Review: Yoko Ono's 'Cut Piece' has lost little of its cutting urgency

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Set us as preferred The Broad’s “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” is more mind than music.She opens your mind; you make the music.

Look into an empty “Box of Smile” and maybe you will.“Give Peace a Chance” — of course.She breaks, and she mends, and not just your mind.

Something tells me the Broad won’t go along with Ono’s “Collecting Piece II” from 1963, which has the following instructions: “Break a contemporary museum into pieces with the means you have chosen.Collect the pieces and put it together with glue.”That’s a smile piece, too, although Ono looks all business holding a crystalline hammer on the catalog cover photo.

I still smile when I recall how her piece for an orchestra that asks the players to bang their heads against a stage wall utterly delighted an audience and musicians at a performance in New York.Only Ono remained deadpan.There were more smiles Saturday evening when The Broad, in collaboration with REDCAT across the street, presented a program of two Ono performance pieces.

It began with six members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra playing Boccherini’s First Sextet.This happens to be the first work ever written for pairs of violins, violas and cellos, as an expression of freedom that, in 1776, felt revolutionary.Perhaps that is why LACO chose the Italian composer to represent a contemporary revolutionary artist in the wake of our 250th July 4.

The actual piece being performed was Ono’s “Sky Piece for Jesus Christ,” in which she instructs an orchestra, whatever size (although she tended to like something larger than a sextet), to begin by playing a work, say, by Mozart.It doesn’t much matter what is chosen, because at the premiere in a 1965 Fluxus concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, Ono and a couple of colleagues crept on stage and began wrapping the musicians in ga...