YAYOI KUSAMA: INFINITY MIRRORS
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013
My husband scored timed tickets to the blockbuster exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington last week, and for someone who loves recursion, it did not disappoint.
Kusama's work is innovative and visually stunning, the immersive rooms in particular creating illusions of vast magical landscapes inside spaces often the size of a bathroom or closet.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room - Love Forever, 1966/1994
Exterior shot of Infinity Mirrored Room - Love Forever at the Hirshhorn Museum
The individual tableaux range from intergalactic to Alice-in-Wonderland-style weird. My personal favorite, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, which is also Kusama's most recent and on view for the first time at the Hirshhorn, fell somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. This room is a total fusion of recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour; it felt like stepping into an infinite futuristic fairytale dreamscape.
Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I have for the Pumpkins, 2016
I'm not surprised Infinity Mirrors has become crushingly popular--popular to the point that one of my friends teased I was "so basic" for going.
For such a photogenic exhibit, photographs don't do it justice. It's interactive and mass-customizable, selfie-friendly, and endlessly Instagrammable. It snuggles perfectly into the sociocultural mores of the moment.
I was fortunate to go on a Wednesday morning when the crowds weren't too bad, but the overall buzz surrounding this exhibition reminds me a lot of the 2011 Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty mania I experienced intimately when I worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The glamour of the Kusama show has likewise transcended its inherent glamour. The more people wait in line, the more people are willing to wait in line. The line has become part of the attraction, not just a means of getting inside to see.
Here are all of my photos from Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors:
