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CUT PIECE (1964) by Yoko Ono

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by Yoko Ono

Performed by Yoko Ono on July 20, 1964

at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan.

Photographer unknown;

courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.

YOKO ONO’S CUT PIECE From Text to Performance and Back Again

by Kevin Concannon

Art is inexorably bound up in the situation where it is

produced and where it is experienced. You can emphasize this,

or you can emphasize where it is produced or experienced: you

can even equate them, and emphasize the equation. The

relationship exists in any case, and, either as artist or as

audience, we are in a situation analogous to a swimmer who

may fight the surf, dive through it and struggle against it

until he gets out beyond where the surf is noticeable: or

else this swimmer can roll with the waves.

Dick Higgins, Postface (1964) [1]

The seemingly sudden and recent popularity of reprise

performances of live artworks of the 1960s and 1970s has been

greeted with an equally abundant supply of critical analysis,

much of which frames these events as “reenactments.” Such is

the case with Yoko Ono’s 2003 performance of her 1964 Cut

Piece. It was performed by Ono on at least six occasions and

by others many times more. The first two performances took

place in Kyoto and Tokyo in July and August 1964. The third

performance was presented at Carnegie Recital Hall in New

York City in March 1965. And the fourth and fifth

performances were offered as part of the Destruction in Art

Symposium presentation of Two Evenings with Yoko Ono at the

Africa Centre in London in September 1966. While Ono

“directed” later performances of the work, these were - until

September 2003 - the only confirmed occasions on which she

herself publicly performed it.

In these first performances by Ono, the artist sat kneeling

on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing,

with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her.

Members of the audience were invited to approach the stage,

one at a time, and cut a bit of her clothes off - which they

were allowed to keep. The score for Cut Piece appears, along

with those for several other works, in a document from

January 1966 called Strip Tease Show.

Cut Piece First version for single performer:

Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him.

It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage

- one at a time - to cut a small piece of the performer’s

clothing to take with them.

Performer remains motionless throughout the piece.

Piece ends at the performer’s option.

Second version for audience:

It is announced that members of the audience may cut each other’s

clothing.

The audience may cut as long as they wish.

And in the 1971 paperback edition of her book, Grapefruit,

Ono included not so much a score as a description, concluding

with the statement that, “the performer, however, does not

have to be a woman.”

In her catalogue essay for the 2005 exhibition, Life, Once

More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, Jennifer

Allen characterizes Ono’s 2003 performance of Cut Piece as a

“reenactment,” and imputes to the artist rather grand

ambitions for the event.

In September 2003 at Paris’s Ranelagh Theatre, Yoko Ono

reenacted her own Cut Piece as an expression of her hope for

world peace…. One could argue that the original performances

of the sixties and seventies needed to be reenacted in order

to catch up with the spectacle, in order to be reproduced, in

order to exist. Ono’s intervention seems to differ since she

decided to reenact Cut Piece, not for an exhibition, but for

the mass media, and not merely to ensure the continued

existence of her work, but in order to make a difference in

the present. In France, the organizers placed a full - page

advert for the event with a statement by Ono who described

her intervention as a response to the political changes in

the wake of 9/11. Her statement appeared around the world for

a little bit longer than fifteen minutes. It seems that Ono

hoped that her performance would reenact the peace movement

of the sixties on a global scale. In this case, the

reenactment searched for a lost totality, not in the

performance, but in an entire generation. [2]

There are a number of problems with this assessment. Most

importantly, the very notion that Ono reenacted her own work

seems to miss the point of an event score entirely. In the

two score variations quoted above, Ono refers to the

performer in the third person - and makes it clear that the

performer may be either male or female. Thus there is no

sense of an “original” performance - or any sense of priority

for the artist’s own performances - even after the fact. The

texts are not so much documents of a singular performance as

the performances are realizations of the score. And whether

these realizations are made by the artist herself or another

performer - or whether they are made in 1964 or 2007 - makes

little difference in this regard. While Allen suggests that

performances of the sixties and seventies might be reenacted

“in order to be reproduced, in order to exist,” she seems to

recognize that there is more than this behind Ono’s 2003

performance when she notes that Ono mounted her Paris

performance “not merely to ensure the continued existence of

her work, but in order to make a difference in the present.”

Having conceived Cut Piece as an event score, Ono foresaw the

work’s realization in a succession of presents. And from the

start, she understood that in each of these presents the work

would be transformed - not from any authentic original, but

from an idea into an experience - each one distinct from the

others. Ono has described her instruction works - or scores - as

“seeds,” activated individually and collectively in the minds

and actions of those who receive them. And as is often the

case with her work, this germinating idea is manifest in

multiple variations.

At earlier performances of Cut Piece, Ono has discussed the

work in several different ways. As will be clarified below,

she has characterized it as a test of her commitment to life

as an artist, as a challenge to artistic ego, as a gift, and

as a spiritual act. Critics over the years have interpreted

Cut Piece as a striptease, a protest against violence and

against war (specifically the Vietnam War), and most recently

(and most frequently) as a feminist work. In September 2003,

at the age of seventy, Ono performed Cut Piece in Paris “for

world peace.” Thirty - nine years after her first performance

of the work, she told Reuters News Agency that she did it

“against ageism, against racism, against sexism, and against

violence.” Although neither Ono nor her critics framed Cut

Piece as a feminist work in the 1960s when she was first

performing it, she has clearly subsumed the subsequent

feminist interpretations of her piece into her own revised

intention all these years later.

John Lennon noted on more than one occasion that Ono was “the

world’s most famous unknown artist.” Although Ono had already

established a fairly substantial reputation in London by the

time she first met Lennon in November 1966, her subsequent

liaison with the married Beatle soon eclipsed her growing

reputation as a prominent avant - garde artist. And after

marrying Lennon she became “the woman who broke up the

Beatles,” and consequently an object of scorn in the

worldwide press. In addition to losing her artistic identity

(in the popular press) and being labeled a homewrecker, Ono

bore the brunt of an onslaught of racism and sexism that is

still hard to fathom thirty - odd years later. It is hardly

surprising then that she now offers her performance against

racism and against sexism. And, having last performed it in

the eighth decade of her life, ageism has become part of her

personal experience as well. To borrow Higgins’s metaphor,

she is rolling with the waves (or perhaps the punches).

In recent years, even before the current vogue for

“reenactment,” Ono’s work has become an increasingly popular

subject of art - historical reclamation, culminating in the

recent retrospective exhibition and book, Yes Yoko Ono. Since

her reemergence onto the art scene (having been virtually

ignored by the artworld during her years with Lennon) with a

small exhibition of bronzes at the Whitney Museum in 1989,

the majority of authors who have considered her work as a

visual artist (or a recording artist, for that matter) have

presented her work as “proto - feminist,” typically citing Cut

Piece, as a major example from the sixties. The act of art

historical description and interpretation is a form of

“reenactment” as well, of course. Allen’s contention that

performances might be reenacted “to catch up with the

spectacle, in order to be reproduced, in order to exist,”

seems to imply that the “event” of the performance is a

“media event” of sorts - prompting the consequential press (or

art - historical literature) as its objective. In the case of

the performance reenactments of which she writes, however, it

seems more likely that it is exactly the other way around.

That is, it is the art - historical attention that prompts the

“reenactments.”

While Ono’s own earlier discussions of the work’s inspiration

and “meaning” certainly accommodate any number of different

readings, the current dominance of feminist

approaches - something the artist herself has clearly accepted

and reinvested into her 2003 performance - or at least her

discussion of it - has had the cumulative effect of recasting

Cut Piece as one - dimensional - and in the process ironically

marginalizing the very work these feminist scholars seek to

reclaim for history - and indeed have. As shall become clear,

the differences between Ono’s own earlier explanations of the

piece and the feminist framings by critics writing since

Ono’s 1989 reemergence are substantial, though certainly not

irreconcilable. These differences can be understood, of

course, in the context of the hermeneutics to which Higgins

alludes in the epigraph. Elsewhere, he has proposed that

hermeneutics is an ideal approach with which to critically

consider Fluxus performances. Paraphrasing Hans - Georg

Gadamer, Higgins explains:

The performer performs the work. He or she establishes a

horizon of experience - what is done, its implications and

whatever style the performer uses are all aspects of this

horizon.

The viewer has his or her own horizon of experience. He or

she watches the performance, and the horizons are matched up

together. To some extent there is a fusion of these horizons

(Horizontverschmelzung). When the horizons fuse, wholly or in

part, they are bent, warped, displaced, altered. The

performance ends, and the horizons are no longer actively

fused. The viewer examines his or her horizon. It is changed,

for the better or for the worse. The best piece is the one

that permanently affects the recipient’s horizon, and the

worst is the piece which the recipient, acting in good faith,

cannot accept at all. [3]

While Ono’s Cut Piece is not necessarily a Fluxus work,

Gadamer’s hermeneutic model is entirely appropriate, as I

will demonstrate below. But first, a review of the work’s

critical reception is in order. My first example raises the

important question of documentation in addition to the

current pervasiveness of the work’s feminist interpretation.

In 1992 artist Lynn Hershman was commissioned to re - document

Cut Piece for European television. Working from photos and

texts, as well as a first - hand account of one of Ono’s

performances that a colleague of hers had seen, Hershman

created a fifteen - minute video documentation of a 1993

performance staged with three actors specifically for this

purpose. Her attempts to interview Ono for the project were

unsuccessful. Cut Piece: A Video Homage to Yoko Ono concludes

with a discussion between art historians Moira Roth and

Whitney Chadwick; the tape had been produced with the

classroom in mind, Hershman told an interviewer in 1993.

One of the most obvious ways in which the video seems to

deviate from the original performance score is in its

splicing together of three performances by three different

women. Hershman saw Cut Piece in terms of “feminism,

violence, and risk” and recreated it with the idea of “video

cutting as a type of violence as well.” When asked why she

chose to present performances by three women, Hershman

replied: “I think she represented everywoman, not just one.”

[4]

Another scene, in which a man from the audience approaches

the stage and raises the scissors in a threatening gesture

(though ultimately lowering his arm and simply cutting her

dress) is based on written accounts of a similar event that

is said to have occurred during the first performance in

Kyoto.

While some of the earlier accounts of Cut Piece performances

refer to the audience’s behavior as sexually aggressive, it

is not until Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt’s 1991

book, Yoko Ono: Objects and Arias, that Cut Piece is given a

specifically feminist reading - and a somewhat qualified

feminist reading at that:

Running through much of Ono’s work is a bold commentary on

women. Yet far from being strident feminist tracts on the

subordination and victimization of women, her pieces achieve

power because of their ambiguity; their willingness to

forfeit the illusion of politically proper thinking throws

responsibility for judgment upon the viewer. [5]

Three years later, though, in Marcia Tanner’s catalogue essay

for the 1994 Bad Girls exhibition, the author calls Cut Piece

“fiercely feminist in content” and explains:

Ono’s inspiration for Cut Piece was the legend of the Buddha,

who had renounced his life of privilege to wander the world,

giving whatever was asked of him. His soul achieved supreme

enlightenment when he allowed a tiger to devour his body, and

Ono saw parallels between the Buddha’s selfless giving and

the artist’s. When addressing serious issues - in this case

voyeurism, sexual aggression, gender subordination, violation

of a woman’s personal space, violence against women - Ono

invariably found means to combine dangerous confrontation

with poetry, spirituality, personal vulnerability, and edgy

laughter. [6]

Within five years, Haskell and Hanhardt’s rather tentative

feminist interpretation had become dominant, cropping up

regularly in the popular press as well. Cut Piece wasn’t

always a feminist statement, however. Cut Piece is an

incredibly rich and poetic work that raises questions about

the nature of the artist - audience relationship, and in so

doing, deliberately offers its performers, audiences, and

critics an opportunity to project their own “meaning” into

the work.

While Ono clearly has no objections to the feminist readings

that currently prevail, her recent comments also suggest that

she understands that “hindsight is twentytwenty.” In 1994

interviewer Robert Enright asked her, while discussing one of

her films, “Did you think of yourself as a proto - feminist?”

She responded: “I didn’t have any notion of feminism. When I

went to London and got together with John that was the

biggest macho scene imaginable. That’s when I made the

statement ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World.’”7 It was 1969

when she made that statement to Nova, a British women’s

magazine. And in 1972 she and Lennon would issue a

controversial pop single of the same title.

Two years earlier, after she had met Lennon, but before she

had “gotten together” with him, she directed a performance of

Cut Piece as part of a “happening.” The 14 Hour Technicolour

Dream Extravaganza at London’s Alexandra Palace in April 1967

was the epitome of swinging London - and the epitome of the

macho scene to which Ono referred. Lennon was in the audience

that night, and the band Pink Floyd was also on the bill. A

film of the event shows Ono’s then - husband, Tony Cox,

presiding over the performance, which featured model Carol

Mann. An enormous crowd presses against Mann, who is perched

on a large stepladder, wearing granny glasses and smoking a

cigarette. In contrast to the solemn air that envelops Ono in

her own performances of Cut Piece, the Alexandra Palace

performance seems a mob scene - a spectacle. While one would be

hard - pressed to present this performance as feminist, Ono

clearly accepted authorship of this performance as

photographs of this event were used in subsequent publicity

for her later concerts.

How, then, did Ono herself talk about Cut Piece when she was

first performing it? Discussing the work in a 1967 article in

a London underground magazine, Ono told her interviewers: It

was a form of giving, giving and taking. It was a kind of

criticism against artists, who are always giving what they

want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted

to, so it was very important to say you can cut wherever you

want to. It is a form of giving that has a lot to do with

Buddhism. There’s a small allegorical story about Buddha. He

left his castle with his wife and children and was walking

towards a mountain to go into meditation. As he was walking

along, a man said that he wanted Buddha’s children because he

wanted to sell them or something. So Buddha gave him his

children. Then someone said he wanted Buddha’s wife and he

gave him his wife. Someone calls that he is cold, so Buddha

gives him his clothes. Finally a tiger comes along and says

he wants to eat him and Buddha lets the tiger eat him. And in

the moment the tiger eats him, it became enlightened or

something. That’s a form of total giving as opposed to

reasonable giving like “logically you deserve this” or “I

think this is good, therefore I am giving this to you.” [8]

This is the very same story alluded to by Bad Girls author

Tanner, above. Yet Tanner characterizes the story as a kind

of poetic spirituality in which Ono cloaked her “serious

issues,” namely feminist issues.

By 1973 Ono was widely considered a “radical feminist.” Only

a year earlier, for example, the record Woman is the Nigger

of the World had been greeted with great controversy in the

mainstream press. Yet in 1974 she discussed Cut Piece at

length in an autobiographical essay written for a Japanese

magazine - with no reference at all to feminist politics.

Traditionally, the artist’s ego is in the artist’s work. In

other words, the artist must give the artist’s ego to the

audience. I had always wanted to produce work without ego in

it. I was thinking of this motif more and more, and the

result of this was Cut Piece.

Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to

give, the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.

That is to say, you cut and take whatever part you want; that

was my feeling about its purpose. I went onto the stage

wearing the best suit I had. To think that it would be OK to

use the cheapest clothes because it was going to be cut

anyway would be wrong; it’s against my intentions.

I was poor at the time, and it was hard. This event I

repeated in several different places, and my wardrobe got

smaller and smaller. However, when I sat on stage in front of

the audience, I felt that this was my genuine contribution.

This is how I really felt.

The audience was quiet and still, and I felt that everyone

was holding their breath. While I was doing it, I was staring

into space. I felt kind of like I was praying. I also felt

that I was willingly sacrificing myself. [9]

The idea of giving the audience what it wishes to take is

very much bound up with hermeneutics - or reception theory - the

idea that it is the viewer as much as the artist who invests

a work of art with meaning. Cut Piece’s reception - the meaning

with which it is invested - is as varied as its audiences.

One of the earliest reviews of Cut Piece that I have been

able to find is of Ono’s second performance of the work in

August 1964 in Tokyo. The headline translates as: “The title

is ‘Stripping’ - avant - garde musician, Ono Yoko’s recital.” And

it continues: In the center of the stage without any props,

under the hazy spot light, a woman sits. From their seats,

members of the audience ran up onto the stage and started to

cut off her clothing with scissors. Soon, the scissors cut

even to her underwear. With the theme ‘Stripping,’ it is a

scene from Ono Yoko’s recital held at Sogetsu Art Center the

other day. [10]

After listing the other works performed, it concludes: “Now,

one may say ‘there, the sign of essence was performed’ and

bow down his head, and others may say ‘If no sounds were

made, give me back my money’ and raise their arms in the air.

Anyway, avant - garde music is a mysterious thing.” This

anything - but - feminist reading of Cut Piece in the Japanese

press can perhaps be better understood when one realizes that

another piece on the program, listed in this review as Chair

Piece, was actually titled Strip Tease for Three. It involved

simply a curtain rising to reveal three empty chairs on the

stage and then descending.

In June 1968, however, a similar characterization of Cut

Piece - along with a suite of provocative photographs - was

presented in the pages of TAB, a New York “gentlemen’s

magazine.” With a headline, “The Hippiest Artistic Happening:

‘Step Up and Strip Me Nude,’” the brief article continued:

Though Time magazine called her performance “music of the

mind,” and Art and Artists in London described it as “the

next logical step,” Yoko Ono’s “art” striptease still seems

like a striptease to excited viewers. The difference here is

that Yoko, a Japanese lovely now performing on the continent,

does not take her clothing off . . . the audience does it for

her. Guys who used to sit back and yell “Take it off!” now

have the golden opportunity to take it off for her. [11]

Published only weeks prior to the revelation of Ono’s affair

with Lennon, the author’s characterization of the artist as a

“Japanese lovely” stands in stark contrast to the

descriptions of her as “ugly” that would soon predominate.

A canonically feminist work since the 1990s, Cut Piece began

its life quite differently. But Ono’s aesthetics of reception

accommodate both these readings and many more too numerous to

review in these pages. Interpretations of Cut Piece as a

feminist work and as a striptease are ultimately at least as

revealing of those respective interpreters as they are of the

artist who conceived the work. For if Cut Piece is both these

things and more, it is foremost a work that challenges our

notions of what a work of art is and who actually makes it - a

conceptual work.

Curiously, Cut Piece has received considerably more press in

the past seventeen years than during the three or four years

that Ono initially performed it - all incidentally before her

famous liaison with Lennon. And for the most part, this

expert opinion has been based on previously published

descriptions and photographs. As it turns out, while Ono’s

staff had unknowingly informed artist Lynn Hershman

otherwise, there is a film of the 1965 Carnegie Recital Hall

performance of Cut Piece made by Albert and David Maysles - and

others as well. I discovered this film in late 1996 while

researching a catalogue essay for Ono’s 1996 FLY exhibition

and subsequently found other films as well. While I had

screened it at conferences in 1997, its first major public

showings occurred within the Out of Actions exhibition at

L.A. MoCA in 1998. From this point on, most writers and

performers worked from this film document.

As noted earlier, Ono had always intended Cut Piece to be

performed by men or women. The first documented male

performance of Cut Piece (that I’ve been able to find,

anyway) took place in Central Park on September 9, 1966, as

part of the Fourth Annual Avant - Garde Festival organized by

Charlotte Moorman. Ono had been scheduled to perform Cut

Piece, but left suddenly for London and the Destruction in

Art Symposium. Ono’s performance had already been publicized

though, so Moorman hastily arranged for two men to perform

the piece in Ono’s stead. Apparently facing problems with

nudity and her parks permit, the performers appeared in large

black bags that were cut off instead of their clothing - a

conflation of Ono’s Bag Piece and Cut Piece. For what was in

all likelihood the first male performance of Cut Piece, then,

the performers wore bags, under which they were fully

clothed. Due to specifically stated park policy, nudity was

prohibited.

The next known male solo performance of Cut Piece was in the

fall of 1968, and the performer was Jon Hendricks, then

director of the Judson Gallery, and now Ono’s exhibitions

manager as well as curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman

Fluxus Collection. Hendricks was a guest instructor for a

“Semester in New York” program sponsored by a consortium of

Midwest colleges. The students were living at the Paris

Hotel, where the course was taught. Hendricks performed Cut

Piece as part of their introduction to the course.

I was kind of nervous so I decided to do Cut Piece. I bought

a suit at the thrift store, put the scissors down in front of

me and explained the work. I saw it as a kind of leveling of

the student - teacher relationship and a way of getting into

something that was timely in terms of both performance and

social issues - the war in Vietnam, riots, and the feeling of

some of us against authority in society. And here I was, the

authority figure . . . . [12] Hendricks’s performance seems

to have been more about challenging the authority of the

performer rather than his vulnerability.

Thus a feminist interpretation of the piece seems to presume

a female performer - something never mandated by the artist

herself. This in turn likely reflects a commonly held notion

that an original performer and an original performance

constitute an authentic version of the piece. Curiously, more

recent performances by men (Jim Bovino at the Walker Art

Center in 2001 and John Noga at the University of Akron in

2007, for example) have more closely kept to Ono’s score.

Both Bovino and Noga assumed the seated position indicated in

Ono’s instruction and maintained a calm, passive demeanor.

Thus performed, the more recent feminist framings seem

irrelevant - and the “content” seems more clearly to be the

actions of the audience members themselves.

This notion of the “original” performance work that underlies

much of the recent interest in performance “reenactment”

might well hold true for other performances by other artists,

but not of performances encoded in scores - Fluxus or

otherwise. Marina Abramović, who recently performed a number

of well - known performance works from the 1960s and 1970s at

the Guggenheim Museum (Seven Easy Pieces, November 2005),

spoke about her own work of the 1970s at a symposium that

followed the week of performances: “We never wanted to repeat

things . . . . We never even wanted to be photographed. We

were pure pure pure.” [13] Curiously, her week of historic

performances was made possible by what Nancy Princenthal

characterizes as a “radical response.”

By treating the irremediably category - resistant performance

form as if it were, say, popular music, and translating

“instructions” as “score,” a performance could be

re - presented by anyone with the necessary stamina and

determination (no small qualifications). If the original

artists were credited and paid, the whole messy medium could

be brought into the world of copyright and distribution and

licensing fees - in a word, into the marketplace. To use

another mouthful of a word, it could also, Abramović argues,

thereby be brought into the academic discourse of history.”

[14]

Of course, this concept of performance score has existed

within the Fluxus orbit since at least the early 1960s - the

very period at stake in Abramović’s project. More

problematic, however, is the idea that new performances

provide an object of sorts for art historical study. As

demonstrated above, reformulations of Cut Piece have arguably

contributed to a distortion of the work, more so than an

illumination of it. On the other hand, the nature of Ono’s

work seems not merely to allow this, but encourage it.

Indeed, one might argue that Cut Piece, more than anything

else, exploits the hermeneutic circle among artist, score,

performer, audience, and critic.

Readings of Cut Piece as feminist, pacifist,

anti - authoritarian, Buddhist, Christian - and even as a

striptease - are all valid. The many and varied interpretations

of Cut Piece by artist, performers, audiences, and critics

testify to the work’s great power - a power embedded in its

score. But most importantly, Cut Piece is an incredibly rich

and poetic work that poses seldom - asked questions about the

nature of art itself and in the process opens itself up to a

multitude of readings. To assert that any of its performances

or interpretations are definitive denies the work the very

multivalence at its core and minimizes the qualities that

make it forever vital and alive.

NOTES

1. Dick Higgins, Postface, New York: Something Else Press,

1964, 2.

2. Jennifer Allen, “‘Einmal ist keinmal’: Observations on

Reenactment,” in Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in

Contemporary Art, edited by Sven Lütticken, Rotterdam: Witte

de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 2005, 211–13.

3. Dick Higgins, “Fluxus Theory and Reception,” in The Fluxus

Reader, New York: Academy Editions, 1998, 230.

4. E - mail correspondence with the author, March 28, 1997.

5. Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt, Yoko Ono: Objects

and Arias, Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 90.

6. Marcia Tanner, “Mother Laughed: The ‘Bad Girls’ Avant -

Garde,” in Bad Girls, New York: New Museum of Contemporary

Art, 1994, 61.

7. Robert Enright, “Instructions in the Marital Arts: A

Conversation with Yoko Ono,” Border Crossings 13,1 (Winter

1994): 37.

8. Roger Perry and Tony Elliott, “Yoko Ono,” Unit (December

1967): 26–27.

9. Yoko Ono, “If I Don’t Give Birth Now, I Will Never Be Able

To,” Just Me! The Very First Autobiographical Essay by the

World’s Most Famous Japanese Woman, Tokyo: Kodansha

International, 1986, 34–36. This article was originally

published in the summer of 1974 in the Japanese magazine,

Bungei Shunju, during Ono’s “Yoko Ono and Plastic Ono Super

Band: Let’s Have a Dream” tour. This translation was

commissioned by the author from Akira Suzuki.

10. “The title is ‘Stripping’ - avant - garde musician, Ono

Yoko’s recital,” Shukan Taishu 36,10 (September 1964): 1.

This translation was commissioned by the author from Sumie

Ota. Thanks to Mikihiko Hori for providing publication

details for this previously unidentified press cutting from

the artist’s files.

11. “The Hippiest Artistic Happening: ‘Step Up and Strip Me

Nude,’” TAB 18,2 (June 1968): 65–68.

12. Jon Hendricks’s personal communication with the author,

New York City, February 4, 1998. In a personal communication

of June 6, 2001, Hendricks recalled that he was seated in a

chair for his performance.

13. Abramović, quoted in Nancy Princenthal, “Back for One

Night Only!” Art in America (February 2006): 90.

14. Princenthal, 90.

KEVIN CONCANNON is Associate Professor of Art History at the

Myers School of Art at The University of Akron–Ohio. With

John Noga, he is curator of Yoko Ono Imagine Peace Featuring

John & Yoko’s Year of Peace, currently traveling, and Agency:

Art and Advertising, scheduled for September 12 through

November 8, 2008 at the McDonough Museum of Art at Youngtown

State University.

Published in PAJ - A Journal of Performance and Art

Sept 90 (2008), pp. 81–93

web.mac.com/kconcan/iWeb/PDFs/2008/CutPiecePAJ.pdf

PCs pledge to scrap NDP’s job-killing First Contract Arbitration by Jamie Baillie

PCs pledge to scrap NDP’s job-killing First Contract Arbitration

Baillie: time to create jobs, not chase them away

September 25, 2013

For immediate release

HALIFAX, NS – A Progressive Conservative government will scrap the NDP’s job-killing First Contract Arbitration law. The Liberals will not.

Progressive Conservative leader Jamie Baillie renewed his commitment to scrap the NDP’s unfair labour legislation outside Egg Films, a Halifax film production company.

First Contract Arbitration is an anti-employer law passed by the NDP that lets an arbitrator appointed by the government impose a collective agreement on a newly unionized employer, even if the company cannot afford it. The legislation has been called “anti-business” and “totally unnecessary.”

“A PC government is focused on helping small business create jobs. This law chases employers away by giving a third party the power to tell them how to run their business,” Baillie said.

The McNeil Liberals won’t repeal the one-sided labour law. The Liberals also won’t lower taxes or freeze power rates to help small businesses get ahead.

Last week, the Nova Scotia Labour Board used this law to impose an expensive first contract on Egg Films. The small, independent film company in Halifax was recently unionized by film and theatre union IATSE, Local 849. The company was ordered to pay its freelance crew wages that even exceeded wage rates in Toronto for similar work.

“This law makes it difficult for us to operate in Nova Scotia,” said Mike Hachey, co-owner of Egg Films. “It allows a union to present a wage proposal that it knows the employer can't afford or accept so that they can ask for an agreement to be imposed. That's what happened to us.”

Baillie noted that Egg employs creative, highly skilled people who should be encouraged to stay to build a life in our province, not driven away.

During review of first contract at the Legislature’s Law Amendments Committee, major employers such as Michelin, Sobeys and Clearwater joined in opposition to the law, arguing it created an economic disincentive to invest in the province.

A PC government will help small businesses prosper and create jobs by creating a tax-free zone for small businesses and freezing power rates.

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