Looking at a Work of Art: Yayoi Kusama "Waking Up in a Quiet Morning" (2010), at the Yoyoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo, Japan, November 8, 2019
I went to the striking Kusama Museum in Tokyo to view her exhibition Spirits of Aggregation that ran from October 10, 2019 to January 31, 2020. In the spirit of my blog’s “Looking” series, I chose one of her recent paintings to spend extra time contemplating. I wrote a draft of the following entry from my notes shortly after returning to the U.S. in December of 2019. The pandemic delayed my finalizing it until 2021. Returning to it brought back the great pleasure I had spending a long afternoon with her work but also how much her pre-pandemic reputation was based on being physically present with works made purposefully to be experienced directly and with other people. I wonder whether and how experiencing her work will differ as museums open up again.
Notes from 2019
It is with much hesitation that I write about my observations of a work by Kusama. She is the “IT” woman artist [in 2019]; everywhere it seems, some version of her ‘infinity mirrors’ is on display. Images abound of people having fun surrounded by her ‘polka dot’ art. It makes such great backgrounds for selfies. People at the Tokyo show come costumed with polka dots. I will risk posting these observations, however, because I chose to spend some time (quite a long time actually) looking at just one of her paintings in this show and made some discoveries that I would like to share with you.
The Kusama Museum experience.
We bought e-tickets several weeks before our assigned time and date to stand outside: every 20 minutes a new group of about 20 were allowed into the museum, a size that made the experience always feel crowded. We decided to go in part because we were missing an installation of one her “infinity mirrors” at the Boston ICA. It made sense to see her latest work in her homeland. But the reviews in English of the Tokyo show weren’t encouraging; an example: “you can get through the entire 5 floors in 40 minutes …. better to go to her home town in Motsumoto and the exhibit there.” But we were in Tokyo and Motsumoto was a long, long train ride away.
Once in the museum, you can zip through the entire show with your preordained group as they crash through one intriguing space after another and stream between you and the work you are trying to see. This is tolerable for the first scan of the entire show that I like to start with in these exercises. But in the churn of people, how will I choose a single work to spend time with, much less find a way to comfortably spend that time? I find a way. The groups walk up through the show but are returned to the first-floor exit by an elevator. Going down, it is easy to get off on earlier floors where I have the space to myself until the next group charges through. But I am patient and soon they are gone too.
My Eternal Soul Exhibition.
I am on the third floor with a group of 16 paintings that make up “My Eternal Soul” (2010-2019). These are her very latest works and seem meant as a kind of summation of her work on canvas, both very personal and engaged in the world of which we are all a part. There are no titles or other words with the paintings. When I read the titles that evening from the show catalog, I read them as messages she is sending out to the world toward the end of a long life. Listed in chronological order, they read as a single poem:
Once the Abominable War is Over, Happiness Fills Our Hearts
Love is so Glamorous, But the World is Engaged in Wars All the Time
Our Party
River in the Moonlit Night
Waking Up in a Quiet Morning
Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears
The Day of Attempted Suicide
The Days of Grief
Spirits of Aggregation
End of the Desert
The Earth Goes Around Like This Again Today
Praying for World Peace in the Sunlight
Dreams of the Girls
I Want to Live Forever
Tomb of Downfall, and My Spiritual Poverty Dominates My Entire Body
Festival of Life
For a Western eyes, the paintings are hung in a challenging way. Americans particularly have come to expect contemporary art displayed in expansive, usually white, spaces, each work isolated enough to earn a time alone with our eyes. These are big canvases, over 6 ft square (194 x 194 cm), hung in two rows, one above the other. There is almost no white space between them and not much above or below. Stepping off the elevator, I am only 6 or 8 ft from a wall displaying 10 works: an onslaught of bold color and patterns. It feels like visual noise. We are not allowed to take photos on this floor and I don’t yet have the show catalog. When I study it later, there are no images of the actual installation. There are only images of the works themselves, one a page. They become isolated works, far from the wall of color as experienced. From those catalog images, I have simulated the wall below to give a sense of it. They are not shown in the order of the actual show because I have no record of what that order was. The room opens up beyond the elevator where 6 more paintings are on 3 other walls and a blessed bench for the patient viewer to sit and look.
Fig. 1. Source: Catalog: Yayoi Kusama, “Spirits of Aggregation” Oct 10, 2019 - Jan31, 2020, Yoyoi Kusama Foundation, 2019, pp. 22,23,25,27,29,30,31,34,36,37.
Choosing a Piece for the Looking Exercise
To hone in on one painting is difficult. I’m not sure Kusama wants us to see them as separate pieces but to experience the room as a whole. Yet, in the end, I find spending time on just one is extremely rewarding.
I choose Waking Up in a Quiet Morning [Figure 2] although I didn’t know its title at the time. It is located just beyond the big wall with the 10 paintings [Fig 1 above]. It was displayed at an angle facing the larger part of the room diagonally. There is a bright red-on-white polka dot painting to its right but angled parallel to the room. I choose this one initially because of its isolation from the rest. It is alone on the angled wall.
Fig 1. Waking Up in a Quiet Morning from Catalog: Yayoi Kusama, “Spirits of Aggregation” Oct 10, 2019 - Jan31, 2020, Yoyoi Kusama Foundation, 2019, p. 26
First Responses: What Am I Looking At? What questions arise?
I start from a distance; it looks like a bunch of red bubbles surrounded by a wavy bunch of black on a faded, but still clean, blue background. There is a darker form in the middle. The color range is very small: blue, black, with red blobs. There are black dots all over the painting.
What happens when you walk from 10 ft away to 6 ft? Now a story starts to form in my imagination. The black form looks like a beaver playing on its back in a pond. The viewer is peering at the beaver through a surround of plant growth. The red bubbles become the breath of the viewer who is also swimming or wading in the pond and is peeking through reeds, spying on the playful beaver.
Closer still, about 4 feet, the painting transforms itself and the beaver disappears. I become aware of black squiggles all over noticeably appearing irregularly on the red blobs. I see myself inside of a brain with the red bubbles being memories and the memories getting covered with the kind of neuron tangles that signify dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Closer still, near the surface of the painting, and I am inside the brain at a molecular level or viewing it with the sort of camera inserted inside your body for a better view of your organs at work in real time.
It feels lonely there.
I return to my choice of paintings. Did I just choose it just because of its slightly isolated location? Why did I choose it? It is not an iconic Kusama piece for one thing. It isn’t just dots. While the red blobs are dominant, they vary more in shape, and the red is more subdued than those in many of the other works. It isn’t just a sea of bright, neon dots. The marks aren’t familiar to me as well. Either because of exposure to her work in the press and elsewhere, or adoption by the advertising or graphic arts worlds, Kusama’s works often seem familiar even if you know you can’t have seen a specific piece anywhere before. I wanted to figure out this painting because it is quieter and harder to penetrate in this particular crowded and “loud” space. It also lacks the graphical, even cartoonish, references to people which many of the paintings have. In this painting, maybe I would discover something about Kusama beyond her public image. What is she trying to do with this work? What is she trying to tell us or talk to us about?
Art Making: Technique
Sometimes there are clues in the how of the making of art. I know these paintings take considerable time and concentration to make. There are hundreds of marks and the repetitive nature of many of these marks are not mechanically done but painted by hand. That absorption makes an inevitable bond between the artist and the work.
Looking closely, I see that the Blue is painted on first; then the Red; then the Black. There are black squiggles everywhere. Definitely the canvas has been turned around a lot to make all those squiggles. You can see the change that would be required in the position of the hand. In this painting, there isn’t as much texture in the squiggles like there is in many of Kusama’s works with repeated squiggles. The black on the bottom is particularly smooth, lacking texture. Because the black is painted on last, when up close the shapes seem like fingers reaching into the painting. This is particularly so when engaged with the red bubbles; the fingers are holding or hiding them.
Turning to those bubbles. I study them more closely. I realize “bubble” is the wrong word for these shapes. They are organic: some male, some female. Some have black squiggles in them; some a few dots only. They are somehow alive: some haven’t started to grow; some are growing; and some are close to the end of their cycle. I go backward and forward again. At 4 feet everything changes. The red blobs become three dimensional and drop backward into the painting and even throb a bit. Kusama must know these kinds of visual changes occur with her work. She must have experienced all kinds of changes in her own perception as she works. I have had these experiences in my own studio. The mastery is knowing how to create them purposefully at some level. It’s something an artist can achieve only after years of doing. I can only admire it.
In My Hotel Room that Evening: The Story
I go back to my earlier question: What is she trying to tell us or talk to us about? I know I can’t answer it literally. I am not her and I can’t even interview and ask her. But I can think about it.
I now have the catalog of the show. I read the title: Waking Up in a Quiet Morning. The title is consistent I think with what I felt and saw when I spent time with this painting earlier today. I think it is most descriptive if I had backed away from the painting first rather than walked toward it. I try to imagine Kusama’s experience: She wakes up slowly as it is a quiet morning and so nothing jolts her awake. She moves from a dream reality: vague areas of color and little forms swimming around, some with a slightly sexual tinge. From what’s going on in her head she slowly begins to focus on her surroundings, first through spots in her eyes and soft shapes beyond, then through a semi-dream of plants and water. The soft shapes begin to form into playful imaginary creatures. From there everything sharpens more and more until a more graphic, pattern of color establishes itself.
Final Thoughts
I think this room of 16 paintings, done very late in life, is a memmoire to us of the themes that have dominated her inner life and work. They must be meant to be seen as a whole, not as separate pieces. Each is a large, human-sized square. Each can hold its own but it is the connections that add up to her message. Maybe this is why she won’t allow pictures to be taken here as she does elsewhere in the show. She wants you to “get the whole”. I think the titles of these works are the code (clue) for this message. Go back and read them above toward the beginning of this essay. I suspect Kusama considered them carefully. They are headlines that sum up the experience she relates in her act of painting.
She calls the room of paintings and assemblages: My Eternal Soul
My day brought a new respect for Yayoi Kusama, what she is seeking and saying through her serious art, and a particular recognition of the genius of her painting.