Touch Me

As an associate of the Fluxus movement during the 1960s, Yoko Ono staged provocative performance events that encouraged audience participation, such as her Cut Piece (1964) in which audience members were asked to snip away pieces of Ono’s clothing until she was left naked. Ono has continued to promote interactivity in her later works. In Touch Me, Ono instructs the participant to “add [a] colour painting” to the blank canvas, and then invites him or her to touch its painted surface through the text-shaped openings in the plexi layer. Touch Me playfully addresses the taboo nature of touch in an art museum setting.