Kusama in Ecstasy

The exhibit of installation sculptures and other large scale works by the contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has received lots of raves, but to be honest I didn’t think it would be my kind of thing. I tend toward more standard Western and European works, usually with a religious bent, that sit just as easily on the wall of a museum as they do in the side chapel of a church. 

Yes, I am boring and predictable. Ask anyone. But I’m also wise enough to heed the entreaties of my family, if only to reinforce the bonds of affection and show that, in fact, I can be open-minded and able to learn, even at my age. If that was largely a policy stance, I was curious to find out what Kusama was about and to visit the gardens, which sit right across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, on a gorgeous late summer day. 

That outdoor experience alone would have been worth it. But as soon as I began reading the descriptions of the works and the words of Kusama herself, I was instantly transported. In a passage about her inspiration for one work she said that it came from “gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth.”

“I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns appeared to be plastered with the same red floral pattern,” she continued:

“I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in this instant, my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space.”

Foolish me and my presumptions. Her commentaries on the entire exhibit continued in this vein, and one could easily conjure some deep source for this vision in Eastern spiritualities that permeate Asian culture. To my mind, shaped by a Western and Christian formation, her experiences sounded remarkably like the mystical visions of a medieval saint, or the cosmological musings of the controversial twentieth century Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 

Whatever the source, her spirituality seems pervasive. Even the more whimsical pieces have a mystical heart. The idea for a fantastical pumpkin sculpture, for instance, appealed to her because it was “generous and unpretentious” and it also had a “solid spiritual balance.” One of the pumpkins has eleven legs and balances on three of them. It manages to be both fun and, at the same time, evocative of the horrifying leggy Mind Flayer monster from “Stranger Things.” That’s quite a crossover. 

I was hooked. But I also kept wondering what was going on here? Perhaps I should have known from the title of the exhibit, Cosmic Nature, that something deeper was up. Kusama’s family operated a plant nursery in Japan when Kusama was growing up, and a recent series of sculptures of plant forms is titled My Eternal Soul. But this goes beyond some kind of “blue domer,” Henry David Thoreau-type connection to the outdoors. There is a lot of vague language in the exhibit’s commentaries about “transcendence,” the “universal themes of life, death, and the interconnectedness of living things,” and a natural world which “is not merely a source of inspiration but an integral source of power for her artistic language.” 

There is not as much about the fact that she grew up in an abusive family during World War II and that in the 1970s she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, where she willingly spent forty-one years. “It made it possible for me to continue to make art every day,” she told The Guardian in 2018, “and this has saved my life.” 

Her mental illness, I learned, came after she returned to Japan from years living in New York. “I could not survive in New York,” she is quoted as saying in one of the exhibit commentaries. “You cannot live there with a lyrical frame of mind … In Japan, I write poetry. In New York, there was no mood for poetry; every day was a struggle with the outside world.” 

That, too, is an experience that resonates with many of us. New York is both inspiration and oppression. Kusama does get a kind of revenge in the end; she is ninety-two  and still producing art, and her work has become enormously popular. The gift shop at the New York Botanical Garden is full of the kind of kitsch that, no matter how high-minded the art, makes money for artists and museums. There are Kusama socks, Kusama shopping bags, Kusma coffee mugs and, my favorite, a deck of Kusama playing cards. 

So it goes. 

Whatever the rewards for Kusama now, they were born of great suffering, as was the art whose popular aesthetic manifests a religious vision that I appreciate even if I can’t really fathom it. Maybe it’s not meant to be so easily grasped. In Kusama’s work, there is simple joy, and an elevation of the spirit through immersion in the material world. 

The exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden runs through the end of October. It’s a perfect time to visit, as the fall foliage turns striking hues and Kusama’s brightly colored sculptures merge with the landscape in a vision Kusama herself would appreciate.

“I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to Heaven,”  Kusama has said, “and I will look down on my beautiful life.”