The Infinite Room Within Us: Inside the Mind of Yayoi Kusama

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 3, 2023

Ten years after the first, revolutionary collaboration with the cult bags of Mark Jacobif the windows on Fifth Ave with impressive avatars of the same artist, Louis Vuitton back to the universe and the infinite space of Yayoi Kusamaand she transforms the unmistakable monogram into a pumpkin-shaped spaceship capable of making our imagination travel out of time, into a fairy tale with no beginning and no end.

One of Kusama’s great fortunes was that she didn’t fall in love with one of the Beatlesotherwise he would have risked having his own genius and talent swallowed up by the success and fame of another, as happened to his compatriot, still an exceptional artist, Yoko Onoonly a few years younger, devoured by her husband’s celebrity John Lennon. Instead, Kusama was engulfed by her own family history and the traumas of her childhood.
Her mother would have liked her to go to etiquette school, perhaps to lead her into a career as a geisha, but she had liked to draw since she was ten years old. Little Yayoi’s artistic talent infuriated her mother who, as soon as she saw her with a pencil in her hand, snatched the drawing and beat her. Not only that: having a father who was very active in extramarital affairs, Yayoi had the task of spying on him while she entertained her lovers. Hence her disgust for the male sex and for sex in general. In short, with the traumas of this girl Freud would have bought a villa in Portofino.

The blessing disguised as drama for Kusama was an early mental instability that caused him to have hallucinations, like flashes of light or thousands of dots, invading his mind. Visions that will later become the foundation of his art and her enormous success, even if it comes after endless suffering and rejection. A success due to his now unmistakable canvases similar to colored nets, made of hundreds of thousands of points, famous as the Infinity Netswhich then, at the beginning of the 60s, will turn into Infinity Rooms. Rooms made of mirrors, which have become very popular and desired by all museums in the world because they are capable of attracting huge audiences. But when Kusama invented them in the early 1950s, no one really gave up.

To escape from maternal abuse, Yayoi first went to Paris, a must for every artist of the time, and then, not yet thirty, he moved to New York in 1957, where he immersed himself in the very rich creative atmosphere, becoming jelly with the most influential artists of the time, from Donald Judd to Eva Hesse. What was seen as madness in the closed and conservative environments of Japan, in Manhattan and Brooklyn is welcomed as a visionary experimentation that still today, indeed today more than ever, seems relevant to us and light years ahead of its time. Hers His polka dots, the famous colored dots, become her trademark that she defines her universe and with which she identifies. Each of us is, according to Kusama, a dot in harmony with billions of other dots in the infinite galaxy of the universe.

Given the times we are going through, we need more and new Kusamas in the world. Suffice it to say that in 1968 he wrote a personal and open letter to the then candidate for the White House, the Republican Richard Nixon, inviting him to have his dots painted on his body and perhaps even to a physically emotional exchange as a reward if he succeeded as future president in ending the Vietnam war. In New York the body becomes both a political manifesto and a canvas for Kusama. So he begins to organize many incredible, revolutionary happenings that today are called performances, even anticipating someone like Marina Abramovic. In 1968 he sets up, perhaps the first in history, a same-sex marriage. He opens a studio where you could paint nudes and a Gay Club, the Kusama Omophile Kompany (kok). Not to mention when in 1969, in the cathedral of modern art, the MoMA, he organized the event entitled Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MoMA, big orgy to wake up the dead at MoMA. Something that, if they tried to do it today, the entire museum staff, including the director, would be fired outright. Three years earlier she Kusama had been invited to the Venice Biennale, in whose gardens she had installed the Narcissus gardenmade of hundreds of mirror spheres that she, dressed in a gold kimono, began to sell to visitors for the modest sum of 1,200 lire.

As if that weren’t enough, Yayoi created a series of furnishings fluffy covered with lumps similar to American sweet potatoes, intended to give a culinary interpretation, even if they were more like phalluses covered with polka dots, as was to be the fate of Nixon’s phallus in the artist’s dreams. Finally, one could not be missing fashion collection, also made up of pierced or decorated clothes with the usual motif and worn by models already then of multiple gender orientations. Today all this seems to be the script of an artist who is not simply radical, but also enormously successful. History is always more beautiful when you read it backwards. In reality, Yayoi Kusama’s years in New York were tormented and even unsuccessful, so much so that – increasingly mentally unstable – the artist decided to return to Japan, where he freely and independently entered a mental hospital in Tokyo, where he still today he resides and from which he goes every day to his studio to work in a meticulous and obsessive way.

For many years Kusama’s art fell off the radar of the world and the art market. Her irresistible rise and her unstoppable triumph began in 1993, when she was awarded the Japanese national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Here she will create a ‘Infinity Room with another of its universal symbols: the pumpkin, the polka dot pumpkin which is a sort of self-portrait for her. Cinderella of art, Kusama imagines transforming the pumpkin not into a carriage but into herself and vice versa, depending on her mood and mental state.
In 2004, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo will organize the exhibition Kusamatrix, a triumph of the public, popular and populist at the same time but not only. A photo from the Getty Images archive shows a young girl taking a Paleolithic selfie with a flip phones. An image that becomes the symbol of what can be defined as the year zero of the viral social media society. Today the Infinity Rooms by Kusama are the Mona Lisa of installations. Despite having reached 93 years of age, Kusama is the artist who most of all represents contemporary reality. The fact that the fashion world has embraced her as a supreme icon is simply confirmation of the consistency with which Kusama has lived her life and her art. One whole without distinction of role. Mental illness as the foundation of her creativity and perhaps her creativity as the reason for his mental state and irrepressible visions of her.

Define Kusama as one feminist it would seem simplistic to me because his approach to life has always been about overcoming roles and genres, a continuous encroachment on the infinite possibilities of every human being. His polka dots they have no gender, they are neither ova nor sperm, but a moving galaxy of both, where they sometimes collide, sometimes unite, still others destroy each other. And since these days we celebrate the first step towards the healthy and clean energy of nuclear fusion, we can venture to say that Kusama’s imagination makes her a pioneer in the fusion of every creative energy that underlies our universe far from immobile but agitated, in constant motion, wonderful and catastrophic at the same time. Kusama, like one contemporary priestess of the presenthas chosen to draw her own human, physical and mental boundaries by herself, sure that the infinite room of the universe is not out there, but inside the depths of each of us.

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