The long line of visitors to see One With Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection at the Hirshhorn makes me wonder. What are they looking for? A taste of eternity? An artsy surrounding for another selfie? After a two-year wait to open, the abbreviated version of the previous exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors in 2017 is significant due to the selection of works which feature the artist's iconic symbols including phalluses, dots, pumpkin, and span her practice with two infinity rooms recently acquired by the museum.
Born in Japan, Yayoi Kusama lived through a traumatic childhood and relates her art to the psychological traumas she was exposed to as a child. She moved to New York City in the early sixties where she enlivened the art scene with her provocative happenings, writings, photographs, installations, overall being fashionably outrageous among her peers, with wit, determination and passion. Upon her return to Japan in the seventies, her fame dwindled while she checked herself into a facility for mentally ill persons permanently. However, she never stopped working in her studio located nearby and since the eighties her career has flourished, bringing her international recognition. Now in her nineties, she is still active as an artist.
The first work, Pumpkin, 2016, is more than an outsized yellow gourd with a patterned black dotted exoskeleton sitting comfortably on its wide saggy base. It is a quiet presence in the middle of a square orange colored room including floor and ceiling, decorated with dizzying black dots of various sizes. The fiberglass sculpture coated with enamel, symbol of serenity amidst an hallucinatory world filled with black dots, hints at the artist's longing, and ultimately represents an ideal self-portrait.
Chatting, looking at their cell phone while waiting to enter Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli's Field, 1965/2017, visitors seem to ignore the rousing poem from Kusama addressed "To the Whole World" and the texts about the artist and her works spread on the red walls of an antechamber-like space. With the last line still in my mind ("Revolutionist of the world by Art"), I walk in the installation: door closes... thirty seconds. The guard has a chronometer. Floating on a thick carpet of white phalli decorated with red dots like corals on a seabed, hundreds of me reflect in the mirrors, getting smaller and smaller until they fade in a black spot, lost in the void of infinity. Surrounded by "myselves" I try to capture this intense stolen moment which I expect to be otherworldly, transcendent, sublime. Time for one or two unavoidable selfies and... out. Still somewhat discombobulated, I regain my footing back in line, ready for the next room.
"Infinity Mirrored Room- My Heart is Dancing into the Universe", 2018, offers a walk through a small dark space filled with black paper lanterns illuminated by colored lights shining through translucent holes. Immersed in waves of blue, violet, red, orange, yellow, green,... a cacophony of colors glowing through dots of all sizes, I feel like experiencing a psychedelic nightmare or looking at a broken kaleidoscope. I hesitate to take a step forward, confused, my rods and cones in disarray, even the floor reflecting the lights appears uneven. Two minutes... time is up. Close to an attack of claustrophobia, I leave the kinetic light show and reach the last room where a metallic dark coat covered with plastic roses set on a hanger is the only piece on a white wall. The monochrome sculpture, a sort of relic, evokes Kusama's episodes of hallucinations. The anticlimactic finale to the short exhibition is not the end of the visit which reverberates long after.
In line with the flow of visitors there is little time to meditate! Getting a whiff of infinity at best, the viewer transformed into a consumer may feel frustrated but Kusama's work reaches beyond the museum. Inspired by her relentless fight with mental disease which has taken over her life, art has become the mean to conquer and share her fears, hallucinations, obsessions, and transcends a trivial design, a dot, to create a world of infinity and spirituality. Her practice reaches a large audience attracted by its pop art side and/or its otherworldly aspect. One of my unforgettable visit was at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy in the East of France where Fireflies on the Water, 2002, is a permanent installation. Without time constraint, alone, immersed in the quiet infinity mirrored room I connected with the artist who stated: "I felt as I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness."
photographs by the author:
"Pumpkin", 2016
"Infinity Mirror Room-My Heart is Dancing into the Universe", 2018
"Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli's Field", 1965/2017
