The Concept of Knowledge in Relation to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets
Walking back to the Metro station from my second visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I couldn’t stop thinking of that one piece nested at the top of the Gallery’s East Building — Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets Yellow (1960). While I was awed by the National Gallery’s multitude of other noteworthy pieces, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci, a handful of Monets, and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, something about Kusama’s painting has stuck with me since those visits. Nothing compares to experiencing it in-person, but I’ll do my best to express my thoughts on just why this particular piece looms so large in my mind.
We all grow up underestimating the extent of knowledge. In kindergarten, we feel like the masters of the world when we finally nail the alphabet. In middle school, we’re either not paying attention or feeling pretty damn good about the three types of rocks — igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary, of course. Then high school rolls around, and with it, upper-level science courses — biology, chemistry, physics. Oh shoot, we realize, we don’t actually know it all. Between then and college, trade school, or wherever we end up, our realization deepens when we find that not only do we (as individuals) not know it all, but we as a species still have a quite a bit to learn. This gradual series of realizations mirrors my initial interactions with Infinity Nets Yellow. I had watched a few videos on Kusama and the Infinity Nets series and was pretty excited to see a piece of the collection in-person, but at first it seemed to be just another piece of minimalist contemporary art hanging on the walls of the East Building. Yeah, it’s pretty, but is it not just lines on a black background? Or black dots on a yellow background? Then, I stepped closer. As I took one step closer, then another, I became enveloped by the intricacies of the work — the texture reminiscent of day-old frosting, the interconnectedness of the thousands of strokes, the patterned regions that create a calm in the middle of this chaotic storm of brushes. I didn’t notice these intricate details at first glance, and didn’t even notice some until my second visit, and I suspect it’s the same for many other viewers. Whenever I visit again, I know that I’ll pick up on another couple details. The experience of the Infinity Nets parallels our lifelong relationship with knowledge — ever expanding and constantly being redefined.
After I noticed the varied texture of the paint on the canvas, what struck me most about the painting was how it consisted of thousands of these little strokes, strokes that are each so unique, yet able to form a greater whole — an infinity net. The breadth of human knowledge guarantees a wide variety of topics — biological, physical, historical, mathematical, ethical, and so on. Within each area of knowledge lies another hundred subtopics, with each vastly different in their specificities: physiology and evolutionary biology, art history and political history, the comparisons are myriad. Yet, while these small ‘strokes’ of knowledge might seem isolated and completely unique, a glance around at the web of knowledge makes us reevaluate and realize that knowledge isn’t a phylogenetic tree of subdivision after subdivision, but a collection of fields that join to create an interconnected net.
A close look at evolutionary biology and physiology reveals a multitude of connections between the fields — for instance, the father of evolution, Charles Darwin, first postulated his great theory of evolution because he noticed similarities in the physiology of finches’ beaks on the Galapagos Islands. While Darwin was making these groundbreaking discoveries, a chapter in art history — neoclassicism — was being written. The rise of neoclassicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries can partly be attributed to key events in political history — democratic revolutions, which helped to invoke in people the same Roman- and Greek-inspired ideals that the Renaissance had conjured 300–400 years prior. We see this most clearly when emerging French neoclassical artists (who, in the case of Jacques-Louis David, were also revolutionaries) drew inspiration from Roman ideals of simplicity and truth to adopt a style that alluded to both the classicism of the Renaissance and the then-current French Revolution. As this parallel between art history and political history during these two time periods emerges, we can also see that a similar pattern occurred regarding scientific advancements. The Renaissance had scientific discoveries that challenged previous status quos, such as Nicolaus Copernicus’s new model of the universe and Andreas Vesalius’s first advancements into human anatomy and physiology that contradicted the writings of the ancient Greek Galen. Likewise, the period in which neoclassicism emerged had Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion and Darwin’s aforementioned Theory of Evolution, which challenged everything that people had previously been told about the conception of humanity and the origin of life.
Both time periods included scientific discoveries, be it in physiology or evolutionary biology, that challenged previous fields of thought. Simultaneously, these time periods had political revolutions — the downfall of feudalism during the Renaissance and the democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Art history reflects this with classicism in the time of the Renaissance and neoclassicism centuries later. We see now that not only are evolutionary biology and physiology connected, but they are also intertwined with art history and political history. While looking at these little subdivisions of knowledge, we initially see small strokes that are completely unique in their size, texture, and shape; we step back and are amazed at the interconnectedness of knowledge, just as I oscillated to and fro the wall on which Kusama’s Infinity Nets Yellow hangs.
The Renaissance movement and the movement towards democracy both originated in part from the discovery of new knowledge that corrected previously held notions, which in turn revolutionized ideologies. History is littered with the corpses of invalidated beliefs that at the time were considered knowledge. Knowledge is everchanging, constantly being redefined in the most unexpected ways, as is what happened prior to and during these time periods. Kusama’s piece reminded me of this when my friend and I tried to decipher patterns on the canvas — we could pick out little regions with strokes that created similarly sized and shaped dots and other areas where the strokes created figures that were almost geometric. When we looked up, down, left, or right, though, we immediately lost the pattern in the chaos of Kusama’s infinity net. Us humans always think ourselves so smart — now and centuries ago alike. Throughout history, we’ve known for a fact that the Earth was at the center of the universe, black swans didn’t exist, and the Earth was flat. As time goes on, however, we continue learning — looking at different areas of the canvas — and what was fact becomes fiction, or what was fiction becomes fact. In this way, knowledge’s unexpected dynamicism is reflected in the chaos that overpowers the regions of patterned calm in Infinity Nets Yellow.
What is knowledge if humans, or organisms with the same conscious ability to decipher information, didn’t exist? Its source would remain — the laws of physics would be followed, organisms would reproduce, and the Earth’s history would take its course. No one would know, though, making knowledge only a potentiality dependent on an outside interpretation. Sound familiar yet? Kusama’s Infinity Nets series, and much of modern and contemporary art with it, paradoxically exists independently and dependently of us. Without an outside observer, an audience, the paintings would endure. With an audience, with an interpretation, these paintings become so much more. They give us a lens through which we can interpret forms of knowledge, just as David’s Oath of the Horatii has become a symbol in history, representing the crossroads of political turmoil and the rise of neoclassicism. With Kusama’s Infinity Nets Yellow, we’ve interpreted the concept of knowledge itself, and in doing so, have interpreted our very own interpretations.
