‘A frightening piece to perform’: can Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece still shock?

Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los Angeles Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a traveling retrospective on view at Los Angeles’s The Broad museum, features black and white footage of Ono’s 1964 Carnegie Hall performance of Cut Piece projected onto one of its walls. It was a landmark event in performance art history, in which the artist, aged 31, sat motionless on the stage as strangers took turns with a pair of scissors to cut away…