Yayoi Kusama and the Botanical Gardens

My final research visit - to the Yayoi Kusama "Cosmic Nature" show in the New York Botanical Gardens - somewhere where I've inexplicably never been before, and which would have been stunning even without the Kusama - that is, without being greeted by a whole lot of well-established trees swathed in red and white spots.

One of my two favorite installations was "Flower Obsession" (I don't care if Will Heinrich, in the NYT, called it "too gimmicky") - where what started off, in April, as a kind of greenhouse with furniture in it is, by now, buried in flowers - every visitor is given one to stick where they like, so that the whole thing is drowning in flowers, like a benign version of Alma Tadema's The Roses of Heliogobalus.

I'm not sure how some got onto the roof.

And then of course there were pumpkins.  My biggest disappointment is that I've not been able to go the show three or four times - the works are surrounded with different flowers growing in different seasons.  This huge pumpkin, in one of the conservatories - "Starry Pumpkin" - is meant to recreate Kusama's delight at coming upon a growing pumpkin for the very first time.  At the moment, it has many chrysanthemums elegantly growing near it (not my favorite flower, but the displays showed how the Japanese tend and manipulate them almost as carefully as Bonsai trees).

I've always found the big shiny surreal flowers of Kusama's more gimmicky, but these ones - on loan from Beverly Hills, if they look oddly familiar - looked at their best (what wouldn't?) reflected among water lilies.

Outside the conservatories, there was a Dancing Pumpkin, split open like an octopus, that one could stand inside.

In further pumpkin homage, the steps up to the conservatories and to the library/art gallery (which showed an assortment of her drawings and paintings - including some beautiful, and very botanically exact early work) - were lined with elegant cornucopia-like falling gourds. 

There was a tiny Infinity Room (which hasn't been open all that long, because of Covid - and you could still only go inside with your Own Party, which was great for me ...) - which reflected the gardens in its mirrored outside.

 I loved another brand new mirrors/lights/pumpkins piece, Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity, which gave spotted pumpkins their own infinity room in which they were gradually illuminated before falling dark again - but no photos allowed, there.

This, in the Native Plants wetlands section of the garden, is a more familiar piece (its concept goes right back to an intervention Kusama staged at the 1966 Venice Biennale), Your Narcissism For Sale - mirrored orbs gently knocking up against each other ...

And behind this part of the gardens - no more Kusama, but a wonderful chunk of rare old growth forest - which formed the core of the gardens when they were founded in the late C19th, and - I never knew such a waterway existed - the Bronx River.  This is an artificial waterfall - it was used to provide the waterpower that drove an old tobacco mill, which ground tobacco into snuff.

And, finally, in case you think I don't look around me on the streets of Manhattan, here's one of a pair of lounging figures on 23rd Street.