An infinite lineup for a 20-second snapshot
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama a prophet for our age of narcissism
At the Venice Biennale in 1966, a 36-year-old Yayoi Kusama installed 1,500 mirror-sheen orbs on a small patch of grass. Nearby, she had planted a sign that read “Your narcissism for sale,” at $2 per sphere — the idea being that self-regard had become enough of a hallmark of the Me generation to merit a custom-made souvenir.
She called it “Narcissus Garden,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it as the Kusama train rolled into the Art Gallery of Ontario this week, bringing with it the collective aspirations of tens of thousands of local Instagram accounts. At long last and after much hype, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” opens to the public on Saturday.
Kusama’s work has radically evolved, most famously into a series of “Infinity Rooms,” small-scale cubes fitted with mirrors on all sides meant to create the illusion of endlessness.
Looking at what’s become of them in the smartphone era, it could readily appear as though, between 1966 and now, nothing much has changed at all.
Rightsized for an audience of one, the six Infinity Rooms here seem custom-tailored to selfie-seeking Instagram addicts. And so, a 52-year circle closes. In this era of the unquashable look-at-me hysteria that the social-media sphere has wrought, self-absorption is a different beast only by matter of technology and degree.
“Narcissus Garden” is here, too, in a secondfloor gallery, splayed out in shimmering swaths
on a bare concrete floor. It’s a nice formal counterpoint — maximal, meet minimal — but I like to think it’s more than that, intentional or not.
The piece, out in the general-admission zone, is surely here to at least partly placate the many thousands who ended up marooned online in a virtual ticket queue for 12 hours or more, only to log off emptyhanded.
But it’s also a sly reminder of one of the artist’s central critiques. Intensively introspective — the Infinity Rooms are not your playground, but her imagined escape into a transcendent eternity — her work has recently been bent by a burgeoning new audience into backdrops for blithe self-amplification. On Instagram, for instance, the hashtag #kusama yields 100,000 hits and growing.
Put another way, those joining the selfie parade either aren’t getting it or just don’t care. At a media preview at the AGO this week, I asked curator Mika Yoshitake, who built the show for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., whether she was concerned that the show might be taken as little more than a six-ring selfie circus.
“Yes!” she blurted, with no hesitation. “I was worried about the funhouse interpretation becoming a dominant factor, absolutely. But the show does try to recontextualize her in a way.”
As we spoke, we stood in a small gallery space tucked off to the side filled with bits and pieces of Kusama’s long history. Photographs of Kusama’s radical late 1960s “happenings,” in which she asked subjects to strip naked to be festooned with painton polka dots; or a vitrine of early photographs and journal entries giving a view into Kusama’s troubled mind, help to give the exhibition depth and shape.
“I am always standing in the middle of the obsession against the passionate accumulation of and repetition inside of me,” she wrote in a 1961 essay, “and am lost in this indescribable spell which is holding me.”
It’s worth noting that, in a media throng that numbered close to 100, this small gallery was completely empty. This is not what most had come to see.
Here’s where I start to worry. For all the depth of Kusama’s thinking and experience, the reductive glare of her biggest hits seems an irresistible lure for a surface skim. Kusama’s story is shot through with darkness and trauma, and her work charts a lifelong journey back to the light.
She was the youngest of four children in a home life filled with anger and resentment. Kusama was the favourite target of her mother’s rage, buried under routine bouts of emotional abuse. Her father registered his protest at the marriage by being absent, locked in a string of affairs. Her mother often sent Kusama, not yet 10 years old, to spy on her father’s trysts and report back with the gory details.
Constantly in distress, the young Kusama began experiencing vivid nightmares and waking hallucinations. Pumpkins, a favourite form to which she has always returned, began speaking to her at about age 10; she found solace in their curving forms, lightness in their peculiarity. Endless repetition — infinity is a concept that wires each Kusama work to the next — became, for her, a gesture of hope: an escape and assurance that this too shall pass.
You can see it clearly in each element of her work, which adorns each of the galleries outside the Infinity Rooms. Each has a roped-off, snaking lineup structure, like you might find at an airport check-in, or at Disneyland, to keep things orderly.
They’re holding tanks, to be blunt, that do their best to build context while viewers wait. And waiting will be the bulk of the visitor experience: each Infinity Room allows just 20 seconds per viewer, with an usher knocking on the door at 15.
It’s what I imagine to be a last laugh from an artist enthralled with the infinite. That’s barely enough time to focus and snap a pic before you’re ushered out. Most, I’m willing to bet, will see the spaces only through their smartphone screen.
In the galleries where visitors are lined up, rich foundational elements that situate Kusama in her proper place in art history abound. The show offers a selection of her “accumulation pieces,” including two big, vaguely oblong panels squirming with soft phallus-like protrusions, painted a shimmering silver. (Ennui, she calls them, from 1976; and yes, she’d readily agree, it’s part of her working out a terror of the male body and sex more generally.)
A handful of her “Infinity Net” paintings, reaching back to the 1950s, show that her fascination with the endless is not a new notion in her purview, whatever Instagram may think, but a lifelong obsession.
As for the Infinity Rooms themselves, they’re largely underwhelming — you stand on a step, not able to move much — though, given the buildup, how could they be anything but? Most will likely burn their 20 seconds taking a picture — that knock on the door comes quickly — and miss seeing anything with their own eyes. Those who missed out on the ticket frenzy can take heart: what you see on Instagram is more or less what those longliners got anyway.
There’s an opportunity here; though in the rush for Insta-ready snapshots it seems destined to be missed. In an image from Kusama’s “Rooftop Performance,” from 1970, naked, paint-splattered bodies negotiate with a New York City police officer while Kusama — fully clothed — whips her hair backward in a wild gesture of freedom.
Nearby, “The Souls of Millions Light Years Away” entertained its requisite lineup: 20 seconds in, 20 seconds out. It’s easy to see them as disconnected, but that’s just Instagram talking. The performances tried to do on the ground what the rooms attempt on a higher plane: soften difference into belonging, the many becoming a universal one.
“The performances were about having people strip down and not see each other as different,” Yoshitake explained.
They gestured toward an ideal, where the particulars of self merged into something greater.
As she approaches her 89th birthday, Kusama’s mortality looms and her journey to the infinite creeps closer.
For those left here on Earth with a brief glimpse into her otherworldly creations, our boundless obsession with ourselves keeps us anchored to the ground.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors continues at the AGO until May 27. A final release of tickets will be available online only to the public March 6, with a final block for members on March 20. See ago.ca for details.