Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los AngelesYoko 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 pieces of her clothing. As an emblem of the Fluxus artistic tradition, Cut Piece “relies on the audience’s actions to complete the performance”, says Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad. This is precisely the work’s inherent risk: it leaves the artist’s body totally vulnerable to the viewer’s unpredictable whims. Consequently, as Ono herself told the art historian Ina Blom in a 1992 interview, “It is a frightening piece to perform.”The tension in the footage is palpable, partic...