Cut Piece has become the central performance of Yoko Ono's oeuvre and, although it has solidified her status within feminist art history, Ono's complex relationship to race and nation has rarely been commented upon. This paper excavates the international cultural circumstances in which "Cut Piece" was performed in order to elucidate the ways it functioned as a working-through of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ono's artistic production of the mid-1960s can be seen as a series of gestures of atomic memorialization that activate the rhetoric of the gift. This reading not only resituates Ono's work among a specifically polemical, post-war art-historical context, but also expands the range of its feminist scope.
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