Each according to her/his life style – on a white sofa fitted with wheels, in a shabby dinghy, or playfully in a portable pool like those invented by Andrea Zittel for personalised caravans in the nineties. We’re nomads, be it for pleasure or out of necessity. It’s a paradox, but despite the latest developments in electronic communication systems technology, instead of being induced to settle down our physical bodies seem to feel the urge, indeed the need, to be on the move more than ever before.
The simple fact is that every now and then we feel compelled to put a face to the messages we receive through these media.
A dwelling may even be thought of as a semi-mobile appendage, like the shell of a technological snail. The mobile homes of Atelier van Lieshout in the form of lorries or camper vans that conceal within their bellies a bed-chamber, a gun-room, a table for chemical experiments are an example. In this way wherever we may go we can take along with us the materialisation of our egos, our good qualities, fads, fancies, defects – the whole lot. After all, all it takes to turn the inside of a car into a dwelling is a plug and a power generator.
Even garments may be turned into dwellings, as recent research in the field of art has shown. Such is the case of the skirts in the form of ridge-tents invented by Lucy Horta. We’re once more in the hi-tech realm, often derived from extreme sports. Like for instance ultralight carbon fibres, the artificial fabrics used for making parachutes, the special zip fasteners and pockets applied to all parts of a space suit, that point the way to what will become commonplace in the future.

But are we just as confidently nomadic when it comes to our thought patterns?
Here, the going gets tough, especially since cracks and conspicuous identity losses have appeared in the edifice of that “parent company” commonly known as the “Western World”. The fact is that till yesterday we could move our bodies about without really ever departing from home.
Eating at McDonalds, going to the movies to see a Hollywood block-buster, donning a T-shirt, sleeping at the Hilton, and visiting a contemporary art museum in Tokyo or New York with more or less the same exhibits doesn’t change much in one’s familiar surroundings, wherever one may be, except perhaps the time zone. Knocking globalisation’s easy, but the short and simple of it is that the global business commuter is thankful for this sort of fare. It’s all comforting stuff that helps overcome the psychological jetlag.
But such uniformity is not at all so pervasive. The new China is proving impervious to our customs; India, Africa, South America are discovering a capacity for “doing their own thing” in many fields unthinkable till yesterday. It may all be great when one’s travelling as a tourist; how else could we gratify our throw-away adventure-lust? But when it comes to travelling for business, then it’s another matter altogether. When we’re not out on the make, what’s beyond our ken can stop being quaint and become terribly threatening and hard to cope with. It’s all very exciting at first but then a discomforting feeling sets in; we feel out of place and what’s different from the common fare gets to be irksome when not downright irritating.

It’s then that a place all to our own starts sounding like an interesting proposition.
Call it what you will: apprehension, world-weariness, or simply a yearning for something staid and steady. A solitary weekend in a house in the country may suffice.
Otherwise, as for John Turrel, the crater of an extinct volcano in the middle of the desert purchased from native-Americans and turned into a peaceful hideaway accessible
only by helicopter may be the answer. They say it’ll be completed over the next year.
Inside it’s already been appointed. It’s meaning, though, is clear: the key to being a nomad without wanting to take over the world is to build up an inner sense of independence and balance. Travel can be addictive and change a source of overwhelming anxiety. Having a pole star to take one’s bearings by from time to time, firmly feeling the ground under one’s feet, seeking one’s own direction can help in avoiding such extremes.

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

In the digital era self portraiture enables anyone to produce a work of art instinctively, without knowing anything about photography. I have been using this technique for several years, with children, adolescents and adults from all walks of life, helping them to make self portraits using my own camera, or letting them use their own small digital cameras or cell phones. Everyone, as they release the shutter, expresses an innate determination to affirm their existence, their awareness, even if unconscious, that they are making art.

A photographic work of art as I understand it is an image that encompasses multiple and sometimes contrasting meanings: it deals intimately with the human condition, it contains a rich diversity of stimuli to thought and feeling, it has a special relationship with time… all within a single harmonious configuration of visual and formal elements.

Facing the camera lens can be an opportunity for a unique experience and a deep non-verbal dialogue. The human eye scrutinises the mechanical eye, gazing into the bottomless pit in search of an image that captures our vision of our self. It looks both inwardly and at the outside world, present and future.

Through the act of looking, the self portraitist acquires a triple identity: author, subject and spectator at one and the same time, and it is this which gives the self portrait its communicative power. The author draws the attention of the spectator, as though whispering in their ear “this concerns you”. We are invited to immerse ourselves in the intricate dynamic of identities and relations between the three roles, an exchange which ensures the author’s immortality in the hearts and minds of posterity. The self portraitist possesses an intrinsic power and freedom of action which is akin to that of the gods. As Michel Tournier has said, the self portrait is the only possible image of the creator (and his gaze) at the very moment of creation.

Following Rembrandt and Van Gogh, more and more people today feel a strong urge towards self representation, to leave a lasting image of themselves which will outlive them. This need may be felt more urgently at certain moments of our lives when our identity is in question, or it may respond to the deeper compulsion of the artist who, as Bob Dylan says, is in a constant state of becoming. The self portrait is also a particularly potent way of expressing problematic feelings and emotions. By objectifying “the bad” in a photograph, we separate ourselves from what we dislike and open up a space for catharsis or renewal. The barriers to our essential being fall away.

Besides looking inside, every self portrait is always a form of performance. It is impossible to construct one’s own image unselfconsciously. All our action, our acting, is inevitably mediated by how we want others to see us. Yet there remains a space, an intense inner dialogue of perception, thought, judgement and acceptance which I believe is independent of the other’s gaze. It is a wonderfully powerful process which needs no words because the work itself contains everything and has no need to be translated to hit the target.

Performance also means stepping outside of oneself, imagining oneself as someone else, as in the work of the young Japanese artist Tomolo Sawada whose ID 400 presents passport photos of herself as four hundred different women. “Here is the astonishing plasticity of the ego”, as Stefano Ferrari points out in his book, Lo Specchio dell’Io – autoritratto e psicologia (Ed. Laterza), “the Promethean need to be and to try everything… to identify oneself with new personalities, to become the other”. And again, “this drive, this urge to recognise and express the multiplicity of identities which coexist within each of us is a defining characteristic of our times”.

Many of us fear the camera lens. In most cases I believe this stems from a problematic relationship with our own image, the gap between how we see ourselves (which remains more or less unchanged from adolescence or infancy) and the image which we see in the mirror. For Barthes photography neither represents nor reflects reality, rather it gives it meaning. We are not our self portrait, we are much more. That is what makes the self portrait such a valuable tool in reuniting our inner and outer images, a way of using our actual bodies and faces to discover our real selves.

To complete the process, however, it is necessary (I would say indispensable) to communicate this discovery to others. The artist, by his constant effort of introspection, separates himself from the outside world, and this is often the root of his existential suffering. By intimately sharing his work with an audience he has the chance to free himself from the confines of the ego and, as in Zen, become one with the cosmos.