Yoko Ono Identity

While the identity was largely debatable in avant-garde theatre, performance artists always presented themselves and claimed their own identity by usually working alone. No character was involved in performance art, and thus performance artists had never been actors. Yoko Ono, for example, performed Cut Piece (1964-66), which is considered “a commentary on identity,” where she asked audience to cut her cloth to test how far and aggressive people could become as it is described as “[T]he invitation triggered the voyeuristic desire among the audience even though most of them felt restrained from participating.” Her underlying idea of this performance was to examine how Americans in the late sixties would perceive the Japanese female artist, …show more content…
Auslander points out, “[B]oth pieces are, in Blau’s terms, examples of the body ‘doing time’: both direct attention to the body’s existence in time.” When you rub your skin so hard, it becomes sore. When you keep open your mouth, it becomes full of saliva. These are our body’s natural reactions, or reflexes. According to Kaprow, happenings is ”[P]laying with everyday life often is just paying attention to what is conventionally hidden.” One of the aims of performance art is to draw attention on our everyday life. Later on, Chris Budern progressed the idea of body as the materiality towards “physical exertion and concentration beyond the bonds of normal endurance” in his 5 Day Locker Piece (1971), where he confined himself in the tiny college locker for five days only with the supply of water through the tube. Budern was pushing the limitation of the body’s capability. This idea of using the body as a material and experimenting its potential resulted from the traditional norms of visual arts, for we hardly see this kind of relationship with the body in avant-garde