{"id":13549,"date":"2019-09-17T13:35:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T17:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=13549"},"modified":"2021-10-05T17:08:37","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T21:08:37","slug":"yayoi-kusama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/09\/17\/yayoi-kusama\/","title":{"rendered":"First Look Inside Yayoi Kusama’s Psychedelic ‘Infinity Room’ At Boston’s ICA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mirrored door of the white box opens and you enter into Yayoi Kusama\u2019s universe. Polka dotted tentacles, lit from within with changing rainbow hues, curl down from the shiny black, 14-foot-high ceiling and up from the shiny black floor. The walls of \u201cLove Is Calling\u201d (2013)\u2014the 90-year-old Tokyo artist\u2019s \u201cInfinity Mirror Room\u201d that will be at Boston\u2019s Institute of Contemporary Art from Sep 24, 2019, to Feb. 7, 2021<\/a>\u2014are mirrored so this psychedelic vision repeats to (seemingly) forever. Kusama\u2019s disembodied voice declaims a poem in Japanese that translates as \u201cResiding in a Castle of Shed Tears.\u201d Your ticket gives you two minutes inside.<\/p>\n

“Being in love with and longing for you, I have locked myself up in this ‘castle of shed tears’ \/\u00a0Now may be the time for me to wander off into the place, the guidepost to the other world points to \/ And the sky is waiting for me, attended by numerous clouds,” Kusama recites in Japanese. “…Over many long years, with art as a weapon \/ I have treaded the path in search of love \/\u00a0During the days I have lived through keeping ‘despair,’ ’emptiness’ and ‘loneliness’ all to myself along the way there were times when the fireworks of life \u201csplendidly\u201d adorned the sky.”<\/p>\n

Kusama said of her art in a 1964 radio interview: \u201cIt arises from a deep, driving compulsion to realize in visible form the repetitive images inside of me.”<\/p>\n

\"Yayoi<\/a>
Yayoi Kusama’s “Love Is Calling” at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Sept. 17, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Yayoi<\/a>
Yayoi Kusama’s “Love Is Calling” at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Sept. 17, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kusama was born in 1929 and grew up on her wealthy family’s seed nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. When she was 10, she had the first of the hallucinations that she would experience all her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne day, looking at a red flower-patterned table cloth on the table, I turned my eyes to the ceiling and saw the same red flower pattern everywhere, even on the window glass and posts,\u201d Kusama recalled in a 1993 interview. \u201cThe room, my body, the entire universe was filled with it, my self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space. \u2026 If I did not get away from there, I would be wrapped up in the spell of the red flowers and lose my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her hallucinations were part of what she has described as \u201cobsessional neurosis\u201d and \u201cdepersonalization. Everything I looked at became utterly remote.\u201d\u00a0She explained in 1975: \u201cThe only way to free myself from them was to control myself\u2014by visually reproducing on paper with pencils or paints, or by drawing from memory these \u2018nondescript\u2019 occurrences, which brightened or darkened in the deep of the sea, agitated me and drove me to angry destruction, as I tried to find out what these frightening monsters really were.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Yayoi<\/a>
Yayoi Kusama, “A Flower (No. 14),” 1953, ink, gouache and pastel on woven paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She painted prickly surreal scenes in the 1940s and \u201850s that evolved into abstractions resembling hairy microscopic cells. She traveled to Seattle in late 1957 to exhibit her watercolors and pastels (\u201cSeveral of the smaller works are beautiful, but one must study them closely to realize the intricacies of their microscopic worlds,\u201d the Seattle Times opined<\/a>), then the following summer moved to New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe art world in Japan ostracized me for my mental illness. That is why I decided to leave Japan and fight in New York,\u201d she told Akria Tatehata for her 2000 monograph \u201cYayoi Kusama.\u201d \u201cThe first thing I did in New York was to climb up the Empire State Building and survey the city. I aspired to grab everything that went on in the city and become a star.\u201d<\/p>\n

In New York, she filled canvases with little circles. These \u201cInfinity Net\u201d paintings were obsessive, minimalist versions of the Abstract Expressionist paintings that then dominated the white Western art world. Some grew more than 30 feet long. \u201cThis endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty hypnotic feeling,\u201d Kusama said in a 1964 radio interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cI paint them in quantity,\u201d Kusama said another time. \u201cIn doing so, I try to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n