The Roundness of Being
Speaking of Dots / Illustration by Joshua Wait
An email popped into my inbox. The message announced a new Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the San Francisco MoMA. I squealed like a child who’d just heard that Santa Claus was coming to town. Even though I’d never seen her work in person, I had seen dozens of images, watched videos, and read articles online. I find her work irresistibly charming. To see her work in person felt like it would be a gift from the cosmic saint of dots.
It might seem that Yayoi Kusama wants to convince us that we have contracted rabbititis. In the episode Hare Tonic, Bugs Bunny secretly paints the room with colored dots, then tells Elmer Fudd that he has contracted rabbititis. The condition causes a person to first see dots, then slowly turn into a rabbit. Bugs Bunny tricks Elmer by removing the glass from a mirror and standing on the other side so that when Elmer looks at his reflection, he sees a rabbit instead.
Kusama does have a trick up her sleeve, but she’s not trying to convince us that we are slowly becoming rabbits. Instead, she wants to convince us that we can experience love through her art. Her argument relies on the experience of an infinite number of dots, illuminated, floating in mid-air. Full of vibrant color. Charming beyond words.
The infinity room Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love at the SF MoMA has no dots hanging from the ceiling. The room contains no electric light. Instead the room relies on an optical illusion. The mirrored walls have circles and semi-circles cut out of them. Light from the outside illuminates the colored glass in the circles causing them to appear in the mirrors as an inifinite number of dots floating in mid-air. The room feels magnificent, buoyant, radiant.
Kusama wants to do more than perform a stunt for us. She wants to do more than convince us of her technical mastery. She wants first and foremost to convince us of the importance of dots for understanding the nature of being. She says, “Dots are symbols of the world, the cosmos. The Earth is a dot, the moon, sun, the stars are all made up of dots. You and me, we are dots.” Dots represent for her a primal form of being. She wants to express her understanding of ontology through them and have us experience it.
In addition to her visual art, Kusama writes poetry. Her poetry reveals an experience of emptiness, a wish for happiness, and a longing for love. In her writing, she speaks of the deeply personal while reaching out for the cosmic. In her artwork, she uses the most primal of shapes to express the most primal of human experience. She moves beyond abstraction into the realm of love and relatedness. Kusama provides an experience through her artwork that takes on the form of an embodied philosophy.
When thinking about Yayoi Kusama, I can’t help but think of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In his book The Poetics of Space from 1958, he walks through the many different ways in which human beings experience space, being, and form. When he comes to the circle, he directs our attention to Karl Jasper’s statement, “Every being seems in itself round.” Bachelard argues that Jasper’s formula can be reduced to an even purer form, “being is round.” Bachelard goes even further and connects the personal with the cosmic by saying, “The world is round around the round being.”
And while Bachelard invites us to understand the roundness of being through his book of philosophy, Kusama invites to experience it through her infinity room. To walk into her infinity room is to walk into the poetics of her space where she says, “Let there be eternal harmony among all in the circles and cycles of living / Peace and endless love for all.” And that is truly the roundness of being.