FREE4ALL, Part 15: Piece of Mind

“Like they say in the sutras:
This is not idle talk, but the highest of truths.’”

–John Cage, 1950

March 21, 1965. Came back from a show at Carnegie Hall this evening. Still reeling from it, actually. I’m not exactly sure how to feel. But I can’t get the experience out of my head.

This was a piece by Yoko Ono, originally from Japan. I’ve seen her work before.

One piece had been included in the “Flux kit” I got as a gift last year.

It was one of ten or so different works collected from artists around the world.

Ono’s contribution was a tiny glass bottle with the seal date written on it. And some Japanese characters, which I was told translates to “Night Air.” So I’ve got some night air from last summer trapped forever in my bottle. I thought it was cute.

Most of her work has a similarly playful spirit to it.

I admit, I sometimes think of the whole Fluxus movement as a bunch of bratty practical jokers. It’s hard not to.

But when you catch one of their pieces in the right mood, sometimes the humor gets damn close to enlightenment. Maybe that’s my Eastern Religions class getting to me…

Anyway, this new work is different. Cut Piece is a lot of things.

But it was not at all funny.

When the piece began, the artist came to the center of the stage and sat on her knees, down on the floor of the stage. Her hair was pulled back, and she was wearing a chic black dress and stockings. She looked beautiful.

Her legs were shifted to the side for comfort, but she was keeping so still that she resembled a statue. She faced toward us in the audience, but she was looking beyond us, with a completely blank expression.

Placed right in front of her was a pair of scissors.

The audience was invited to come up, one at a time, to cut a piece of cloth from her dress. Participants were free to cut what they wished, and to take home any scrap of cloth that they had cut.

And that was the whole of the piece.

Or so I had thought, at first. Now I’m not so sure.

Thinking about the instructions that were given to us, it all seemed quite simple. Strange and clever, yes. But simple.

Like La Monte Young’s musical instructions of “Draw a line and follow it.” Or Yoko’s own bottle of night air. My initial impression with Cut Piece was: “I get it.”

But that was before the piece began. Sitting there in that auditorium, watching it all play out in real time, that was another thing entirely.

From the moment the first participant approached the stage until the piece ended, the mood of the room was excited, tense. Like it was full of electricity. Every interaction between participant and artist seemed to give off a unique charge.

A woman came up first.

She decided to snip a thin sliver from Yoko’s left sleeve. Another woman rounded off a bit from her collar. They each did so quickly, but politely, and with care. And then they left.

Then some young men stepped up as well. And already the dynamic seemed to change.

These men had a similar brusque formality as the women who came before them. Regardless, it felt different. Seeing their larger frames hover over her diminutive figure, examining which portion of garment to strip from her. I won’t say it felt predatory.

But the vulnerability of the artist enduring this procession jumped out all the more. The gender dynamic added tension, and made the cutting harder to watch.

No one could deny the erotic charge underneath the proceedings, even when it was women participating. This became more obvious as the event went on. Each volunteer was doing some small part in stripping away a person’s clothing, for everyone to see.

The more polite interactions couldn’t help seem a little sensuous as they carefully bared the flesh of the woman in front of them.

And the more impersonal interactions, they felt downright objectifying. Their cutting from her dress felt laden with violence.

And yet those were the nice ones. This being New York City, some Neanderthal types eventually got the nerve to step up onto the stage and have some fun.

One man toward the end of the show outdid them all. He circled dramatically around Ms. Ono like a hyena closing in on prey. He then proceeded to make an extensive series of large cuts all around the dress.

His intent was clearly to strip her completely naked, to reveal the most intimate parts of her body. But also to take his sweet time doing it, to glory in the sexual thrill. And most importantly, to bask in his own bravado as the guy who showed everyone just what this woman was.

Ms. Ono’s stoicism was near absolute throughout the performance, but her demeanor cracked a bit in reaction to this creep. A sigh and an eye roll briefly trumpeted her disgust.

She concluded the performance shortly thereafter, allowing a few more participants to make some cuts.

Covering herself as best as she could with the shredded remains of her dress, the artist finally stood up and exited the stage.

The piece had concluded.

Thinking back to that ordeal with the boorish man, I felt enraged at his behavior. Why do we have to deal with people like that?

I also felt ashamed. Why hadn’t anyone told that jerk to shove off?

Worst of all, I felt guilty. I was a part of this audience, after all. And I did nothing. We did nothing. We had all played our part as voyeurs, and we played it well.

Naturally, I felt a good deal of anger toward Ms. Ono herself.

The whole premise of this performance was her own design. Even the boorish antics of the jerks showing off, they had adhered to the rules that the artist herself had stipulated at the beginning.

I mean, what does one expect from a piece that’s focused on cutting away another person’s clothes? She must have known the real risk of hecklers or perverts. Wouldn’t that be obvious?

Not to mention a real risk of violence. It’s not every day that the public is invited to use sharp objects on passive strangers.

This is what I had been thinking when the piece had concluded. In part to make me feel less guilty about my complicity in the whole thing.

Thinking more about it now, I think there’s a lot more to the whole experience. When we were first given the piece’s instructions, I assumed that the meaning of it was centered on the dress.

I thought that perhaps its slow destruction by cutting could symbolize something. It felt ritualistic in some way.

Yet it seems different from Ono’s previous work inspired by rituals. I read in the paper about another work called Bag Piece. There, the participants were invited to enter a large black bag, and they could move about as they wished while inside it.

Whoever was in the bag could see well enough around them, but all everyone else saw was a giant black mass of moving cloth.

Inspired by the works of Ono’s hero, John Cage, the piece was centered on freedom of movement. The people moving around in the giant black bag provided a striking, often ritualistic display of shifting forms. One that was designed to be unique for every performance, and every gathering of people.

I think Cut Piece is also about freedom and openness, and about bringing a community together into a work of art. But it’s not about freedom to avoid repeating ideas. The point is not to create endlessly varying dress designs. I think it’s more about freedom as responsibility.

Ms. Ono had set down some simple rules, and she left the rest to us. And so we all got to see what various people would do with the freedom given to them. What choices they would make.

Most artists give to their audiences only according to their own terms. Here was one person who was interested in exploring what an audience will take from her, according to their own judgments.

In doing so, this woman made herself truly vulnerable. She entrusted her own care to the participants of the event. Even her clothing signaled this respect, as she decided to wear something very nice…

… and probably expensive, to be cut away into pieces and taken by the audience.

As for the predatory antics of those select jerks, I would never say those men were being respectful. But their contributions were certainly illuminating. Those men represent a potential risk that always co-exists with freedom in community efforts, particularly in mixed company. And thus they were an important component of the piece. Ironically, they granted it real power.

Yoko must have considered this all along.

And what about my own freedom? I never got up on the stage myself, opting instead to sit and watch from my seat. That was a choice I made, consciously or not. And while I could have yelled something at the boorish man to stop his antics, I remained silent then. We all did. That was a choice as well.

Cut Piece was simple in concept. But in execution, there was subtlety. There was complexity.

Not to mention, there was difficulty. Watching the interactions between artist and audience was often uncomfortable. And thinking further about the choices we made there has been somewhat troubling as well.

This was the artist’s greatest gift to us. She coordinated a shared experience that can provoke thought among its audience going forward.

At some personal risk to herself, she created a space for us to gather and experience real freedom and responsibility. To feel the electric charge, as well as the weight.

And from that experience, at least some of us can contemplate our decisions, and can emerge as changed people.

I can’t help thinking of mandalas, something I learned about in Eastern Religions.

Buddhist monks in Tibet spend hours and hours making designs from colored sands.

The mandalas can be large and intricate in detail. And yet, other monks will steadily sweep those sands away, working to erase the mandala before the artists can ever finish working on its patterns.

The practice seemed futile and rather absurd when I first read about it. But the monks do this ritual together to live out a deeper truth.

All is transitory. It is not the “things” or “stuff” of the world that matter in the end. What matters is spirit. Values. And the interactions that members of a community share with one another. Those are the treasures to cling to.

In a sense, Cut Piece was a new kind of mandala that we all took part in. That we all created, and shared together. There may be other similar performances in the future, but ours was a unique moment in time.