Draft:Narcissus Garden

What is the Narcissus Garden?

Narcissus Garden installed at Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil.
Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Year of first exhibition: 1966
Medium: polished, reflective, stainless steel spheres
Dimensions (one sphere): 12 inches in diameter
Location of first appearance: 33rd Venice Biennale
Location of image: Brumadinho, Brazil

The Narcissus Garden is an immersive, site-specific installation created by Yayoi Kusama. The work comprises of 1,500 highly polished mirrored orbs, each 12 inches in diameter, which were laid on the ground for their first appearance in 1966 during the 33rd Venice Biennale — an exhibition of international contemporary art hosted annually in Venice, Italy. She installed her work near a pavilion without invitation or permission. Kusama wore a golden kimono and stood among the orbs, under a sign that read "Your Narcissism for Sale," selling the orbs for 1200 Italian lira, or 2 USD each. The garden is presented as a human-made garden that embraces the narcissism in the viewers desire to view their reflection through the orbs. Kusama was expelled from the Venice Biennale for "radical art showing". After that, she decided to open Narcissus Garden in other areas of the world, which has been interpreted as a message of commercialization and narcissism.

Narcissus Garden installed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, located in Tel Aviv, Israel from November 2021 - April 2022.

Yayoi's Historical Background

Wax model of Yayoi Kusama, used for Louis Vuitton in 2012

Name: Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生)
Born: 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano
Nationality: Japanese
Known for: paintings, sculptures, performance art, installations
Affiliated movements: Pop art, Minimalism, Abstract expressionism, Institutional critique.
Website: http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 as the youngest daughter of a family from Matsumoto in central Japan. Her family was unsupportive of Kusama's passion for art ever since she expressed it at an early age of 10 years old. Her mother would discourage her dreams of becoming a professional artist and steer her in the path of becoming a traditional Japanese housewife. During World War II, school-aged children, such as Kusama herself, were called to work twelve hours a day at a parachute factory. While working there, she continued to draw with limited materials she could find.

After the end of World War II, continued her artistic studies in Kamakura City but grew sick of the conventional approach that her teachers took and judged her art as "not passable". In 1957, Kusama left Japan and moved to New York, where she created most of her important works.

Yayoi is open about her mental health and how it intersects with her art. She told Grady Turner at BOMB Magazine how she experienced psychological issues since her first time painting at the age of ten, often seeing hallucinations that only she was able to see alongside obsessional images that plagued her. In her autobiography Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, she claims that she would see everyday objects speak to her, stating that "One day, [she] suddenly looked up to find that each and every violet had its own individual, human-like facial expression". She expresses that her works are results of coping from her psychological obstacles.

Yayoi Kusama is well known for her extensive use of polka dots in paintings, sculptures, performance art, and installations in art styles of pop art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and institutional critique. She began designing her own clothes and was the founder of Kusama Enterprises in the late 1960s, which were inspired by her paintings. Her work is presented alongside artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, William de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock.

Kusama talks about how she uses art as a tool for making sense of a world that she perceives in dots, repetitive shapes, and infinite planes. Ever since 1977, she checked into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, a private Tokyo mental health facility and never checked out. She continues to produce art in various media such as sculptures, paintings, poetry and fiction in her studio nearby.

Conceptual Art and Its Significance

Conceptual art is a form of art where the concept behind the work holds significant purpose and meaning than the finished art object itself. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s, with Marcel Duchamp's Fountain cited as one of the first conceptual artworks. It continued through the mid 1970s when it started to become international, happening in European, North American, and South American countries.

The Narcissus Garden is inspired by the Greco-Roman myth in Ovid's Metamorphoses called Echo and Narcissus, Book III lines 350-500. In the myth, Narcissus was a beautiful young man who was loved by all, but there was no one whom Narcissus would return affection for. Narcissus was fathered by a river God at a nymph named Liriope. Ovid described Echo as a nymph who had a peculiar way of talking, where she would repeat the last spoken words by others and could not start a conversation nor fail to answer other people (line 360). One day, Echo spotted Narcissus and immediately fell in love, so she followed him through the woods. Narcissus rejected Echo and she ran away deep into the forest where she remained forever hidden. Her bones became the rocks and her voice was heard in valleys and caves.

Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1597 - 1599, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy.

Narcissus (plant), common name daffodil, looking downwards towards the water as Narcissus did in Echos and Narcissus.

One day, Narcissus was hunting and bent down for a drink. When he saw his reflection, he fell in love with what he saw; himself. He was in utter shock and awe to the point where he froze in time. Narcissus stayed by his reflection, calling to the Gods asking why he was denied the love that him and the reflection shared. Indulged in love, Narcissus remained laid besides the water and wasted his life away. Echo returned to see this and mourned. Narcissus died and when the nymph's went to grab his body for the funeral, he had turned into a flower, particularly a daffodil, which interestingly holds the scientific name for its genus called Narcissus, part of the Amaryllidaceae and Narcissaceae plant families.

Narcissus turned into a daffodil because it is a beautiful flower, just as he was, but is poisonous. Daffodils are often found on the edge of ponds or rivers looking down into the waters. As they wither and die, they droop closer to the water with their bowed head, appearing to look towards the ground near their roots. Relating to Narcissus and his crazy love, the ancient myth reflects that the flower was an incarnation of the man himself — a beautiful, but stark reminder to avoid vanity and stay focused on the world around.

Technical and Aesthetic Approach

The hundreds of identical and reflective spheres create a sense of infinity. When asked about her artwork, Kusama says, "I work with the principal themes of infinity, self-image, and compulsive repetition in objects and forms, such as the steel spheres of Narcissus Garden." Kusama talks about the concept of self-obliteration, which is the idea of becoming conjoined with the surroundings, crossing the line of Self. To share this feeling, Kusama creates works that invite visitors to lose themselves in infinite repetition.

Each orb symbolizes an interconnected universe. The reflective mirrored steel material offers infinite existence as it extends the world out for the viewer as they lose themselves in a legion of convex reflections. Each reflection invites the viewer to stay and reflect on what they see: architecture, the vast, open sky, and other people and objects. The orbs of Narcissus Garden symbolize the pond that Narcissus fell in love with himself in, while each visitor that passes plays the role as Narcissus. Momentary Assistant Curator Kaitlin Maestas says that this immersive affection with self causes the viewer to feel more connected with the world, just as Narcissus felt in Echo and Narcissus.

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Public Engagement

The installation invites viewers to interact with the orbs. Many visitors explain their experience and thoughts when viewing this presentation. On Medium, a woman describes her visit at the Valley Gallery in Naoshima Island, where she was able to see the orbs drifting on a pond and scattered across the field. She emphasized how her reflection appeared fragmented and distorted when she looked into the orb, signifying that Kusama chose the spheres to illustrate the disintegration of self that comes with being self-absorbed.

Reflections being shown through the reflective orbs of Narcissus Garden. This particular photo was snapshotted by a viewer at the National Gallery of Victoria, located in Melbourne, Australia.

Another viewer of the installation says on Hyperallergic, an online arts magazine, how the installation made him feel during his visit to the Rockaways, a part of New York.

Narcissus Garden showing its reflective properties, capturing all that is in the atmosphere and reflecting it back to the viewer.

He said they give a playful feel, as if a child had scattered giant sized marbles throughout a room.

The Legacy of Narcissus Garden

Each iteration of the installation brings forth its own distinct character in where it gets displayed. Narcissus Garden has been commissioned and re-installed in various art fairs, parks, venues, and institutions around the world in locations both indoors and outdoors, on land and on water. Some major events it has been apart of include the 2001 Triennial of Contemporary Art at Yokohama, Japan, the 2004 Whitney Biennial at Central Park, New York City, the 2018 MoMA PS1, Rockaway! festival presented at Fort Tilden, New York, and in a pond in Inhotim Museum, Brazil. The recreation of this work represents self-importance and makes a comment on art commercialism. Kusama's intention of her work was to show that art's value is not tied with money or status, but to its emotional and conceptual power, hence why she sold her orbs for a cheap price in 1966. She made her work available so buyers would not have to search high and low, making her objects available at an auction, art fair, or selling her items at a secondary market ran by art galleries.

References

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