extrait
Introduction
Franck Gautherot,
Jaap Guldemond,
Seungduk Kim
(p. 59-62)
Yayoi Kusama. Mirrored Years delighted visitors to Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam last year. The title
Mirrored Years refers to both Kusama's recurrent use of mirrors
and the exhibition's twofold set-up: the amazing early works,
attitudes and strategies of Kusama's time in New York in the
1960s mirroring, so to speak, the equally amazing works that she
continues to produce forty years later in her studio in Tokyo.
It was the extraordinary freshness and power of her recent
work that took us back to Kusama's very fruitful years in the
U.S. Mirroring several aspects of her recent work with her work
of the 1960s highlights the abiding force of Yayoi Kusama's
oeuvre. The juxtaposition of renowned installations such as the
Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli's Field from 1965 with a recent
‘immersive' mirror room such as Infinity Mirror Room –
Fireflies on the Water (2000), and the juxtaposition of the
Kusama's famous Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale in
1966, comprising hundreds of mirrored balls in front of the
Italian and Dutch Pavilions, with the site-specific installation
Invisible Life (2000), comprising dozens of convex mirrors on
the walls and ceiling of a network of corridors, reveals the
coherence of Kusama's oeuvre over the years while
simultaneously highlighting the freshness and innovative
nature of certain themes explored in her work.
With the resurgence of interest in her work over the last
decade or so, Kusama has been known for her striking use of
colour as a strategy in exploring the power and possibilities of
visual perception. Since Kusama is now invited all of the world to
(re)produce herself again and again as the ‘polka dot queen' that
she once was, we set ourselves the challenge of restricting the
use of colour in the exhibition, focussing instead on her black and
white works and those that employ mirroring and reflection.
This curatorial concept afforded us the opportunity of
placing greater emphasis on other aspects of Kusama's oeuvre,
and the coherence and renewing of Kusama's highly
idiosyncratic formal idiom and exploration of different
techniques. For example a juxtaposition of Kusama's use of
real mirrors with Kusama's use of a mirroring effect as in the
famous Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963) in
which a rowing boat covered with white phallic protrusions
has been ‘mirrored' by 999 posters of the same boat covering
the three walls and the floor of the exhibition space. Another
interesting and telling juxtaposition is that of an early threedimensional
painting with a huge new Infinity Net Painting (2007). The more recent work seems to be a two-dimensional
and enlarged version of the ‘original' early 1960s work. Or a
documentary film of Kusama's performance in Central Park in
New York next to a recent ‘staged' performance in which
Kusama uses herself as a flowerpot as part of a traditional
ikebana flower arrangement.
Apart from a strategically placed anthropomorphic, red and
black installation The Regeneration of Time , Kusama's
use of colour in the exhibition has been restricted to the
aforementioned ‘immersive' mirror rooms that appear neutral
and white from the outside, and her psychedelic 16mm film
Self Obliteration (1966) in the exhibition's third and final part
space. The exhibition was tailored to Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen's large galleries, which offered the ideal conditions
for building a landscape. Introduced by a zigzagging corridor
dotted with convex shaped mirrors, the visitors enter Kusama's
world by seeing a distorted image of themselves. At the end of
the corridor the visitor had two choices; turning right into a
large day-lit space with a huge window offering a view over a
garden, in which a sort of open landscape consisting of The
Regeneration of Time, Narcissus Garden and Aggregation: One
Thousand Boats Show, and a few related two-dimensional and
three-dimensional paintings had been created. Turning left, the
visitor entered the museum's vast main exhibition space,
darkened at its centre but with its four walls lit to welcome the fifty black and white paintings of the Love Forever series
(2005 – 2008). This series was hung side by side, in a single
line of black figures, eyes, fishes, flowers, stripes, mouths and
other recurrent motifs. The centre of the space hosted a field of
puffy, silver clouds, creating a wavy atmosphere.Walking
between the clouds, knowing their secret, is like being high,
naturally, freed from gravity and the burden of weight. Miles
high up. The combination of the strict horizontal line of the
black and white Love Forever paintings and the fluffy silver
and black sprayed inflated vinyl clouds, furnished a moment of
delight despite the almost darkness of the space.
Mirroring the exact size and formal qualities of the first daylit
room, the third and final space echoes the up-in-the-air
landscape, housing two kaleidoscopic landscapes: Infinity Mirror
Room – Phalli Field (1965) and Fireflies on the Water (2000),
both mirror boxes to be entered. The Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli
Field is literally an endless field of phallic protrusions (with white
with red dots); appealing and soft, whereas Fireflies on the
Water is a giant kaleidoscope of small coloured LED lights
floating like flies over a dark water basin. A short pier allowed
visitors to enter the centre of the cabin where they could lose
themselves in this blinking mind. The effect is strong and longlasting.
The journey is gracious and time seems suspended
among the multicoloured lights. Projected images of films from
the 1960s propose another set of distorted images and
psychedelic music in a journey into the past. The ‘love-in', ‘be-in',
and related ‘smoke-in' were the mood of those times of war
(Vietnam). Kusama time; the priestess of polka dots, of orgies
and nude painting performances, the goddess of free love
surrounded by her young protégés, of all sexual preferences,
ready to be appointed by her. Literally flanked by Kusama's
newest sculpture Soaring Spirits (2008), floating freely in the
space and expressing Kusama's continuous belief in a free mind,
in a multiple and visionary world.
A successful exhibition by Kusama is a trip towards magic,
towards the ultimate visual perceptions and sensory
experiences of all times. An all time high! The book that accompanies the exhibition has been
another collaboration between the three of us and different
writers. The amazing researches of Midori Yamamura brought
some kind of new informations on Kusama's formal strategy
and gives another breaking-rules behaviour by an artist who
has claimed throughout decades to be as free as possible from
any form of constraint, authority nor moral correctness.
The idea to draw the artist biography through a patient
selection of archived photographs – thanks to the studio
Kusama to have let us free to investigate and select all kind of
material – shows how an artist decided to build up her own
photgraphical representation with a precise point of view.
Be snapshots or professional studio shots posed and
framed with a great care, this ensemble shows a strong
personality as well as it constitutes – in the backgrounds – an
extract of a possible catalogue raisonné of Kusama's oeuvre.
Her constant and repeatedly narcissism is mirrored in the
use she has done of reflective surfaces.
In this way the title of the exhibition has been the key
word to edit and design this book.
