Yoko Ono, 1965
After the dark germination of Redon's seedling, we arrive at a question. Something has begun to grow inside you. But what? And who are you, now that it's there?
This is a self-portrait of Yoko Ono. But Yoko Ono is not in it. Instead, there's a mirror. A small, cheap, metal mirror tucked inside a brown paper envelope that's been stamped with ink and scribbled on in pencil.
When you open the envelope and look into the mirror, you see your face. Not hers. Yours. Which means that Yoko Ono's self-portrait is actually a portrait of whoever is looking at it. Including you.
This is what the Fluxus artists did in the 1960s — they made art out of instructions, jokes, ordinary objects, and ideas. They believed that art didn't have to be precious or permanent. It could be a gesture. A thought. A mirror in an envelope.
Ono made this work the same year she published her book Grapefruit, which was full of instruction pieces like "Draw a map to get lost" and "Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in." Art as a set of possibilities. Art as something you complete in your mind.
So when she makes a self-portrait that's actually a mirror, she's asking: What is a self? Is it fixed? Is it something you own? Or is it something that changes depending on who's looking, who's asking, what moment you're in?
We've moved through separation, fragility, fusion, ashes, and germination. You've been watching other people's images of loneliness and connection and transformation. But now — now — Ono hands you a mirror and says: your turn.
Who do you see?
The self-portrait with no self in it
The artist disappears. The viewer becomes the subject. The boundary dissolves. Which is, in a way, the perfect answer to the question that started this tour: What does loneliness look like when two people stand side by side?
If you were to open that envelope and look into that mirror right now — after everything you've been through — who would you see?
Not your face. But who you are. The person who stood on that shore with Munch's lonely figures. Who held Bourgeois's fragile rings. Who dissolved into the kiss and woke up in the ashes and watched something small begin to grow again. Who are you, after all of that?