(...) But maybe the most fascinating aspect of Cut Piece lies in the forensic audiovisuality of the Maysles Brothers’s film documentation. Unlike photographic documentation which always makes Performance Art appear better than it probably is, the film excerpts of the Carnegie Hall performance not only document the hesitant, nervous, clumsy, and self-conscious venturing of the audience into Ono’s demarcated zone of selfhood but also the disconnected chatter, noise, and levity of the audience. No reverent solemn event, this Fluxus-aligned, pseudo-Zen text enactment elicits an overcompensating response to the work’s confrontational elision. It uncannily sounds like gonzo porn video, as voices audibly joke about the intimidating actions they perpetrate. The same year, Ono appeared in Michael Finlay’s bizarre and seedy “adult film” Satan’s Bed (1965), in which she plays a Japanese mail-order bride who is kidnapped to force her immigration department husband to continue allowing drugs from Asia to be smuggled into New York for a drug syndicate. The film features shots of Ono modestly in the shower or attired in a nightgown, unable to speak English, ordered and shuttled onscreen like a package caught in transit, raped and ravaged off-screen. At one point she dresses in a white kimono in an attempt to get her captor drunk to escape from the apartment and sits cross-legged at his feet, serving him sake, after which he ravages her. One wonders if this rarely-cited element of Ono’s multifarious cultural output is silently intoned in Cut Piece’s simmering implication of violence.