Yoko Ono | Self Portrait

Yoko Ono

Self Portrait

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

envelope: 6.2 x 10.8 cm; mirror: 4.9 x 5 cm.

Edition size unknown

Yoko Ono's contribution to Fluxus 1 is an envelope stamped with her name and the title, which contains a metal mirror. It's a self-portrait not of the artist, but of the reader/viewer. 

The work is vastly improved in later box editions when it is retitled Box of Smile. Here the viewer also completes the piece (literally, with their image) but the act of opening the box and looking in only to see your face invariably prompts a smile from all but the most cynical of participants. The idea that you might close the box and it permanently house your smile is similar to many of the fanciful notions in her artist book Grapefruit, such as "Imagine the clouds dripping Dig a hole in your garden to put them in."

Ono produced a black, white and clear version of Box of Smile through Fluxus (and later ReFlux) as well as smaller editions that have served as gifts over the years. 

“When you go to hotels or somewhere like that, they always have a mirror, but the mirror doesn’t really reflect you. It just suggests, like an airbrush thing of you. And if you keep looking at what you see in that mirror, then you can’t really deal with your real face… You have to break the mirror, but you also have to see the mirror. You have to have that dichotomy constantly. If we don’t have that dichotomy, then we become sort of two-dimensional. We become like a painting, not a person.”

– Yoko Ono, Interview Magazine, November 26, 2013