Spring has come early in Washington, DC, and not just in the form of an unusually warm February that led Bougie SoulCycle friends to raid neighborhood wine stores for their rosé stocks. No, spring has arrived at the Hirshhorn Museum, with polka dots, twinkling lights and glowing pumpkins in the shape of one of the largest Yayoi Kusama exhibitions that ever started this Thursday.
There is perhaps no greater attraction for a museum around the world than the 87-year-old Japanese wonder Yayoi Kusama. A retrospective of her work broke visitor records in Latin America and Asia back in 2013, and the permanent installation of one of her Infinity Mirrored Rooms on Broad in Los Angeles ensures around-the-clock lines every day of the week.
This blockbuster exhibition titled Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors shows a whopping six of her Infinity Mirror Rooms as well as more than 60 other works by the artist. This is the largest number of infinity mirror rooms that have ever been in the same place at the same time. These mirror rooms made of twinkling lights, glowing pumpkins or psychedelic geometric light patterns have become cultural sensations over the years, especially with the advent of Instagram. There is perhaps no better evidence of the power of this social media platform in relation to Kusama’s work than Adele, using footage of Broad’s Infinity Mirrored Room after seeing it on Katy Perry’s Instagram.
For the uninitiated, standing alone in one of their rooms can be a truly moving experience – imagine being in a real-life version of the afterlife in The OA. And given the capital city has been overwhelmed for the past month, a few minutes of otherworldly bliss feels right.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929 and grew up in a family that owned a nursery and seed farm. Very early in her childhood, Kusama suffered from hallucinations and relationships with her parents were strained – her father was unfaithful and her mother abusive. As anyone lucky enough to see the 2012 retrospective of her work on the Whitney, she pushed herself into surrealism and abstraction as an art student in Kyoto, constantly pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for a woman of her time. In 1957 Kusama traveled to the USA, first to Seattle for a year and then to New York City, where her career began despite a predominantly sexist art scene.
In the new Hirshhorn exhibition, her works on paper from Japan and her early works in New York give an enormous insight into the artist’s lifelong attempt to create the feeling of limitlessness – to extinguish the senses. Her 1960s Infinity Nets Yellow is a fascinating example of this, with a honeycomb of yellow and black surrounding the canvas. In the 1960s, Kusama also began creating her accumulation “Soft Sculptures” – filled phalluses that she attached to furniture to support her fear of sex. Some are emasculated in this form and covered with spots or bright colors. Others, like the ones painted silver for their 1963 armchair, actually look more threatening.
Eventually, finding that the physical requirements of creating her accumulation sculptures were strenuous, Kusama experimented with using mirrors to achieve the level of repetition she wanted – and the art world has never been the same.
Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field was their first Infinity Mirror Room in 1965 and the first visitors will be seen in the exhibition. A floor speckled with white phalluses with red spots is reflected in all directions by the surrounding mirrors. And while viewers can’t recreate that iconic shot of Kusama in a red romper leaning on the phalluses, you still have 30 seconds to be surrounded by spotted penises for as far as the eye can see.
Nearby (as the exhibition is largely in chronological order) is the closest of Kusama’s mirrored rooms, the psychedelic Infinity Mirrored Room – Love Forever; A hexagonal room with flashing geometric patterns, which is viewed through a peephole and replicates the mirror room of the Endless Love Show, in which she staged group performances in the 1960s.
Performances have been a big part of Kusama’s success in New York, and the exhibition will bring hope to eccentric performance artists around the world. Part of it is dedicated to Kusama’s nude body festivals, where she covered naked dancers with dots to protest the Vietnam War. Her colorful and provocative presentations made her a photographer’s dream. Their 1969 Grand Orgy to raise the dead in the fountain in the MoMA Sculpture Garden made the front page of the New York Daily News.
But as the frenzy of the ’60s turned into the’ 70s, Kusama – and her health – got lost. In 1973 she retired to Japan and in 1977 moved to a mental hospital where she still lives. She and her work would be forgotten in the West for the next decade and a half, until she returned to the public consciousness at the 1993 Venice Biennale, which represented Japan.
This exhibition features some of her work from her time in exile, including the heart-wrenching collage Soul Going Back Home from 1975, which was part of a series honoring her recently deceased friend, Joseph Cornell.
The exhibition continues to work its way through its various pieces, including the bubbly Dots Obsession – Love Transformed in Dots (a room made up of giant pink bubbles with black dots, one of which has a mirror room you can walk into and which is filled with inflated bubbles, another with a peephole for a mirrored chamber made of metal balls) and My Eternal Soul (a series of paintings that began in 2009 and deal with color and death). But the reasons the timed tickets continue to gobble up (the first two weeks have already passed) and the lines will likely fill the sidewalk along Independence Avenue is because of the three recent show-stopper mirror rooms that Kusama has used LED environments . The first is Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, her installation from 2013, which caused a sensation at the David Zwirner Gallery with its sparkling rainbow of LED lamps and found a permanent home at The Broad. The last mirror room is the Infinity Mirrored Room – All the eternal love I have for the pumpkins. It contains bright yellow pumpkins (a recurring item in her work) covered with black polka dots of various sizes.
But it is the middle mirror room that stands out. Annihilation – that feeling of nothingness, especially when it comes to death – is a main theme of Kusama’s work, and what I’ve come closest to in one of her installations over the years is the aptly titled aftermath of the annihilation of the Eternity.
A mirrored black space creates a seemingly endless black nothing, and then with a flicker an infinite number of golden cylindrical lanterns come to life, piercing the darkness and creating a moment of peace. Kusama was inspired by the Japanese tradition of Tōrō nagashi, in which paper lanterns are sent down a river to guide the ancestral spirits to where they will rest.
Given the number of mirrored rooms and the fact that the exhibit won’t go to New York City (it will travel to Seattle, Los Angeles, Ontario, Cleveland, and Atlanta), this exhibit is likely one of the largest in Washington. DC has seen it for a while. In a museum world where the spectacular is the biggest draw (see Renwick reopening last year or The Beach of the National Building Museum), the Hirshhorn may have just played a royal flush.
Given the expected number of visitors, the final piece of the exhibition (another of her works that caused a stir at Zwirner) is likely to be a delight. The Obliteration Room is a room in which everything – all furniture, fixtures and the floor – is painted white. Each visitor to the exhibition is given a series of stickers that over time will transform the space into an explosion of polka dots.
“Lose yourself in the timeless flow of eternity,” Kusama once wrote to President Richard Nixon. “Anatomical explosions are better than atomic explosions.” It’s hard not to read this and see it as anything other than gossiping naive. Kusama says she wants young people to “fight with all their might” and “drive our society towards a better future and a world of peace”. However, there is something about Kusama’s work that seems a little wishful thinking given the global situation. The world she creates is a world in which harsh realities and complications are papered, painted and blinded – where the struggle of reality is literally forgotten.
But in this time of bitter disenchantment, I’ll take anything that makes people smile.
Comments are closed.