Tag: sky

Yoko Ono. Morning Piece. 1964. Glass, paper, ink, and glue, dimensions vary. Private collection. © 2015 Yoko Ono

In 1965 Morning Piece was performed over three days on the roof of Ono’s apartment building at 87 Christopher Street. Like many of her early works, Morning Piece originated as an instruction with the potential to be realized by the artist or others. To perform the work, Ono attached small pieces of paper to shards of glass and sold them to participants. Each specified a future date and a particular period of the morning, namely “until sunrise,” “after sunrise,” or “all morning.” She conceived Morning Piece while she was living in Japan in 1964 and held several performances—at her apartment, on the roof of a gallery, in a park—selling mornings and informing buyers, “You can see the sky through it.” It is through the changing sky, a dominant motif in Ono’s work, that a morning is experienced. The work offers the buyer the possibility of possessing an intangible, universally shared, and infinitely repeating feature of human life: a morning. The artist views sunrise as an opportunity for renewal and reflection and she encourages participants in Morning Piece to use their glass morning as a vehicle for meditation and contemplation.