"It’s about life. It’s about confronting our mortality. It’s about the clarity of vision and also perception." — Mika Yoshitake
Is life about...death? Or more specifically, is being alive, a drawn out embodied perception with all regards to a post-life.. or neo-life? One in which the parameters to explore are boundless, eternal, infinite. For now we reside in a space of liminality. Surveying our wounded landscapes at eye-level; wishing for a better view. As telescopes are only able to observe the observable, our eyes too follow the same laws. So indeed, we are limited as humans—unless perhaps we choose to expand our definitions of what it really is to “see” or “feel” or “be”.
Yayoi Kusama has a particular way of creating illusory experiences for her viewers. With Fireflies on the Water, those who enter her installation are transported someplace otherworldly, infinite, without regards to space or time. Can we ever say for sure that a concept such as, “infinity” exists? Or is this notion contradictory, too abstract for the realms of our natural world in which adheres to and is bound to physical laws. Kusama may not be able to accelerate us to the infinite speed of light, but she sure is able to simulate somewhat of a stretching of cosmic limits in her light pieces. LED lights act as one- hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms. Atoms that make up our cosmos, and more or less, Kusama’s phenomenological environments. Kusama’s mirror room installations act as not only a place in which we can scan the room infinitely, but be reflected back onto ourselves, back into the personal universe’s of our minds. The notion that we may have to face ourselves for the rest of eternity is something I think about often. We have many distractions in the corporeal world which let these moments pose as fleeting, but what happens when it is just us, our heartbeats, and the infinite universe of self-reflection? The idea of infinity Is paradoxically both freeing and terrifying..
To investigate pattern, repetition, infinity— is to investigate one’s self, one’s complex psychological states. Essentially, what I gathered from experiencing Kusama’s spaces, was a reflection of her onto me and back onto the space. The rooms acted as the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank; through stimulated environments and conditions, one is offered a way to experience mindfulness in boundless forms. Being one with everything (multiplicity of the universe). As, Chandelier of Grief is meant to evoke a destabilizing yet mesmerizing effect, I feel as though that is the intent of life as well. What Kusama does feels similar to what John Keats provokes to Ricky Varghese: a love affair with beauty and sublime experience(s), one that evokes transcendence and transcends us belong the culpabilities of our vulnerable and aging bodies, the physically and materialist of everyday life—perhaps bringing us closer to divinity.
The ‘violence of sublimity’ in the context of Maisel’s art work and the theme of mortality posing as a reminder of, “life’s potential to be laid to waste, come to ruin, decay, die, and rot.” seems to me to speak on the paradox that is human life. To be within something yet to be completely outside of it. Where we stand currently, is somewhere in between the two—not within and not entirely without. Spatially betwixt, transient, right before a threshold. The concept of liminality comes to mind. Our physical and mental limits are able to create significant feelings of tension of separation. Feeling separated or disconnected serving us as catalysts for our own alienations. We are in a liminal space where identity is lacking, control has been beared-away with consequences for actions seem futile in a world where nothing matter because nothingness only mimics the concept of infinity. As we detach from our actions, our connection to space in time drift further astray, memories become conflated with realities. A suggested dehumanization of our world is present, where petroleum's power is supreme. With an aerial view, (or God’s-eye view) the shift from human power and life-force to crude oils and fossil fuel energy acts as a cruel lesson on decay. As the universe as far as we can see gets submerged in toxic sludge, through use of a telescope or our eyes, we watch the degradation, or the creation of an anti-infinity. Gazing into complex mixtures of hydrocarbons, we consider a universe that is becoming as fragilized and finite as the reflection of ours into it.
Maybe this is where the reality becomes a nightmare? A heavy thick fog hangs over everything. I can no longer trust my memories— I know they stem from an artificial past. There is no guidance, no warm hand reaching out to guide me through the flames, no balmy voice to assure me that behind these horrors are smoke screens. I grieve not with chandeliers, but with my contemplations, my vacant gazes into the street. Lucid reflections of moonlight glisten atop a sheet of liquid, walking along the lake is sort of like walking through one of Kusama’s installation rooms. I want to focus my gaze on the glittering specs of light but I am destabilized by a putrescent miasma. When plants and natural matter die and begin to decompose, they create sulfuric compounds that are broken down through a series of steps, resulting in the release of hydrogen sulfide gas. Essentially, swamps smell bad because they are full of dead things. Almost all metropolitan cities smell bad.