardly be characterized as a mere looky-loo stealing from the New York scene, as Richie implies. Cut Piece and other works by Ono are certainly indebted to Cage. One may, for example, consider that despite being debuted as a piece of music at the 1964 Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert, Ono remains silent throughout Cut Piece. One review noted Onos silence specifically: her skirt was cut, then a section near her breasts, she remained silent even when they cut off her slip. 45 The first use of silence in musical composition is usually attributed to Cages 1952 composition, 000 (433 No.2), in which the performer remains silent except to open and close the keyboard cover of the
42. Sutorippu wa, 5. 43. Kemuri no ChoukokuMojino nai ShishuuShingeijutsu Happening to Torikumu Nihon Josei, Shukan Yomiuri, May 6, 1962, 70. 44. Donald Richie, Tsumaduita Saizenzen: Ono Yoko no Zenei Show. Geijutsu Shincho, July 1962, 60. 45. Zenei Ongakuka no Kimyou Kiteretsu na Show; Kore ga Geijutsu Deshouka, Shukan Shincho, August 31, 1962, 17.

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piano. As such, 433, like a musical equivalent of the Duchampian readymade, presented all accidental and incidental sounds occurring in the environment as music through artistic intention and the institutional framework of the concert. Cut Piece, however, complicates the idea of the performer and the idea of subjectivity in a way that Cages piece does not. While Cages piece questions the nature of silence and music, the subjectivity of the performer is never examined (except in terms of what constitutes a musician). In contrast, in Cut Piece the artist becomes the instrument and the audience the player, complicating the dualistic relation between subject and object, suggesting that the two positions are not mutually exclusive. Cut Piece therefore performs an indeterminacy, not of musical composition but of subjectivity. In this sense, Ono may be credited with doing precisely what Yvonne Rainer would later suggest artists do with Cages legacy: [To relay] conceptual precedents for methods of nonhierarchical, indeterminate organization which can be used with a critical intelligence, that is, selectively and productively, not, however, so we may awaken to this excellent life; on the contrary, so we may the more readily awaken to the ways in which we have been led to believe that this life is so excellent, just, and right. 46 Put differently, Onos work used Cages methods with a critical intelligence, and with Cut Piece in particular, to bring the problem of the embodied subjectivity and those of gender and race, produced by the institutions of family and nation to the fore. 47 More specifically, by showing through her performances that both the proscenium and national boundaries (at least in terms of identification) are porous, Ono took on her
46. Yvonne Rainer, Looking at Myself in the Mouth, October 17 (Summer 1981): 678. Quoted in Robyn Brentano, Outside the Frame: Performance, Art, and Life in Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object (Cleveland: Cleveland Center of Contemporary Art, 1994), 58. 47. While I realize that race is not solely determined by nationality, nation and race are intimately connected, even if often negatively so. Particularly in Japan, many natives will argue that the Japanese are a race.

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marginal status and appropriated the negative condition of dislocation into an opportunity. Ono presented herself as Japanese in New York, emphasizing her interest, among other things, in Zen Buddhism, and as a New Yorker in Japan, bringing the latest styles of avant-garde art, including those of Cagean composition and Fluxus-style events. Richies, and other critics hostile responses to Onos works may be understood as a response to this ambivalence of identity and geographic location that Onos persona represented. Marginal people, Mary Douglas suggests, are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable It is often treated as both vulnerable and dangerous. 48 In this sense, marginal people are like dirt. They are denigrated and feared due to their predicament of being out of place. This spatially undefined state is a threat for Richie because it questions his understanding of the artist as autonomous and original. For him, ideas associated with New York artists, and particularly with Cage, ought to stay contained within the space of the New York scene. The question of who and what defines the New York art scene is, however, contestable. Ono was, in fact, an instrumental member of the vibrant New York avantgarde scene in the 1960s. By 1961, a year before Richie wrote his review, Ono had, with the minimalist composer La Monte Young, organized a series of now legendary performances that featured such composers as Toshi Ichiyanagi, Henry Flynt, and William Morris at her Chambers Street loft. Fluxus organizer George Maciunas had

48. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 118.

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hosted her first solo exhibition at his newly established AG Gallery in 1961. Toshi Ichiyanagi (then Onos husband) pointed out in his rebuttal to Richies piece that the composer Morton Feldman called Ono New Yorks Lenfant terrible and that Cage also gave her special treatment. These statements overemphasize the importance of patriarchal figures of the scene for defining the scenes members, but Ichiyanagi concluded by reversing Richies accusation by stating, all of Onos friends have been influenced by her more or less. 49 As a response to Richies vitriol, Ichiyanagis assertion must be understood not as an attempt to situate Ono as the origin of New York avantgarde art or as the source of influence so much as a deconstructive move through which the very notion of influence as unidirectional is called into question. In this respect, Richies assumption that Ono could not actually be the New York scene seems essentialist, particularly in light of his next point of contention. In other words, all of her pieces were amateurish and brazenly Japanese in spirit apparently the Japanese believe that any work of significant duration is a good and important work. 50 Remarkably, Richie wrote this in Japanese for a Japanese (reading) audience. Giving no justification for his sweeping characterizations, the text seems almost hysterical. As a Japanese woman who had performed as an American composer, one could assume that Ono did not have as much faith in the Japanese spirit as Richie did. Furthermore, the Japanese apparently did not believe that any work of significant duration is a good and important work, for Richies was not the only response critical of Onos compositions/events.
49. Toshi Ichiyanagi, Saizensen no Koe: Donald Richie he no Hanron, Geijutsu Shincho, Aug. 1962, 138. 50. Richie, Tsumaduita, 60.

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Perhaps Richie did not comprehend the Cagean lesson that there are many kinds of silences. If the Japanese audience sat through what Richie felt was an unbearable performance in relative silence for its entirety, this was no guarantee that the audience felt it was an important work. The Shukan Shincho asked, for example, a strange and wacky show by an avant-garde musician: is this art? only to answer itself: alas, it may not be in our nature to be associated with avant-garde art. More important, however, than Richies misconstruing of the Japanese reaction to Onos work is his insistence on the coincidence of Onos Japanese spirit and her work, for it is precisely to this kind of forced grounding in embodied particulars that Cut Piece responds. There is in dominant cultural imagery, as Mary Douglas has argued, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartres analysis of viscosity, a danger associated with things that do not respect boundaries. The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a crosssection in a process of change Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it Plunging into water gives a different impression. I remain a solid, but to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity. Stickiness is clinging, like a too-possessive dog or mistress. 51 Perhaps it was this dangerous state, clearly understood as feminine, which threatened Richie and other critics. Viscosity clings like a mistress, presumably disrupting, from outside it, the hetero-normative order represented in the sacred union between husband and wife. Art critic Yoshiaki Touno, who was a performer in Onos first concert at Sogetsu Hall, characterized his experience at the concert in a similar fashion. Performing in Yoko Onos concert drove me slightly mad, he wrote, I felt

51. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 47.

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immobilized, wrapped up by the sticky obsessions of a strange woman.

52

As

philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, it is women and what men consider to be their inherent capacity for contagion, their draining, demanding bodily processes that have figured so strongly in cultural representations, and that have emerged so clearly as a problem for social control. 53 In Cut Piece, Ono is marked, by being cut open, as having the feminine capacity for contagion. Considered in this light, Cut Piece becomes less about the objectification of women than about the dangerous seeping body of woman. The contagious, viscous quality of femininity functions as a threat to the stable, selfidentical understanding of subjectivity. One of the technologies used in the attempt to contain the seeping quality of femininity is clothing. As Grosz notes, the fluidity and indeterminacy of female body parts, most notably the breast, but no less the female sexual organs, are confined, constrained, solidified by clothing or, at the limit, by surgery. 54 By having audience members cut pieces of her clothing, Ono staged a collaboration, a barter with the audience in which they received a gift in return for removing a technology of confinement and constraint. The feminine and the threat it poses have also been contained through masculinist architecture and spatial design. In regard to the city environment, feminist geographer Elizabeth Wilson has written that there are male and female principles [at] war with each other at the very heart of city life. 55 This war, Wilson writes, is based on the struggle between rigid, routinised order and pleasurable anarchy, the male-female
52. Yoshiaki Touno, Chance Operation (Guuzen Sousa), Camera Geijutsu, July 1962, 128. 53. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 197. 54. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 205. 55. Elizabeth Wilson, Into the Labyrinth, in Gender Space Architecture, ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, Iain Borden (New York: Routledge, 2000), 151.

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dichotomy. In a less essentialist view in regard to the manifestations of masculine principles at play in the city, Henri Lefebvre has written, the verticality and political arrogance of towers, their feudalism, already intimated the coming alliance between Ego and Phallus. 56 Yoko Ono and John Lennons collaboratively produced film, Erection (1971), which shows the erection of a modernist geometric building in time-lapse, against a soundtrack of Onos hypnotically meandering mosquito-buzz-like vocal work suggests that she too was concerned with masculine and feminine tendencies at work in the urban environment. In both urban and rural environments, sexual difference is produced within the institution of the family and the closely associated architectural manifestation of the home. The house, Mark Wigley has argued, is involved in the production of gender division it merely appears to secure. 57 Writing about masochistic tendencies in the performance art of the 1970s, Kathy ODell points out that by appropriating Sophocles Oedipus Rex to name the process through which patriarchy is established, Freud drew a connection between domestic and theatrical spaces. In turn, she argues, performance artists of the 1970s literalized Freuds link by showing that the institutional frameworks of performance art and the home are comparable. 58 A similar claim can be made for Cut Piece, a key precursor to the performance art works that ODell examines. The first shot of the Maysles Cut Piece film shows a male cutters backside, and zooms out to reveal the stage curtain behind Ono, unmistakably situating both performer and
56. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 261262. 57. Mark Wigley, Untitled: The Housing of Gender, in Sexuality & Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 336. 58. Kathy ODell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 62.

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cutter on a theatrical stage. The framework of the home, which ODell suggests has a parallel relation to the stage, underwent a major transformation in urban areas of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Japanese government promoted the process of urbanization along with the shift from an economy based primarily on industry to one based on information. The population exploded as a result of so-called miraculous economic growth that Japan underwent immediately prior to this period, and new architectural structures had to be developed to house it. While the national population increased by 10% between 1945 and 1955 in Japan, the six major cities there (Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Fukuoka) grew by 200% on average; Tokyo grew by 251%. These transitions inevitably entailed a concurrent transformation of how one came in contact with and lived with others. The contradiction of living anonymously in closer proximity to strangers, then, may have been one condition that informed the structure of Cut Piece, or at least how it might have been originally received in Japan. The Japanese governments answer to the problem to urban crowding was the development of danchi, or giant government-subsidized apartment complexes. The increased compartmentalization of living quarters in the danchi was evident not only in the numbers of units in each phenomenally large housing developmentin 1963, the Soka Matsubara Danchi, which comprised 5,926 units, was developed in Saitama Prefecturebut also within each unit. As literary critic and spatial theorist Ai Maeda points out, the transformation of domestic space and the ideal family it aimed to produce was legible in the layout of the danchi unit. The introduction of the dining (read eat-in) kitchen was intended to realize the aim, first introduced in 1942 by the Public Housing

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Corporation, to separate eating and sleeping quarters. The larger kitchen, Maeda notes, was built, however, at the expense of the room traditionally used to welcome guests. Although the authority emphasized that the new layout introduced a clearer demarcation of private and public realms in the home, which it did do, read differently, it also promoted the further privatization of space with a parallel focus on the production of the nuclear family. 59 The redefinition of private and public spaces in these homes was promoted technologically with the mass production of the cylindrical lock. On one level, the structure of the cylindrical lock managed to create a sense of security for the occupants of each apartment unit while also allowing for the existence of a master key. At the same time, it better sealed the occupants from the outside, making it impossible, for example, to peep through a keyhole. 60 As voyeurism is one of the tropes through which Cut Piece has been predominantly understood, the reproduction of a peep show of sorts on stage may be read as a response to this fervent sealing and containment of bodies within the ideology of the family, which was realized and secured through contemporary architectural developments. The door of a danchi unit was now equipped with a magnifying lens which allowed the person inside to identify any unexpected visitors before opening the door and making him or herself vulnerable to them. Its tenants no longer needed to face strangers at the door. The link between the treatment of the body as a building and the attempt to privatize bodies with buildings can be traced throughout the history of privacy, Mark
59. Ai Maeda, Toshikukan no Nakano Bungaku (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1992), 587. 60. Lacan tells us that for Sartre, it is precisely when one is peeping through a keyhole that one becomes aware of and is shamed by the gaze. Jacques Lacan, Anamorphosis, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguuin Books, 1979), 84.

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Wigley argues in a different context. The body was increasingly subjected to the very same regimes of hygiene, order, discipline, and prohibition as buildings. 61 This was certainly the case in the architectural design of the danchi unit, which attempted to promote two kinds of separations or prohibitions. While separating eating and sleeping quarters was one agenda, the focus on the nuclear family inside the danchi unit meant an emphasis on incest prohibition. A husband and wife, the Public Housing Corporation claimed, should not sleep in the same room as their children. 62 The section entitled if you don't give birth now, you never will, in Onos autobiography draws a link between Cut Piece and her ambivalence towards the formation of a nuclear family of her own. Ono begins the section by describing how aggressively she was approaching her art-making process, and describes Cut Piece in particular, to show that she was tackling art making with my entire body. 63 She then contrasts it to her domestic existence at the time, which she describes as having been lacking. She writes, This event [Cut Piece] was a quiet success But, it felt as if there was strong draft blowing through my domestic life. 64 Cut Piece, she explains, was her come back piece, and the people of the Village welcomed her back. During this same period, however, she felt restless at home. When I live with someone, she wrote, I always start to think that I would be happier alone. She goes on to describe her home as a place where she stayed only out of guilt for her child. Now that I had a child, I knew I couldnt just do as I pleased. It wouldn't be good for the child to only have one parent. Still, there were times when I could no longer stand it and ran away from the house with
61. Wigley, Untitled: The Housing, 3589. 62. Nihon Jutaku Kodan 10 Nenshi (Tokyo: Nihon Jutaku Kodan, 1965), 136. 63. Ono, Tada no Watashi, 389. 64. Ibid.

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Kyoko. 65 She then continues to explain that she was coerced into having her daughter. I had Kyoko when I was around 30. I had felt that it was too soon to have a child, but Tony [Cox] insisted, but youre already 30, if you don't have a child now, you may never be able to. I became too afraid to have an abortion and had the child. Therefore, Ono concludes, I never quite felt like a mother, even after the child was born. It made me sad when I looked at the childs face. 66 Clearly, Ono felt ambivalent about her role in the nuclear family, which she seems to feel was thrust upon her. She situates Cut Pieces success specifically in the Village, signifying that her art-making was something she associated with the urban environment, positioned opposite the home, where she was confined inside her biological role and from which she wished to run. Although outside of their synchronic occurrence, she does not explicitly connect Cut Piece to the discomfort she felt in being confined in the home and grounded by her child, the cutting away of what contains her body and the transgression of boundaries in Cut Piece can be understood as strategies taken to make a spectacle of the pain that she suffered in the domestic sphere. One flees the pain, Alphonso Lingis argues, by losing oneself in the spectacle outside, or failing that, in making it a spectacle, retreating behind to objectify it. To suffer is to find oneself mired in oneself 67 In one sense Cut Piece thus might be considered as a way to deal with pain and flee ones self, to be outside of subjectivity and the body marked by an essentialist organization of sexual identity. After the first cutter seen in the Maysles film of Cut Piece, a white woman dressed in a dark suit and a scarf enters the frame/stage. She turns around and kneels
65. Ono, Tada no Watashi, 39. 66. Ono, Tada no Watashi, 3640. 67. Lingis, Sensations, 169.

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down to pick up the scissors before the camera can capture her face. She sits, on her knees, next to, rather than in front of Ono, as the first cutter had done. As a result, both women are visible. Her torso is bent over as she cuts into the cuff of Onos sweater. The camera zooms in slightly. She cuts up the sleeve. In one of the most interesting articles written on Cut Piece, Kathy ODell writes that Ono trains an icy eye on the audience.68 Its not really so, at least not the way the performance is represented in the film. Onos eyes roll up toward the ceiling as the scissors glimmer and travel up to her elbow. Her mouth does remain still, but its impossible not to sense discomfort in Onos eyes, which now dart around from the ceiling toward the camera and to the side as the woman cuts. Ono is also blinking repeatedly in quick succession, her eyes neither icy nor fixed. Close viewings of the Maysles film reveal that previous analyses of the piece have too closely followed Onos textual score for the event, in which she writes, Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. 69 Ono looks at the woman for a second as she stands up to leave the stage. Onos facial expressions speak, I think, of fearthe anticipation of pain. As the woman leaves the stage, a masculine voice commends her, Well cut, well cut! This sequence shows the incongruence between Onos experience, which I read as pain, and the cutters, and perhaps to a greater extent, the jeerers reception of it. One of the tenets that Elaine Scarry puts forth in her remarkable book The Body in Pain is that pain is ultimately incommunicable. Due to its incommunicable quality, Scarry suggests, this realm of sensory harm skews the quantitative comprehension of space.

68. ODell, Fluxus Feminus, TDR: The Drama Review 41.1 (Spring 1997): 53. 69. Munroe and Hendricks, Yes: Yoko Ono, 279.

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However near the prisoner the torturer stands, the distance between their physical realities is colossal, for the prisoner is in overwhelming physical pain while the torturer is utterly without pain Although the distance separating the two is probably the greatest distance that can separate two human beings, it is an invisible distance, since the physical realities it lies between are each invisible. 70 No matter how near one stands to another in pain, then, there remains an unfathomable distance between them. And this distance is, for Scarry, the ground that makes torture possible. Ono is not, it is important to say, actually tortured in Cut Piece. In the way that it makes a spectacle out of the performers pain, however, Cut Piece is structured like torture. As Scarry writes, torture bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferers body. 71 Significantly, the torture room is often referred to in cinematic and theatrical terms: In the torturers idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the production room in the Philippines, the cinema room in South Vietnam, and the blue lit stage in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama. 72 The purpose of the torture room is to turn what fundamentally cannot be shared into a spectacle. To anyone who has been asked in an emergency room to rate their pain on a scale between one and ten, the difficulty of describing and the absurdity of quantifying pain is familiar. Cut Piece produces an occasion to bring Scarrys arguments regarding pain together with Levinas theories of subjectivity and solitude. If as I argued previously, Cut
70. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 36. 71. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 27. 72. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 28.

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Piece promotes vulnerability as a mode of existence, then pain is the primary sentience of this vulnerable subject. To be vulnerable is to be susceptible to harm and pain. Just as Scarry argues that pain cannot be shared, Levinas explains in a conversation with Philippe Nemo, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. 73 Reciprocally, if it is incommunicable it is that it is rooted in my being, which is what is most private in me. Cut Piece asserts that pain is precisely what is at the root of ones being. This is why at the end of the 1966 Cut Piece performance at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, Ono held up a sign reading, My body is the scar of my mind. I read this not as a suggestion that the mind precedes and presides over the body, as in the Cartesian subject, for the mind too is always embodied, but rather as evoking the idea of the body as a surface that is socially inscribed. 74 In this way, Cut Piece and Onos experience point to the importance of the specific markings of the body, such as race, gender, and class, are read selectively and differently depending on ones location and audience. Cut Piece is understood differently not only at different points in history, but in different locations. Most western audiences could not have understood that the way Ono was seated is traditionally a feminine way of sitting. Similarly, no critic in Japan would have written, as a critic for the Daily Telegraph wrote,

73. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1985), 57. 74. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xii. Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives. The Mobius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another.

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Miss Ono sat looking inscrutably Japanese. 75 By provoking such varied responses, Cut Piece suggests that the self and other are always and specifically embodied, raced, sexed. With Cut Piece, Ono complicated notions of how one might ethically relate to others by dragging them into the realm of lived experience and all the ambivalence and pain that it implies.

75. Kevin Cocannon, Yoko Onos Cut Piece: Crticial Reception (1997), http://webcast.gatech.edu/papers/arch/Concannon.html, accessed August 1, 2010.