Once the haunt of the avant-garde, installation art has matured into a 21st-century mass-culture phenomenon. There is no better evidence of this evolution than the immense popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored “infinity rooms.” The David Zwirner gallery expects upward of 100,000 people for her New York exhibition, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” which includes a new infinity room, Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe. Such popularity comes as no surprise once you’ve stepped from the pallor of a traditional art gallery into the magically glowing, impossibly endless space of a Kusama installation. Visitors enter with openmouthed joy and leave with loopy, blissed-out smiles. But despite all the humor in these rooms, Kusama’s personal history suggests deeper undercurrents flowing through her work. What’s going on here?
Born in Japan and now 90 years old, Kusama is a daughter of New York’s Pop and psychedelic eras. She was in the thick of things in the 1960s, palling around with Donald Judd and arguing with Andy Warhol. Yet her bohemian bonhomie masked an emotional turmoil that could be quite dark. At times, her work habits bordered on the manic, and she saw herself as pathologically obsessive. “As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see,” she has said. “At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.”
The Japanese Kusama is a daughter of New York’s Pop and psychedelic eras.
At Kusama’s breakout gallery show of 1959, her wall-size “Infinity Net” paintings were obsessive indeed, painted in around-the-clock sessions and made of numberless tiny brushstrokes that embodied a fascination with the limitless. “The nets,” she said, “symbolize horror towards the infinity of the universe.” Around 1965, Kusama moved from nets to graphic Pop-art polka dots—infinite fields of them. She’d found an irreducible motif. At her nude “happenings” of the late 60s, Kusama anointed herself the “High Priestess of Polka Dots” and painted the participants’ bodies with polka dots that “obliterated their individual selves.” Her solo performances of the period were titled Self-Obliterations. And her infinity room of 2013, Love Is Calling, featured a recording of a poem by Kusama, a meditation on love and death called “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” played on a loop. Since 1977, Kusama has produced all her work while voluntarily residing in a Tokyo mental institution.
Clearly, Kusama’s infinity rooms are more than amusement-park attractions. Whether they are expressions of the Romantic sublime or Buddhist selflessness, I can’t shake the sense that sadness and alienation lie at the core of these outwardly happy works. Infinite space is a lonely place. —Lewis Jacobsen