All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins
“All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” is an art installation by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Using light, acrylic yellow pumpkins, and ‘infinity mirrors’ it creates a dazzling, luminous, mesmerising spectacle.
The title alone is strangely moving, the ordinariness of ‘pumpkins’, the pleasing abstraction of ‘eternal love’ and the personal ‘I’ create a strange connection between familiarity, ordinary affection and transcendence to seem to say what the art itself is saying: any love is all love.
Art in a way is a representation of the self. The self is composed of identity and relation, art uses the rich language of metaphor, weather visual or verbal, to help us understand that things are only what they are in relation to other things. In doing this it represents a moral world, a world of relations dancing in an eternal space.
The infinity mirrors take us to a place beyond time, like any religious space that separates the profane from the holy, profane time from sacred time, it seems to glimpse a vision of wholeness beyond momentary glimpses.
In a recent track by the electronic artist Jon Hopkins a recorded talk by Ram Dass speaks over Jon’s ambient background of sound: “How do you open the heart…
