Cut and Tear
On 20 July 1964, Yoko Ono debuted Cut Piece at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan. The innovative, feminist artwork, which utilises audience participation, invites an active audience to ‘come on stage—one at a time—to cut a small piece of the performer’s clothing to take with them’ as Ono passively sits on stage wearing a long-sleeved black suit, a pair of scissors in front of her.
Whenever Ono performed Cut Piece, whether at the first performance or during repeats in Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris, she directed participants to approach and snip away at her clothing, one by one, piece by piece, to reveal her naked body underneath. In these restages the work took on a new element in which the audience members could cut each other's clothing as they wished. The piece was a double-edged sword: in giving the art attendees agency to participate in the piece, Ono also rendered them complicit in exposing the naked female body on stage. In her 1964 book Grapefruit, Ono noted that the performer need not be female; ‘the performer’ is in the third person.
Cut Piece has always provoked reactions, whether viewers believe it’s a bold display of violence against women via destroyed clothing to those who consider it an attack. The artist Marcia Tanner described Cut Piece as ‘really quite gruesome—more like a rape than an art performance’, arguing that Ono’s passivity is at the mercy, control, and violence of both the audience and the male gaze, as ‘the audience's role changes from voyeur to victimizer, sadist and aggressor, being dangerous and threatening.’
In 1938, Elsa Schiaparelli unveiled her Tears Dress, inspired by the Dalí painting Three Young Surrealist Women Holding In Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936). The garment, which combined both the ‘the illusory and the real’, is a finely detailed trompe l’oeil pattern of torn flesh, an appliquéd mantle of tears, and pale stripes of fabric that peel back to reveal a livid pink underneath. Material as skin.
In their book chapter ‘Fashion, Representation, Femininity,’ Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton note that Schiaparelli’s designs are not frightening or morbid but rather imbued with a sense of masquerade, carnival, excess, and decadence. As they say, Schiaparelli embraces ‘the decorative, the superfluous and the nonfunctional’. They go on to say that the design of The Tears Dress ‘counterposes violence and anxiety with poise and tranquillity,’ as seen through the pale blue fabric, faded to white. Schiaparelli’s gown highlights the skin rather than cuts away large panels of material; Evans and Thornton comment that the design suggests a woman who has been left naked and powerless through the violation of her clothing:
The imagery of violence, the suggestion of attack, is counterposed by the elegance of the dress, its existence as sophisticated fashion, the fact that it is not rags, not torn. It is a piece suggestive of a fantasy which is both acknowledged and denied. Violence and eroticism are simultaneously displayed and made to disappear; beauty is brought to bear on rupture’.
Schiaparelli designed a dress intended to blur the boundaries of fabric and flesh, but some spectators may find it difficult to distinguish between the two. While The Tears Dress may hint towards violent Surrealist imagery (disembodied mannequins, for example), Schiaparelli has chosen to accentuate the woman’s strength and vulnerability by confronting and refusing to hide the violent attack that has taken place. The result is that Schiaparelli’s designs have become ‘self-conscious, constructive and critical, allowing fashion to become a language linking the internal subconscious to the external physical body.
In her book Art and Feminism, Helena Reckitt wrote that Ono’s Cut Piece explores ‘how viewing without responsibility has the potential to harm or even destroy the object of perception.’ The most recent reprise of Ono’s perfornace art took place in Paris in 2003, and like each reinterpretation of the performance, it underwent further change: in this version, Ono claimed that the purpose of Cut Piece was for world peace. As can be expected since her first performance nearly 40 years prior, Ono stressed that her mindset was very different from when she first performed it, stating ‘Force and intimidation were in the air. People were silenced. Cut Piece is my hope for world peace. When I first performed this work, in 1964, I did it with some anger and turbulence in my heart.’ The 2003 performance was about love. ‘Come and cut a piece of my clothing wherever you like - the size of less than a postcard,’ she asked the audience, ‘and send it to the one you love.’
P.S. I recently launched a new, small, blog called Observatory Time, for those who are keen.
What a fascinating comparison! I have never seen Cut Piece but I find even the description profoundly disturbing. The performance of female vulnerability seems redundant to me and the only defensible reason to stage it in my view would be to provoke audience members to stop it, but I fear that even in the radical circles and times of the 1960s, the basic embarrassment and passivity that spectators feel would not make this happen: they would watch if empathetic or cut if aggressive/drunk/extrovert/downright sadistic and there would be no progress made in resisting the daily attacks on women everywhere. Quite the opposite. (And I also consider myself to be against censorship!) You don't say what you think of Cut Piece, Sabina, would you be prepared to make a direct comment from your own/feminist perspective?
Re. the Schiaparelli, this I see as a more humanist artwork, emphasising the common physicality of all people under their clothes and I like the staging of it on a glamorous evening dress. To wear such a garment would be to take ownership of the body's interior rather than give away all agency as in Ono's performance. Lack of agency has nothing to do with world peace, to me.
Whether anyone agrees with these reactions of mine to your brilliant post, or not, it has certainly made me think and organise my thoughts, somewhat! Thank you.