Feminism Movement in Cut Piece
What is everyday to people? They wake up in the morning, eat something, do something,
and sleep at night. They are repeating same things over and over again and it seem to
ignore these everyday actions in their life because they do not think everyday is important
for their life. People believe they live their life in the same way but they do subconsciously
notice that something behind everybody’s everyday is different and has hidden messages
to all of us. They are, however, not trying to search these messages. Many things such as
media, government, and cultures control people to forget what the everyday really means
to them. Many artists try to make these invisible things visible so that people can actually
notice and feel their everyday life around them. Artists bring invisible things to visibility
so people who see these arts can think about their everyday. Feminist art came about in the
1960s when female slowly started to realize they do not really have gender equality. Yoko
Ono, a Japanese multimedia artist performed Cut Piece in 1965 to recognize audiences to
that men’s sexual aggression to women. Bringing up this feminism movement shows
people to participate how these invisible things are really serious.
Yoko Ono’s art has feminist movement, which shows female discrimination. She held the
event for audiences to able to experience it by themselves. She performed Cut Piece in
Japan in 1964, in America in 1965, and in London in 1966. She sat on the stage with her
best looking clothes on and let her audiences to cut a bit of her clothes off and audiences
were allowed to keep piece of cloth that they cut off. Her face looked really calm in the
picture but in the video, she started to look sad, upset, confused after one male came to the
stage and cut her cloth really widely (figure 1). She wants audiences to understand how
male can be so dominant thorough her face expressions and wants audience to see what
they are seeing is invisible for most of people. As seen in the video, first audiences were
hesitating to cut her clothing, however after that they got more daring. Near the end, she
began to move more because she had to hold her bra up to hide her breast after male
audience cut her bra strips. At first, she was being just an object, however when male
