Last weekend Marissa and I visited family in
Washington. We woke up early Sunday
morning, hoping to score tickets to the Yayoi Kusama show at the Hirshhorn, but
after waiting on line for a few hours, we came up short and had to settle for a
quick tour of the museum shop where we found art souvenirs decorated with
Kusama’s distinctive polka dot styling.
Thanks to my wife I manage to stay at least peripherally
aware of what’s going on in the art world.
I had never heard of Kusama before this trip to Washington, which is
little surprising, given she seems poised on the brink of art star status. Perhaps it’s just another indication of how
our culture continues to fracture and lose coherence –that it’s possible
for an artist like Kusama to be both renowned as a genius (with her paintings
commanding the highest price for any living female artist) and yet virtually
unknown to the broader public.
This new show at the Hirshhorn may change that. The show has drawn enormous crowds thanks to Kusama’s
signature style, which is highly decorative and accessible, almost pop-arty in
spirit, while still full of mystery and pulsing with life. Not only that, but Kusama’s personal story is
compelling and quirky enough to give her a further lift in the public arena. She comes from the same mold as Vincent Van
Gogh – an artistic genius inspired by intense personal vision and a touch of
madness. Making her home by choice in a
mental hospital for many years, she has nonetheless navigated her way through an incredibly productive
art career, spanning more than half a century, and has achieved a level of recognition recently that has allowed her to pursue her vision on a grand
scale. Perhaps this will be her moment to achieve breakout fame.
The Kusama paintings that I find most interesting are part of the series she refers to as Infinity Nets. This is a mode she has been working in for
many years. The Infinity Net paintings
are composed of arrays of dots that sprawl across the canvas; on closer inspection
each dot can be discerned as a small, crescent shaped brushstroke daubed thick
with paint. The overall effect (at least
to the extent I can tell from looking at reproductions) is both luminous and
hypnotic –sort of the visual equivalent of what you see when you meditate with
your eyes closed, and your entire visual field pulsates with energy and
speckled light. These paintings are
very contemporary in look and feel, being steeped in the vernacular of abstract
expressionism; but at the same time they are also infused with a primitivism
and decorative glee, which reminds me of a cosmic Aboriginal wall painting as
well as the great (and obsessive) patterning you see adorning the finest
outsider artwork.
There’s one other element that I find most compelling about
Kusama’s Infinity Nets. These paintings
are infused with a Buddhist spirit. I feel this strongly even though the
paintings do not include any discernible Buddhist imagery or iconography. But the whole idea of depicting the cosmos
this way strikes me as close to the core of Buddhist aesthetics.
Now, please don’t get me wrong -- I have no idea if Kusama
herself is a practicing Buddhist or fellow traveler of one stripe or
another. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever her personal beliefs may be,
Kusama’s work can be understood as developing out of a grand tradition of
Buddhist art that has sought various ways (over the course of the millennia) to
represent the infinite extent and interconnectedness of all phenomena and all
living things. These are major themes
evident in the mandalas, wall paintings and prayer flags on display throughout
Asia, in the temples and stupas from Varanasi to Phnom Penh to the plains of
Tibet. Considered alongside a wall
painting with hundreds of nearly identical Bodhisattvas sitting in meditation
on their Lotus platforms, it’s easy to recognize the connection between
Kusama’s Infinity Nets and the more conventional ways that Buddhist artists have
tried to convey the idea of infinite space and time, subject to the confines of
a shrine or temple’s wall space.
Still more specifically Kusama’s Infinity Nets (consciously or
not) make reference to Indra’s Net, which is one of the central metaphors used in
Mahayana Buddhism to describe the composition or fabric of the universe. Indra’s Net is composed of a fine mesh of
jewels woven together – each jewel is a microcosm and reflective of the cosmos
in its entirety. The image is used to
help explain core ideas of Buddhist doctrine - how Buddha nature resides in
every living being; and each part of the cosmos is reflective of the whole. Like the sparkling jewels in Indra’s Net, our
capacity to experience this infinitude eventually becomes exceedingly clear
and unhindered. Connecting the dots,
from Indra’s Net to the Infinity Nets, the fabric of the universe can be
perceived and experienced as one and the same.
There’s a particularly striking parallel to Kusama’s artwork
that dates back to 8th Century China. That was when a Buddhist monk by the name of
Fa Zang, came up with an idea for creating a work of art that would demonstrate
the iterative and infinite reach of Indra’s Net. The immediate
purpose of this art project was to provide China’s Empress Wu with a better
understanding of the fine points of Buddhist doctrine. In order to do so Fa Zang placed large brass
mirrors all around the inside walls of one of the rooms in the palace; then he placed
a statue of the Buddha, along with a lamplight, at the center of a room. As Fa
Zang explained this arrangement to the Empress, the statue of Buddha in the
middle embodied the concept of Emptiness, while the image of the statue
reflected in each of the surrounding mirrors represented the phenomena of the
world – mere reflections of Emptiness.
Then looking more carefully into each of the mirrors, Fa Zang showed the
Empress how each mirror reflected all the other mirrors in the room – a way to
experience first hand the infinite reach and iterative nature of each jewel that makes up the fabric
of Indra’s Net. Although Fa Zang’s
artwork has not survived to the present day, it can be inferred that his
demonstration worked well, since the Empress Wu went on to become one of
the staunchest supporters of Buddhism in China’s long run of dynastic
succession.
In any case, Fa Zang’s demonstration with mirrors stands as a direct
precursor of Kusama’s Infinity Net – it’s an attempt to draw the infinite into
the realm of immediate experience. It
also may be one of the earliest recorded examples of conceptual art –
undertaken more than a millennium before such happenings and conceptual art
projects became a staple of our downtown art scene.
The art historian James Romaine has noted that Kusama’s
Infinity Net paintings share this same quality evident in Fa Zang’s work – they
are not merely pictorial representations.
They are also experiential. As
Romaine has written:
Kusama participates in a tradition
of the sublime expressed in abstract painting . . . . [Her] Infinity Nets first
emerged in the late 1950s as Abstract Expressionism was both triumphant and
waning. In the work of an artist like
Willem de Kooning, the gestures are grand, boisterous, unique and
directional. They are repositories of
bursting energy. By comparison, Kusama’s
gestures are unpretentious and repetitive, without relinquishing their individuality;
yet, collectively, they build and generate energy latent in the material paint
and capture (remember, these are nets) light.
The Infinity Nets shift from pictorialism, in which a painting suggests
a vicarious experience, to a more direct perceptual experience. This process draws the infinite into the
imminent.
This is a wonderful way to describe the challenge faced by
any artist of a spiritual bent – hoping to create an imminent experience
instead of a mere depiction of the spirit that resides within.
One of the best ways I can assess Kusama’s success in this
effort is that the experience of her work, at least for me, already felt compelling even
while we were standing in line outside the museum. Maybe Marissa and I will have a chance to see
Kusama’s Infinity Nets up close and in person in Cleveland or Seattle when the
show hits the road later this year. But
for now we must content ourselves with the promise of imminence based on the
immanence indwelling – a realm where spirit and metaphor reign supreme - and where Kusama's vision can be savored, no matter how it has been reproduced; it's a microcosm and a cosmos all the same.
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