Viewing \u201cCut Piece\u201d now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago \u2014 that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren\u2019t paid or treated as such \u2014 is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, \u201970s and early \u201980s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical \u2014 certainly for its era but even now.<\/p>\n
In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously \u201coverlooked.\u201d Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited \u2014 artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though \u201coverlooked\u201d is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The \u201crediscovery-industrial complex,\u201d as it\u2019s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work \u2014 what Schneemann called the \u201cconsidered disregard for the comfort of the audience\u201d \u2014 but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.<\/p>\n
Ono, who has a new exhibition, \u201cYoko Ono: Music of the Mind<\/a>,\u201d opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month, is at the center of this reassessment, but she\u2019s not alone. In July, London\u2019s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective<\/a> of the work of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter\u2019s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, \u201cAna Mendieta: Back to the Source<\/a>,\u201d left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.<\/p>\n Also this spring, Abramovi\u0107, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working \u2014 for \u201cThe Artist Is Present\u201d at MoMA in 2010, she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit \u2014 is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell\u2019Accademia in Venice, the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her \u201cBalkan Erotic Epic,\u201d a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York\u2019s Park Avenue Armory in December.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Viewing \u201cCut Piece\u201d now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[85270,1149,85274,85266,85267,61314,85268,85269,9,24,55,54,56,85271,38796,85273,85265,54385,85272],"class_list":["post-216234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-ana-1948-85","tag-art","tag-carolee","tag-finley","tag-karen","tag-lee","tag-lozano","tag-mendieta","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-ono","tag-performance-art","tag-schneemann","tag-tsummertravel2026","tag-womens-rights","tag-yoko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}