Finding Yayoi Kusama in Las Vegas

Preeti Verma Lal

“Exactly 45 seconds. That is what you have for infinity in a mirrored room. And the aftermath of obliteration of eternity.” A white-gloved woman in nifty black suit stood by a speckless wooden door ushering the curious in. There was a long queue in Las Vegas’ Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts and I waited. Patiently.

A voice broke the quietude. There she was. In poppy red wig and ever-there polka dots. Peering out of a rectangular television screen, Yayoi Kusama, the world’s most expensive woman artist, was talking of her deep interest to understand the relationship between people, society and nature and how her work is forged from the accumulation of these frictions. I wanted to fathom the depth of Kusama’s bulbous eyes, but got stuck with the subtitles — Kusama was speaking Japanese. But even in that unlearnt language, I could pick nuances of the 90-year-old artist’s craft, and being, and her obsession with polka dots. “All of us are just a dot in the universe,” she was uttering.

The woman in black suit gestured. It was time to enter Kusama’s famous Infinity Mirrored Room. Wood, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED & aluminum installation. 415 x 415 x 287.4 cm, 163 x 163 x 113 inches. I stepped in gingerly and stood on the central platform. Countless flickering golden lights crowded inside the room, like an infinite horizon; my own silhouette caught in myriad convex reflections. Within, a dizzying sense of losing my Being. Self obliteration. And then magically locating it in an intense cycle of light and darkness.

Before infinity could consume me, 45 seconds had briskly ticked off the stop watch. I stepped out of the white door — dazed, stupefied, astonished. I am neither the first nor the last one to be baffled by Kusama. In the past years, more than 5 million people have queued for the highly Instagrammable (that is how pop critics describe it) Infinity.

At the upscale gallery housed inside Las Vegas’ iconic Bellagio Hotel, Narcissus occupies another room where metal mirrored spheres are displayed en masse to create a dynamic, reflective field. Here, within the optical reality, the visitor becomes a part of the art. 

Kusama’s overtones can be unsettling. Perhaps that idiom stems from her own life which began in 1929 in a rural provincial town of Matsumoto (Japan), where she was born to a philandering father and a mother who derided the artist in her daughter. One day while sitting amongst peonies and violets in her garden, little Kusama heard voices. The flowers were talking to her. That was the beginning of her battle — and alliance — with hallucinations.

In orthodox Japan, Kusama felt stifled, her art yearned to break out. One day, the 27-year old sew a few dollar bills in her kimono and flew into America. The year: 1958. In a crowd of white, male artists, a female Japanese artist was relegated to the cold corner. Until in 1966, when she hijacked the 33rd Venice Biennale with Narcissus Garden, a lake of 1,500 reflective balls in which the viewer’s face was infinitely multiplied. She sold the balls for $2 each. That brazen act is often described as ‘pivotal’ to her career and also a milestone in art history as the ‘commodification and mechanisation’ of the art market.

Back in the US, she staged human installations (painted polka dots on bare bodies) and faced flak for her brazenness. Distraught and depressed, she jumped off a high window. When death — and fame — eluded her, she returned to Japan and voluntarily checked herself into a hospital where she has lived for four decades now — walking across the street to her studio in the day and returning to the white bedsheets of a sanitised hospital at night. 

Global reputation took long to knock on her door. When it finally did, Kusama became the world’s top selling living woman artist, named in Time magazine’s World’s Most Influential People. She opened her own museum in Tokyo and is currently the subject of a feature length documentary film about her life, Kusama — Infinity. In 2015, Art Newspaper named her as the world’s popular artist.

At 90, Kusama still wears the nylon red wig and the polka dots are still everywhere. In her art and in her clothing. She is still immersed in painting, sculpting, writing and installing art. She is still sedulously chasing her desire to ‘become famous, even more famous’. 

I stepped out of Las Vegas’ Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts conscious that I am just another dot in the world. Another dot. Not a Yayoi Kusama polka dot that “can’t stay alone” though. Instead, a polka dot that is one with infinity. Yayoi Kusama display is on at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts until April 29