Fluxus Flap

You don't want to be the one holding the scissors when there's little or nothing left. That's one idea in Yoko Ono's Cut, or so I'd always assumed: that the performance would proceed like Zeno's paradox, with viewer-participants scissoring less and less material from the artist's garments as she is denuded, as the burden of awkwardness passes snip by snip from artist to viewer. That was my assumption, anyway, but that's not what actually happens in the 1965 performance at Carnegie Hall.

The piece begins in a predictable way. Spectators mumble occasionally, appraising how each one of their tribe takes from the artist's sacrifice. They snip gingerly, until one viewer—wanting no small souvenir, or perhaps no share of the artist's shame—surgically removes the artist's blouse in a confident intervention. He defies the established interaction with the artist, and the audience—now passive in relation to the artist and this former compatriot—titters over his arrogance ("He's getting carried away").

When he has completed his operation, the young man then trains the scissors on the shoulder straps of the artist's bra. With a flash, revealing roll of her eyes, Ono gives away the game: This wasn't how she intended the performance to go. The audience's protest to this second transaction is less mute. One male voice can be heard interjecting something like, "Why don't you leave some for somebody else to do something," while a woman snaps, "Stop being such a dweeb!" There's something dark in that he said/she said exchange. Something more revealing than the piece Ono planned, which is undone.

Yoko Ono, Cut, 1965.

Ono is in the District this weekend; she's planting peace trees around.