1000scientists:

Blood Piece by Yoko Ono

From Whitney Frank’s “Instructions for Destruction: Yoko Ono’s Performance Art”:

Painting with one’s own blood is simultaneously a deeply personal act, as the artist uses a foundational substance of life to paint, and an extremely violent act as death is the final stroke of the painting. Ono of course, did not intend for people to literally complete this instruction; but she herself originally composed Blood Piece with her pricked finger.

This piece also relates to Fluxus values and practice because with her instruction to paint with one’s own blood, Ono illuminates the absurdity of being so serious about art production that one is willing to die for it—a seriousness projected in Western modern art and the source of Fluxus’s counternarrative. Blood Piece is a macabre demonstration that shows how anyone can become an artist since the tools are already within each person. In this case, it is not natural talent running through an artist’s veins that makes them worthy of recognition, but rather the blood, a basic feature of life all humans share, is an artistic medium worth exploring.