THE
WASHINGTON
POST
.
FRIDAY,APRIL
1, 2022
EZ
14
Five years later, the conditions that set
up Kusama’s work for success have
changed. From the Museum of Ice Cream
to immersive Van Gogh experiences, Insta-
gram-ready installations have become a
cottage industry — attempting to mimic
Kusama’s appeal for profit, but with a
small fraction of her artistic flair. The
social media that fueled the Kusama craze
has taken a darker turn, with Instagram at
the center of conversations about mental
health and the wider realization that
looking into dizzying reflections of our-
selves and our desires through online
algorithms can be more distorting than
dazzling.
There’s an argument that Kusama’s
rooms might be even more appealing to-
day. The maximalist aesthetic of the artist’s
classic works only grew in popularity dur-
ing the pandemic. And after two yearsduring which many of us found ourselves
confined to our homes, looking at four
walls that seem to unfurl into an ever-re-
ceding horizon can seem almost poetic, like
a symbolic release.
So it’s tempting to wonder: Will the
Hirshhorn be able to woo visitors with
Kusama 2.0? From the first room in the
show — which features just the single,
quiet drawing “The Hill” — it’s clear that
this exhibition isn’t out to wow but to pull
us into Kusama’s inner world. From her
massive, fiber-reinforced plastic pumpkin,
which has been placed in a new polka dot
room, to a sculpture of a coat that seems
overgrown with playful flowers, each work
is rich with the distinctive touch of the
self-anointed high priestess of polka dots.
With her show opening this weekend,
here’s our guide to “Eternity,” and ways to
think about Kusama’s art.T OP: Visitors examine photographs of artist Yayoi Kusama, part of the exhibition “One With
Sculpture Garden in Washington. ABOVE LEFT: Nikki Oka stands in one of two “ Infinity Mir
exhibition, which also includes sculptures, an early painting and photographs of the artist. “OKusama as performance art
When you enter the “Infinity Mirror”
rooms “Phalli’s Field” or “My Heart Is
Dancing Into the Universe” and take out
your phone, you’re tapping into ideas long
active in Kusama’s work. Success has
sanitized her, but before Kusama became
a household name, she was a performance
artist. She burned American flags to pro-
test the Vietnam War and hosted parties
at which naked people covered each other
in polka dots. For one of Kusama’s early
performance pieces — a critique of com-
modification in art — she stood outside
the Italian Pavilion at the 1966 Venice
Biennale and sold 1,500 plastic mirror
balls for $2, in front of a sign that read,
“Your Narcissism for Sale.” Today, we’re
still buying what she’s selling. In a clever
sleight of hand, she has conscripted us in
an ongoing, collaborative performance
piece, tricked us into supporting a career-
long commentary on narcissism. Much
like social media, where we think we are
receiving a service but really we’re being
sold, we, the narcissists, might just be
Kusama’s product — with every photo we
post a brushstroke on her ever-expanding
canvas.Kusama as obliteration of the self
Beneath the surface of Kusama’s eye-
popping art, you’ll find a methodical,
meditative practice. In the Hirshhorn
show, you can see it in the meticulous,
hand-stitched plush sculptures of “Phal-
li’s Field” or in the dots that line “The
Hill,” one of 5,000 works on paper Kusa-
ma made in the 1950s. Implicit in her
work is a quiet tedium, a thankless
process, an accumulation of “meaning-
lessness” that Kusama has said brings her
closer to the profound. For the artist, who
had a difficult childhood in Japan during
World War II, repetition became a kind of
escape. Some scholars believe her polka
dot motif may have been born at a river
she retreated to near her childhood
home. There, she saw millions of white
stones, prompting what she called “a
mysterious vision” in which the stones
“confirm[ed] their ‘being’ one by one
under the glistening sun.” Throughout
her life, she has experienced similar
visions, where shapes multiply and blotout her surroundings. The sculpture
“Flowers — Overcoat” recalls another
vision: one in which the rich, red flowers
of a patterned tablecloth appear to have
filled the space around her. She described
feeling restored, “returned to infinity,”
her “soul obliterated.” In a world of
information overload, her repeating visu-
als appear like a mantra, an immensity
you can grasp.Kusama as connection
When Kusama made “Phalli’s Field,”
her first mirror room, she hoped the
viewer would “experience their own fig-
ures and movements as part of the
sculpture.” Inside the work, the lighting
is so unforgivingly bright, you feel every
pore on your skin illuminated. Here,
phallic forms grow like weeds, toppling
over each other, handicapped by their
abundance. Standing above them, your
figure deteriorates into the mirrored
distance, leaving you acutely aware that
you too are no more than an assemblage
of tangled, gooey organic shapes. In “My
Heart Is Dancing Into the Universe”
(2018), you follow a dark pathway around
polka dot lanterns, lulled along by shift-
ing colors. The boundary between the
floor, the walls and the ceiling seems to
melt. Interrupted by the floating lan-
terns, your figure becomes a hallucina-
tion, akin to a fickle mirage in water. For
Kusama, the depersonalization experi-
enced in these rooms has a moral signifi-
cance. In a Vietnam-era letter to Presi-
dent Richard M. Nixon, Kusama suggest-
ed art as a way to nonviolence. “Lose
yourself in the timeless stream of eterni-
ty,” she wrote. “Self-obliteration points
out the way. Kusama will show you how
by covering your body with polka dots.”
The artist believed that through radical
repetition, we could rid ourselves of ego
and become connected to a greater whole.
Modesty was essential in Kusama’s view:
It was even the reason she loved pump-
kins, which she called “humble and
amusing.” So while we stand in her
mirrored rooms, we might consider that
we are just one of many. In Kusama’s
excess, there is a reminder that, as she put
it, “Our Earth is only one polka dot among
a million stars in the cosmos.”From the Cover