a. natasha joukovsky
journal
YAYOI KUSAMA: INFINITY MIRRORS
Kusama's work is innovative and visually stunning, creating illusions of vast magical landscapes inside spaces often the size of a bathroom or closet.
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:
THE POLEAX
My article "Alternative Facts and Anna Karenina" is in The Poleax today.
I fleshed out this framework a bit in a piece for The Poleax entitled "Alternative Facts and Anna Karenina," published today:
“...there is an even older, analog precursor to what’s going on here, one that operates outside Trumpian fictive reality but nevertheless functions in much the same way as alternative facts: realistic fiction. Mimesis, or the imitative representation of reality in art, involves a similar kind of cognitive trompe l’oeil as post-truth propaganda. Both high-fidelity fiction and low-/no-fidelity representations of reality can create worlds that seem very real, blurring the line between art and nature, fact and fiction. ”
Read the full article here.
AN ENGLISH MAJOR-TURNED-CONSULTANT'S GUIDE TO RIGHT NOW
For anyone who has been having trouble keeping things straight recently.
Alternate title: Dear President Trump Please Stop Offending Not Just Reality But Also Actual Fiction
Made this for anyone who has been having trouble keeping things straight recently. As a human being, I'm offended by his assault on facts. As someone in the process of writing a novel, I'm offended by the bad name he is giving to fiction.
SELLING ANTI-CONSUMERISM
Increasingly, we see companies and individuals selling us the absence of things, selling us on negative space, on minimalism. How do you sell things when consumerism itself is passé? You sell anti-consumerism.
Full-page Patagonia ad in the New York Times published black friday, 2011.
As a subjective but real yearning for a persuasive illusion, glamour is perhaps the cornerstone of advertising and the jet fuel of consumerism. Glamour is what convinces us we want things we don't want and need things we don't need for just long enough to pull the trigger and buy things we shouldn't buy.
"Subjective" is the operative word when it comes to deliberately harnessing glamour this way, that is as a marketing tool. This is why marketers tailor to segments and demographics. Nevertheless it is possible to see macro trends. The grotesque conspicuous consumption and label-mania of the early 2000s has been, I think, gradually giving way to a more sophisticated sales pitch to more sophisticated consumers. Increasingly, we see companies and individuals selling us the absence of things, selling us on negative space, on minimalism. How do you sell things when consumerism itself is passé? You sell anti-consumerism.
Selling anti-consumerism sounds like a paradox, but it functions more like a cliché. Specifically, it's like calling out a cliché as cliché in order to use the cliché without seeming cliché--which is, of course, not a departure from the use of cliché, but the total mastery of it; the ability to bring an old, tired truism back from the dead. And when powerful things resurrect, they tend to be even more powerful than they were the first time. It's hard to argue with a cliché that doesn't seem cliché.
Calling out consumerism is an almost identically neat trick, as exposing and empathizing with consumers' gripes with consumerism creates stronger bonds of trust and loyalty than even the most ideally-targeted pro-consumption ads can.
Stripping away glamour, it turns out, has a glamour of its own. Marie Kondo's promise of spare spaces and aesthetic organization sells books (I bought one). Six years after Patagonia's "DON'T BUY THIS JACKET" black friday ad in 2011, the brand is more popular than ever (I've bought lots). There is a warm, feel-good comfort to Patagonia's fleeces beyond their soft, recycled pile in the company's commitment to environmentalism and responsible sourcing.
This starts to get near the reason why anti-consumerism is so seductive: it not only offers guilt-free purchasable pathways to the rejection of purchasing, but the ability to broadcast that ethos. In a strange kind of alchemy, material things can become signifiers of distain for materialism. It is now possible to buy something in order to show that you're above buying things. And lucrative to sell them. Just because Patagonia is probably one of the best, most ethical companies out there doesn't mean "DON'T BUY THIS JACKET" isn't clever, glamorous advertising and brand stewardship. They're selling us by selling us they're not selling us. But they're still selling us. It's not a reversal of consumerism, but rather another recursive layer embedding the will to buy where it's harder to see and probably harder to cognitively counter.
Recently my most maximalist friend sent around an article from GQ with a request for advice on developing a minimalist wardrobe. No surprise, the author's decluttering process required $5,800 of new spend, including $990 for a single cashmere sweater and $811 for two pairs of sneakers. This is starting to sound like an indictment of minimalism, which it isn't. I enjoyed Marie Kondo's book, and, as previously hinted, own a small mountain of Patagonia. But in this post-truth era of alternative facts, I think it's important to recognize this trend for what it is and unpack the glamour here all the way down to the uncomfortable truth: that anti-consumerism consumerism is still consumption, that a cliché exposed is still a cliché.