Becoming the Artist: A Literature Review Examining Spectatorship of Yoko Ono’s Performance Pieces

Abstract

This research paper examines the role, appearance, and effect on the work’s completeness of audience in performing arts, which is a genre that challenges conventional definitions of art such as painting and sculpture, and often involves hybrid performance works.

Particularly, this paper will analyze the three representative pieces, including "Sky Piece to Jesus Christ" (1965) where members of an orchestra are wrapped in gauze bandages during a concert and thus forced to stop playing their instruments, while audiences are commanded to produce noise in this process. The "Instruction Paintings" series (1961) where audiences were encouraged to complete the pieces in this art series by adhering to the given instructions. In “Cut Piece” (1965), in this work audience members are invited to take a tiny piece of the performer’s, Ono, garment with them by cutting it off. of Yoko Ono between 1960 and 1970. Yoko Ono was an inventive practitioner of conceptual and performance art in the 1960s. In her artworks, she has experimented with the effect of audiences on the message of performing art displayed through several techniques. This includes utilizing imperative instructions in her work that achieve the use of sending invitations to audiences for contribution to the performance of the art. This blurs the line between artist and audience and evokes an opposition to the traditional definition of audience in arts, where the actions involved are limited to viewing, hearing, reading, and listening.