Wonder Displacement: Are we too full of ourselves, or just lacking a safety container?
- Tales from Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors, and a very special request!
What is it in the word “wonder” which creates an expansive, all-reaching sense of peaceful and completely fearless joy?
When you experience that state of wonder, what is it that allows you to be truly in it, and then what pulls you back out of it?
I’ll tell you now, I wonder about this state frequently in my own musings and playful explorations. It is ever-present for me, even during my dark moments. This is why I’m so magnetised towards creating verbal and visual portals which signify how many more “realities” we can immerse ourselves within.
And so, when I spotted the chance to view Yayoi Kusama’s immersive Infinity Mirrors exhibition at the Tate Modern, I moved all kinds of inner and outer logic in order to get myself there.
🚨Special request! I have been shortlisted for the Cass Art Creative Spaces award, and voting closes in a few days’ time. Would you help me embark on my next big, immersive art project by voting for me now? 💗🙏😍
Vote here➡️ https://www.cassart.co.uk/creative-spaces/
Thank you! (And I’ll let you know how it goes!)
Unbound Creativity, Madness and Safety
At the very start of the exhibition, we are told a little of Kusama’s life story, most prominently that she grew up within a highly conservative, unsupportive family and that from an early age she experienced “self-obliterating” hallucinatory visions of the world as infinite repetition of polka dots.
I’ve always been fascinated by the creativity-madness continuum and debate surrounding it, and Kusama’s story really highlighted to me that perhaps the most crucial aspect of unbound creativity is safety. Do we feel safe to create? Do we feel safe to say what we want and are urged towards, in the ways most natural to us?
Kusama’s work is all about playing with boundaries, and becoming one with our landscape, our universe. It is deliberately self-effacing because that is the very thing she struggled with. Her hallucinations, anxiety and pain are directly linked to her expressionistic output, so much so that by the 70s she checked herself into a mental health hospital specialising in art therapy. She has lived there since. In a way she has found the safety she most needs to fully express her work; she is both supported and protected. She is also open about her need to create, that “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago."*
Inside one of her Infinity Mirror Rooms is an experience which radically quietens the highly conditioned, linear and logical self. Take her Chandelier of Grief as an example: you step into a dark room with around 4 others, and the door is closed. Immediately you see a vertical glass box in front of you, inside of which hangs an illuminated chandelier.
Logically, you could stop there and scrutinise the exhibit as one might a few feet away from a canvas on a gallery wall. But instead, the experience of being inside a hall of mirrors takes over. You remember you are an experiential being. You are forced to attune to all of those other senses normally silenced during your routine day. You experience a funereal sense of beauty, poignancy and existential wonder. It feels as if you are playing a dozen characters at a grand wake, and the 4 other people in the room with you make up the hundreds of other characters that you see reflected and multiplied around you in this great hall filled with chilly chandeliers. Your mind can no longer make sense of what you are looking at and experiencing. It is indeed an experiential form of nihilism, and yet…
There is also so much wonder and awe induced. This is the paradox of our lived, conditioned, and regulated “reality”. We narrowly define what is “real” as a form of safety and protection, because without it we fear we may lose our minds, our essence altogether.
And that is why we struggle to acknowledge, accept and embody our own multidimensionality. We live in fear of completely obliterating the societal scaffolding of our “self”, even if it means a life of experiencing and being so much more.
* Art Review (interview), 2007, archived from the original on 20 September 2016, retrieved 18 February 2010
Creating our own Safety Containers
It seems to me that after decades of suicide attempts and hospitalisation, Kusama finally found the safety container she most needed to thrive in her life and work - and she seized it. Most of us never reach that point. Instead, we follow along with what’s expected of us, squeezing ourselves into all the wrong boxes and never feeling “safe” in the way that most supports us individually.
My favourite installation of the exhibition was Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the brilliance of life. I could have spent hours in there: in meditation, sitting or lying on the floor. Instead, each group is allocated just 2 minutes (standing). It was not lost on me that allowing more than 2 minutes would be a clear health hazard - not logistically, but mentally and sensorially. The moment you step into this room, you are drawn into its depths. It feels like you have transported to another world entirely, one without end and where the landscape is constantly shifting as the light sequences change. It would be so easy to lose your wits, very quickly.
What I personally experienced strongly was a feeling of overwhelming affirmation. Here is a space which invites people to come face to face with the multiple possible realities of themselves and the world around them. Here is an exemplification of our infinitude and nihilism is perfect unity. Here is where boundaries may disappear, but in actual fact are very intentionally and integrally created to support us in that experience.
With my own art centring on our fully embodied acceptance and soul-expression, it was really fascinating to experience Kusama’s work as she approaches a similar space from the opposite angle. Of course we must “lose ourselves in order to find ourselves”. Of course the world - and universe - is exponentially more than we assume on the daily. Of course we must really challenge ourselves to feel - mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and energetically - this existential experience instead of switching between rationale and autopilot. Of course.
And yet the safety issue keeps pulling us back. And what feels safe and supportive one year may shift entirely the next.
Integrity is the word which keeps nagging at me, ever more persistently. Specifically:
Am I feeling integrated right now, or are bits of me trying to act out / run the show?
Is this action/ interaction/ decision integral to who I am and my soul’s truest expression?
It’s through these foundational questions we can tune into our own unique safety container for this phase of our evolution. And with that, open ourselves up to the ever-expanding universe of possibilities for ourselves.
What are your foundational and integral safety-container elements right now? And how can you come back into that expansive inner integrity this month?
Yayoi Kasama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms is exhibiting at Tate Modern until 28th April 2024, and is well worth a whole day out!