148. Narcissus garden

 

 Narcissus Garden
Yayoi Kusama. Original Installation and performance 1966. Japan Mirror balls

Her work as emerging from her mental illness: she says has had hallucinations since she was a child. She also says that her ability to produce artistic works is a therapy for her. has often revisited mirrored forms in her work, exploring notions of infinity, illusion, and repetition in discrete sculptures and room-size installations.

Yayoi Kusama

1966

plastic silver balls

Content: 

Mirror balls are stacked on the surface of water. They are in the shape of an oval.

Context:

The Narcissus Garden is a reference to the myth of Narcissus who was a young man that was so fascinated by himself in the reflecting water that he dies and a flower grows out of the place that he dies. The installations were later moved to water, where the floating balls reflect the natural environment and the viewers that are around the work of art. Installations has been exhibited in many places around the world. Both in water and in dry spaces.

Form:

Asymmetrical balance

Style:

Happenings

Function:

to show how you look into your reflection, forcing a confrontation with one's own vanity and ego to either go forward onto the garden or to step back away from your reflection.
MeaningThe meaning behind this piece is to see how victors take in their own vanity or ego by looking at themselves in the mirrored reflective balls.

• Yayoi Kusama is one of the most popular female artists to ever come out of Japan 
• she voluntarily lives in a mental-health facility in Tokyo and has had a life-long history of insanity 
• she arrived in New York City in 1958 and began to move up the ranks among other seminal artists 
• she set up her first exhibit in 1965, which was a room full of mirrors with phallic stuffed pillows covering the floor, making it appear as though there was a continuous "sea of multiplied phalli expanding to its infinity" 
• Narcissus Garden, from 1966, was the most famous of her exhibits
• consists of 1,500 mass-produced plastic silver globes on the lawn outside of the Italian Pavilion of the 33rd Venice Biennal
• she was not officially invited to the Biennale, but she had the blessing of some super important guy on the boar
• the balls were tightly arranged and reflective 
• images reflected in the ball (of the landscape, the other balls, and the viewer) were "repeated, distorted, and projected" 
• the balls were compared to fortune teller's balls 
• "When gazing into it, the viewer only saw his/her own reflection staring back, forcing a confrontation with one's own vanity and ego." 
• in addition to the balls, Kusama herself, dressed in a gold kimono, drifted throughout the viewers as a peddler, selling miniature-sized versions of the balls and complimentary pamphlets about her work 
• the organizers of the Biennale eventually made her stop selling things but the installation remained 
• the exhibition has frequently been interpreted as Kusama's own self-promotion (making "Narcissus" an appropriate and self-conscious title) and as her protest against the commercialization of art 
• the exhibition was intended to be the media of an interactive performance between the artist and the viewer
• Kusama's Narcissus garden has repeatedly been re-commissioned and installed in various settings, including Central Park in New York City 
• the re-creation of Narcissus Garden has changed its meaning; instead of a kind of satire of new mods of art, the exhibition, which involves the production of hundreds of pricy silver balls, has become a symbol of "prestige and self-importance" 
• the meaning keeps evolving in the digital age: mesmerized by the distorted images in the balls, viewers snap a picture of themselves on their cell phones and post it to social media, amplifying and changing the connotations of narcissism in conjunction with the work 
• following the Venice Bienale in 1968, there was an economic downturn and a student movement in Italy lead many to boycott 
• opposite to what Kusama did, many artists who were invited to exhibit at the Biennale withdrew their works and refused to participate