What We Lost in Kusamaland

The Infinity Rooms made Yayoi Kusama world-famous and upstaged the radical work that came before.

During her final decades, Yayoi Kusama, who died last week at 97, was most well-known for her Infinity Rooms and the lines of fans waiting to take selfies inside. These spectacles turned a radical artist into one of the most generic brands on Earth and made it harder to see the incredible depth of her body of work. 

“My art originates from hallucinations only I can see,” she once said. It is one of the great artist statements. Born into a prosperous but unhappy family, the owners of a seed nursery, Kusama saw visions of flowers from an early age, dots that spread across surfaces and spoke to her. By making them the sole focus of her practice later on, she externalized an internal condition. 

Calling herself “a heretic of the art world,” she moved to New York in 1958 at 29. Abstract Expressionism was the dominant style of the period, but she began making paintings with tiny multiplying marks and arcs. Then thousands of them. Then hundreds of thousands. 

These Infinity Net paintings are among the great works of the postwar period. They look like lace, skin, cellular structures, ocean surfaces, star fields. They breathe without any discernible composition. The hand is everywhere and nowhere. The self is created and negated stroke by stroke. Reviewing Kusama’s first New York solo exhibition at Brata Gallery in 1959, Donald Judd said, “Yayoi Kusama is an original painter,” and called her five white-net paintings “strong, advanced in concept and realized.” Later, he bought one for $200, paying for it in four installments. The two became friends, lovers, and neighbors on East 19th Street. Judd recognized another artist who, like him, was dismantling composition, hierarchy, and the autonomous object.

Then Kusama literally went off the wall. By 1962, she was covering ordinary objects — chairs, shoes, ladders, clothing — with hundreds of stuffed fabric phalluses. In “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show,” exhibited at the Gertrude Stein Gallery, a phallus-covered rowboat sat inside a room covered with 999 photographic reproductions of itself. She had spoken about her fear of sex, but instead of repressing it, she rendered the phallus ridiculous through sheer proliferation. She turned masculine authority into upholstery and swaying seas of vulvalike anemones. As she was making these early forays into soft sculpture, she was also wading into “installation art” long before that was a thing. The Infinity Rooms, which began in 1965, weren’t originally intended as entertainment. They were an attempt at disrupting the stable boundaries between the self, objects, surrounding space, and architecture. Inside one, the individual is both multiplied and diminished. 

By the late 1960s, Kusama had also turned herself into material, staging happenings, body-painting events, naked demonstrations, and antiwar actions. In 1966, she turned up at the Venice Biennale without an invitation and installed Narcissus Garden: 1,500 mirrored balls spread outside the Italian Pavilion. She offered them for sale under a sign reading “YOUR NARCISSISM FOR SALE.” She was not afraid of turning the art world itself, and her audience, into performance.

After she voluntarily checked herself in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo in 1970s, the international art world largely moved on without her. But by the late 1980s, history began correcting itself. A New York retrospective came in 1989, and in 1993, she returned to the Venice Biennale, this time as Japan’s official representative. In 1996, Paula Cooper Gallery mounted an important exhibition of her paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the 1950s and ’60s, and two years later came the landmark traveling retrospective “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968,” organized by LACMA and the Japan Foundation. 

By the 21st century, an artist who had once struggled for attention was impossible to escape. Or avoid. Kusama became Kusama™. Suddenly, Kusama was a logo, a one-liner. The vast Kusama industrial complex flattened a once astonishingly strange artist, but the visionary power of the language she invented is harder to ignore.

Kusama saw repetition before repetition became the condition of contemporary life. She saw infinite images before the infinite scroll. She saw the self multiplied endlessly before social media gave each of us a hall of mirrors. She imagined an existence in which everything is covered by the same proliferating signs, where the individual is simultaneously everywhere and vanishing. It only took almost a century, but Kusama succeeded in making the world more like herself.