For quite a few months now, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum has been maintaining an exhibition of the work of Yayoi Kusama, called One With Eternity. That exhibition has now ended, and I am sad to see it go, even as excited as I am for the next exhibit in that space.
Kusama is, at 97 years old, one of the world’s most successful living artists, and her work has been shown and re-shown all over the world. One of her signatures (she has a number of them) is the “mirrored room”, in which a small room is erected in a larger room with interior surfaces covered with mirrors so that when you enter, you are presented with an infinity. The two mirrored rooms displayed as part of the One With Eternity exhibition also displayed one of Kusama’s other signatures: the polka dot, as well as thoughts on gender as one of those two rooms involved shapes that are distinctly phallic in nature:
One of the best things about the mirrored rooms–beyond the way they provoke your eye into perceiving something approaching infinity–is the way they yielded interesting opportunities for photographing that very infinity. I found this particular room challenging from that standpoint, I must admit, but I got some results that I liked.
Kusama’s use of polka dots is hardly unique to this one mirrored room. In fact, the polka dot recurred in all of the art throughout this installation:
Another recurring motif in Kusama’s work is pumpkins. Yes, pumpkins.
One entire room of the installation space was given to the display of one of Kusama’s pumpkins. Just one. But what a pumpkin it is! If you’ve never thought that the pumpkin could be a thing of grandeur, well, that’s probably because you haven’t seen Yayoi Kusama’s take on a pumpkin. And it wasn’t just set down in the middle of the room, either…or actually, yes, it was, but no easy display this. Look:
It’s hard to describe my emotions from the first time I walked into this room and saw this thing sitting there. First, the size–it’s huge! Second, the sheer absurdity–it’s a pumpkin, writ large upon the floor, almost glowing in its gigantic nature. Third–did I say “absurdity”? Well, that’s not right. This is pure whimsy. And fourth–the sheer assault on the visual sense when you entre this room was almost a force of nature in itself. All that orange, all those dots, the bright lights gleaming off the pumpkin’s burnished surface…it felt like the sensation of looking up at a sky on a cloudless night, well away from the city. The whole thing just takes you in and for as long as you’re there circling this thing, it becomes your world. This pumpkin.
I won’t be looking at pumpkins the same way this fall, this much I can promise.
I would very much like to hear from the people who do the physical work of setting up an installation like this. Are the walls, floor, and ceiling painted like that for the duration? Does Kusama have wallpaper in that pattern that is hung wherever this pumpkin goes? Floor tile? I really want to know!
(And this wasn’t the only giant pumpkin at the AKG as part of the Kusama show. This one was in another hallway entirely, waiting to be discovered. No less the whimsical, though this time feeling more like a piece of art set in a place for viewing.)
The other major part of this Kusama exhibit was another mirrored room, and this one was pure magic. If the first one, the one with the polka-dotted phalluses, was a brilliant and stark infinity, this next one was a purely dark one, dominated by colors that transitioned and shifted as you gazed into the distance. This room is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
The photography temptation here was intentional camera movement with a longer shutter speed:
If the first room was a bright and phallic infinity, this one was just pure psychedelic wonder. And in the first one, you couldn’t help seeing yourself as part of that infinity; in the brightness there you were, everywhere, you, repeating into the endless haze beyond the limits of your vision. This room, though, erased you. You might be able to pick yourself out in the reflection, somewhat nearby, but that was all.
The other day I went to walk the Kusama exhibit one last time, and I saved this room for last. I could have gone back in the line to go through again, but I decided not to. I visited this exhibit five times during its run here, and when my final walk-through of that mirrored room came to an end–how short 45 seconds can feel, when you spend it staring into infinity!–I stopped on my way out. One look back, and then back to reality and the finite world.
But how finite can it be….
For all of my photos from the One With Eternity exhibit, and to see bigger versions, go here.
