Ono remarked that, throughout her art, she was “searching for an emptiness that is not empty” (Brackett, 2017), a vision that is thoroughly influenced by her Zen Buddhist background. ![]() Although she is omnipresent throughout the eight-hour documentary, she evidently remains as concealed today as she was during those first impressions when she was introduced to popular culture. To regard her as the sideshow to the jamming boys, the girlfriend sitting on the amp, is to cut once again at a figure. At this time, Ono was at the height of her career, exhibiting internationally, and widely recognized as one of the great visionaries of performance art. It takes a singular (and decidedly masculine) lack of imagination to view Yoko Ono in 1969 as merely unintrusive or benign or without opinion. She never says, ‘Oh, I think the previous take was better than that one.’ She’s a very benign presence and she doesn’t interfere in the slightest. She never has opinions about the stuff they’re doing. ![]() Peter Jackson himself offers these remarks in a recent Sixty Minutes interview: Iewers were surprised to see how unintrusive Ono’s presence is during the recording sessions seen on Get Back while the boys were jamming, she can be seen reading the newspaper, knitting, or helpfully rolling joints. According to Dani Di Placido of Forbes Magazine: Since the release of Get Back, Ono’s true nature, and her chief virtue apparently, have now been revealed. We now know, to quote Paul McCartney, “ the Beatles did not break up because Yoko sat on an amp.” But do we know her any better? According to many commentators, we do. Get Back has done much to correct this and to expose the pernicious mythologies upon which the general animus against Ono was built. For over fifty years, the public has attempted to sever Ono with the sharp instruments of racism and misogyny. ![]() Watching Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary, Get Back, was a little like seeking to know what it’s like inside the stone after the cutters left. People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone. In the 1966 artist’s statement on the piece, Ono wrote: Throughout the performance, Ono’s equanimity spoke to another form of being stripped bare, to a form of surrender that is not merely passive and empty but represents an artistic vision and a woman’s integrity that exceed the cutters’ shears. As Julia Bryan-Wilson put it: “the clothing destroyed by the atom bomb and the repeated accounts of children wandering the streets with school uniforms hanging off them burned and torn, submit themselves as visual precedents for the tatters of Cut Piece” (Bryan-Wilson 2003). It also hearkened to images of garments torn asunder after the atomic bombs were dropped on Ono’s native Japan. ![]() This performance was a re-enactment of the multiple forms of stripping and fetishizing to which women’s (and particularly Asian women’s) bodies were subjected. Audience members were told they could keep the piece of fabric they had severed from her garment. During the performance, Ono remained still as audience members approached and cut pieces of her suit until she was stripped bare. For Cut Piece, Ono wore a suit and knelt onstage with only a pair of scissors accompanying her. In 1964, two years before she met John Lennon, Yoko Ono exhibited Cut Piece, one of the earliest works of feminist performance art. Get Back, Yoko Ono, and the Art of Performance
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