The shortest way to get rid of fear is to transform it into a desire so burning, so that it would be unimaginable not to fulfill it. That rule is the underlying theme of Yoyoi Kusama’s oeuvre. Everything she did as an artist for the past 90 years, has been based on a determination to speak her truth and become famous in the process. Her newest collaboration with Louis Vuitton is an extension of that successful attitude.
The single thing I remember from chemistry classes at school is the definition of boiling water. A single bubble of oxygen overcomes the distance from the bottom of a glass container into the surface of the liquid. And then another bubble follows the first one. And then the next one. Water starts to boil with the growing amount of the bubbles up to the point of vomiting gas in an uncontrolled way. Could there be a better way to illustrate an artistic flow and creation by using a basic law of physics? Perhaps there is, and I dare anyone more knowledgeable in science to prove me wrong. For the time being however, I am sticking with my oxygen bubble metaphor because a bubble is basically a dot in three dimensions. “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe” – says Kusama in the 2018 documentary on her.
Today, the polka dot queen is 93 years old. She can do whatever she wants. Firstly, because she has nothing to prove to anyone anymore. Secondly, it is not like she has much time left to make a pop-culture and social media statement by joining forces (for the second time) with a world-wide megabrand like Louis Vuitton. Then again, I secretly hope the artist will be so preoccupied with making new art (Kusama is a true titan of hard work, creating new pieces daily), that she will simply forget to die. If for whatever reason, that is not the case and her Louis Vuitton’s 2023 collection is the last global splash of her personal brand and her art reaching for the attention of a so-called average consumer, then I am not afraid to say the whole thing is top notch sophistication.
From the pieces inside of the collection itself, through the arrangements of the window shops, the interiors of the showrooms around the world and instagram filter with DIY dots, Kusama is tapping into the root methods of her creative process from the 60s.
The silly effect of colorful freckles distributed evenly onto iconic shapes and cuttings of LV, matches the 2023 enthusiasm of social media platforms like instagram and tik-tok, whose algorithms are slowly but steadily shifting towards promotion of quality content over the right amount of hashtags. The gesture of painting a dot with a brush is as simple and primal as taking a picture with a smartphone. Sequences of Kursama’s experimental movie called “Kusama’s Self-Obliteration” from 1967 would successfully go viral as 2023 reels or YouTube shorts.
This collab is symptomatic to the zeitgeist and perhaps important to Kusama’s work in general, also because her approach was always about fighting the odds by using the quality of her art. She did what Oscar Wilde did 76 years before her: came to the USA with no portfolio and little to no network but with a drive to readjust the optics. Historians of art keep pointing out that Kusama’s task was more challenging because she was a Japanese woman in a world of male dominated art world of abstract expressionism. But the truth is, dear children, that in New York everything is a fair game. To some extent, this city does not care who you are. The attention is a privilege earned by one’s prerogatives. That must have been a kind of a liberation and emancipation that Kusama found positively inflaming after growing up in post-War Japan.
If Yasujirō Ozu’s movies are teaching us anything, it is that the mental landscape of the capital of blooming cherries in the 1950s was more tight than the principles of convergent perspective of the European renaissance paintings in the 14th century. In New York, the tightness is out in the open: it is displayed in the grid of the streets. But the case is there is no manual to walk them, you just Pac-Man your way inch by inch. The question remains just how hungry are you?
I observe the collab from the NYC point of view and it is ironic how well the LV pop up store sits next to the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking district. Its interior is designed as Kusama’s famous infinity rooms with dots and mirrors multiplying themselves. In the middle a big LV logo covered with silver foam-like balls serves as a desirable selfie background. With the right amount of copywriting this could be an economically engaged sculptor at the next Whitney Biennale. Shopping experience as a performance or an installation with a capitalism-criticizing agenda? I can see a chunk of Artist-In-Residence grant going into that project proposal. This showroom is a real show off of the lack of boundaries between art and commerce. Let’s call it a success then, because in this case the artist staying behind the concept, has a reputation of actually being accomplished – just like big names from Whitney’s collection.
Kusama’s work is also about the idea that the only pressure worth pursuing is the one that comes from the inside. She had to make art to overcome her illness, despair and anxiety. She made herself come to America to do that. Art is a game we play in order to gain some peace of mind – seems to be the message. She managed to find the simplest methods to communicate it and forms that anyone can relate to: mirrored-infinity rooms, pumpkins, dots, flowers. It is so easy to disregard them as instagrammable, fleeting, plastic or kitsch. They work because they annoy you, and that provokes staring. And if you stare it means that you are processing information.
Ok, so does it also mean that by wearing a $3400 jacket with white dots, a customer will enter the state of a meditation and contemplation over the universe? Of course not. Will a frackled LV bag bring a reflection about the complexity of a human’s psychic to its owner? I don’t think so. However this collection makes sense because it is honest in its lack of hidden agenda. It is the same attitude of any other of Kusama’s pieces. To ask what this collection is about is like asking what the pumpkins at Naoshima island in Japan are about.
I still remember how seeing a yellow pumpkin over the sea shore made me feel. I was bored, it felt too decorative to move me. But then I started walking around it. The pumpkin was just there claiming the space and adding value to it in a way that was interesting only by direct contact with it. The same will happen for the elements of the LV collection – they should be judged by the way people will wear them.
In 2023, effective brand sales and communication must take into account the logic of an ancient aphorism: you are not a drop in the ocean – you are an ocean in a drop. In the spirit of this phrase, I propose another slogan: “Bubbles are the new units of culture.” This also explains why Kusama with its dotted infinity is so effective (or at least strategic) as a branding element borrowed from the art world.
I also dreamed of coming to New York to heal myself. So far, standing in the middle of chaos works quite well. I just have to figure out a way to get famous. Or rich. My slogan about bubbles as units of culture is copyrighted, which I am willing to sell for a modest sum. Details on priv.
