Yayoi Kusama, the famed 94-year-old Japanese artist sometimes referred to as the “princess of polka dots,” has brought her longtime fixation to Chicago, offering visitors to WNDR Museum the chance to immerse themselves, for 60 seconds, in a yellow universe of infinitely repeating black spots.
Let’s put aside, for the moment, the success or lack thereof of “Dots Obsession,” an installation Kusama first created in 2008, and which also comes in combinations of red and white or pink and black. More significant is her being the star attraction at WNDR, a local example of the international craze for multisensory, art-themed exhibitions. These have become ubiquitous crowd-pleasers in cities across the globe, with multi-sited branded corporations charging top dollar for entry to high-tech spectacles like the Mozart and Van Gogh immersive-experience double bill currently on offer at the Chicago location of Lighthouse Artspace. WNDR, opened in 2018 by tech entrepreneur and Groupon co-founder Brad Keywell in an industrial building in the West Loop, with satellites in Seattle, Boston and San Diego, is unique in its approach, running an in-house studio where artists and techies collaborate to create new exhibits, including many on view at the museum. Still, it’s very much on trend, offering dizzying LED flooring, wildly patterned responsive wall projections, mirrored rooms expanding endlessly, and plenty more agreeable, flashy environments. Think interactive science museum, but artsier and with fewer explanatory didactics.
Journalists, critics and scholars have been paying attention, as one does to new phenomena that sell millions of tickets and occasionally supplant the display of actual artworks, like at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where 30,000 square feet of digital projections now fill the fourth-floor galleries instead of contemporary painting and sculpture. It’s generally agreed that these events are inextricably tied to the type of world we live in today, where our diminishing attention spans are being maxed out by social media, and that our entertainment venues have shifted accordingly. It’s also widely accepted that the first of these spectacles was an immersive Van Gogh show that debuted in Paris in 2019, and that historical precedents include panoramas, world’s fairs, carnival fun houses, biennials and large-scale multimedia installation art.
Another origin, which Kusama’s top billing at WNDR brings full circle, is the avant-garde art of the 1960s and ’70s: Happenings, Light and Space, Fluxus, and other experimental movements that sought to break out of the white cube and make art that was participatory, anti-establishment, and sensorial. Kusama, who moved to New York City in 1957, was there at the very beginning, making paintings of spacey intricacy, covering furniture with soft small phallic sculptures, arranging public performances of nude participants painted in colorful dots, and, in 1965, creating the very first of her mirrored infinity rooms.
“Dots Obsessions” at WNDR, as compared with the strangeness and intensity that has marked much of Kusama’s lifelong oeuvre, disappoints. It is not quite the momentary glimpse into self-obliteration that the artist has been exorcising since she first had a vision of dots covering her body and surroundings as a child. That’s a shame but maybe a useful one, because it suggests that a serious critique of all the experiences on offer at WNDR is in order — not to mention a more general assessment of what happens when avant-garde tactics are watered down and monetized in the service of entertainment and sales.
WNDR is organized as a series of linked exhibits that visitors move through sequentially, with floor symbols showing where to stand for optimal immersion — and selfie-taking, naturally. From the get-go, visitors are meant to be not just viewers but participants, touching and triggering effects that begin with the entryway walls, covered in reversible-sequin fabric of the kind found on kids’ clothing circa 2018. There’s a room where faces are scanned and analyzed, then added to a zoom-like grid of people projected on the walls. Fun, familiar or creepy, it’s hard to say. A quartet of charming split-flap displays, the kind that used to be common in train station departure halls, noisily flip through letters to spell out sentences of limited profundity — a problem fixable by hiring a local poet to write them. A wall of vertical LED panels cycles through waves of color based on text messages sent by visitors, a potentially delightful experiment in synesthesia done in by the dullness of the visual results and the fact that there is no way to know the content of the message being responded to, and thus no way to judge the interest of the translation. Three separate installations feature screens covered in dense imagery that responds to the body movements of visitors, mildly entertaining but also disturbing in the case of “Masterpiece,” where a shake of the arm causes paintings by Van Gogh, Vermeer and other great artists to be disfigured by blotches and stains. An Ames room, a classic type of optical illusion generated by a distorted space that makes two people appear to be of vastly different sizes when seen or photographed through a peephole, would be so much more marvelous if the wall text actually explained the mechanics of the trick.
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The rest of the exhibits at WNDR — there are 22 in all — continue more or less in this mold. Bright and colorful art-and-tech productions, well enough made and maintained, they are vaguely fun as amusements, fairly superficial in terms of purported content, and alarmingly feeble examples of meaningful participation.
The one exception is by the artist Santiago X (Koasati Hacha’Maori), whose exhibit is a 360-degree projection that rewards slow, careful, open-minded viewing. What’s perceivable, given enough time, is a depopulated landscape in constant flux between past, present and future, nearly devoid of structures, shifting continuously between growth and deterioration, beauty and melancholy, memory and possibility. X doesn’t offer a motivational phrase or a quick aesthetic fix, his goal isn’t to amuse or entertain, and it’s hard to take a good selfie. Heck, it’s difficult to understand what his “Flux Room” is even doing here, except as a model of what could be if only the substantial technological and creative resources of a place like WNDR were put to use by genuinely critical artists intent on challenging systems from within.
WNDR Museum is open daily at 1130 W. Monroe St.; tickets $32-$50 at wndrmuseum.com
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.