Yayoi Kusama

executed in 2006

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Yayoi Kusama: Eight Places for Burning Soul, February-April 2005, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue, pp. 18-20 (similar work)
New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Yayoi Kusama, October-November 2006
Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, YAYOI KUSAMA: Flowers that Bloom at Midnight, May-July 2009 (similar work)
Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture, May 2009- April 2010 (similar work)

There are minute marks on the base surface within the mirror box. On one exterior side surface, a little to the left of the midpoint of its lower edge, there is a small crescent crack. Otherwise the work is in good condition overall.
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This work is unique. Yayoi Kusama plans to make a total of ten variations on this work.  Eight have been created thus far between the years 2005 and 2007, one of which has already been accessioned into the Tate Collection.

 

"I had a desire to prophecy and measure the infinity of the boundless universe..."

Yayoi Kusama

 

                The looming stature achieved by Yayoi Kusama both as something of a national treasure in her homeland of Japan and as one of the most influential figures in the Eurocentric modern and contemporary history of art is, in no small measure, a gargantuan feat.  The sheer number of large retrospectives that have been held at prestigious art institutions in her honour over past decades is an evidentiary fact.  Much scholarly discourse and extensive investigation have precipitated as a result of her vast and prolific artistic career.  Every respectable monograph has conscientiously outlined her pivotal phase in New York during the 1960's and 70's, then proceeded to position the period as an indelible backdrop to her subsequent years back in Tokyo, thus paving the eventual way toward the artist's international recognition.  Her creative journey has spanned over the inception and flowering of many sweeping art movements, dominant schools of thought and a host of clever "ism's", yet despite earnest efforts by critics and art historians to subsume her work under one blanket term, Kusama's art categorically defies all classification.  Utterly unique, the artist's oeuvre has displayed a remarkable consistency since the very beginning.  A strict logic seems to govern the evolution of her art—an honest and raw expression of her inimitable life story and singular belief. 

 

                An aftermath of an unhappy and abused childhood, Yayoi Kusama's mental health has been permanently damaged.  The artist constantly teeters on the edge of suicide from being bombarded with intense hallucinations that obliterate the entire world surrounding her.  Unable to control her apparitions, Yayoi Kusama has therefore diverted these energies onto the very tangible, physical endeavour of creating art.  In fact, she capitalizes on her hallucinatory visions and channels them as motifs and patterns, thus bringing to existence her famed polka dots and infinity nets.  While Kusama consistently labours to invent new formats and diverse apparatuses with which to present her art, she has never ventured away from her signature dots or nets. 

An overarching survey of her body of work, however, betrays a yearning to breach limits and demolish boundaries.  Rigorous analyses of her oeuvre of work have routinely partitioned the development of her art into three general phases of expansion: the first being her Infinity Net paintings, the second her Accumulation series and finally her environments.  An apparent trend can be extrapolated where an ongoing proliferation is accomplished through greater and greater multiplication of identical forms.  Her Infinity Net paintings have consistently grown in size, from a single canvas to covering cover entire walls.  The burgeoning scale of these net paintings, however, reflected the confinement of a flat surface and the need to enter three-dimensionality.  The transition occurred naturally as a result of this impulse and gave way to Kusama's Accumulation series, where she covers entire rooms (including furniture and figures, etc.) with a sea of repeating soft sculptures or found objects. 

It was only a matter of time before the artist grew hungry for more.  It was in 1965, at the now defunct Castellane Gallery in New York City, where Kusama finally devised an ingenious way to engineer a presentation of her art that allows endless expansion.  Infinity Mirror Room, (figure 1) also commonly referred to as "Peep Show," is a large box with an interior covered entirely with mirrors.  The fabric phalli obscuring the ground can be perpetuated into oblivion.  A small hole proffers the only avenue into the hallowed space within, ensuring that a viewer should experience maximum visual effects.  A peep into the room envelops one into an all-encompassing imagery where one's reflection is caught floating above the phalli field below, together extending in all possible directions.  This very installation constitutes the prototype of Yayoi Kusama's environments.  In 1993, Yayoi Kusama's Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (figure 2) from the collection of Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo was recreated at the Japanese Pavilion of the 14^th Venice Biennale.  An enhanced rendition of its earliest predecessor, this box is not only covered with mirrors on its interior walls, but on its exterior walls as well.  Infinity is projected in every conceivable bearing. As a significant milestone in her artistic development, Kusama's "environment," manufactured through the apparatus of a mirror room, shall reappear in ever-changing designs at every one of her solo exhibitions thereinafter. 

 

                Yayoi Kusama's The Passing of Winter is a miniature presentation of the artist's infinite environment—it is a standing mirror room.  Building upon the line of thought that fostered the systematic maturation of Kusama's mirrored environments, this beautiful work epitomizes the realization of a theatrical visual experience through a startling economy of means.  A perfect cube is constructed out of six square surfaces.  Each of these six walls is made of mirrors inside as well as outside, out of which three circles of varying sizes are incised in seemingly arbitrary configurations.  The box is then buttressed from below by a criss-cross glass pedestal.  Together the main and supporting sections form a dignified piece of architecture, exuding a geometric harmony of clean lines and balanced angles.  A calculated precision characterizes the placement of the circles—one peeps in and is instantaneously immersed in a flawless vision of a million dots radiating from the center.  Some are dark and some are light, some are small and some are large; dots facing opposing directions overlap with each other, the total aggregation of which culminates in a magical "mandelic phenomenon."[1]

                In all its simplicity, The Passing of Winter manages to capture infinity within a finite space.  The cube as an object, is the reification of multiple dichotomies: the finite and the infinite, surface and depth, flatness and three-dimensionality, the round and the square and perhaps most intriguingly, the self and the other.  The mirror, in Michel Foucault's words, "functions as a heterotopia...it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there."[2]  The self is at once multiplied yet warped within this mirrored cosmos that dismantles all rules of perception.

                Making a concerted effort at escaping from her obsessions, Yayoi Kusama transposes onto her art her hallucinatory visions.  The artist's trademark motifs of infinite nets and endless dots, features which have been the axis of her creative spirit right from the very beginning, come together in this work.  As her audience, we are given the precious opportunity to peer into her phantasmal world, travel through her delirious consciousness and sense her very own existence. 

 

                Adorned with an exceptionally poetic title, The Passing of Winter collects all the thematic strands that run through the Yayoi Kusama brand of art.  It is as if the artist has never aged.  Still deploying her beloved dots replicated up to infinity, the work stands as a true fin-de-siècle expression of a legendary artistic existence.  It amalgamates her alter-ego's with decades of experience in generating innovation presentations and refining technical skill.  Upon the passing of winter, the final season of a year, or perhaps the final epoch of a lifetime, Yayoi Kusama presents a timeless work that shall forever capture her boundless universe.

[1] Yalkut, Jud, "The Psychedelic Revolution: Turning on the Art Trip," Arts Magazine (Nov. 1966): 22.

[2] Foucault, Michel and Miskowiec, Jay, trans., "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986)