Inside a Kusama infinity box at David Zwirner Gallery: an infinity of healing polka dots

Inside a Kusama "Infinity Box."  Using plastic stalactites and stalagmites and mirrors, Kusama creates an infinity of healing polka dots.

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The concept of infinite repetition is the center-piece of Kusama's work. As a child she suffered brutal treatment at the hands of her mother and visions of the infinite appeared to her as a response to this suffering. Therefore, the essential element of this artist's identity can be understood as an ordered and systematic response to cruelty emerging from the pain itself. Pain becomes the source of a vision of perfection and the infinite that can only cover the universe, not change it.

Perhaps this is why the artist has said repeatedly that her art is an attempt at self obliteration. It is also as if the infinity of polka-dots has a therapeutic value. Systems of thought and art have a softening effect on the realities of brutality and absurdity. In the very creation of the infinity of flowers and dots there is a loss of self, a covering of the component parts of experience by an ideal vision of life that destroys the essence of life for a pattern engendered by the harsher aspects of life.

Thank you to my buddy Vivian for these photos!